The Woman Who Would Be King Read Online Free PDF Page A

with orders to slaughter all male foes, except for one son of the chieftain who would be brought back to Egypt as a captive. Did the young king order this expedition? Thutmose II was only eleven or twelve years old, and Hatshepsut was likely a girl of thirteen. Ahmes was probably the one who instigated this cruel annihilation. It was her husband, Thutmose I, who had conquered southern Nubia in the first place, his first campaign there still famous for his slaughter of their chieftain and that influential display of the bowman’s corpse on the royal barge at Thebes. To her, this was sacred work.
    All three key players—the king, his queen, and his regent—were perhaps in the throne room when the pronouncement of no mercy was made. Both Hatshepsut and Thutmose II would have recognized the intent behind Ahmes’s decision and valued the resolution for what it was: rebellion against the king of Egypt was akin to jeopardizing the cosmos by acting against the sun god himself; such an act could never be permitted. When the Egyptian army reached Kush, they carried out their orders successfully. Egypt’s riches always came upon the backs of such atrocities. War was not just compulsory; it was a gift to the gods.
    Ahmes and Hatshepsut needed to add another pillar to support the new kingship: the immortalization of Thutmose II’s reign in Egypt through new temple construction. The women were not content to give the young king all the credit; indeed, they included their own images in the new structures they created at Karnak Temple,an unprecedented move that hints at just how powerful they really were. On at least one of the surviving monuments, Thutmose II shares equal space with his Great Wife, Hatshepsut, and his mother-in-law, Ahmes. 7 These two women were responsible for establishing the visual ideology of the young king’s reign. In other reliefs, Hatshepsut even appears without the king, standing alone before the god Amen-Re in one of his temples, perhaps the first time a King’s Wife was depicted with such agency of her own, wholly removed from her husband. She is shown dressed as a traditional queen, wearing an archaic skintight linen dress that had been popular a thousand years before and a vulture headdress (which for all we know was an actual taxidermied vulture) with richly feathered wings that spread about her head like the lappets of a wig. A round crown called a modius sat atop the colorful vulture headdress, and Hatshepsut embellished the crown with two tall ostrich plumes as an extra extravagant touch. From the images on these temple blocks and stelae there is no mistaking Hatshepsut’s power as queen. The reliefs depict her performing rituals that were usually the king’s responsibility: Hatshepsut is shown standing before the god Amen, who is in either his clothed form or his sexualized manifestation; she is holding an offering, and the king is not present as an intermediary. 8
    In addition to these traditional trappings of a strong kingship—waging ruthless military campaigns and building monuments in the king’s name—Ahmes and Hatshepsut added an unexpected twist. Something new emerged from the process of crafting this young boy’s kingship: unprecedented depictions of female power, and their source is likely found in the feminine underpinnings of Thutmose II’s kingship. For millennia Egyptian temples had been places of both ritual and architectural conservatism. Yet these two women not only held the reins of political power but also formally recorded that power in stone. And the remaining evidence suggests that courtiers and priests accepted these images in the most sacred temple of Thebes. Any discussions the elite may have had concerning the audacity of a woman depicted performing such sacred rituals went unrecorded, but tellingly the stone carvings from Hatshepsut’s time as queen remain unmarred. Given that her supremacy on the reliefs produced during her husband’s reign is so overt, many