You're Dead to Me - Hatshepsut (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: September 2, 2023

Greg Jenner is joined by special guests Kemah Bob and Dr Campbell Price as they head back to Ancient Egypt to meet the unique and powerful ruler, Hatshepsut. She reigned for over 20 years, built a temple which is still admired today, had a ‘special’ relationship with statues and was one of the first rulers to focus on divinity rather than gender norms. So why did history try to erase her?For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.Research by Genevieve Johnson-Smith Written and produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Siefe Miyo Audio Producer: Abi PatersonYou’re Dead To Me is a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and former chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. And today we are travelling back thousands of years to unwrap the mysteries of ancient Egypt's ultimate yummy mummy,

who ruled as pharaoh for over two decades. Yes, we're talking about Queen Hatshepsut. And to help us do that, I'm joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, he's curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum, a fellow at the University of Liverpool, and the chair of the Egypt Exploration Society. What a job. You may have read his excellent book, Pocket Museum, Ancient Egypt, and you definitely would have heard him on our Ramesses the Great episode. It's the fantastic Dr. Campbell. Hello Campbell, welcome back. Hello, I'm delighted to be back. Much happier talking about Hatshepsut in fact than Ramesses. She would definitely get an

invite to my fancy dinner party over him. Oh okay, playing favourites already. And in Comedy Corner, she's a fantastic comedian, writer and producer. You'll have seen her on TV as the host of It's a Sin after hours or co-hosting The Island on the Dave channel or on Richard Osman's House of Games. And you'll have heard her many times on Radio 4 or on many podcasts, including The Guilty Feminists. But most importantly, on our podcast, talking about prohibition in America. It's Kima Bob. Welcome back, Kima. Well, thank you so much. Oh, my gosh. What a beautiful intro i was like

is that me and then it's like oh cool it's like whoa i've really lived a life you know you've got stories to tell have you heard of hatshepsut i'm guessing not i have but i have no idea like i've heard the name okay i. I mean, like, who even is she? I guess is the big question. Like, who even is she? She's the word. Yeah, pronoun is right. We're talking about one of history's most interesting women,

but perhaps not well known. But by the end of this episode, we'll know plenty more. Lover Queen. Great. So what do you know? Well, that brings us on to the first segment of the podcast, the So What Do You Know, where I have a guess at what you, our listener, might know about today's subject. And in terms of the lovely ladies of ancient Egypt, I'm guessing you've definitely heard of Cleopatra. Of course you have. You've probably heard of Nefertiti.

And we talked about Nefertari on the Ramesses episode. But I don't think you know Hatshepsut. She's not had the classic movie treatment, but she has featured in some historical novels, and she's the inspiration for one of Rhapsody's songs on her acclaimed 2019 hip-hop album Eve, dedicated to inspirational women of colour. So there is some kudos there, but who was the real Hatshepsut, and what was it about her reign that makes her so interesting to novelists and modern musicians? Well, let's find out, shall we? The real housewife of Egypt County. Yeah, I mean, I think Egypt was bigger than a county, but certainly plenty of drama, for sure.

Kima, in terms of Egyptian history, do you know roughly how long Egyptian history was when we talk about ancient Egyptian history? Too long. That's fair. Too long. That's fair. Too long, yet too short. Do you know what I mean? Over too soon. Yeah. Campbell, it's easily 3,000 years.

