Historical Women - Hatshepsut

Statue of Hatshepsut

I cannot believe I have not done a Historical Women entry since Kristina Nilsdotter Gyllenstierna back in May 2016. Or I did talk about two other historical women in my entry about Johanne Hildebrandt's book Sigrid, Sagan om Valhalla. One of the latter two (Cleopatra VII) can also be considered successor of the woman I will devote this entry to: Hatshepsut.

I am reading a book about her at the moment, The Woman who would be king by Egyptologist Kara Cooney which means that I will probably return to Hatshepsut in another entry in the near future. She is just so amazing and not really so well-known as many other (male) pharaohs (Many people even have trouble saying her name!) wherefore I thought she needed a presentation post as well. There are also other aspects of the book I will devote my book entry to. The Egyptian names can be transcribed in a lot of different ways. I have chosen to use the spelling from Cooney's book in this entry.

Hatchepsut's birth name (upper) and throne name
Maatkare (lower) in hieroglyphics

Hatshepsut was the daughter of the king Thutmes I and his so called Great Wife Ahmes. She seems to have had two brothers who probably died before their father. Thutmes I had, like every other ancient Egyptian king, many other wives besides Ahmes which whom he also had children. However, the royal blood in Ancient Egypt was inheritade from the mother, which is why it was the sons of the Great wives (often also the king's sister - an incestuous tradition which was only allowed for the royal family!) which first and foremost inherited the throne. Because her brothers most likely died, the throne went to a minor wife called Mutnofret's son Thutmes II.

To strengthen the royal blood, Hatshepsut was most likely forced to marry Tuthmes II and with him she had one daughter that survived the baby years called Neferure. With a minor wife called Isis (Just to be clear: To me, Isis is a lovely Egyptian goddess and nothing else!), Tuthmes II had the son Thutmes III. He would inherit the throne when his father died.

Hatshepsut's mummy, found in KV60

Hatchepsuts father had been a strong, stabile king, but his heir was not and he died only a few years into his reign, leaving behind a group of toddlers. As The King's Great Wife, Hatshepsut acted as regent to Tuthmes III before proclaiming herself king after two years. Yes, it is important to say that she was king. Not least since we, today, see the title of queen as lesser to the title king, but first and foremost because that was the title she used for herself.

Sometimes the ancient Egyptian royal names and titles can be somewhat confusing. The names most inportant to know is Hatshepsut's birth name (Hatshepsut) meaning Foremost of noble women and her throne name Maatkare meaning The truth is the soul of Re.

Hatchepsut is not the first woman to rule as king in ancient Egypt. The first that researcher cannot totally ignore being Sobeknefru at the end of the 12th dynasty and there might have been others ruling both in their own name and in the name of their sons/stepsons.

Djeser-Djeseru

While the 18th dynasty in ancient Egypt has a lot of martial warriors, Hatshepsut's reign was peaceful with lots of economic growth. She invested a lot in architecture, not least making Thebes the grand capital of Egypt. Her most famous building is Djeser-Djeseru (Holiest among holy). Her murtuary temple in  Deir el-Bahri. While male pharaos bragged in paintings and reliefs of their military expeditions, Hatshepsut bragged about her much more peaceful expeditions to Punt, a land far south in Afrika.

In the art, she let herself be dressed in the traditional (male) royal attributes like the king's crowns and the fake beard. However, she still has some female traits as well. Her facial features are rather feminine and her chest is not always flat, but you can see female breasts lurking underneath like in the photo of the statue of her above.

Tuthmes III became king when Hatshepsut died. They might also have co-regined for a couple of years before her death. This was pretty common and to smooth the transition of power between kings. In the case of Hatshepsut, she has long seen as more or less "the evil stepmother" who took the throne which rightfully belonged to Tuthmes III. Not least, because he started errasing her name from the monument. To me I would think this was simply because he needed to proclaim he had pure royal blood and therefore had to emphasize his own mother as the King's Great Wife.

As Tuthmes II:s queen, she had a tomb built for her in the Valley of the Kings (KV20). It was excavated by Howard Carter (mostly famous for finding Tutankhamun's tomb) in 1903. It is uncertain if it was ever used. Carter found two sarcophagi for Hatshepsut and her father, but no mummies. The mummy of Tuthmes I was found in the royal mummy cache in Deir-el-Bahri together with 39 other royal mummies in 1881, but Hatshepsut remained lost until 2007 where researcher identified her mummy as one of the two female unidentified ones in the tomb KV60. Studies of her mummy showed that suffered osteoporosis, cancer in her left hip, arthritis and perhaps also diabetes. She did not, however, suffer a violent death.



