The Rest Is History - 299: The Greatest Female Pharaoh

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

"One of the greatest rulers to have ever lived" - Tom Holland. But how much do you know about Hatshepsut? And how did she propel herself from regent to become one of the most revered rulers of all time? *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. I have done this with a loving heart for my father, Amun. I call to attention the people who shall live in the future, who shall consider this monument that I made for my father. It was when I was sitting in the palace that I remembered my maker. My heart directed me to make for him two obelisks of electrum, their pinnacles touching the heavens. Now my mind turned this way and that, anticipating the words of the people who

shall see my monument in future years and will speak of what I have done. He shall not declare what I have said to be an exaggeration. Rather, he will say how like her it is, loyal to her father, for I am his daughter in very truth, who glorifies him and who knows what he has ordained. So that's an inscription on the temple of Amun-Ra at Ipset-Sut in Thebes. The inscription, as you know, Tom, made by arguably Egypt's greatest female pharaoh, Hatshepsut. Well, arguably, I think definitely. Well, that's a big claim. Well, so we've done Cleopatra, haven't we? We have.

But Cleopatra ends up a failure. I mean, she dies, commits suicide, her kingdom is conquered. Hatshepsut is a queen who reigns a millennium and a half before the time of Cleopatra, the beginning of the golden age of the new kingdom. And, you know, she's not just the greatest female pharaoh. She is one of the greatest pharaohs full stop. And she's not as well known as Cleopatra is that with Cleopatra, you have all kinds of brilliant details about, you know, what she was doing, what she looked like, what she was getting up to, all that kind of stuff, who she was sleeping with. With Hatshepsut, we don't have that kind of detail. We don't have the equivalent of a Plutarch or a, you know, a biographer or historians like that giving us the details.

Cleopatra is all the stuff about her is written by her enemies. So it's all very lurid and therefore very sexy, very colourful. With Hatshepsut, there is pretty much nothing. There's inscriptions, Tom. But I mean, that's all we're talking about, isn't it? Well, by the standards of pharaonic history, there's actually quite a lot. But by the standards of Greek or Roman history, there isn't. And by the standards of 20th century roman history there isn't and by the standards of 20th century history there really is you know we know about the most obscure of james callahan's cabinet ministers in the late 1970s yes then we do about this titanic woman but but i think that that what

you can do is to put her into the context of what is actually a very dramatic and thrilling story okay which is the recovery of egypt from a period of incredible humiliation and prostration so hatchet so it is born around 1500 bc um so you know if you go back further to kind of 3000 bc uh egypt emerges as a unitary state along the banks of the nile from the beginning you have these dynasties of kings the idea that the monarchy lies at the heart of this kingdom that the monarch is the kind of interface between the dimension of the gods and the dimension of of the earthly realm this first manifests itself through what is called the old kingdom the old kingdom these are building the pyramids all that kind of stuff then it kind of

collapses into a state of of anarchy lots of different kings this is seen by the egyptians as a terrible thing then they recover and establish what is called the middle kingdom the middle kingdom again then collapses um around 1630 bc and the humiliation is that the northern reaches of egypt which include the pyramids, which include the ancient capital of Memphis, get conquered by foreigners. And these are foreigners who come from Palestine, Canaan, whatever you want to call it. And this is an unconscionable humiliation because the Egyptians are fabulously xenophobic, fabulously conscious of themselves as being superior to all the kind of the people who surround them and so this is this is a cause of immense shame and meanwhile in the south are people called the cushites who are kind of nubian kingdom yeah who again the egyptians have

periodically been going off and kicking sand in their faces and forcing unfair trade deals on them and establishing forts along the stretches of the Nile that runs through Cush. They also get a bit uppity and they start kind of kicking the Egyptians around. So I think the parallel would be imagine Byzantium, the Roman Empire in the 7th century. You've lost Rome. You've lost the western half to barbarians. And then you have the Arabs who previously had been subject to the Romans and they've nicked vast swathes of Roman provinces. And all you've got is Byzantium. peoples, you have the Kushites to the south, and you have the remnants of the Egyptian state in what comes to be called Thebes, what's now Luxor. And there's no guarantee that they're necessarily going to recover, but they do, thanks to the emergence of a succession of remarkable kings and of remarkable

queens. And that's what's so fascinating about it. So sometimes, Tom, we get some comments from listeners. So actually some from quite sort of longstanding listeners, and they say, we wish you could do more powerful women, women with agency, women who aren't just being kicked around by men or seen through men's eyes and so on. And you could argue, couldn't you, that Hatshepsut, who we'll come to after we've done the context, that she's one of the most outstanding early examples. Absolutely, yes. Of a woman with real imperial agency. Well, her name literally means the foremost of noble women. And I guess that that's a very accurate description. I mean, she is incredibly formidable and able leader. I mean, it is obviously very, very unusual for women to rule. The Egyptians don't have a word for queen. All women are defined in terms of their relationship to the king. So the mother of the king, the end of the Middle Kingdom. But otherwise, the idea that a

woman could rule as king was obviously, you know, it generated all kinds of tensions. So Hatshepsut in that sense is a real innovator, but she's not coming from nowhere. And her forebears, so the succession of extraordinary warrior pharaohs who first of all, they conquer the territory that's lost, and they then expand northwards into the Near East and southwards back into Kush. So they are very formidable militarists in the classic sense of a male pharaoh, but they are surrounded by incredibly formidable women who often serve as regents. Those are the two traditions that Hatshepsut is drawing on.