Yeah. Conservatively, Greg, pharaonic history, so the time you've got pharaohs on the throne is 3,000 years. Oh, my gosh. So there's a huge amount of Egyptian history, which we talked about last time time rameses where do we squeeze that shepsa into that enormous timeline where does she go early middle late well relatively middle uh greg in egyptological terms she's in the 18th dynasty dynasty being the royal family and we'll talk a bit more about family so she's around roughly 1507 to about 1458 give or take bce so that's like a century before tut 200 years before rameses the second and a whopping

1400 years before a famous queen cleopatra wow it's it's just sort of boggling isn't it that i say there's a lot on this podcast but cleopatra is closer to us keema than she is to the great pyramid of giza that's so wow i wonder if people from like other places were just like tired of egypt they're just like oh they're still at it just take a break fall already i mean i'm going to start with the boring question campbell her childhood absolute total mystery or do we have like some clues an honest answer to that question no we don't know a lot about hatchet suits childhood she's clearly someone very important you can tell that from her name so her name Hatshepsut means foremost of noble ladies she's born into the royal family yeah great name oh my gosh she is expected to marry as

a woman the next pharaoh and she is in fact the daughter of a pharaoh a guy called Thutmose I and one of his wives called Achmos she marriesries her half-brother, Tutmos II, and then is the stepmother of the next king, Tutmos III. So it's all a very involved situation, you could say, to keep the royal blood... It's super tutmos, I'd say. It's very tutmos. It's keeping the royal blood pure.

We might call it quite incestuous. But you want to know exactly who's in and who's out the royal family. It's also confusing in terms of language because the ancient Egyptians' word for husband is the same word as the word for brother. So you can be a sen, meaning your brother or your spouse. Great. And sometimes your brother is your spouse, which is just to save language. He's tucked mostly the useless, isn't he? He's not very good. He's not really a competent king, as far as we can tell. The husband, her husband, Thutmose II, unlike his father and unlike his son,

isn't really remembered because he doesn't really build much, or he doesn't build much on his own because quite unusually Hatshepsut his wife is ordering things like obelisks to be erected but we've got texts from contemporary observers at the time an official a guy called Ineni saying her husband Tutmose II snuffs it and then basically everything's under her control so wait so people are like he's useless because he didn't like get any buildings made like he didn't live long enough keema no okay like that's like so he's he's not great as pharaohs go that's like your job like as a pharaoh it's like order the construction of monuments if nobody's making an obelisk you failed the country. Yes, basically. What a vibe.

Brother slash husband, Thutmose II has died. Does Hatshepsut inherit the throne? Does she have to share it with her son, who's also her nephew, Thutmose III? What's next, Campbell? Well, it's not an unusual situation because men die generally before women, especially royal women. Looking forward to it. Watch out, Greg. I'm very tired. I've only got 10 years left so so she's kind of in a in a position of power anyway

so yeah she's the the co-ruler the regent for this boy tutmose the third probably her stepson not biological son but he is maybe only two years old so she steps into this role she has another name which is really weird usually only the pharaoh has another name so she's born Hatshepsut but she has this other throne name Mat-ka-ra which means something like the justice of the sun god spirit which is very pharaonic and she never denies or contests that she has this junior partner this took most the third figure but she's always shown literally one step ahead of him in in reliefs and paintings or she's shown in the lead position doing more active things so she's never a queen so this is in modern english we think of kings and queens she transitions from being a king's wife to being

the pharaoh. Brilliant. Okay, so she's sort of in a job share with her stepson, who's a toddler. That means she's basically running the show. Again, we are 1400 years before Cleopatra. So, an obvious question, Campbell. Is it okay for a woman to rule? Sure. I think the key thing is, she doesn't seem to take the kingship by force. You know, she must have buy-in from the people in the court, the kind of kingmakers. And she goes on to rule quite successfully for 20 years. Hatshepsut has powerful women at the end of the previous dynasty and the start of her own dynasty. end of the previous dynasty and the start of her own dynasty. So within a few generations,

people like Achmos Nefertari, who is worshipped as a goddess. No, it wouldn't have been completely outrageous to have a woman ruling as a regent, having real power, and she would have had plenty of powerful female role models, I think. That's nice. It's good to have role models. Kima, congratulations. You're the new king slash pharaoh of ancient Egypt. What's on your to-do list? What would you do on day one? I got to get some stuff built. I've heard and I've seen that if you're not ordering some buildings to be made, are you truly effective?

