Archive: Hatshepsut

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0:30at Whole Foods Market. Before Achilles found glory and Odysseus eventually found his way home, someone had to compose the Iliad and Odyssey. But was their credited author, Homer, even real? Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy show that takes history seriously. And we are traveling back to 8th century BCE to trace the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems that became backbones of Western literature. Join me and my fantastic guests as we unpack the stories of ancient Greek culture, war and triumph and have a laugh while we do it. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:07Thank you. Bye.

1:12This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. One of the great pleasures of In Our Time is its serendipitous nature. The subjects are full of surprises. Sometimes it could be an author you particularly admire and you wish to compare your knowledge against the deep understanding of the guests. The next week comes a subject you've never heard of. And that's why for this selection of highlights from Melvin Bragg's voluminous treasure trove of episodes, I have selected one about which I knew absolutely nothing until I heard it.

1:59The story of Hatshepsut, whose life answers the mysterious question, when is a queen not a queen? And the answer is, when she's a king. The ancient Egyptians had no word for queen, and so once she became co-ruler with her baby stepson, she was designated a king. Hatshepsut had a serious impact on the royal culture of the pharaonic rule and left a rich legacy of statues and buildings, and Melvin's guests played a significant role in piecing together what it tells us about Egyptian society in the second millennium BCE. But she also inspired jealousy, including in her stepson, Thutmose III, who after her death began erasing her from the history of ancient Egypt.

2:50And if you're interested in pornographic graffiti, remember to listen to the bonus material part of this episode where Melvin and the academics boldly go where not many of his guests have gone before, or since. Enjoy listening. Hello. In the early 15th century BC, a woman came to power in ancient Egypt. Her name was Hatshepsut, and she remained the longest reigning female pharaoh until Cleopatra 1400 years later. She was remarkable for ruling in a society normally controlled by men. She ruled for about 15 years. But that's far from the most remarkable thing about her. Many scholars regard her as one of the most influential pharaohs of the New Kingdom period of Egyptian history.

3:31Among her achievements, she forever changed the public image of the pharaoh, embarked on a far-reaching building program, and increased Egypt's prosperity by expanding its trade network. Yet at some point after her death, it seems that a systematic attempt was made to erase her memory from the records, and her image was removed from many of her monuments. With me to discuss Hatsheput's life and legacy are Elizabeth Frude, Associate Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford, Kate Spence, Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum.

4:06Elizabeth Frude, Hatsheput was born around 1500 BC, not long after a period of turmoil, turmoil even in Egyptian history. What had been going on? Well, when Hatshepsut came to the throne, Egypt had been stable and centralised for only about 70 years, and that's only three, four generations. Prior to that time, Egypt had been split into a number of different kingdoms. So in the north you have what we call the Hyksos rulers, and these are rulers that probably were of Canaanite origin, so from Syria, Palestine, and they seem to have set up at least one or maybe several kind of kingdoms in the delta area.

4:43To the south, far in North Sudan, you have the Kingdom of Kush, which is a major African kingdom based in the site of Kerma, which is just south of the Third Cataract. So you have these major foreign ruled polities on either end of Egypt, deep in the south but coming into typical Egyptian territory, and these Hyksos kings in the north. and squeezed in the middle you have Egyptian dynasties, Egyptian kingdoms. One at Abydos, which has recently been confirmed archaeologically, and a nascent kingdom in Thebes. And it's this Theban kingdom that leads and drives the unification of Egypt at the start of the end of the 17th dynasty, the start of the 18th dynasty.

5:26And it's that Theban dynasty, it's those Theban kings that Hatshepsut has descended from. So those conquerors, those kind of reunifiers of Egypt is where she has her origins. That's the family she descended from. And this cultural memory of Egypt's trauma and this kind of split and division that it was under for a couple of hundred years is still very present. It's still very much part of cultural memory. So how did it become stabilised and active and conquering again? These kings that were established in the Theban area, which is modern Luxor, they started this program of reunification. So a series of military excursions down into the north to drive out the Hyksos, probably to take over this Abidin dynasty as well and maybe other kinglets, just to gradually expand, gradually consolidate, drive out the foreign rulers and push back the Kushite kingdom as well.