The idea that Egypt is a great power, but also this idea that women do absolutely have agency in this period. Right. Okay. So I know you want to talk a little bit about the context, don't you years before the birth of christ yeah so greece and rome are nothing yeah and egypt has been through this terrible sort of um you know it's been relegated basically well it's it's struggling to it's yes it's been it's been relegated to the leagues and it's struggling to avoid going into receivership it's west brahmachalbian you know it's it's a constant threat and then you it comes back. Egypt comes back. So the Hyksos, who are these Asiatic kings who have established themselves in the north of Egypt, obviously they start to adopt Egyptian customs and practices, but they always remain self-consciously foreign. They have temples to their own gods. They practice their own fashions. The reason that they've been so successful is that they have a new military weapon, namely the chariot. And it takes time for the Egyptians to adopt that. But in due course of, you know, the famous image of Tutankhamen in his chariot or Ramesses,

the great whatever, the chariot will become a kind of defining emblem of the pharaoh. And so it takes time for the Egyptians down in Thebes to kind of develop that. But they do, they start to adopt Hyksos weapons, which are much more kind of formidable than the traditional Egyptian weaponry. And by, well, by the kind of the 1540s, they're starting to launch attacks northwards. So there's one king who seems to be quite successful, then he gets very brutally killed in battle the the autopsy on him is is horrible the arms and hands were left in the agonized attitude into which they had been thrown in the death spasms following the murderous attack the evidence of which is so clearly impressed on the battered face and skull so tom where's where's that from like who wrote

that down so that's the auto that's the autopsist who does it who look is looking at this guy king's mummy oh right so the body has been brought back from the battle and he's you know it's it's also hurried that that they can't kind of even out the limbs they just mummify him and chuck him in his grave because they're in you know the exigencies of war being what they are but that king's son a guy called Kamos, he's much more successful. So he boasts that his army goes like a great blast of fire, that he approaches the Hyksos king in his palace and makes wine from the Hyksos king's vines and drinks it before his palace. And basically, you're having the sense there that things are starting to tick up for the Egyptians. And Kamos is succeeded by a bloke called Amos, who might be either his son or his brother. And it's absolutely typical of the state of our knowledge that, you know,

Egyptologists devote entire books to arguing over these kinds of details. I was just trying to work out a way in which, is it possible he could be both? But I don't think it is. There's a bit of intermarriage, isn't there? There's a bit of the sort of Ptolemy style. Yes, absolutely. And there is indeed quite a lot of intermarriage.

Partly because, and it's chiefly down to Amos, actually, this extraordinary king who does this. He absolutely centres the idea of the king and his family as being at the heart of the state. And he's able to do that because it's Amos who finally expels the Hyksos from Egypt. So he storms their palaces and their fortresses in the north. And he then pursues them through Sinai into Canaan. And he captures all kinds of fortresses. So he renames the great fortress of gaza the town that pharaoh seized right which is very descriptive um does what it says on the tin and then he goes southwards and

he um he conquers kush and kush is that this is very important because kush produces lots of gold and amos basically is the model of a great conqueror and so because of that, he can legitimately portray himself and his family as being absolutely the beating heart of this newly recreated great power that is Egypt. And so therefore, it is important for him to basically keep things within the family so that he marries his sister. So his sister is Ahotep. Is that right? No, Ahotep is his mother. Okay. So Ahotep is a very, very big cheese. So she, in the best traditions of the new kingdom, incredibly boastful.

So she give praise to the lady of the land. You know, this is written on one of her inscriptions. The mistress of the shores of Haunebet, whose reputation is high over every foreign land, who governs the masses the wise one who guards over egypt and interestingly you said greece and rome you know not on the scene but there is a theory that how nebet is um it might be crete because she is buried with a cretan axe and a cretan dagger right so uh there's a sense that you know at the foreign court they're interested in looking abroad and adopting foreign fashions.

So that would be Minoan, wouldn't it? Yeah, so that would be Minoan. So Ahotep is the mother and she had ruled actually as regent for Ahmos. Ahmos marries his sister, who infuriatingly is also called Ahmos. Oh, yes. Ahmos Nefertari. So it's not, you know, it's not enough that the brothers and sisters are marrying, but they're actually called the same. So it's potentially incredibly confusing. But she also, so again, when the male Ahmose dies, the female Ahmose, let's call her Ahmose Nefertari, that's her her full name right she uh she then rules as regent for their son who's a young boy called amenhotep and so she she effectively is you know she she doesn't call herself the king

but she is ruling in the place of the king but that's why it's interesting right that she rules in the place but she doesn't yeah is that because at that point they have no you know you said there had been a uh one female king i don't want to say queen because that implies a consort. No, she's not a queen. So there'd been one female king back in the mists of time. About 200 years before. So not in the mists of time. In the memory, in people's memory.

