Kara Cooney - The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World

The Woman Who Would Be King:
Hatshepsuts Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt

When Women Ruled the World

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FRONT COVER: Interior coffin of Ramses II (O. Louis Mazzatenta)

FRONT COVER DESIGN: Melissa Farris

ISBN 978-1-4262-2196-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4262-2197-2 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

For Remy
who is not afraid (of me)

(After Ian Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000].)

P REDYNASTIC P ERIOD CA 53003000 B.C

Upper Egypt

Naqada III/Dynasty 0 CA 32003000 B.C.

E ARLY D YNASTIC P ERIOD CA 30002686 B.C

1st Dynasty CA 30002890 B.C.

2nd Dynasty CA 28902686 B.C.

O LD K INGDOM 26862160 B.C

3rd Dynasty 26862613 B.C.

4th Dynasty 26132494 B.C.

K HUFU CA 25892566 B.C

5th Dynasty 24942345 B.C.

6th Dynasty 23452181 B.C.

7th and 8th Dynasties 21812160 B.C.

F IRST I NTERMEDIATE P ERIOD 21602055 B.C

M IDDLE K INGDOM 20551650 B.C

11th Dynasty 20551985 B.C.

12th Dynasty 19851773 B.C.

S ENWOSRET III CA 18701831 B.C

13th Dynasty 1773after 1650 B.C.

14th Dynasty 17731650 B.C.

S ECOND I NTERMEDIATE P ERIOD 16501550 B.C

15th Dynasty (Hyksos) 16501550 B.C.

16th Dynasty 16501580 B.C.

17th Dynasty CA 15801550 B.C.

N EW K INGDOM 15501069 B.C

18th Dynasty 15501295 B.C.

A MENHOTEP IV/A KHENATEN CA 13521336 B.C

N EFERTITI CA 13381336 B.C

R AMESSIDE P ERIOD 12951069 B.C

19th Dynasty 12951186 B.C.

R AMSES II CA 12791213 B.C

20th Dynasty 11861069 B.C.

T HIRD I NTERMEDIATE P ERIOD 1069664 B.C

21st Dynasty 1069945 B.C.

22nd Dynasty 945715 B.C.

23rd Dynasty 818715 B.C.

24th Dynasty 727715 B.C.

25th Dynasty 747656 B.C.

T AHARQA CA 690664 B.C

L ATE P ERIOD 664332 B.C

26th Dynasty 664525 B.C.

27th Dynasty 525404 B.C.

28th Dynasty 404399 B.C.

29th Dynasty 399380 B.C.

30th Dynasty 380343 B.C.

2nd Persian Period 343332 B.C.

P TOLEMAIC P ERIOD 33230 B.C

Macedonian Dynasty 332305 B.C.

Ptolemaic Dynasty 305285 B.C.

C LEOPATRA VII P HILOPATOR 5130 B.C

R OMAN P ERIOD 30 b.c.a.d. 395

T his is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys, he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the Lord will not answer you in that day.

But the people refused to listen to Samuel.

No! they said. We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.

1 Samuel 8:11-20

I am a recovering Egyptologist.

Like many of us in the field, I was initially attracted to the subject because of some unexplainable, irrational love for an ancient culture that lay millennia in the past. I felt I knew these ancient people somehow, and followed an indescribable urge to jump into the academic time machine to learn anything I could. Ive now worked in Egyptology since entering graduate school in 1994, investing countless hours learning and teaching the ancient hieroglyphic language, committing kings portraits to memory, traveling back and forth to Egypt, and waxing academically about what my research has uncovered.

The most common question asked of me as I stand at a podium for a lecture, or at a cocktail party with a drink in hand, is why I chose to become an Egyptologist. People want to know what a person like me is doing in a field like this. But other Egyptologists never demand my origin story; we all know in our bones that our urge to study that ancient place remains inexplicable, like the reasons we fell in love with someone. The heart wants what the heart wants. Maybe I just dont want to admit that I was drawn in by the dazzling gold, the massive statuary, the pyramids whose codes have yet to be cracked, the unabashed displays of power. Or maybe I fell for the idea of divine kingship that could reify miracles in stone and craft philosophical tales of complex religiosity.

But that unassailable strength of ancient rule, once so attractive to me, has now soured. The realization was like suddenly understanding that youre in an abusive relationship. Such sudden apprehension is not as stark as an addict hitting rock bottom; its much more subtle. Your partner treats you real nice when hes in a good mood and buys you beautiful things. But everything seems stacked in his favor, and you begin to question your reality. Is he telling you the truth? And should you really be constantly submitting to his so-called better judgment? When what you thought were moral truths repeatedly turn into lies, its time to admit you have a problem and find a way out.

Escaping from such an asymmetrical situation can be difficult, though. The cognitive shift is usually not a panicked run from a physical abuser in the dead of night. But it does demand unlearning what you have learned, or remembering what you forgot. Any victim of the more nuanced forms of psychological control knows that cognitive retraining is required to see what could not be recognized before, to understand that your cult leader does not truly have your best interests at heart, that you can indeed exist on your own.