6:20So a series of campaigns under at least three kings of the late 17th and early 18th dynasty were pushing Egypt, the borders out and gradually restoring territory and gaining control again. And Hatshepsut is probably directly descended from these conquering kings. Yes, and the last of those, the one from whom she's directly descended, seems to be particularly effective. Yes, he was the one that, in biographical texts and royal texts from the time, talks about driving out the Hyksos and pushing them up into Syria-Palestine as this great kind of final conquering victory. And he is one of her ancestors.

6:59She was directly descended from him. Kamal Price, let's just take a swerve for a moment before we come back to her. Are there any other examples of female pharaohs before a chiptote? Yes, we have this impression of the pharaoh as being always a man. The god the pharaoh is incarnating, the god Horus, the falcon, god of kingship, that must always be a man. But in fact, there are lots of women who ruled Egypt. What do you mean by lots? How many? It's hard to put a number on it. But if you imagine the life expectancy of even a royal person in Egypt was not great. Women ended up ruling as regents a lot for young children.

7:44But they're not charas, they're regents. Well, right at the beginning of a unified kingdom in Egypt, there's a lady called Mernith. And she has this really big, impressive tomb alongside others belonging to male kings. She seems to have acted as a regent, but we don't have texts of a sufficient length and detail to give us more information about that. This happens again and again where women seem to step in for young boys, boy rulers. But then there's a lady called Sobek Nefru. Stepping being their mothers, usually. Yeah, the mothers. Regents. Regents. But not pharaohs. Not until a lady called Sobek Nefru.

8:23and she really seems to rule not because she's the mother of a young son, a young king, but on her own terms for about four years, about 1700 BC. And it seems actually that Hatshepsut could have based some of her ideas about presentation on this lady Sobek Nefru. But then just, as Liz said, just immediately before Hatshepsut comes to the throne there's this war-like dynasty the 17th dynasty and they comprise again, several regents, powerful women. There's one woman in particular, Queen Ahotep, who, we've got a nice text describing her bashing up foreigners and mustering the troops. And there's a sense that she's a kind of Amazonian queen.

9:08So possibly this is an influence for Hatshepsut. But you say Amazonian queen. They didn't have a word for queen. And is she a pharaoh, so a regent? I'm sorry to be picky, but it's you, isn't it? There is no word for queen as in female ruler. So what is this basher, as you've so eloquently described it? What is she? Is she a regent or is she a pharaoh? She's a king's mother who acts, again, for a young son. A regent, yeah. But who must control a lot of the material wealth, the power in the land. And then there's this lady called Ahmos Nefertari. Now, she, again, is a regent, mother of a famous king, Amenhotep I.

9:48and she, after her death, becomes worshipped as a goddess. So there's a possibility Hatshepsut even met this woman, an elderly lady maybe, when Hatshepsut was young. So there's this precedent for strong female characters with real ability in a world where you don't live for very long, maybe women have a greater life expectancy. We're talking about the average of the early 30s, aren't we? Even less than that, yeah. But basically dentistry, as I understand it. Abscesses. Well, that's very clear, but I'm just trying to isolate the idea of this woman being a pharaoh and everything that a pharaoh implies in terms of depiction, in terms of history, in terms of influence on Egyptologists such as your good selves.

10:32So, Kate Spence, what do we know about her immediate ancestors? The early 18th dynasty are descended from the kings that Liz was talking about earlier. and the throne seems to have passed to someone called Amenhotep I who doesn't seem to have left any children. The throne then passes to a king called Thutmose I who is Hatshepsut's father. He was probably distantly related to the royal family but we have no real evidence of this and he seems to have been married to a woman called Ahmose who was almost certainly directly related to the family of the rulers who'd actually instigated the 18th dynasty and the New Kingdom.