Do people remember that, would you say? I don't think it's hugely, it's not a huge thing. They're not chatting about it in the pubs of Thebes. I mean, Hatshepsut, of course, in due course, will make quite a huge thing i mean i'm not chatting about it no they're not no they're not pubs of thebes i mean hatchets of course in due course will make quite a big thing of it but right i don't think it's particularly so when when when our most male dies and our most female comes in as regent yeah it doesn't occur to her and nobody's saying oh why don't you take the throne it's just not an option no but so you've had for two successive generations you've had women ruling as regents for underage kings right you've had a hotep yeah ruling for ahmos and then you've

had ahmos nefertari ruling for their son amenotep and i think that that kind of beds down the idea that women you know are very very able to govern egypt yeah um but what it doesn't do is establish the idea that a woman can rule as king there always has to be somebody that she's standing behind basically yeah basically but amos nefertari is incredibly effective and it's during her regency and the rule of hasan amenotep that that you start to get a very significant development at thebes so so thebes is on the east bank of the nile which is seen as the land of the living and on the western bank the land of the dead because that's where the sun sets they start to build mortuary temples temples that are being raised to the memory of the kings and very possibly this is when what will become the valley of the kings

start to be respected so this idea that you have the land of the living which will become the great temple of karnak on on the right side and on the left side you have this dimension of the dead this is ahmos nefertari is presiding over that and and this these people are not pyramid builders are they i mean people who think that the we conflate all ancient egypt into one sort of mass the pyramids were were centuries and centuries before yeah yeah and they've basically twigged the fact that if you don't want to have your you know your treasure nicked from your from your tomb kind of advertising it with a huge pyramid is is not a sensible way to do that and in due course the mortuary temples of which hapshuts will be the most famous is built on one side of this mountain ridge

and then the valley of the kings lies in the discreetly in the valley behind it right so that's that's going on with um akmos nefertari as regent and her son amenotep but the problem is the incest because uh incest is not good is it for fertility you will know that your fondness for science and genetics you will know that i don't know where i wonder where you're going with that your knowledge of genetics so so basically aminotep does aminotep has no children has no sons yeah and so this is still reeling from this accusation i have to say and so this is a problem uh because they need a king and so he looks around and he he adopted the dog behave yourself he adopts um someone who who seems to

have been a distant relative and was definitely the kind of the big military man the most trusted lieutenant at the court it was a guy called thutmose right yes and listeners will be delighted to know that there are an enormous number of people called thutmose in this story so again you just need to that's always good you just need to keep a handle so this is thutmose the first okay and he is an absolutely tremendous lad he's a military man he is a military man who just rampages around. His nickname is the Panther. The Panther. Yes.

Because he pounces and savages and kills. Yeah, but I think of a panther as kind of elusive and quiet, stealthy. He's none of those things if he's boozing and shouting. Well, he's a loud panther. Okay. He's a panther who likes a drink. Okay. I like that.

I'm trying to think of a modern analogy and I can't. Well, so he's incredibly successful. Yeah. And the measure of success is for a pharaoh basically at this point seems to be military. Yeah. So it's pretty much become a tradition that you become pharaoh and then you go roaring off north and you beat up all the people in Canaan, which he does very successfully. Yeah. And also that you you go south and you attack the cushites and thutmose the first does very very well against the cushites

so he captures their capital a place called kerma um he sacks and burns it he reaches this great rock of courts it's kind of you know, incredibly shiny kind of mineral rock. Which has been very holy to the Kushites and they put up all kinds of religious inscriptions. And he erases the lot and puts up an enormous kind of self-glorifying inscription to himself. He founds forts all along the line of the Nile, which have traditional Egyptian names like No One Dares Confront Him and I Am Brilliant and Screw You Kushites. Right. You know, all these kinds of names. And he just leaves inscriptions everywhere boasting about, you know, how brilliantly he's done. So there is not a single Nubian left there.