And I don't want to do anything that can help people. I don't want to make sure that can like help people like I don't want to make sure that people are like fed or anything like that that's not really my vibe but I would like a real big building okay yeah so the question then is um does she start building stuff or is it more about war and conquest she's inherited this newly reunited Egypt, quite strong military position Egypt has, thanks to her dad, Timo's I. She doesn't seem to be so interested in military endeavours herself, but she is interested in trade. So trade with the goal of obtaining nice, fancy, luxury foreign goods. That's a way of showing off to the gods that you're a legitimate,

powerful ruler. And she, we know because she records it on her beautiful temple at Deir el-Bakri, she's most famous for sending this great expedition to a mysterious land of the gods called Punt. So she brings boats back, bursting full of exotic things like frankincense and myrrh, these very fancy trees to make incense. Incense is a way of calling the gods down into temples. Incense is very important. It basically makes a space divine by smelling nice. So lots of exotic woods, gold, ivory.

Elephants, husks, panther skins, herds of cattle, a troop of monkeys, um dancing peakby performers it's the kind of jesus package like if you don't have frankincense and myrrh like how am i supposed to prove my like that's great yeah gold frankincense and myrrh but i mean in the bible they don't talk about panther skins do they i mean that's there must be a wise man who got lost on the way because pamper skins jesus look amazing primo can i ask a sort of quite boring geographical question where slash what is punt the exact whereabouts of it are not known east africa seems most likely hatchet suit sends a fleet out and this is the most impressive thing to get get to that area, you have to go down the Red Sea. To get to Red Sea port, you basically build ships on the Nile, flat pack it, carry it across the desert for hundreds of miles, then rebuild the ship on the sea. Potentially, it was something like a 2,000 kilometre voyage there and another 2,000 kilometres back. She definitely sounds like an organiser. But the most important question that Kima has already asked is, has she built any stuff? Because

that's all we care about on this podcast, isn't it? Build that stuff! So Campbell, tell me about the stuff she built. The biggest thing she builds that we know about is this fantastic terraced temple. Often Egyptology calls these things mortuary temples, but they're not focused on death or dying. They're focused on the eternal life of the pharaoh and their union with Amun, the god Amun-Ra, who's worshipped at Karnak on the east bank, at what's named Luxor.

On the west bank, you have this set of temples and Hatshepsut is the most impressive, I would say. Like until now. Yeah, tourist attraction now oh my gosh it's the photogenic place to go and the temple is known as Deir el-Bahari but I think it's also got another name Campbell yeah so the ancient name for it is Jesser Jesseru which means literally sacred of sacred or holy of holies. The mountain itself is sacred to the goddess Hathor. She's often shown as a cow and she's the mistress of drunkenness and partying. So she's a party cow. And Hatshepsut is very pious towards Hathor, this very powerful goddess.

So the whole temple is like an arena of celebrating how great Hatshepsut was and how pious she was to all the gods and how much of a good daughter she was to her dad, Thutmose I. The husband, the rather ineffectual Thutmose II, hardly gets a look in. It's all about Hatshepsut and the gods. Yeah, it's an absolutely enormous temple,

3,500 years old you know you can visit it today keema if you had the infinite resources of a pharaoh yeah what would your what would the keema bob building look like so it's in the shape of a big party cow because i'm quite the party cow myself and you come in and you're like whoa it's gold everywhere on the inside almost to the point where it becomes like things aren't actually functional because they're made of gold and you're like please i just needed a phone like i just wanted some water and you're like, sorry, all I got is gold in here. So all gold vibes except a giant picture of me, which is for some reason not made of gold. And the picture of you, is it you as a human form

or is it you in Sphinx form? It's actually me in party cow form. Okay, great. It's my truth. Okay, so we have Hatshepsut. She's got a shrine depicting her as the daughter of the god Amun. But she's also, of course, claiming to be the daughter of Thutmose I. So has she got two daddies?