11:21So we have an idea of a royal grouping who intermarry and keep the firm going. Very much so. One of the difficulties is it can be difficult to establish who is related to who precisely because we don't have the family trees. we have relationships to specific kings. So someone will have the title of king's mother or king's wife, king's daughter, but we don't actually always know which king they're related to. So a lot of ink is spilled over trying to work out quite who is related to whom. But Hatshepsut is the daughter of Thutmose I, who was a general, we think, early in the 18th dynasty and who seems to have stepped in as heir because Amunhotep I didn't produce any children.

12:07His wife Ahmose is the great wife, so she's the chief of many wives within the harem, and Hatshepsut seems to have been her eldest daughter. There was probably a younger daughter as well, Nefru Biti. And then there are a number of sons that we know about, including two called Amunmose and Wajmose, who seem to have died before Thutmose I did. And they then have to find, because when he died, there doesn't seem to have been an adult male child to pass the throne on to. So the throne passes to an individual called Thutmose II who we think was a small child at the time of accession. We're not sure exactly how old but he's thought to have been younger than Hatshepsut through a number of quite complicated arguments.

12:57It's quite complicated enough, Frankie, so we can say we've done complication for the moment. Right, OK, so we have Moses II, and he then seems to be married to Hatshepsut, who we think is his half-sister and is probably older than he is. This is quite common in the royal family at the beginning of the 18th dynasty. Egyptians generally don't seem to have practised brother-sister marriages, but this does occur within the royal family and seems to be particularly strong in the early 18th dynasty. The idea seems to have been that this is modelled to some degree on divine precedent, but primarily probably to keep wealth and power within one family.

13:40But she was in, given the secondary developments of wives and the other, she seems to have been in rather a powerful position. Graham was talking about these powerful royal women, the powerful regents. She was already that, wasn't she, because of the primacy of her birth to the first wife. Her father was a great warrior. She's in a strong position already in the court. Very much so. She's in an extremely strong position and she already holds important titles, particularly the title of God's Wife of a Moon. So she's embedded in the cult practice of the Theban 18th dynasty at Luxor by this time.

14:20I meant what Campbell was saying. So why did she, do we know anything about, was she forced to marry him? Did she choose to marry him? We know absolutely nothing about this. One of the big problems with our records is we vaguely know sort of where relationships are likely to have happened. But we know nothing about the motivation other than what we can deduce historically. so there is no way of knowing whether she was happy with this. The likelihood is that she would have expected to marry as the eldest daughter of the major wife and the previous ruler, Pharaoh, she would almost certainly have expected to marry whoever was coming to the throne next and if she hadn't married that individual there probably would have been no chance for her to marry outside the royal family.

15:03So again to go back to Graham's idea of there being only one woman Pharaoh before but lots of powerful women. She's in the stage of being the most powerful woman in Egypt by this marriage. It would have put her into the position to become that, although her mother, Queen Ahmose, is probably also a very, very powerful individual at the time. So there's this sort of line of very strong women who gradually sort of shift power between themselves. OK, come back to you, Elizabeth Froude. The qualifications that you rightly made all along the way there, Kate, It seems that we are talking about patchy evidence.

15:41We are talking about things put together from inscriptions on monuments, sometimes half erased, sometimes large gaps between, and so on and so forth. But let's also tell the listener that among the three of you, you've got some pretty certain ideas of what went on in key areas. Otherwise, you wouldn't do this programme, would we? And so we take it for granted that the evidence is patchy, but the evidence is also there and has been knit together over the years by Egyptologists. So, Elizabeth, so she became, her husband became Thutmose II. And do we know what role she played? He's the pharaoh now.

16:20She's what? She's the principal wife. And so in that role, she would probably participate in rituals and in temple environments. What sort of rituals? Probably supporting rituals to him. So particular kind of temple practices, like the daily ritual in the temple and things like that. When the king was performing those at maybe particular festivals or something, she would probably be part of that. She bore the title of God's Wife of Amun, which means she probably had her own separate set of ritual practices that she was doing in support of the wider royal ritual performance. We don't know much about what those might have been just from temple depictions.

