Elizabeth Day on Hatshepsut

0:00Cleopatra may be the most famous woman of ancient Egypt, but far more significant was Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh of the 15th century BC during the early period of the New Kingdom. These are the opening words of a beautiful book from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's in front of me now, and Hatshepsut is our subject today, a mighty pharaoh and Egyptian queen whom I know little about, so I'm looking forward to today's show. My guest here in the studio is the novelist and history graduate Elizabeth Day. Welcome to Great Lives and thanks for your nomination. Why have you picked this intriguing woman?

0:41First of all, thank you for the introduction of me as a history graduate. I don't often get to use that these days. And secondly, I, like you, knew very little about ancient Egypt and had never heard of Hatshepsut until I went to Egypt for the first time over Christmas and New Year. And I was blown away by the scale of history. And I was particularly taken with her story. And I think my entry point was the fake beard. So in Cairo Museum, there is a bust of Hatshepsut with this dark beard. And we were told by our guide, this is a female pharaoh. And she had to present herself as a man to be taken seriously.

1:26And of course, that immediately intrigued me because I'm always looking for examples of strong women through history. and from there I was lucky enough to go to Luxor and I got to visit her temple and I've got a new novel out in September and I rewrote a chapter of it in order to mention her and I think that's magical that someone who we know so little about who existed thousands of years ago can still hold such a lure in the modern day. Elizabeth Day, I should add, is the author of nine books including How to Fail, Everything I've Ever Learned from things going wrong. Her next novel, you've just mentioned it, is called One of Us.

2:05And I've read online, Elizabeth, that your recent trip to Egypt rekindled your sense of wonder about that past world. I had a particular link to Cairo in that my grandparents got married there during the Second World War, and so I'd always wanted to go there. And the pyramids were astonishing. We actually went inside. I don't know if you did that, Matthew. No. They're sort of like a claustrophobic Isha print. And I think the thing that I found just most astonishing about it is that I was able to walk across flagstones that were 7 ,000 years old, plus the astonishing beauty of the tombs and the Valley of the Kings and just the peaceful flowing banks of the Nile and this sense that history continues just as the Nile flows.

2:53it just felt as though I was in direct communion with this ancient civilization that had done so many amazing things like inventing time and how we still think of time so yeah I was bowled over by the whole experience plus I love the food and the people and I got a great rug from there too. We don't expect our guests to be absolute experts on their choice but how much do you know about her life. In fact, how much does anyone know about Hatshepsut's life? I'm assuming a fair bit of detective work is involved in reconstructing someone's life from, what is it, three and a half thousand years ago?

3:33Well, my understanding is that she left a lot of her narrative on the walls of her memorial temple. From what I know of her, she came to the throne as a regent for her stepson, who was very young at the time. And then either she got a taste for power or she realised that she could do a better job. And she started inventing her own mythology. And so one of the things that she claimed was that her mother had been impregnated by the sun god Amon-Ra. And this legend is depicted on the walls of her temple. And so for me, I see her as a terrifically strong woman who presented herself as a man in all of the hieroglyphics and the statues that were later defaced by a subsequent male ruler.

4:21And the other thing that I really like about her was that she might have had a long standing affair with her architect. Her architect was a prominent man in Egypt who never married, which is unusual for the time. And he built these wonderful temples with her. He was the tutor of her daughter. I rather like the fact that they were both so unconventional and that they might have had this romantic affair, like Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester, or they might just have been epically wonderful collaborators. I was interested in what you said about the fact that we don't know too much about her gives free reign to our imagination.

4:58I mean, is she a little bit of a blank slate on which you're painting your own feminism? Yes, but the short answer, yes. But as a novelist, I love that because I love being able to take the grains of a story and then imagine the things that might be lacking. so I definitely think I bring my own specific context to it and there's something I think you mentioned that Egypt had reignited my sense of wonder and I think that's partly why that we can place our own stories in this context and I like to imagine her enjoying that and you say she's a blank slate I mean quite literally because the subsequent ruler defaced a lot of her statuary and a lot of the things that she had deliberately made in order to tell her story.

5:45And so we also have very little clue of what she actually looked like. Joining us on the line from near her home in Bolton is Professor Joyce Tildesley, Egyptologist and author of Hatshepsut, The Female Pharaoh. Your first book, I believe, Joyce. Well, it was actually my second book, but it's the one that I think I feel closest to. And I totally agree with what's being said, that it's a story. We know that she existed and we have key points in her life that we know about, but there's also a lot of gap there that we haven't filled in yet. So we each sort of approach her chaps up slightly differently and come up with our own version of her, which is fascinating.

