Early Rise to Authority: From Consort to Regent

Hatshepsut was the elder daughter of the 18th-Dynasty king Thutmose I, and the consort of her half-brother, who would soon become king Thutmose II in 1492 BCE. When Hatshepsut was very young, around 16 years of age, her husband-king Thutmose II passed away—after only three years of rule. Hatshepsut had a daughter, Neferure, but no sons. From among the dead king’s sons by one of his lesser wives, a new king, Thutmose III, was chosen by the oracle of the god Amen-Re, as revealed to the powerful royal priesthood. Thutmose III was then a boy of not more than three years of age, and could well have been chosen by the priests because his birth mother was more pliable, allowing Hatshepsut to serve as the boy’s regent. While it is likely that they considered Hatshepsut the most competent royal figure remaining, it should be assumed she was also intended to serve as a means for the elite to preserve the status quo—and their power—in the kingdom.

Navigating the Corridors of Power

From 1497 BCE, Hatshepsut’s informal rule on behalf of the boy-king allowed Egypt’s elites to maintain their lucrative positions in the royal court. This was an era in which, elsewhere in the world, the boy-king might well have been assassinated by jostling warlords weeks after his ascension. Yet Bronze Age Egypt was protected from outside invasion by deserts to the east and west, a sea to the north, and giant granite boulders that blocked the river Nile to the south. The bounty of the Nile, which flooded its banks every year leaving behind fertile black soil to grow wheat and barley, meant a stable and plentiful food supply that afforded Egypt societal and hence governmental stability. This stability also gave the young queen regent time to understand the workings of the state and make sound decisions in the boy-king’s stead.

Hatshepsut had the wherewithal to discuss military campaigns, tax income and budgets, and manage diplomatic visits with grace.

Hatshepsut had the wherewithal to discuss military campaigns, tax income and budgets, and manage diplomatic visits with grace. This practical knowledge was probably part of her early upbringing: she would have learnt by witnessing the example of her father Thutmose I—a military man not born to the kingship, who fought Levantine warlords and won, and who created new agreements with polities in West Asia.

Hatshepsut also showed practical savvy in court affairs. For example, in filling an important position, she named two men to the role, thus limiting any one of them from acquiring too much power. Her appointment of so-called “new men”—up-and-comers disconnected from old elite families—led to the rise of courtiers loyal exclusively to her rather than to the agenda of the old order, which did not always align with her goals. She worked closely with one such hire, a man named Senenmut, on her most important projects, including the construction of two huge granite obelisks: a construction order that would take at least a decade to fill.

Egypt’s surviving material shows that even as soon as Hatshepsut had taken informal power as queen regent, her elite followers began building grander and more elaborate tombs and other structures, using new building materials, showing how her supporters benefited from her reign. In his autobiography, Ineni, one of her courtiers, calls her a “mistress of command with excellent plans” that had advanced him, and made him and others wealthy.

Hatshepsut had not only been the highest-ranking royal wife of the previous king, but also served as Egypt’s most powerful priestess—the God’s Wife of Amen—having probably been positioned in that role by her father King Thutmose I. These roles afforded her the vantage point to acquire a keen understanding of Egyptian statecraft, which always went hand in hand with religious considerations. As a girl, Hatshepsut was thought wife of a god to whom the King was considered chief priest. Hatshepsut’s priestly training helped her to see that every political decision was best communicated by the temple. If the gods had decreed something, no man (or woman) could be blamed for making that decision, and there could be little political pushback against it.

Consolidating and Legitimising Power: From Queen to Pharaoh

As regent, Hatshepsut’s first years of rule were uneventful. She made sure the young king was educated, brought up in the temple rituals, and trained in the military arts, even as she was ruling in his stead. Her initial claim of power was an informal one.

Then from around the second year of her rule, an inscription from Semna describes Hatshepsut performing rituals as the “heir of the king and daughter/son heir of the gods”: a title usually reserved for kingship. Later, early in her reign, there is an image from Karnak showing Hatshepsut wearing queenly dress but with a king’s headdress.

By the seventh year of her reign things have changed dramatically. For political reasons that have not been recorded, Hatshepsut’s informal power was made real.

When the young King Thutmose III was just eight or nine, Hatshepsut was crowned king alongside him, with the full support of her courtiers, Egypt’s elite families, and its powerful temple priesthoods. Hatshepsut became king—not a “queen”, which was a subservient role at the time that implied no direct political power. From that point, Hatshepsut presented herself and acted as ruler. In statuary, in reliefs, and probably in rituals before the court and the populace—she appears as a man. Breasts bound, wearing a masculine kilt, sporting the long beard of kings: in images from this period, she is the Pharaoh.

Under Hatshepsut’s rule, what had been an authoritarian, military kingship under her father and husband-king became a bustling court of priests and officials, all vying for influence. Hatshepsut cultivated an elite sphere of increasingly competitive and restricted knowledge, veiling her royal power in deep religious mysteries and obscure codes: if you knew how to read a cryptographic version of her name, you were in her much sought after inner circle.

Under Hatshepsut’s rule, what had been an authoritarian, military kingship became a bustling court of priests and officials.

Kingly Acts: Opening up Trade and Keeping the Peace

One of Hatshepsut’s notable achievements as Pharaoh was to reestablish the trade networks that had been disrupted during the Hyksos occupation of Egypt in the previous century. She appointed men to make arduous journeys north and south to advance this goal. This increase in trade further bolstered the wealth of the 18th Dynasty Egyptian kingdom. It also demonstrated Hatshepsut’s keenness to revive ancient models of kingship and royal practice, and reaffirm her place within these traditions.