Bowmen have fallen amid the slaughter and lies corpses across their native land. Their entrails drench the valley's blood, pours in torrents from their mouths. He takes the body of the Nubian king who he's killed, the Cushite king, and he lashes it to the prow of the nubian king who he's killed the kushite king and he lashes it to the the prow of his ship as he sails back up um the uh back back up the head head down and so the body slowly rotting getting eaten by flies it's tremendous tremendous

display and then he goes right north and he he attacks a kingdom called the uh the kingdom of the mitanni which is um a kind of aspirant great power in northern syria northern iraq southern what's now southern turkey wins a great battle there erects an inscription and excels himself there by going on an elephant hunt so you can see that he he you know he's he's a big hitter he is i like him tom i won't i won't hide it so thutmose the first he is the father of Hatshepsut. Right. And Hatshepsut is devoted to him. And one of the reasons for this, perhaps, is that when he went on his expedition into Kush, he took Hatshepsut, who at this point must have been quite a young girl, with him. So she has seen daddy in action. She has seen the greatness of the

Egyptian army. She has seen what it is to be a mighty king, a mighty ruler. And these are lessons that she seems to have taken in. And Hatshepsut is the daughter of Thutmose's principal wife. So this is a queen who is of royal descent. Thutmose I has a son by a lesser wife, also called Thutmose and so when he dies Thutmose the second succeeds and marries Hatshepsut right but there is a power imbalance there because Hatshepsut's line of descent is much more regal than Thutmose the second but on the other hand he is a man so presumably he commands automatic deference in a way that she perhaps doesn't from the men the other men the soldiers the courtiers whatever but is blood all i mean i suppose that's the it's clearly more important that a man rules

than a woman which is why despite the fact that hapshitzut's line of descent is is more prestigious yeah she is the wife of the king so to that extent she is a conventional figure but she's a powerful figure she's she's she's a big player and thutmose the second by contrast seems to have been a bit of a weed right i think he's quite young to begin with there's confusion as to exactly how long he reigned some some scholars say three years some say 13 years but he doesn't seem to have had a great military track record the expeditions to go and beat up the kushites he doesn't seem to have led them in person. So Thutmose II and Hatshepsut, they do have a child, but it's a daughter, Nefererere.

So she is obviously not in line to succeed. Thutmose II has also had a son, inevitably called Thutmose, by a lesser wife. And so he's kind of in pole position to succeed. And when he dies, by this point, Hatshepsut is probably late teens, maybe even early 20s. And so she steps in, in the role as regent. And that's a conventional thing. You know, there's nothing too out of the ordinary. This has happened kind of two generations before her. But it's what happens next that really is extraordinary and that enables Hatshepsut to be commemorated as one of the most remarkable rulers who's ever lived. And do you think we should take a break at this point? I think on that enormous claim, Tom, that enormous claim, we'll take a break and we will return

for Tom Holland to justify why Hatshepsut is one of the greatest rulers who has ever lived. So join us after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment

and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest is entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com There was no one more beautiful. Her splendor and her appearance were divine. She was a maiden, exquisite and blooming. Now that is a description of, for Tom Holland, one of the greatest of all world leaders in history, the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut. And that description, Tom, was written by Hatshepsut herself. Well, modesty wasn't really accounted a virtue in Egypt.

It's like talking to the presenters of The Rest is History about their own podcast, isn't it? It's the kind of thing that one of them might write in the Daily Mail about himself. It is indeed. Yes. And it's kind of interesting because it does draw attention to the way in which one of the problems with getting a handle on the personalities of figures from ancient Egyptian history is that the way that they're portrayed tends to be done in terms of stereotype and, you know, difficult to know whether this is actually an accurate description of her so based on the mummies uh of of her family they all seem to have been quite

short you know slight kind of napoleonic quality to them it's been argued on the basis of analysis of their portraits that they seem to have had quite big noses right so right so so it has been argued that this was and definitely we don't definitely have hatchet so it's mummy so we yeah we don't can't use that as evidence. But quite a lot of her relatives seem to have had buck teeth. This is harsh, though, isn't it? I mean, if all trace of you was lost to posterity, and we were extrapolating from the mummies of your cousins or something.

I know, I know, I know. And adding to the general vibe uh is the the thesis that joyce tardsley in her brilliant book hatchets of the female pharaoh and she advances the the idea that hatchets that might well have been bald bald well because they did they shaved their heads men and women okay and you know that's why they wore the wigs right um so she might be have been small big nose with buck teeth and ball. But apart from that, very hot. What did she say of herself? Yeah.

There was no one more beautiful. Her splendor and her appearance were divine. I go with that, actually, Tom. Yeah. She's clearly a woman of immense charisma. I mean, there's no doubt about that. Just before we get into her reign, and since you suggested that we use our own description of

herself, it's a really good way to actually talk about how do we know anything about any of these people? Is it all from hieroglyphic inscriptions? And we are desperately trying to sort of, we're piling conjecture on conjecture, basically. Yeah. Well, I remember you saying about Tudor when we did Lady Jane Grey and saying that, what was it, that she walked past a bush or something. Catherine Howard walked past a bush or something. The mother of English gardening. Great piles. So there is a slight element of that.

And what adds to the complication, of course, is that often we don't even, you know, we can't even be certain that, you know, a wife is a sister. A sister might be a wife or having all kinds of complications. They all have the same names. It is very, very difficult. But with Hapshetzut, I think because she's so unusual, and what she does is so unusual, the strains that exist between the way that kings are conventionally portrayed and the actual reality is sufficiently strong

that you can kind of work out what she's doing. I mean, that's what makes her so interesting. So you ended the first half on a bit of a cliffhanger because you said she was poised to do something absolutely extraordinary. And I guess from her actions, we can divine a little bit of her character. So what is it that she does that is so remarkable? So her husband stroke half- half brother has died and has left a son who is not descended from the principal queen. So is therefore of lesser rank than Hatshepsut herself, discounting his gender. Yeah. And he's a very small baby.