6:24Have you, in your own version of her, formed a sort of relationship with the same kind of person as Elizabeth has? To a large extent, yes. I see her as a very intelligent woman, and a woman with a lot of imagination, which is an odd thing to say about someone who died so long ago, but she seemed to be courageous. She had the courage to break away from just pure warfare, which pharaohs were quite obsessed with when she came to the throne. She does a lot of building, she does a lot of planning. A lot of her buildings have gone, but particularly in the area of Luxor, there are still a lot of her buildings left and we can see what she was doing.

6:58And it's remarkable stuff. I mean, her mortuary temple, memorial temple, it's absolutely beautiful. It's one of the most beautiful buildings from the ancient world still today. Can you give us some idea of Egypt at that time, at Hatshepsut's time. What was going on in this part of the world? Well, it's the late Bronze Age. There's been a period where Egypt has been ruled by foreigners in the north and there's been sort of civil wars breaking out and it's not been clear what the line of succession is. And having a king on the throne, a pharaoh, is really important to the Egyptian people. Anyway, if this gets resolved, pharaoh's kings from the Luxor region, Thebes it it was called then, expanded an empire both to the northeast and to the south, into Nubia, and sort of developed a time of unprecedented wealth and prosperity, which Chepsut inherited when she becomes regent and then becomes co-ruler.

7:50She is the wealthiest person in the world, or in her world anyway. Did you know all this, Elizabeth? I didn't. I'm so fascinated, Joyce, and I love that she has gripped you as well. And I'm also slightly relieved that I didn't get everything terribly wrong. No, no, not at all. She was the longest reigning female pharaoh until Cleopatra, whom no one has yet nominated for great lives, by the way. But we've known about Cleopatra far longer. Hatshepsut was only really unearthed in the 19th century, I think. Am I right about that, either of you? Joyce, I defer to you. Well, the problem is, as Elizabeth has said, that she depicted herself as male, with a male body.

8:32I wouldn't say she was depicting herself as a man. I would say she was depicting herself as a traditional king. But the people looking at it, observers, they could see these images, but of course they thought it was a male king. And we couldn't read the hieroglyphs for a long time. And it was only in 1822 that hieroglyphs were decoded. And then we could read the text. And then there was a period of intense confusion because these male images were with these female texts because she sometimes referred to herself as a female. How to marry up this male image, this female text, very difficult. and it's only relatively recently that we've actually understood the full story that she was a queen who took power alongside a co-ruler.

9:09Was she the first female pharaoh as far as we know or are there others? There are others but it's quite a complicated question actually. It sounds quite simple but it's not. We have one called Sabik Nofru who was definitely a female pharaoh but we have a whole range of women and Hatshepsut was one of these as well who actually rule on behalf of an infant pharaoh. so if you're the queen consort and your husband dies or is away for any time but it's mainly death the queen will step forward and will rule until either the king comes back or until her son is old enough to be king so we have these women who are actually ruling egypt but their reigns are entirely within the reigns of their sons dates in egypt are quite confusing every time a new king comes on the throne they start the dating system again and it goes year one year two year three and then if that king dies it'll be year one year two year three and so on again so because of this we have a lot of women who are effectively ruling egypt well they're not crowned as king i also found it very interesting that in order to establish her legitimacy she did tell this story about how her father was amon ra who had impregnated her mother and unlike the story of jesus actually they had sex.

10:28But I found that so intriguing because this is 15th century BC. So the idea of that story replaying the story of how religions or cults of worship are formed, it really sort of fired up my imagination for the power of storytelling. And it's interesting, Elizabeth, having done about 500 great lives now, how many of the great women whom we have studied achieved prominence, not just in politics or business, to achieve their stature because their husbands died. It's very striking. That's very interesting. Joy, sorry, were you about to correct something that I said? No, not correct as much, but Hatshepsut is getting her power from her father who was a pharaoh, but she also invents this divine pharaoh at the same time and she's quite happy to have them both side by side as her pharaoh and she will use whichever one she wants to.

