Ancient Egypt

Egyptian Pharaohs

How a Woman Became Pharaoh in Ancient Egypt

Explore the political, religious, and legal steps by which Hatshepsut became pharaoh of Egypt, and what it meant for a woman to rule as king.

How a Woman Became Pharaoh in Ancient Egypt

For most of ancient Egyptian history, the title and office of pharaoh was held by men. The king was understood to be the living embodiment of the falcon god Horus and, after death, of Osiris. The office carried with it a sacred masculinity that, in principle, was not transferable to a woman. Yet a few women in Egyptian history, most famously Hatshepsut, did become pharaoh. The story of how they did it is a remarkable case study in the flexibility of Egyptian religious and political thought.

The Religious Framework

In Egyptian belief, the pharaoh was a divine being. He was the son of the sun god Ra, the earthly image of Horus, and, once he died, the new Osiris. His role was to maintain ma’at, the cosmic order, by performing the rituals that kept the sun rising, the Nile flooding, and the people of Egypt in harmony with the gods. For these rituals, the pharaoh had to be male, or to be ritually made male.

This presented a real problem for any woman who inherited the throne. In practical political terms, royal women could and did wield great power, they could govern as regents, they could be chief priestesses, they could issue decrees, and they could direct the army. But to take the throne, and to perform the central religious duties of the office, a woman had to be transformed.

Hatshepsut’s Precedent

There were earlier examples of powerful royal women. The Old Kingdom queen Khentkaus, who lived at the transition between the Third and Fourth Dynasties, was probably a reigning queen in her own right, and may have been the mother of the founders of the Fifth Dynasty. Other queens, like Sobekneferu at the end of the Twelfth Dynasty, ruled as pharaoh in their own right. But these are the exceptions. For most of Egyptian history, queens wielded power without claiming the throne.

Hatshepsut went further than any woman before her. She took the full titulary of a pharaoh, a Horus name, a Nebty name, a Golden Horus name, a prenomen, and a nomen, and she had herself depicted in the traditional male costume of a pharaoh, with the false beard and the royal kilt. In her temple at Deir el-Bahari, in the great obelisks at Karnak, in her tomb in the Valley of the Kings, she is shown as a male king.

The most thorough treatment of the visual side of this transformation is still Gay Robins’s Women in Ancient Egypt (1993). The divine-birth and coronation inscriptions themselves are translated in Miriam Lichtheim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume II (1976), which is the volume I find myself reaching for.

The Political Steps

The political circumstances that brought Hatshepsut to the throne were unusual but not unique. Her husband, Thutmose II, died around 1479 BCE, leaving as his heir a young son, the future Thutmose III, by a minor wife. The infant king was too young to rule on his own, and the normal Egyptian solution was a regency: a senior member of the royal family would govern in the name of the young king until he came of age.

Hatshepsut was the obvious choice. She was the king’s chief wife, a daughter of the great Thutmose I, and the most senior woman in the royal family. She became regent, and for about four or five years she ruled Egypt in her nephew’s name. Then, in about 1473 BCE, she did something unprecedented: she took the throne herself.

The exact circumstances are unclear, but the result was not a usurpation. Thutmose III remained alive, was not killed or deposed, and was in fact shown alongside Hatshepsut on her monuments as a junior co-ruler. The transition looks more like a negotiated arrangement than a revolution, a political deal between Hatshepsut, the court, and the powerful Amun priesthood, which appears to have supported her.

The Religious Transformation

If the political steps were remarkable, the religious transformation was even more so. Hatshepsut’s inscriptions and reliefs consistently present her as a male pharaoh, and the texts go to great lengths to explain how this came to be. Several texts record a divine oracle in which the god Amun, in the form of his living image, the high priest of Thebes, declared Hatshepsut to be the rightful king. Other texts record a story that she was the daughter of Amun, who had visited her mother in the form of the pharaoh Thutmose I and conceived her. This was, of course, the standard divine-birth story of the pharaoh, applied to a woman.

In the famous “coronation inscription” of Hatshepsut, the god Amun himself is shown crowning her as king, and the god Hapi, personifying the Nile, embraces her. The texts present her kingship as divinely ordained, the result of a heavenly command, and thus consistent with the religious order of Egypt. For the broader context, see our guide to the Egyptian gods and goddesses and Egyptian mythology and beliefs.

Other Women Who Became Pharaoh

Hatshepsut set a precedent, but her example was followed only a few times in Egyptian history. The most notable later female pharaohs include:

  • Neferneferuaten, who may have ruled briefly in the late Eighteenth Dynasty, possibly as a successor to Akhenaten and possibly a woman using a male name.
  • Twosret, who took the full titulary of a pharaoh at the end of the Nineteenth Dynasty, c. 1191 BCE.
  • Cleopatra VII, the last of the Ptolemies, who ruled as a pharaoh of the Ptolemaic line in the first century BCE.

In all these cases, the women adopted a masculine royal image, took male names, and presented themselves as heirs to a pharaonic tradition.

Why Did It Work?

In other ancient cultures, in classical Greece, for example, or in Mesopotamia, women were systematically excluded from rule. What made Egypt different? Several factors have been suggested:

  • The divine nature of kingship. Because the pharaoh was a god, the office was not inherently bound to biology. A woman who took on the divine title was, in principle, as legitimate as a man.
  • The role of royal women in Egypt. Egyptian queens had a more important ritual and political role than their counterparts elsewhere. They were “great royal wives” who participated in royal rituals, and some of them held priestly titles and enormous wealth.
  • The political flexibility of the system. Egyptian kingship was pragmatic. When a strong woman inherited or was available, the system could accommodate her.

On the other hand, one should not overstate the openness of the system. Female rule was rare, and the cases that succeeded are almost all cases in which the woman had no good alternative male heir to support. The system accommodated Hatshepsut because there was no adult male Thumosid to back. It did not, in three thousand years, ever produce a dynasty of female kings. That is itself a fact about Egyptian attitudes, even if it is not the fact the older textbooks liked to point to.