And from the beginning, Hatshepsut acknowledges him as a king. And her own role is to begin with, it seems, that of a regent. So the role of Thutmose, who will go on to become Thutmose III, there are really two alternatives as to what is happening there either hatchet so it is ruling as regent because she has no choice because thutmose is is the only obvious you know thutmose the third is the only candidate yeah so she's making the best of a bad job but it's possible to see it in another light which is that she wants to rule she feels she has the right to rule she's able she's competent she has the right blood in her veins and therefore she has fixed on this little baby as a kind of a screen, a patsy, someone who can, you know, she can use him as a front and get all the reins of power in her hands. So both alternatives are possible. And I would guess the latter is, you know, it could be both to a degree. I mean, we can't know.

Yeah, she might have started as an expedient. And then after a few months or years thought, you know what, I'm actually really good at this. Yeah, so we don't know. We don't know whether she aims right from the beginning to establish herself as king. Yeah. But it's evident that what she is doing is incrementally kind of moving herself towards the position where she can be hailed as king. To begin with, she is not only regent, she is also the wife of Amun. And Amun is the king of the gods. Initially, he was a very unimportant regional god based in Thebes. But because he is the patron deity of this great warrior dynasty

that has emerged and conquered the whole of Egyptgypt and and made themselves kings of of the whole of egypt he gets enshrined as the supreme god and so his role gets blurred with the traditional king of the gods rey so amon rey oh yeah exactly so they they become combined don't they effectively yeah and so you have this great temple what you know what's now karnak anyone who's been to luxor will have seen it it's kind of one of the mean, probably absolutely up there as one of the great tourist sites of the world. I mean, it's absolutely stupefying kind of conglomeration of shrines and obelisks and pillars and all kinds of things. And it gets built over the course of the 18th dynasty. Hatshepsut, in her role as wife of Amun, is basically with the chief priest of Amun. I mean, she is in charge of that. And it's so rich and it's so, dare I say, sacral that immediately she has an incredible

degree of power there. But it's not enough. She wants more. So at some point, maybe five, six, seven years into her regency, she takes on a name that identifies her as as a male king so every every egyptian king takes on what's called a throne name and hatchet so it takes on the name of mart kare so mart is it's kind of truth order the idea that everything is as it should be it's kind of balance isn't it yes balance um and the car is the soul and ray is the king of the gods. Yeah. So truth is the soul of Ray. So that's a really significant development. And then seven years into the regency, again, perhaps a little bit before that, suddenly she's presenting herself as a king. So the crowns, the scepters, the trappings, the sort of...

The false beard. Yeah. The whole works so the false beard just a quick interjection on the false beard because that is one of the things that people who know a tiny bit about this will know the false beard is not that she is passing herself off as a man the false beards because they're common aren't they among for egyptian kings that they will wear these things absolutely so a king is a living symbol. And so you're portrayed in absolutely set ways. And when you manifest yourself in the court or before the people, you are dressed as a symbol,

as a symbol of kingship. And that's what Hatshepsut is doing. She wants to conform to every kind of stereotype that is going. The fact that she's a woman in that sense is irrelevant because all kings are to an extent playing a role. The symbolism is more important than the reality. So essentially the reason that the Egyptians are willing to accept her as king seems to be because, precisely because the symbol is more important than the reality yeah that's what enables her to do it but still she's kind of you know no one has has really done it in quite the way that she does it and she does it really really brilliantly so what she does to establish her legitimacy is is that she writes her erstwhile husband half-brother Thutmose the second out of the story you know this kind of wimp who just

gets kind of jettisoned so it appears that she's just got it directly from her father exactly but but then the question is who is her father and that inscription that you read at the beginning right at the start of the episode yeah you know she's she's calling amun the great god the king of the gods yeah her father and so what she does is she promulgates the idea that amun appeared to her mother in the guise of of thutmose the first and the uh you know full-on descriptions of amun's erect penis nice um he he comes bearing the scent of perfumes and fragrance and as the great tide of his desire spills and seeds hatchets at its mother, so the scent of perfume floods the whole palace. It's a bit like the arrival of the milk tray man. Exactly so.