Hatshepsut oversaw preparations and funding for a trading expedition to the Land of Punt (in modern-day Eritrea or Ethiopia): an act depicted on the walls of her mortuary temple. This successful expedition brought back vast riches, including gold, ebony, ivory, spices, and incense trees to be planted in the temple gardens. Artefacts from the era show how new oils, musical instruments, and weapons entered Egypt under her kingship. Hatshepsut’s appointed vizier—the king’s second-in-command—fulfilled her orders on these trading ventures and also helped put down insurrections in Kerma (in modern-day Sudan). According to a tomb inscription written by her overseer of the treasury, Hatshepsut personally oversaw the collection of the spoils of war.

Hatshepsut also probably oversaw several new diplomatic agreements that consolidated Egypt’s power in the north. Indeed, there were no military campaigns in the Levant during Hatshepsut’s reign: she appears to have settled all international issues there through coalition building and communication, rather than violence. In the south, however, she brutally put down rebellions in Upper Nubia, while extracting as much wealth as possible in minerals and labour from Lower Nubia.

Building a Great State

Hatshepsut was an ambitious builder, and commissioned hundreds of embellished construction projects across Upper and Lower Egypt. These projects served various purposes: they showed her piety to the gods, and made conspicuous her income from increased trade, proving her god-given might and mandate as an Egyptian pharaoh.

Among Hatshepsut’s most famous monuments is her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri near Luxor, known as Djeser-Djeseru (the Holy of Holies). Built into the cliff in front of what now is called the Valley of the Kings, it is renowned for its grand architecture and detailed relief sculptures, with a series of terraced stages for ritual performance and a link to her tomb on the other side of the cliff.

The site of the temple was carefully chosen, being next to the tomb of one of Egypt’s most respected and powerful pharaohs—Mentuhotep II (ruled c2009–c1959 BCE) of Egypt’s 11th dynasty, who had ushered in a period of Theban might that Egyptologists now call the Middle Kingdom.

These projects served various purposes: they showed her piety to the gods, and made conspicuous her income from increased trade, proving her god-given might and mandate as an Egyptian pharaoh.

Hatshepsut’s massive Deir el-Bahri project was the first time any Egyptian king had created a mortuary temple primarily presented as a temple of the god Amen. A king’s mortuary temple was meant to serve as a space that architecturally bound regal and divine authority in death. But this temple was also a living monument, because she had it constructed at the culmination point of an important festival called the “Beautiful Festival of the Valley”, a Theban festival of the dead ancestors whereby the cult statue of the god Amen was transported across the river to the temple to symbolically access the gods’ power. Hatshepsut further remodelled Thebes and Karnak more than any previous king and built several grandiose projects for new ritual routes.

By commissioning new monuments, developing new ritual structures, and changing the relationship between king, god, and dynasty, Hatshepsut manufactured a divine mandate for her rule through ritual and oracle, established through a newly constructed landscape. Perhaps she had to do this because of her unique position as a woman in the role of a king. Nevertheless, it changed Egypt’s kingship forever: subsequent pharaohs would continue to seek the blessing of their gods, rather than imposing political rule upon their subjects.

Hatshepsut refined Egypt’s governance from an arbitrary decision-making process into an organised bureaucratic system.

End of a Legacy?

When Hatshepsut died after 22 years as Pharaoh, Thutmose III buried her in state in the Valley of the Kings. He helped finish her Temple of Millions of Years in the great cliffs sacred to the goddess Hathor. And he finished her Red Chapel in the heart of Karnak, upon which he was shown alongside her on its deep magenta quartzite blocks as king in a subservient position to his masculine-presenting aunt, walking behind her, rarely appearing in the company of the gods without her.

But only a few years after her death, Thutmose III sought to erase her legacy by defacing her monuments and removing her name from the list of kings. Statues of Hatshepsut were smashed. Her relief images as king were chiselled away, replaced with plaster forms of other kings in Thutmose’s lineage, as if she had never existed at all. Hard stone like the red granite of Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel is very hard to cut, yet Thutmose III took the time and care to have the chapel dismantled and discarded, no doubt to make a statement.

Hatshepsut had left Egypt richer and more confident of its place in the world. So, what motivated this desecration? Perhaps it was Thutmose III’s need to legitimise an heir not connected to the Hatshepsut family lineage. To fend off competition from among Egypt’s elites, the destruction of Hatshepsut’s material legacy signalled the end of her influence for good. Even her priestly office of God’s Wife was greatly reduced, ensuring that no king’s daughter would be able to gain political power through that means again.

Despite these fervent attempts to erase Hatshepsut’s legacy, the modern rediscovery of her monuments and her story, particularly during the 19th century, has led to a reassessment of her role and contributions. We now know that in her time, Hatshepsut had consolidated the priesthood into an institution that could successfully take on the throne. She reformed official positions, establishing a system of governance with built-in checks and balances to curb overreach. She professionalised her police force by employing able desert men called Medjay. Hatshepsut refined Egypt’s governance from an arbitrary decision-making process into an organised bureaucratic system.

Today, Hatshepsut is celebrated as one of ancient Egypt’s most successful pharaohs, and a leader who thrived in the most remarkable of circumstances. After Hatshepsut, it would be another 1,500 years before a pharaoh’s daughter would once again reign in Egypt: a woman named Cleopatra.