17:01When you're talking about rituals, are you always talking about religious rituals or the state rituals? It's hard to separate the two, actually. But are they sacrificing stuff, or what are they doing? They're offering to the gods, absolutely. So they're providing sacrifices of animals, oxen, that sort of thing within the temple environments. They're not doing this every day. They have priests that run the temple environments, and the kings are relatively separate from that for most of the time. But on particular occasions, they would be performing these rituals. We are talking about a priest-powerful society, aren't we?

17:35Yes. So the fact that she, Camille, can I turn to you now, the fact that she held the title of God's wife of Amun put her among the priests, ahead of the priests, and gave her her own independent power and wealth. Absolutely. So as Liz alluded to, this role, this ritualised role for the queen is an important one to support the pharaoh. But with this title of God's wife of Amun, there's a link, a direct link, between the woman fulfilling that role and the god. and it's a quasi-sexual role that's not quite clear to us. But the estate, this title came with an estate. And so you need administrators to control this vast amount of wealth that comes with the title.

18:19And I think it's interesting, after Hatshepsut, that title of God's Wife of Amun is dropped for several centuries, perhaps out of fear that women with that title have become too powerful. But it's an important title. It's one independent from the pharaoh. What evidence did they bring to bear then? Or did it need evidence that she was God's wife of Amut? I think, I mean, in her position in the royal family, that was just an accepted role. But don't we have an inscription or an illustration of this? A literal illustration? There are plenty, yeah, plenty. What do they show? They show, as with all Egyptian scenes, almost all Egyptian scenes, a kind of stereotyped, very formal, decorous, appropriate way to show the queen in front of a god, interacting with a god.

19:10But what's interesting about Hatshepsut is these become more and more kingly. They become more and more direct. She gets featured in scenes you would expect a pharaoh to be featured in. When he said God's wife, is there a sexual element as well as a religious and metaphorical element? Absolutely, yes. And how do we see, as it were, that? I don't mean, I'm not looking for pornographic, I know that rubbish. Is that depicted in any way? It's focused mainly on the words used. So wherever she appears, she's called the God's wife. The wife of the God Amun-Ra, the principal God of the state at this time.

19:52Prep for a busy week with Whole Foods Market. Start your day with fully cooked breakfast sausages from Amy Lu. 365 brand frozen waffles with no bleached flowers and of course whole foods market eggs which are all cage free or better in the evening bring home a build your own family meal that feeds four for just 35 choose one entree and two sides shop smarter not harder at whole foods market before achilles found glory and odysseus eventually found his way home someone had to compose the Iliad and Odyssey. But was their credited author, Homer, even real? Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy show that takes history seriously.

20:34And we are traveling back to 8th century BCE to trace the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems that became backbones of Western literature. Join me and my fantastic guests as we unpack the stories of ancient Greek culture, war and triumph and have a laugh while we do it. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye. ...in Egypt. Kate Spence, do we have a notion of when she emerged or became or see however she got hold of it? She became pharaoh. Yes. Tumos II died after we think probably only about three years on the throne. How old did he be? We don't know. Probably somewhere around sort of early teens or even before that, possibly.

21:25He has to have been old enough to have fathered a daughter because he and Hatshepsut had a daughter called Neferure. So they'd had a child, but they hadn't produced a male heir. But there were children in the royal court, but they're thought to have been extremely young. And the throne passes when he dies to Thucmose III, who we think was probably extremely young when they took the throne. The latest estimates are saying he's probably a toddler. probably only a couple of years old, estimates ranging between about two and six probably. So really young child taking the throne. His mother was a very, seems to have been a very minor wife.

22:07Her name is Isis. She's only ever mentioned later during his reign as a king's mother, so she had no formal titles in relation to Thutmose II. And Hatshepsut somehow, presumably, because she already held a lot of power in the royal court, manages to get herself appointed into the position of regent. So she is ruling the country effectively for a toddler, even though she's probably fairly young still herself, maybe sort of late teens, possibly even into the early 20s. So she already is ruling the country for this child and basically trying to hold the dynasty together. She would have had the support of many of the courtiers because all of the courtiers owed their position to their relationship to the royal family.