Exactly so. But of course, what it's not like is like the kind of the Christian idea of becoming yeah pregnant uh this is this is a full-on sex but it's a little bit like the sort of greek myths yes it is a little bit like that i was just thinking about alexander the great he claimed that he was not the son of philip the second yeah but the son of zeus so this is a itself is a formula right i mean absolutely and alexander kind of you know he claims to be the son of Amun as well. So that idea that earthly kings aren't really your father. But it's complicated because at the same time, Hatshepsut is obviously devoted to Thutmose I. So the fact that she's kind of basically saying that Amun cuckolded Thutmose doesn't stop her from very much being you know her father's daughter right yeah very much daddy's girl and so it's this idea that Amun has not only fathered her but has chosen her as king and so you get all these freezes in in the great temple that that Hatshepsut will have

built for her on on the western side her great mortuary temple, that show her being born and show her being presented to the gods. And what's interesting is that when she's being presented to the gods as a kind of little baby, she's clearly male. She has a kind of male genitalia. And is that because that's the formula and they don't want to break from the formula? I mean, she's not trying to claim that she's a boy, obviously.

No, she's not trying to claim that she's a boy obviously no she's not um so you know people people had all kinds of fun with this so freudians were fascinated by this yeah you know you know daddy issues all this kind of stuff and i guess you might you know we might be tempted now when gender fluidity is such a say she was non-binary to say you know was she was she non-binary uh i i think that would be a wholly anachronistic way of reading it. What she's doing is making play with the fact that to a degree, to be a king is to play a symbolic role. Yeah. But clearly this is imposing tensions. It does impose strains because it's obvious that she's not a man and she's not pretending to be a man. And so that's why sometimes she's portrayed as a woman sometimes

she's portrayed as a man what she does very interestingly is to give some of her predecessors female epithets so her father you know who we've described as an absolute lad he is described in in inscriptions put up by hapshitzut as the perfect goddess so that idea that you know if a woman can be play a man's role yeah kings have are also can play the the role of a goddess i mean you can completely understand why that that works for her because it to imply this sort of shifting from one to the other legitimizes her unprecedented place i mean it's not completely unprecedented but you know what i mean yeah and i think also it it kind of draws attention to the way in which she is she is um casting herself as a god and the idea that male and female roles in the dimension of the heaven are less secure than they are on earth is also a part of it so she's kind of

laying claim to that but it's clear that that there's a problem for people don't quite know what to call her right so it's in this period that her advisors start to come up with this circumlocution. So they start to call her after where she lives, i.e. The great house. The palace, the great house, which is transliterated as pharaoh, is what a pharaoh is. So before that, people weren't using the word pharaoh to refer to the kings. They used it to refer to the building. I'm not absolutely sure about that.

And if there are any expert Egyptologists listening, perhaps they could let us know. But my understanding is that it's definitely from Hatchett's time that that phrase starts to come in. So it's equivalent of, you know, the White House or the palace. We don't call Joe Biden the White House. But I suppose it's plausible that in the long... I mean, we do use it as a...

Yeah, but you say the White House says. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. The palace denies this. The Elysee's position is Downing Street. Downing Street are telling us that, yeah, people do say that. And no doubt to our successors, that will seem ludicrous and bizarre, just as calling somebody the Great House does to us. So it works. It clearly works. Hatshepsut rules for 20 years and her reign is is incredibly successful so she launches the traditional campaigns against Kush it's possible that she went in person there are inscriptions that record the hands of slaughtered Kushites being cut off they would cut off either hands or penises and make great piles and count them to find out how many had been slaughtered and and and these there's an inscription describing these being

presented to her so it may be that she that she did take part in an actual campaign one of those images is definitely better than the other and one of those images is not one i care to think about too much no well and i and you know again the idea of severed penises being presented to a female king. Yeah. It's no wonder the Freudians have enjoyed it. And the other thing, of course, that Freudians would enjoy is her architectural extravaganzas. So in Karnak, she's a great sponsor of buildings there. And she has huge twin obelisks, which at the time were the largest ever erected, put at the entrance to the temple.

And it's kind of sheathed in gold. Two obelisks of electrum, their pinnacles touching the heavens. That's what she says in the inscription. And again, a Freudian would kind of perhaps enjoy that. But her most famous building is the building that I already alluded to, her mortuary temple, which gets built on the west bank of the Nile. And it's stunningly beautiful.

Have you been to Egypt? I've never been, Tom. Never been to Egypt. Have you been? You clearly have. I have. Yes, I've been several times. And her mortuary temple,

which isn't just her mortuary temple. So it's also a mortuary temple for her father. So again, you know, daddy is there, but it's also full of different temples and shrines to the various gods, including Amun, all kinds of people like that. It was called by Hatshepsut, Jessa Jesseru, which is the Holy of Holies.

And it is, if you imagine a Greek temple designed by Le Corbusier, the great modernist architect, there is something modernist about it. There is something Greek about it.. There is something Greek about it. And there is something Egyptian about it. And it's a very unique, distinctive building. I mean, it's definitely one of the great buildings of ancient Egypt.

It's maybe one of the great buildings in the entire world. It's absolutely stunning. And it's kind of arranged as a series of terraces with the cliff as the kind of backdrop. And this cliff on the other side is where the Valley of the Kings is. So her tomb is on that side. The Mortuary Temple is on the side that is facing the Nile. And actually, do you know what the path is that joins them? I don't, Tom.

