Hatshepsut

Hatshepsut was born around 1507 BCE into the royal house of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the family that had driven out the Hyksos, the foreign shepherd-kings who had ruled the Delta, and welded Egypt back into an empire. Her father was Thutmose I, a general who fought his way to the throne and then fought his way to the Euphrates, the great river of Asia, and her mother was Queen Ahmose, the great royal wife. As custom demanded, the princess was married to her half-brother, who became Thutmose II, for the blood of the royal line was thought too sacred to mix with common stock. The marriage produced a daughter, Neferure, but no son. When Thutmose II died around 1479 BCE, still a young man, the heir was a small child: Thutmose III, born to a secondary wife named Isis, an infant who could not yet lift the crook and flail, the shepherd's staff and whip of kingship. Egypt needed a regent, and the dead king's widow stepped forward. She was about twenty-five years old.

A regent rules in a child's name, and for a few years Hatshepsut was shown in the old way, standing dutifully behind the boy king. Then, around the seventh year, she did what no woman of her dynasty had done before: she took the throne herself. She assumed the full fivefold titulary of a pharaoh and the throne name Maatkare, Truth is the Soul of Ra, and from that day her statues wore the kilt, the nemes headdress, and the braided false beard of a king, while her inscriptions twisted their grammar to fit, calling her his majesty herself. To justify the unthinkable she reached for two stories and set them in stone. At Karnak she declared that her earthly father, Thutmose I, had named her his heir before his assembled court. And on the walls of her temple she told a greater tale: that Amun, the hidden king of the gods, had come to her mother in the likeness of the king, that the ram-headed potter god Khnum had shaped the child and her soul upon his wheel, and that Hatshepsut was the god's own daughter, born to wear the double crown of the Two Lands, Upper and Lower Egypt.

Her monument was Deir el-Bahari, the place the Copts would later call the Northern Monastery, on the west bank of Thebes where the cliffs curve like an amphitheatre. She named it Djeser-Djeseru, the Holy of Holies, and its architect was Senenmut, a man of modest birth who rose to be her steward, her chief of works, and the tutor of her daughter, a man the court whispered about then as historians whisper now. Against the towering golden rock he set three great terraces linked by ramps, their pale colonnades as clean as stripes of sunlight, their courts planted with living myrrh trees brought home from Africa. On its walls the temple carried the two stories of her life she most wanted told: her divine birth, and the voyage to Punt. Senenmut raised himself two tombs, one of them hidden, its ceiling painted with the earliest star map known, and then, near the end of her reign, he vanishes from the record as completely as a man swallowed by the desert.

In her ninth year she sent five ships down the Nile, through the old canal to the Red Sea, and south to Punt, a fabled coast of incense trees somewhere along the Horn of Africa, where Egyptians had not traded for generations. The fleet came home with thirty-one myrrh trees rooted in baskets for the temple terraces, sacks of crimson incense, gold, ivory, ebony, leopard skins, and apes, and the chiefs of Punt themselves came to bow, including their queen, whom the artists carved with frank amazement, a heavyset woman riding a donkey. It was the most celebrated trading expedition in Egyptian history, and the incense smoke of Punt rose to Amun for centuries. At Karnak, the vast temple precinct of Amun on the east bank, she raised two obelisks, the greatest of her age, each a single shaft of Aswan granite nearly thirty metres tall, its pyramid point sheathed in gold that flashed across the river. Her inscription boasts that the pair were cut, ferried, and raised in seven months. One of them still stands, the tallest ancient obelisk in Egypt.

The reign was an age of building and trade rather than conquest: temples restored that the Hyksos had ruined, mines reopened in Sinai for turquoise, a Red Chapel of granite at Karnak to house the sacred boat of Amun, and the wealth of two continents flowing into Thebes. The army was not idle, mounting expeditions into Nubia, the gold land to the south, but there were no great wars, and none were needed. Through it all the boy king grew up. Thutmose III was not poisoned, imprisoned, or exiled; he was given high military command in her final years, a fact that sits awkwardly beside every tale of a tyrant stepmother. Her daughter Neferure, the living knot between the two kings, disappears from the record in her teens. And in her twenty-second year, around 1458 BCE, Hatshepsut died, a little over fifty, and was carried into the Valley of the Kings, the desert ravine where the New Kingdom buried its rulers, to a tomb she had prepared beside the sarcophagus of the father whose name had made her a king.

Twenty years passed. Then, late in the long reign of Thutmose III, the erasure began. At Deir el-Bahari her statues were dragged down and smashed, the pieces thrown into a pit beside the temple; at Karnak her cartouches, the oval rings that held her royal names, were chiselled out or walled over, and her pair of obelisks was bricked in to the very tips. For centuries the world blamed the vengeance of the nephew she had overshadowed. But a man does not wait two decades for revenge, and the careful targeting, the queen's name cut out while kingship itself was spared, reads more like cold statecraft, tidying the male line for the heirs to come. Thutmose III marched on to seventeen campaigns and an empire, while her name sank into the sand. Three thousand years later the Metropolitan Museum's excavator Herbert Winlock found the pit and pieced her statues together, Polish restorers raised her temple from ruin, and in 2007 a team led by the Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass identified her mummy, found long before in a small tomb, when a single molar in a box inscribed with her name fitted the gap in the jaw exactly. The woman who was king had her name back.