Why hatshepsut became pharaoh

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Pharaoh Hatshepsut enjoyed a peaceful and prosperous reign. She built magnificent temples, protected Egypt's borders and masterminded a highly profitable trading mission to the mysterious land of Punt. She should have been feted as one of the most successful of the 18th Dynasty kings. Not everyone, however, was impressed by her achievements. Soon after her death in BC, Hatshepsut's monuments were attacked, her statues dragged down and smashed and her image and titles defaced. The female king vanished from Egyptian history.

She would remain lost until, almost three thousand years later, modern Egyptologists reconstructed her damaged inscriptions and restored her to her rightful dynastic place. The Egyptians believed that the spirit could live beyond the grave, but only if some remembrance - a body, a statue, or even a name - of the deceased remained in the land of the living.

Hatshepsut had effectively been cursed with endless death. Who could have done such a terrible thing, and why? Tuthmosis III, stepson and successor to Hatshepsut, seems the obvious culprit, but we should not condemn him unheard. There are two major crimes to be considered before we draw any conclusion. Ahmose had failed to provide her husband with a male heir, but that did not matter overmuch; the royal harem could furnish an acceptable substitute.

Prince Tuthmosis, son of a respected secondary queen, was married to his half sister Hatshepsut, and eventually succeeded to the throne unchallenged as Tuthmosis II. When Tuthmosis II died suddenly, after a mere three years on the throne, a dynastic crisis threatened. Again there was a prince in the royal harem, but this time the prince was a baby. Under normal circumstances the royal mother would act as regent for her son; unfortunately the mother in this case was a lady of unacceptably low status.

A compromise was reached. The infant Tuthmosis III would become king under the temporary guidance of his stepmother, the dowager Queen Hatshepsut. For a couple of years Hatshepsut behaved as a totally conventional regent, acknowledging the young Tuthmosis III as the one and only pharaoh. Then, with no explanation, she was crowned king. Hatshepsut now took precedence over her stepson, and Tuthmosis was relegated to the background.

He would languish in obscurity for some 20 years. From this point onwards, Hatshepsut enjoyed a conventional reign. Military campaigns were scarce; it seems that few enemies were prepared to challenge pharaoh's might. Instead Egypt's vast resources were directed towards a nationwide improvement programme which was to see an extension of the Karnak Temple complex, and the building of the Deir el-Bahari mortuary temple, one of the most beautiful monuments of the Dynastic age.

When she died, after 22 years on the throne, Hatshepsut was buried with all due honour alongside her father in the Valley of the Kings. Hatshepsut had usurped her stepson's throne. What could have caused her to take such unprecedented action?

But why? You were a god. Hatshepsut probably knew her position was tenuous—both by virtue of her sex and the unconventional way she had gained the throne—and therefore appears to have done what canny leaders have often done in times of crisis: she reinvented herself.

The most obvious form this took was having herself portrayed as a male pharaoh. But he believes it may have been motivated by the presence of a male co-ruler—a circumstance with which no previous female ruler had ever contended.

She was not cross-dressing! The key word here is maat—the ancient Egyptian expression for order and justice as established by the gods. Maintaining and perpetuating maat to ensure the prosperity and stability of the country required a legitimate pharaoh who could speak—as only pharaohs could—directly with the gods.

By calling herself Maatkare, Hatshepsut was likely reassuring her people that they had a legitimate ruler on the throne. She began with the erection of two foot-tall obelisks at the great temple complex at Karnak.

Reliefs commemorating the event show the obelisks, each weighing about tons, being towed along the Nile by 27 ships manned by oarsmen. Hatshepsut carried out her public works program across the empire, but it was concentrated in the area around Thebes, the dynastic and theological center of the Thutmoside dynasty, where she built a network of imposing processional roadways and sanctuaries. At Deir el-Bahri, just across the Nile from Thebes, she erected her magnum opus—an immense memorial temple, used for special religious rites connected to the cult that would guarantee Hatshepsut perpetual life after death.

Try This! Explore More. Hatshepsut, like other pharaohs, was the child of a king. Unlike the others, she was a woman. Read this next. Women Heroes.