11:22but she's not the only one who has this myth. The myth of God's fathering pharaohs actually goes further back as well and other pharaohs will also use this myth. Whether they're copying it from Hatshepsut's mortuary temple we don't know. She is the first one to test it out so clearly on the mortuary temple walls but it's something that other people do as well. This connection between the pharaoh and the divine is a really, really strong one and technically you're the only person in Egypt who can really negotiate with the gods on behalf of Egypt. So that's why it's so important to have a pharaoh on the throne.

11:56And that's what always makes me wonder if, I mean, how did she come to the throne? How did she persuade people that she could do this? And it might well have been ambition. But I also wonder if there was some sort of event that happened that meant that she or an adult pharaoh was needed on the throne to negotiate with the gods. I mean, of course, it could be something that she'd invented or, you know, she devised herself. Can I ask a weird ahistorical question to you, Joyce? Sure. Does Hatshepsut ever come to you in dreams? Or have you ever had a sort of psychic reading where you might have communicated with her?

12:29No, no. And I try very hard not to even think that way, because I know as a historian I should not be thinking that way. I should be trying to look at the facts. But she's the sort of person who sort of does slightly come to you as a person, as well as a historical character. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. Have you met her, Elizabeth, in dreams? Not yet. I keep hoping. Who was she? How was she brought up, Elizabeth? Where did she come from? I know because Joyce has reminded me that she's the daughter of a pharaoh. Yes. And she married Joyce. Didn't she marry her half-brother? Half-brother.

13:06She's the daughter of a pharaoh, but it's a pharaoh who seems to be adopted into the royal family. He's not the son of the previous pharaoh. Ideally, it would be the son of the reigning pharaoh would be the heir to the throne. But if there isn't one, you can adopt into the royal family. And this is what happens to her father, Tuthmosis I. He's adopted in and he's a successful general. She's his daughter and she marries his son by a different mother. You see, it's also the story of unconventional families, Matthew. That's another context that you can bring to it. But the more you study it, you can see there is no such thing as a conventional family.

13:38They married their sisters, didn't they? Yes, kings did, but nobody else did at this time. Sisters or half-sisters. It's a special privilege. It made a lot of sense because then you would have someone who was trained for the role from birth, just as the king was being trained for the role from birth. Of course, they didn't know that genetically this is a really bad idea. But it meant that because the role of the queen is a really important one. And I think for years we've probably underestimated the role of the queen consort of Egypt. but when we start to realise that she might actually be called on to rule Egypt we can see that she had to be specifically trained for a job just as the king had to be trained for it too.

14:14Is it true Joyce that Atchetsut was the person who drew you away as it were from accountancy to run away to join the circus of archaeology? Yes, yes I would say that because at that point when I wrote the book I was working as an accountant which obviously is a really good job to do and that's actually quite interesting as well. In a way, Egyptology is a bit like accountancy in that you're trying to fit things into patterns and I just became completely absorbed by this story. Still am, still am. I would still, if I had to meet someone from the ancient world, if I could have that, it would be Hatshepsut.

14:49Well, I hope she's listening. You're listening to The Great Life of Hatshepsut. Nominated by Elizabeth Day and helping us with the details of her life is Professor Joyce Tildesley, who earlier this year was named Archaeologist of the Year in a public vote. And Joyce, you visited many of the sites that reveal clues about this pharaoh's life, including the temple her architect helped build for her. Describe for us what it's like to take us there to those places you've been to. Oh, well, when you go there today, it's in the desert, and it's a beautiful tiered building. It cuts into the Theban cliff there.

15:26it's on three tiers and as Elizabeth said she uses the walls of her temple to tell the story of her reign and you can see in some places where she's been chiseled out and we've talked a little bit about that I just want to suggest here though that maybe yes he is chiseling her out and his son carries on with this but maybe he's not so much hating her because she took over his job but maybe B, he's putting her back where he thinks she should be as a queen regent. So he's happy with her helping guide him, but he wants to claim his whole reign for himself. It's really hard to tell because if we look where the two of them are depicted together, he's always shown with her.

16:05She never cuts him out of the story, and I think this is great about her. She could have so easily got rid of Tuthmosis III and been the only king on the throne, but she didn't. She trained him up, made him into a general. So I think that says a lot about her. We've touched on the beard she's depicted with. How do you think she, Hatshepsut, dealt with the business of being a king, which is an essentially male concept, within the body of a woman? Well, to be a king of Egypt is not necessarily to be male. It's accepted that the king can be female. The problem is how do you present yourself to other people?

