Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 189

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Woman Who Would Be King:  Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt," by Kara Cooney:

 

The selection process of Thutmose III was quickly (if not instantly) idealized and mythologized by the political players, but the practicalities of rule still needed a firm hand in the current delicate state of affairs. Thutmose III was a small child at best, more than a decade away from effective rule on his own; he would need a strong regent. His mother, Isis, was apparently an inappropriate choice; although we can assume that as a member of the harem she was beautiful and fertile, it is also probable that she was neither educated nor highborn. She was clearly trumped as candidate for regent by the dowager Great Wife Hatshepsut, who had already been serving as God’s Wife of Amen for almost a decade. When the time came to choose the hand that would guide the young king, it was Hatshepsut who took her place as regent. This fact, in and of itself, says all we hope to know about Hatshepsut’s proven leadership abilities and the confidence that the priests, military, and bureaucracy had in her. They all seem to have welcomed the rule of this young queen.

To mark her initiation into the profound mysteries of kingship, the new female king formally changed her birth name from “Hatshepsut” to “Khenemetenamen Hatshepsut,” which, although unpronounceable for most of us, essentially meant “Hatshepsut, United with Amen,” communicating that her spirit had mingled with the very mind of the god Amen through a divine communion. Indeed, the grammatical form is instructive, because the verb khenem, “to unite with,” has a feminine -t ending here, indicating that the Egyptians were up-front about the fact that a woman had merged with the masculine god Amen. There was no subterfuge about her femininity in her new royal names, but her womanly core was now linked with a masculine god through her kingship. Hatshepsut’s first suggestion of sexual ambiguity was in this name change.

She had already taken on her throne name before the coronation; the precise meaning of Maatkare is still disputed, but it could be read as “the Soul of Re Is Truth,” or even “the Soul of Re Is Ma’at,” meaning that the goddess Ma’at was at the core of the sun god’s essence. The name was enclosed within an oval, what Egyptologists call a cartouche, as was the name Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut was now the proud owner of not one cartouche name, as all other royal women possessed, but two, in the manner of a masculine king. 

Whether Hatshepsut herself chose the throne name or it was the invention of her priests and other advisers, she was incorporating the element Ma’at into her royal name, implying that at the heart of the sun god’s power was a feminine entity, Ma’at, the source that was believed to keep the cosmos straight and true. Names were believed to capture a person’s essence, and with this new label Hatshepsut herself became the force of truth within the sun god, an entity that acted to maintain order in the universe. Indeed, she was not only claiming to be a manifestation of the sun’s life force, as any king might, but also declaring herself to be a female expression of that solarism. Hatshepsut’s throne name communicated to her people that her kingship was undoubtedly feminine, and that feminine justice was necessary to maintain life with proper order, judgment, and continuance.