Hatshepsut
Pharaoh, builder, trader.
Full detail, evidence and debate
Hatshepsut ruled Egypt for around two decades as pharaoh in her own right, presiding over a period of peace, an enormous building programme and a celebrated trading expedition to the land of Punt. Her monuments were defaced decades after her death in an erasure that historians are still arguing about.
- Reign
- c. 1479 – 1458 BCE, 18th Dynasty
- Route to power
- Regent for her stepson Thutmose III, then co-ruler as king
- Mortuary temple
- Djeser-Djeseru at Deir el-Bahari
- Expedition
- Voyage to Punt, recorded in temple relief
- Obelisks
- Two raised at Karnak; one still standing, c. 29m
- Erasure
- Images defaced c. 20 years after her death
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How a queen became a king
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Hatshepsut was the daughter of Thutmose I and the principal wife of her half-brother Thutmose II. When he died, the heir — Thutmose III, his son by a secondary wife — was a small child, and Hatshepsut became regent, as royal women had before her. What was unusual is what happened next: within about seven years she took the full titulary of a pharaoh, was crowned, and ruled as king rather than as a regent acting for one. Egyptian kingship was a male office with no vocabulary for a female occupant, so the iconography adapted: she is shown in the kilt, the nemes headcloth and the false ceremonial beard, sometimes with female pronouns in the accompanying text. This was not disguise. It was the correct visual grammar for the role she was performing.
The Egypt she governed
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The early Eighteenth Dynasty was Egypt at its most confident: the Hyksos had been expelled, Nubia was under control, the treasury was full and Thebes was becoming a monumental city. Hatshepsut's reign was largely peaceful — there were campaigns in Nubia but no major wars — and she used the space to build and to trade. Her chief official Senenmut, who held an extraordinary accumulation of titles and was tutor to her daughter Neferure, oversaw much of the building work. The relationship between them has attracted centuries of speculation, resting on very little evidence beyond his unusual prominence and the graffito of unclear meaning found near her temple.
Deir el-Bahari
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Her mortuary temple, Djeser-Djeseru, is cut into the cliffs at Deir el-Bahari in three colonnaded terraces linked by ramps, its horizontal lines set against a vertical rock face. It is among the most admired buildings of the ancient world and looks startlingly modern; it drew directly on the neighbouring Middle Kingdom temple of Mentuhotep II while vastly exceeding it in scale. She also raised obelisks at Karnak — one of which, nearly thirty metres tall, still stands — restored temples damaged during the Hyksos period, and built extensively across Egypt and Nubia. The volume of construction is one measure of how stable and well-funded the reign was.
The Punt expedition
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
The temple's most famous relief sequence records a naval trading voyage to Punt, a land somewhere on the Red Sea coast — Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia and eastern Sudan have all been proposed. The reliefs show the ships, the loading, the houses of Punt built on stilts, its ruler Parehu and his wife Eti, and the cargo: myrrh and frankincense trees carried whole with their root balls for replanting at the temple, ebony, ivory, gold, live baboons and leopard skins. It is the richest surviving visual record of an ancient Egyptian trading voyage, and it doubles as a claim about the reign: a king who could reach the ends of the known world and bring back the incense the gods required.
How we know
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
The temple reliefs and inscriptions, the obelisks, the statuary — much of it recovered smashed and buried in a pit near the temple and painstakingly reassembled by the Metropolitan Museum's excavations — and the administrative record of officials such as Senenmut. Her mummy is probably, though not certainly, the body designated KV60A, identified in 2007 partly by matching a tooth found in a labelled canopic box; the identification is accepted by many Egyptologists and questioned by others. Later Egyptian king-lists mostly omit her, which is itself evidence of what happened after her death.
The erasure, and what it means
The broad outline is accepted but dates, numbers or details are actively argued by specialists.
Roughly twenty years after Hatshepsut died, her images were chiselled out, her cartouches replaced with those of her father, husband or stepson, and her statues broken up and dumped. The work was done under Thutmose III, who had by then reigned successfully in his own right for two decades. The old explanation — a resentful stepson taking revenge as soon as he could — collapses on the timing: he waited twenty years, and the erasure was selective, targeting her kingly representations rather than every trace of her. Current arguments favour dynastic housekeeping: securing his own son's succession by removing an anomalous female king from the record, or eliminating a precedent, or resolving a theological problem about how the line of kingship ran. Whatever the motive, the effect was that she vanished from Egyptian history until nineteenth-century Egyptologists reconstructed her from the fragments.
Legacy
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Hatshepsut is now recognised as one of the most successful pharaohs of the New Kingdom by any conventional measure — length of reign, stability, building programme, trade — and her erasure has become a case study in how women get removed from the historical record, and in how carefully the record then has to be reassembled. Deir el-Bahari is part of the Theban Necropolis World Heritage site and among Egypt's most visited monuments. She sits at the head of a long African line of women who held sovereign power: Amanirenas in Kush, Amina in Hausaland, Njinga in Ndongo, the Asante queen mothers.
Where to go next
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Ancient Egypt covers the civilisation and Kush its southern neighbour and rival. Amina of Zazzau and Njinga cover later African women who held sovereign power, and the Egypt country profile covers the modern state and its heritage management.
Sources
- General History of Africa (8 volumes)African source
UNESCO International Scientific Committee · 1981–1993
https://www.unesco.org/en/general-history-africa - UNESCO World Heritage List — African sites
UNESCO
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/
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Ancient Egypt
An African civilisation on the Nile, in contact with an African world.
Three thousand years of state continuity on a single river produced monumental architecture, mathematics, medicine, writing, law and administration — sustained by constant exchange with Nubia, Punt, Libya and the Levant. Egypt is the longest-running state experiment in human history, and it is African.
Nile ValleyAmina of Zazzau
The queen who walled her cities.
Warrior queen of the Hausa state of Zazzau, remembered in chronicle and oral tradition for campaigns that opened trade routes across Hausaland and for the fortified earthen walls — ganuwar Amina — attributed to her. Her historicity is accepted; her dates and the scale of her conquests are argued.
Hausaland (Nigeria)Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba
Thirty years of diplomacy and war against Portugal.
Njinga Mbande negotiated, converted, defected, allied with the Dutch, commanded armies personally into her sixties and kept a state independent of Portuguese Angola for four decades. She is one of the best-documented African rulers of the seventeenth century, and among the most difficult to sentimentalise.
AngolaThe Kingdom of Kush
Nubia's answer to empire — and, for a century, Egypt's pharaohs.
From Napata and later Meroë, Kush ruled the middle Nile for over a thousand years, conquered Egypt as the 25th Dynasty, fought Rome to a negotiated peace under a one-eyed queen, and built more pyramids than Egypt ever did.
Nubia (Sudan)