It's called Agatha Christie's Path. Oh. Because it's a path that features in- Death on the Mount. The novel. No, it features in Death Comes as the End, which is a path that that features in death on the mouth the novel no it's um it features in death comes as the end which is the novel that she set in ancient egypt which isn't very good actually i don't think but anyway let's no but it's nice to know that you know

there's an anchor the christie link definitely and so from the point of view of um making sense of hatchet soot's life the great thing about this this huge temple is that there are a beautiful exquisitely carved and painted scenes from her life. So it's here that we get the portrait of her divine birth, her election by the gods. There are scenes showing her obelisks being transported. And most famously, there is the illustration of an expedition that she sent out to a land called Punt. Ah, right. And Punt seems to, it's a kind of simultaneously

a mythical land and a land that seems actually to have existed so perhaps the horn of africa i think is is the most popular location for it and it shows uh all kinds of um wonderful treasures being brought back so wild animals maybe uh rhinoceros maybe giraffes and so it shows all kinds of of wonderful things being brought back by this expedition that hatchet so it's sent so exotic plants and these plants are then planted on her mortuary temple um ebony ivory perfumes so the perfumes when amun impregnates hatchatshepsut's mother are described as having come from Punt. Right. That's how beautiful they are.

And also there are wonderful scenes of Punt. So there's a house on stilts with a kind of turtle floating underneath it, swimming underneath it. And most famously of all, they show the queen of Punt, who it is fair to describe as a woman of size. A woman of size. She's very, very large. Right. describe as a woman of size. She's very, very large. And this is all kind of showing Hapshetsut as able to construct stunning architecture and to commission vast kind of trading expeditions. So this is the model of what it is to be a great queen. But in terms of the real Hapshetsut,

what's going on? What are the dynamics of the court? There is one intriguing clue that is to be found very, very discreetly placed within this mortuary temple, which is the portrayal of someone who is not royal, a man called Senenmut. And Senenmut is the great right-hand man. so he's the architect and a tutor and and what else tutor tutor to the hatchet so it's daughter um overseer of the audience chamber steward of the queen's estates steward of amun overseer of all the king's works responsible for the for the for the mortuary temple responsible for the obelisks. And he has himself portrayed in the upper sanctuary, you know, which is kind of unheard of. Yeah.

This is the most sacred part of the temple. So very, very strange. And we have details of his life also from two enormous tombs that he built for himself, which he portrays itself very much as a kind of rags to riches story. And there are actually, you know, there are 26 surviving statues of him is he is he possibly are they more than friends tom well so this is this is the great question yeah so there was a there was um an ostracon a kind of a shard of pottery found in the great workman's village where the workmen who who labored on the mortuary temples and in the valley of the kings lived and it shows what seems to be a man having sex with a woman wearing a pharaoh's headdress. And it's often been suggested that this might be a kind of scurrilous portrayal of Senenmut and Hapchetsut.

I mean, we don't know for sure. Might be, might not be. But obviously, there are all kinds of questions around that. So one of the things that's intriguing about Senenmut is that he doesn't seem to have had a wife, which is incredibly unusual. I mean, unheard of for a prominent Egyptian not to have had a wife. It has been suggested that perhaps this is a bit like the Earl of Leicester or the Earl of Essex with Elizabeth I, kind of playing down the fact that they're married.

You know, there would be nothing to stop Hatshepsut having a relationship with him if she'd wanted. But would that not have meant that she was no longer the king? Yes, exactly. Well, no, it wouldn't, but it might've compromised her role. As with Elizabeth I. Essentially, she has, yes,

she cannot afford to marry. So there is a kind of, you know, intriguing Elizabeth I parallel there. And the other thing that complicates it is that Selenmuk doesn't seem to have been buried in either of his tombs so we again we don't know what happened there was he assassinated was he disgraced and this is the kind of the frustration of egyptian history is that you get the scent of all these kind of extraordinary narratives but not enough evidence and some listeners might say oh gosh typical blokes they can't read about a powerful

woman having a you know an impressive male right hand without imagining that they're in bed together so it's also possible that there's there's nothing to there's no absolutely possible because i think i think it's clear that the partnership was one that was founded on a kind of shared sense of what was possible for a king to do. I mean, the extraordinary architecture of Hatshepsut's funerary temple is evident in other temples that she either restored or developed. So she also sponsors lots of buildings in Karnak. And these are very, very innovative, very kind of sophisticated novel. It must have come from Hatshepsut, the inspiration for this, but she needed someone to

do it for her. And clearly it's Senenmut who's doing that. So there is clearly a kind of mixing of, you know, a meeting of minds there. He's a very, very able man. She's a very, very able woman. And together they create these remarkable monuments, but we don't know what happens to him. And also the other thing that we don't know is the exact circumstances of how she is remembered when she dies. She seems to have died naturally, maybe late 30s, 40s, which was, you know, a ripe old age for Egyptians. And she is succeeded by the young Thutmose III. So he's been waiting patiently all this time. He's been waiting very, very patiently. And what happens when Hatshepsut dies is that the people in Canaan who've been subject to Egypt immediately rise in revolt, which I think is an incredibly telling tribute to Hatshepsut's renown, that it's felt, you know, that this woman dies and immediately, you know, succeeded by her male heir. And it's assumed by the people in Canaan that this is an opportunity for them to rise up in revolt.