16:45And Sobek Nofri, who we've already mentioned, was a king before Hatshepsut. And she got around this problem because there's a very specific way that a king looks. He's always a young, fit male body, wears a kilt, wears a false beard, smites enemies. He's very active. whereas women are traditionally far more passive and don't wear a false beard, don't wear the same regalia and so on. Sobh Iqnofru got round this problem by wearing both a queen's dress and putting a king's kilt round it. So she tried to combine the two and it wasn't particularly successful. Sartorially it sounds a bit of a mess. Very, very difficult.

17:19But it shows us that that's the problem. That is the issue, that you want to conform to what is expected from a king. The fact that you're a woman doesn't matter or shouldn't matter to anybody. So Hatshepsut's artists, they start by depicting her with a feminine body, but eventually they just stop and she just appears like any other king and they're relying on people who can read the texts to know that she's a woman. But it's a way of confirming that you are the right king on the throne and it's why she does a lot of what she does. She starts with some military campaigns at the beginning of her reign.

17:52She restores Egypt where it was damaged during the civil war and the foreign occupation. and she's doing this to prove that she is an effective king. That's above all what she wants to do to show that she is the right person on the throne. Here from a recent Book of the Week on Radio 4 is Deborah Findlay reading Pharaohs of the Sun by Guy de la Bédouillère. Hatshepsut now explored the idea that the concept of a king could be separated from its physical manifestation in a man and treated as a distinct idea. In this ingenious reimagining of the concept, kingship became a mantle which could be adopted by a man or woman and conflated an either.

18:38This way, Hatshepsut created her own version of the male-female composite of Egyptian kingship in which both parts were vested in her. This sounds very much like what you've just been saying, Joyce, am I right? Yes, yes. Another interesting thing about Hatshepsut is that she has a daughter who starts, when her mother becomes king, starts to act as a traditional queen consort would act. So it's as if the king also needs a feminine element who is separate from the king as well as being part of the king to act alongside her. So you get everything here. You have two kings on the throne, Dothmosis III and Hatshepsut, but you also have her daughter Neferurei acting as if she was a queen.

19:22I mean, it makes me think of the divine right of kings that we had before the Civil War in England. The fact that the kingship is this godly object that people are appointed to. Or the idea of when we say in modern times, the White House issued this statement is this idea that the power is bigger than the individual. Yes. Yeah. And once she's been crowned king, there's no stepping back for it. You can't abdicate. She is then king till she dies. She had a daughter, did you say? Who was the father? Tuthmosis II. And is this the daughter tutored by Hatchipsuit's architect? Yes, yes. Can I ask about her name?

20:03Because it took me a long time to be able to pronounce it and I'm probably still not doing it. I still can't. It's so difficult. For some reason it's so difficult. And our wonderful female guide said, if you think of it as Hatchipsuit, that's helpful. So that really helps me. That's very useful. Thank you. Sorry, Joyce, go ahead. I was going to say that when she becomes king, though, she develops five names because all kings of Egypt have five names. And from the point she became a king, she would have been known as Mart Kar-Re. That's what the people would have called her. Mart is a concept in ancient Egypt, which is the opposite of chaos.

20:37Rightness and justice and order and peace. So that's her name. But I mean, they wouldn't necessarily, although it's a sort of mission statement, they wouldn't necessarily translate their names either. If you know what I mean, like my daughter's called Philippa, but we didn't choose it because she's a lover of horses. You know, it's just a name. Did she do those things, the rightness and justice and peace and all that? Let's talk about her achievements as a pharaoh. Was she a good pharaoh? What did she do? I think she was an excellent pharaoh. she fought a little tiny bit at the beginning of the reign because this was expected that's what a pharaoh would do but really she didn't have anyone who wanted to fight her the interesting thing is because Elizabeth was talking about failures when Egyptologists first got to grips with the Hatshepsut story some Egyptologists actually did interpret her as a failure because she didn't fight and expand the empire and they saw a time of peace and prosperity Wow!