Hieroglyphic names were borrowed here. The picture of the statue of her was found here, of her mummy here and of her temple here.

Johanne Hildebrandt - Sigrid, Sagan om Valhalla

Sigrid is the fourth book in Johanne Hildebrandt's Sagan om Valhalla series and the first one to take place in the Viking Age. The name of the main character to me is rather special since one of my two middle names is Sigrid. The book does not have anything to do with me though. The Sigrid it is supposed to portray is the "Swedish" queen Sigrid Storråda (Sigrid the Haughty according to Wikipedia) who first married the "Swedish" king Erik Segersäll (Erik Victorious), but who later divorced him and remarried Danish king Svend Tveskæg (Sweyn Forkbeard). The book is about Sigrid Tostesdotter who is forced to marry Erik, but falls in love with Svend instead. The connection to Freja is not entirely clear, but it is said that Sigrid is related to her and there is also talk about what happened to Saga and the geneaology in between the book about Saga (The post was updated 1 september 2016.) and the one about Sigrid.

At first I thought the topic for this book would be, the Christianisation of Scandinavia and/or the changing power structures which that entailed. It is my favourite research topic and I think I have something to say about it. However, as I thought more about the historical Sigrid Storråda I found a more interesting topic would be her power and her marriages. Actually I think you can find out a lot about her character (and also the role of the Viking woman) from how she handled her relationships. This sounds perhaps very much like "a woman is nothing without a man", but I do intend this to be something completly different.

In a time when marriages were much more a matter of politics (Especially in the higher end of the social ladder that Sigrid belonged to.) her choices of husbands do not seem so strange. I think the historical Sigrid was much more practical in this than Hildebrandt's Sigrid. For short I do not think she hated one (Erik) and loved the other (Svend). Instead I think she had a very strict view of both her power and the politics of Scandinavia during this time.

In a way this gives her a connection to what is probably one of the most famous female rulers throughout history: Cleopatra VII of Egypt. I am sure everyone have heard all about her love life, but because of my love for the British children's show Horrible Histories, I will leave a link to their Lady Gaga inspired song so they can tell you the short version:

Cleopatra also had two pretty famous relationships: Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) for which she is actually most famous. It has been pretty easy to rally about Cleopatra and her relationships and lots of people (mostly men) have done so both in the past and in the present. However, I want to put her and Sigrid Storråda together and see if I can say something about them as people beyond their husbands by looking at their relationships to them.

We have already established that marriages for the Viking elite was more about politics than love and the same is true for Ptolemaic/Roman Egypt. Looking at Sigrid's and Cleopatra's relationships they actually both seem to have been pretty politically consious women. Establishing allies with the most powerful men in their world (Erik Segersäll and Svend Tveskæg respectively Caesar and Mark Antony) they seem to both had thought about what would give them most power. They also happened to establish this power by bearing everyone of these four men's children. This was probably the only means women in upper class families could gain influence and power (if their husbands didn't die). What I think is interesting too about this is the fact that Sigrid actually manages to get a divorce from Erik (The Norse written sources are not clear as to why, so I will leave it at that.) and manages to get some power status for herself while "between marriages" (so to speak). When she divorced Erik, she also took away all the new allies she had brought into the marriage.

In my last entry about chess I talked about how the change from vizir to queen in the European version of chess was an excellent way of showing the importance of women in Early Medieval Europe and Sigrid's story supports this. The women seem to have been very important in the political structures of the time and also free to move as they pleased. Sigrid's marriages to both Erik and Svend and her divorce from Erik show to me that she was a very politically consious woman and her children ended up on both the Swedish and Danish thrones at the time. I also think the Christian church's negative attitude towards divorces might have originated from this power that the women had in divorces.

Detail of the Oseberg ship

The story of Cleopatra is far more tragic, but I do not think her society was as open to female power as the Viking one was. Her relationships to two of the most powerful political leaders show, just like Sigrid's that she had a political mind. It was not her fault that she ended up on the losing side.

Last but not least, the Scandinavian archaeological artefact I have chosen for this entry is a picture showing how beautifully decorated the Norwegian Oseberg ship is. The ship burial belongs to my favourites. It was found in Oseberg in Vestfold in Norway and excavated in 1904-05 by Norwegian Haakon Shetelig and Swedish Gabriel Gustafson. It was a burial of two women and included lots of precious artefacts. More information can be found here.


I read the hardcover verison of Sigrid, since that is the one I own myself (and it is really nice), but I think the papercover edition is so wonderfully beautiful, that I just had to include a picture of it. The picture was borrowed from here.
The Youtube clip is owned by CBBC. 
The picture of the Oseberg ship was taken from Wikipedia.