So it's a tribute to her renown. Very bad mistake on their part, however, because Thutmose III will prove himself to be perhaps the most able military leader in the whole of Egyptian history. He goes bombing off. I mean, he absolutely flattens them. He wins a great battle at Megiddo, Armageddon, as it will in due course become. he rules for 33 years absolutely glorious reign tremendous success and at some point an attempt is made to deface Hatshepsut's monuments that's interesting so we earlier we did one on Akhenaten and this happened to him a very very kind of total damnatio memoriae attempt to erase his his memory, wipe out his name. And it's been a very popular theory that this is an expression of Thutmose III's resentment against his aunt. But the complication with that is that, well, firstly, I mean, it would have been very easy

for him to stage a coup. He's a young man. He's in charge of the army. He could easily have toppled his aunt. He doesn't seem to have done it. I mean, he didn't do that. He lets her die of natural causes. And the second thing is that this seems to have happened this this attempt to erase uh hatchet soot from the from the record seems to have happened several decades after her death and so the likely theory i think is that what is being targeted isn't hatchet soot herself but the memory of the way in which she'd made herself king. And so it seems to have been a kind of an attempt to establish the fact that women could not rule as kings. Is that because his own heir is threatened by a woman? I think probably, yes. I mean, it's basically, it's trying to put, it's trying to ensure that women play the role of

regents, but not of of kings and you do have obviously very powerful female figures that follow through the 18th dynasty of whom nefertiti is the most famous and there has been a thesis that she did actually rule as as king but unlikely um so essentially that seems to have been the the thing and it and it seems to be pretty cursory because otherwise we wouldn't know about hatchet so we do have her inscriptions and a kind of memory was preserved so her name wasn't preserved in the king lists but she wasn't completely erased from historical memory in the way that akhenaten was right so historians didn't have to kind of recover her they kind of did she it wasn't remembered that she'd been a woman so she's kind of commemorated as a man.

Oh, right. Crikey. So the discovery that she was a woman was kind of, you know, it wasn't quite an excitement on the level of discovering Akhenaten and Tutankhamen, but it was pretty exciting. And that's why she's remembered, I think. Well, also, I mean, she must really endear herself to feminist historians and historians, as you were saying, of gender. People who write about gender in ancient Egypt must be all over her. Yeah. Well, I mean, she's a fascinating figure, rather in the way that Elizabeth I is, I guess. The tension between her role and her gender is obviously fascinating. And the fact that she was so successful with it means that she's all the more a kind of intriguing subject of study and of course you know fashions in this change so yeah so quickly the the tone that was adopted when she was first

discovered because the histories were mainly being written by men fabulously sexist then you have kind of freudianism then you have the effect of of feminism and kicking it in the 70s now i i'm sure there are all kinds of gender fluid takes. And it reflects, you know, the fact that there's just enough to kind of generate these hot takes. Yeah. But not enough to disprove them. And that's both the fascination and the frustration of Egyptian history. But I suppose what you would say is if you were trying to, I mean, you can tell she's formidable because she lasts so long in such an unprecedented role. And she creates a stunning architecture.

Yeah, an amazing architecture. But also then the very fact of her nephew Thutmose III's success. I mean, you said he's pretty much the greatest of all Egyptian pharaohs. You know, his power is unchallenged, isn't it, in the Near East generally? Yeah. I mean, you could argue he's building on her well he is building her foundations isn't he he absolutely is yeah he absolutely is so very impressive woman tom i think um do you think i justified my claim i think you have justified your claim actually

yeah you have i think um i'm still i'm still shocked that you made that remark about incest in the first half i was alluding i was alluding to your interest in science not your priorities i just want that put absolutely that's been on my mind the whole podcast oh no wonder you've been so quiet yeah i know it's unprecedented that really is unprecedented no that was fascinating tom it's really interesting and um we should do more we and we will do more powerful women but i think also more on egypt i mean love to do the pyramids at some point the pyramid beginnings of egypt all

that kind of stuff that would be great fun very much i'm very much up for that so we have lots of fun things coming up don't we we have the uh the real downton abbey i think is our next episode we have the real we have a lot of real things because we have the real da Vinci code. We're going to be talking about the story of the Cathars. We're going to be talking about the life and presidency of Ronald Reagan. Tom will be doing an impersonation. We are doing Columbus. We have tons of fun things.

So Tom, thank you so much for what I can only describe as a tour de force. You're too kind. And we will see you all next time. Goodbye. Bye-bye. you're too kind and we will see you all next time goodbye bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad free listening and access to our chat community please sign up at at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest

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