21:32It does not actually everything I know, I know I mean it's ridiculous to me it's such a successful reign but yes yeah where are the wars come on there's your male historians for you how did you guess could we look for a moment at this slightly mysterious figure the the architect tell us more about him Joyce well we don't again know a great deal about him but he's a prominent person and as Elizabeth said he's not married which is very unusual everybody was expected to marry in ancient Egypt I mean there's an outside chance he was married and there's no record of his wife but it seems unlikely because he's a self-made man very closely linked to Hatshepsut's court she did appoint a lot of self-made people when she when she took on the throne she inherited advisors but she slowly replaced them with her own group of advisors and a lot of these were self-made men so he's one of those he claims to be the architect of the beautiful temple, whether he's actually the architect who sat down and drew the plans or he's just in charge of a directing organisation, we don't know.

22:37And he's a scribe and he's done lots and lots of things. He's obviously very wealthy because he builds two tombs, but the two of them are linked together. And there's always this rumour that they were sexually linked, basically, as well as being great friends. We find his image hidden in her temple. And this is very interesting because normally an ordinary person wouldn't put their own image into a royal family it would be sacrilege and he does this and it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't be able to do that without her finding out about it so either she said yes you can do this or she found out about it and was very angry because he vanishes and we never see him again um but yeah it's interesting he looks after her daughter as well which is up to that point is usually more usually associated with with a woman's role of a sort of nurse.

23:28So there was obviously a very close link there. Do you want to see her as having another half, so to speak? I'd like to see her as having someone that she could confide in and turn to for advice, because I can imagine it was a pretty conflict ridden, stressful and untrustworthy level at which to operate. So even if he was simply her close friend, I would like that for her. But I had a question for you, Joyce. Did the architect and the daughter vanish around the same time? It's difficult to tell. I think he vanished later, but it's difficult to tell. Did she change Egypt, do you think, Joyce? Well, physically she did, certainly.

24:13I mean, in the area of Luxor, she actually remodelled the Luxor Temple, the great Luxor Temple there, and she helped develop the processional routes around it. And, of course, she built a memorial temple. She probably built in other places as well, but we don't have as much information because it hasn't survived in the same way, so we can't say exactly what she did throughout it. But definitely, physically she did. After she died, though, and Tuthmosis, for whatever reason, had sort of tried to eliminate her from history, there's this sort of reaction against it, and the next queens who come along are not as prominent as Chepsut had been.

24:48Suddenly the queen shrinks down a bit, so I think she influenced history a bit in that way as well, in that the next kings were less likely to want a very, very prominent queen. Do we know how old she was when she died, Joyce? She disappears and there's just one text commemorating it in year 22. I would say between 40 and 60, something like that, probably near 50. A great age. Yeah, I was going to say that was actually a great age for ancient Egypt. You know, a lot of women died in childbirth. A lot of people never made it to 10 years of age, so that is actually really quite old. Was her body ever found, her mummy?

25:28Oh, that's a really, really good question. There is a mummy on display in Cairo, which is identified as Hatshepsut, but there's a lot of dispute about whether that really is Hatshepsut or not. The evidence can be interpreted either, with so much of ancient Egypt, the evidence can be interpreted either way. Of everything we don't yet know about her, Elizabeth, what would you most like to find out? I would, it sounds so trite and there's no way of finding this out, but I'd like to know if she was happy. Archaeologist of the year, I believe you can do it. What do you think, Joyce? Well, I would personally, I'll move on from that quickly.

26:10I would quite like to know how she persuaded people that she could be crowned king. To me, that's the key of the whole thing. Was there some sort of plot developing? Was there some sort of plague or something happening that needed someone who could communicate with the gods? Did people just think it was a logical reward for so many years of hard work? To me, the whole key to understanding what happens in her life is that, but we just don't know. We've only got her version of the story, and of course her version of the story, there's no opposition to it. It just says it happens because I'm the daughter of the god and I'm daughter of Tuthmosis I.

26:42So we need a bit more information there. Elizabeth, the picture we have is so sketchy, and yet she has become such a compelling figure more than 3 ,000 years after her death. Why? Why now? I do think that we are going through such an interesting time. And in times of great transition, I think we look for representations of ourselves in past ages, almost as reassurance that all this too shall pass and that there will be some lasting hope on the other side of it. And also, in a time of transition, we look to stories that reflect the uncertainty that we're feeling of our own age. And into those stories, we can place our own meaning.

27:28We like riddles. We do. My thanks to you, Elizabeth Day, and to you, Professor Joyce Tilsley, up in Liverpool. And thanks to our radio audience for listening. Goodbye.