Hatshepsut: The Woman Who Became Pharaoh

Hatshepsut (c. 1507-1458 BCE) was one of the most successful pharaohs of ancient Egypt, and one of the most unusual. She ruled for around twenty years in the early New Kingdom of Egypt (c. 1479-1458 BCE), at the height of Egypt’s imperial power, and was the first woman in recorded history to take the full titles and regalia of a pharaoh and rule as a king. Her reign was long, peaceful, and extraordinarily productive. Yet after her death, her successors, most likely Thutmose III, tried to erase her name from history in what is still one of the most systematic damnationes memoriae of the ancient world.

I find this period the most interesting in Egyptian history, and the reasons are not the ones most writers give. The conventional story is the Obelisk Story and the Punt Story, and both are good, but the more I read the Karnak material the more I think Hatshepsut’s real innovation was institutional: she built a kingship that her stepson could inherit without bloodshed, and she did it deliberately. That is a more interesting accomplishment than a long obelisk.

Early Life and Royal Blood

Hatshepsut was born around 1507 BCE, the daughter of Thutmose I, the third pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and his chief queen Ahmes. Through her father she was a direct descendant of the warrior king Ahmose I, who had expelled the Hyksos from Egypt and founded the New Kingdom. Through her mother she was related to the Theban priestly elite.

She had at least one sibling, a sister who would become the royal wife of Thutmose II, and she was married to her half-brother Thutmose II, becoming his “Great Royal Wife.” When Thutmose II died, around 1479 BCE, his son by a minor wife, the future Thutmose III, was still an infant. Hatshepsut became regent for the young king, the official protector of the throne. Within a few years, she had taken the title of pharaoh herself. For the unusual legal and religious steps required, see our article on how a woman became pharaoh in ancient Egypt.

Reign: Trade, Building, and Peace

Hatshepsut’s reign is one of the best-documented of the New Kingdom. The reliefs at her great mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari describe her major achievements in vivid detail, and the inscriptions on the rocks at Aswan record the quarrying of granite for her obelisks.

Her most celebrated achievement was the great expedition to the Land of Punt, an exotic trading partner on the Red Sea coast (probably in modern Eritrea or Sudan). The relief in her temple shows the Egyptian fleet sailing south, the queen of Punt, often identified as Ati, waiting in her mountains, and the returning ships laden with myrrh, ebony, ivory, gold, and exotic animals including a giraffe and a panther. One of the more striking reliefs at Karnak is the botanically accurate depiction of the plants brought back from Punt; a small detail, but a reminder of just how careful Egyptian artists were when they wanted to be. The expedition opened new trade routes and brought enormous wealth to Egypt’s temples.

Domestically, Hatshepsut is best remembered as a great builder. Her reign produced:

• The mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari, a masterpiece of New Kingdom architecture designed by her steward Senenmut and built into the cliff face across the Nile from Thebes. The temple’s central terrace is more than 200 m (660 ft) tall in elevation, ranking it among the largest religious structures of the ancient world.
• A pair of obelisks at Karnak, one of which still stands and is among the tallest ancient obelisks ever successfully raised, at about 29.5 m (97 ft) tall and weighing some 343 tons.
• Numerous additions to the Temple of Karnak, which was already expanding across roughly 100 hectares (247 acres) for the Amun precinct alone.
• Restoration work on older temples, including the sanctuary of Amun at Luxor.

Her reign is also notable for the absence of major military campaigns. Hatshepsut was a builder, not a warrior, and her reign was a period of peace and trade. To learn more about the queens of this period, see our guide to the queens of the New Kingdom.

The Royal Image: King, Not Queen

What makes Hatshepsut’s reign so remarkable is the way she presented herself. Although she was a woman, she took the full titulary of a pharaoh and insisted on being depicted with the traditional male attributes of kingship: the false beard, the royal kilt, the double crown, and the bare male chest.

This was a calculated religious and political decision. In Egyptian belief, the pharaoh was the living embodiment of the god Horus, and the office of pharaoh was, in principle, male. By depicting herself as a man, Hatshepsut was claiming that she was pharaoh, in the full religious and political sense, regardless of her biological sex. The full implications of this transformation are explored in how a woman became pharaoh in ancient Egypt.

The single most thorough treatment of the visual side of Hatshepsut’s reign is still Gay Robins’s Women in Ancient Egypt (1993). Robins reads the iconography carefully and argues, convincingly in my view, that the male costume is not a simple disguise but a coherent theological statement.

The End of the Reign and the Damnatio Memoriae

Hatshepsut died around 1458 BCE, possibly in her early forties. She was buried in KV20 in the Valley of the Kings, the deepest of the royal tombs, and her mummy, discovered in 2007 in a CT-scan study led by Zahi Hawass and identified by the DNA match to her grandmother Ahmose, was transferred in the 2021 Pharaohs’ Golden Parade to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo, where it is on display.

For a long time, scholars debated whether Thutmose III had ever been eclipsed by Hatshepsut, or whether her regency had been peaceful and co-operative. The 2007 identification of her mummy settled a long-standing puzzle and confirmed that she had been a full pharaoh, not merely a regent.

After her death, her name and images were attacked. Her cartouches were hacked out of monuments, her statues smashed, her obelisks walled up. Whether this was done by Thutmose III himself or by his successors late in his reign remains, in my view, genuinely unsettled. The older view, that Thutmose led the destruction in a fit of personal resentment, has been eroding for a generation. The newer reading, associated with the work of Jörn-Christian Wiedenfeld and others, is that the defacement campaign was stretched out over decades and may have had more to do with the restoration of Amun’s prerogatives than with the question of Hatshepsut’s sex. I am sympathetic to that reading but not yet convinced; the campaign is too selective to be purely theological, and too late to be purely personal.

Legacy

Hatshepsut remains one of the most studied and most celebrated pharaohs in Egyptian history. Her temple at Deir el-Bahari, painstakingly reconstructed in the twenty-first century, is now one of the most visited sites in Egypt. Her expeditions, her buildings, and her brief, brilliant reign have become symbols of what Egyptian civilization could achieve under capable leadership.

In an era that valued male strength above all, she ruled as a king for two decades and left behind a record of peace, prosperity, and architectural achievement that few pharaohs could match. Her reign stands, I think, as one of the most successful and most mysterious of the entire New Kingdom.