#35 - Hatshepsut

Hey everyone, I am so excited to bring you this week’s episode on Hatshepsut, an incredibly audacious, ambitious, and ultimately talented woman from Ancient Egypt. She stepped into the role of king, despite the fact that it broke every rule of royal womanhood, and created such a successful reign that it became a threat to her successors. Unruly Figures is dedicated to making complicated history more accessible and interesting for non-historians. If you love this mission, please support this project—your pledge will help me access paywalled archives and ensure that I can keep doing this in-depth research and creating these episodes. 🎙️ Transcript Hey everyone, welcome to Unruly Figures, the podcast that celebrates history’s greatest rule-breakers. I’m your host, Valorie Clark, and today I’m covering Hatshepsut, a woman who used her deep theological knowledge of ancient Egypt to rise to its most powerful position: King. But before we jump into Hatshepsut’s life and how she became one of the greatest kings of Egypt, I want to thank all the paying subscribers on Substack who help make this podcast possible. Y’all are the best and this podcast wouldn’t still be going without you! Each of these episodes takes me nearly 30 hours of work, which means they’ve become a full-time job. So if you like this show and want more of it, please become a paying subscriber for just $6/month or $60/year! Contributions help ensure that I will be able to continue doing this work. Becoming a paying subscriber will also give you access to exclusive content, merch, and behind-the-scenes updates on the upcoming Unruly Figures book. When you’re ready to do that, head over to unrulyfigures.substack.com. Also a small trigger warning right up front. We’re talking about Egyptian royalty here, so we’re also going to talk a little about incest. The two just go hand-in-hand, sorry. I’ll try to warn you when that topic comes up, but if I forget, I apologize! Okay, let’s hop in. For this episode, I’m relying a lot on Kara Cooney’s excellent and recent biography of Hatshepsut, The Woman Who Would Be King. There’s a lot of information out there about this female ruler, but a lot of it is conjecture and I think Cooney does a good job of being really clear about what is fact and what is conjecture or guesses. And for good reason! The difficult part of creating a story for any Egyptian pharaoh is that their personal histories are often left untold. Biographer Kara Cooney writes that the king was quote, “meant to bea living god on earth, [so] naturally he had to be shrouded in ideology dn not defined by his personality, schemes, plans, and ambitions.” The rulers of Egypt were meant to be vessels of their gods, and as such couldn’t be publicly depicted having human fallibilities like ambition, doubt, fear, greed, excitement, joy—it’s very austere. Quote, “The system of diving kingship and cosmic order mattered most to [the ancient Egyptians], not the individual person who was king at a particular time. The institution of kingship was unassailable.” The ancient Egyptians quote, “never underestimated the power of the written word; anything that smacked of personal politics or individual opinion was excluded from the formal record… [they] preserve the ‘what’ of their history in copious texts and monuments for posterity; the ‘how’ and the ‘why,’ the messy details of it all, are much harder to get it.” Fittingly, we only understand Hatshepsut through the things she built—and how they were destroyed. Hatshepsut was born around 1500 BCE, during the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom, though she wouldn’t have used any of those terms to describe it. This was a moment of prosperity and dominance for Egypt—they had recently subjugated Nubia, their neighbor to the south, which was rich in natural resources like gold. And if you’re interested in hearing more about Nubia, get on the list to pre-order my book, I talk about one of Nubia’s fiercest rulers in it. Obligatory self-promotion aside, Hatshepsut was part of the Thutmoside dynasty; Thutmose I was her father. He had been chosen to reign after Amenhotep I had no surviving family except his mother, who had been his regent. It’s unclear how Thutmose was chosen; Cooney guesses he had some sort of familial connection Amenhotep, but he definitely wasn’t one of the previous ruler’s sons. Whatever his previous life, it would have all gone away when he took on this mantle—he would have known that, quote, “kingship was essential to the survival of Egypt and the Egyptian people. Politics and religion went hand in hand in Egypt: if there was no king, there was only cosmic chaos.” It’s unclear if he was married or had children before this, but I sort of hope he wasn’t because this would have been a difficult transition for them. For Thutmose, monogamy also went out the window by necessity. Pharaohs had a King’s Great Wife, whom they hoped to have a son with to continue the line. But by the eighteenth dynasty, the reality of the difficulty in bearing a son who survived to adulthood had been thoroughly realized. Again, we’re talking about 1500 BCE, medicine just wasn’t the same as it would be even in 1500 CE. Henry VIII had better chances of keeping his children alive, and we saw how that turned out. So pharaohs were basically required to have multiple sexual partners, who were all called King’s Wives, because they needed to have as many children as possible just to hope that one boy would survive! Cooney characterizes it as, quote, “he was considered the bull of Egypt: royal sex was linked to the ongoing creation of the cosmos itself.” He was probably expected to have sex with his new Great Wife Ahmes or one of the other “lesser” Kings Wives every night that he was in the royal residence. If he was married before this moment, Ahmes superseded his first wife and it’s unclear if that hypothetical first wife would have been allowed to stick around. And if he had children from before he ascended the throne, they could not inherit the throne because they would have been born from a non-royal, non-religious union. He would have gone through a ritualistic process that would have enabled him to become a vessel of Horus so he could rule; only children born to him after that could have inherited. So Hatshepsut was born to Thutmose I and his Great Wife Ahmes. And this is the part where incest comes up. Traditionally, pharaohs married their sisters. For ancient Egyptians, incest was pretty much only practiced among royalty, that we know of, and it was very much related to the fact that the pharaoh was also meant to be a divine figure, a vessel of Amen-Re. The mythology of the Egyptian pantheon included a lot of incest—Atum, the first god, had to have sex with himself to be born, quote, “magically producing his own birth and subsequently the first generation of male and female gods. The brother-sister pair, Shu and Tefnut, copulated with each other and produced the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut.” And so on and so forth. Through this lineage, Horus, king on earth and the god that pharaohs embodied was the son of another of those brother-sister pairings. So incest was seen as holy for Egyptian royalty, and royal daughters would have only had the option to marry a future pharaoh, who would also be at least their half-brother—it was him or celibacy for life. There were literally no other options, and we see very few marriages between royal daughters and quote-unquote “commoners” during this period of Egyptian history. Of course, if you study ancient Egyptian history, this practice also probably contributed to a lot of succession crises because after a couple of generations, sibling couples either can’t produce offspring or their offspring is severely ill as a result. To make this practice more comfortable, male and female siblings were raised separately. They wouldn’t have had a typical sibling relationship as we think of siblings today who are raised in the same househol… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unrulyfigures.substack.com/subscribe