22:55So if the kingship had been lost by that line of the family, there would have been major turmoil. And as Liz said at the beginning, there's a lot of worry about the country returning to turmoil and instability. So she starts off as regent, and then extraordinarily cleverly, she makes very, very gradual incremental changes within which... Can you give us some examples as you're going along? You said she makes a play in the Blander Dam, but I haven't got any examples. Yeah, she starts around year two of Thutmose III's reign. There is an inscription from Semna in which she is referred to as performing ritual and as the heir of sort of the king and the son or daughter, the heir of the gods, which basically means those are things which would normally be reserved for kingship.

23:43And then we have images. we have an image from Karnak from somewhere early in the rain where she's shown wearing a queenly dress but with a king's crown on and then at some point between year two and year seven but probably closer to year seven she actually declares herself king and takes a full royal set of titles. Year seven being year seven because? The Egyptians count sort of time through the regnal years of specific kings so when a new king comes to the throne I say we still but we don't talk about the current years but so year seven is the seventh year of the reign of King Mose III and then we add all of those together to try and project back in time so she declares herself a full king takes a full royal titulary and then starts to present herself as well as acting as ruler There's a consideration here that might seem to be strange, but Elizabeth's true.

24:46One of the ways you progressed in societies like that, and then until a few hundred years ago in societies like ours, is by assassination. So why didn't she assassinate her stepson, Thutmose III? She would have had the opportunity to. Within a court, a large court that is probably factionalised around particular individuals, there certainly would have been the opportunity to. So it must have been a very stable court. The family must have been very secure. And as Kate mentioned, they must have been very concerned within this small family, you know, royal group to maintain the dynasty. And that must have been the primary concern.

25:25And so instead of Hatshepsut, and she probably wouldn't have been able to suddenly seize full power on her own. She needed the support of the family and the wider kind of court group. that court group was stable and secure so a small child could come to the throne and hold the throne and the only mechanism for her to gain power was through Queen Regency which was absolutely established and expected of these royal women so she's absolutely following I think what is expected and normal within this sort of situation you have a very stable court very stable family group and so she does what is expected she steps in as Queen Regent it's what happens next that is extraordinary.

26:06To you, Camel, what happens next? Well, we all want to know, when do they know so we can know when she became pharaoh? We're talking 1500 BC, we're talking about this woman pharaoh, and when did people begin to say this is the pharaoh? So there's this key monument, the Red Chapel, and this is a small building made of quartzite, which is a red British stone, and that's why it's called the Red Chapel. this was built to house the boat, the golden boat in which the god's statue travelled around that was a key part of Egyptian temple ritual and in this Hatshepsut takes the opportunity to depict herself and her supposed co-regent Tutmos III but she shows herself and Tutmos III both as men but she takes the precedent she is the leading figure in these scenes and in one text on that chapel she says the god Amun the chief god of the state in the form of an oracle the god speaks to her and says you are my chosen king you will have the kingship for yourself even though this is dated to year two of an unknown king not quite sure another king that's not a hatchet suit she claims that that title of Pharaoh, ruler of both lands.

27:32And this was built when? This Red Chapel? We know specifically when it was built so we know, I know, not specifically I mean, okay, okay I see a phrase coming over all your eyes never mind, within a year or two we know two or three years, but that is when she is known, she says she is Pharaoh and she seizes public power. Yes, she goes from sharing power, there's this acknowledgement that the toddler Thutmose III is the notional pharaoh and Hatshepsut is the regent. And then this announcement that the gods have endorsed her and she follows this up again and again in other scenes and texts that she has been chosen and we hear much less of Thutmose III.

28:13And we'll stick to the architectural line for a moment, Kate Spence, because her mortuary temple, which is called Deir el-Bari, supposed to be evidence of her greatness as pushing into monumental buildings, architecture, and establishing authority, and as one of the things that she did. She didn't turn her energies to military campaigns, as far as we know, but she did to monumental building and trade and diplomacy. Let's kick off with monumental building. The Mortuary Temple, Daryl Bahari is the modern name. It sort of means sort of northern church or cathedral or whatever. It was originally called by Hatshepsut Jezer Jezeru, which is sort of holy of holies or most sacred of sacred spaces.