In which case, how does that work? Well, here's the thing. Hatshepsut presents a story of her divine birth in which she says her mother remember Queen Achmos is sitting in the palace one day and she smells this overwhelmingly beautiful smell of incense from Punt and in walks a man that could be her husband but actually is the god Amun-Ra himself. And so he seduces her by his divine cologne and they have sex and Hatshepsut is conceived. So she's literally saying, Hatshepsut is saying, I'm the bodily daughter of the god Amun-Ra.

So I'm literally a demigod. And so gods smell amazing. They smell just like, they smell delicious and seductive if you had to redesign uh gods to smell differently these days what would the uh the go-to smell be i'm kind of want to create a kind of just like androgynous scent that also reminds you of things that grow in nature so it's like wow you smell like the ocean but also a plant when it's cut open and that's hot i mean that is a very divine thing too that's creation that's fertility that's perfect it's life okay so we have here a pharaoh a queen she's like the ultimate career girl

building stuff doing trade but we haven't heard any kind of romance she's forced to marry her half-brother which isn't perhaps too much fun but we do have another significant presence in her court a guy called senen mut now senen mut holds all of the high titles basically he's in charge of all the estates of amun-ra he's the overseer of all royal building work so he's like the royal architect he's uh the tutor to Hatshepsut's only daughter Neferuri Princess Neferuri uh he comes from nothing he's not born into an aristocratic family but his name is everywhere all over Hatshepsut's monuments, on a series of little objects I like to call love beads, which are donation monuments in themselves,

little beads with the name of Hatshepsut, the name of a pharaoh built into the foundations of temples, but with his name on them as well. So a very intimate way of connecting yourself with the pharaoh and interestingly senenmut has no evidence of having had a wife so people have naturally suggested that maybe um they were special friends so what do you reckon kima do you think that chips had had a special gentleman friend or do you think he's just he's just a sort of you of very effective business partner?

I think she's a hardworking woman. She's ordering buildings. And sometimes you need someone to relieve that stress with and to have special moments. We have Hatshepsut here. She's built all this stuff. This incredible temple, the Holy of Holies, it's called. She's building statues to herself.

She's obviously reigning for over 20 years, I think. And we also have this quote attributed to her, which is translated in one of her obelisks at Karnak. Now my heart turns to and fro in thinking what people will say. They who shall see my monument in the after years and shall speak of what I have done. So she's interested in what's going to happen after she's gone. She's already aware that people will discuss her when she's dead.

So I wanted to ask Campbell, does she hang on to her throne until her death? And then what happens in that handover period? Well, this is one of these things, Greg, we i have to say honestly we don't know okay i'd like to think she dies a natural death and then the stepson tutmos the third succeeds her and goes on to rule for another 30 odd years a traditional view is the stepson hates her she's the wicked stepmother he goes around chiseling her image out. So her image is the subject of a real campaign of destruction. Her name is attacked. Her image is attacked.

But we know this actually happened some 20 years after her demise, her presumable death. So I suspect it's more for dynastic reasons. And that actually maybe Tutmose III actually quite liked Hatshepsut. And she was a mother figure to him. But it's more convenient to paint the picture of a wicked stepmother, I think. So hang on, how do you know all this stuff then if her name was wiped from history? Yeah!

How come? Well, to be honest, they didn't really do a very good job. Ah, okay. Incompetency. Good. So we know about her because lots of the buildings have survived. The erasures that were done don't completely remove her image. And there were lots of hidden things that didn't get attacked. So cool. She's venerated, you know, 500 years after her death.

The king of Egypt calls his daughter Matkare, which was Hatshepsut's name as pharaoh, not just as queen. So he must know. So I think Hatshepsut had her own little fan club that persisted after her death. Oh, wow. Okay. That's kind of sweet. We know that Hatshepsut herself was a step-mum.

Was she also a step-mummy? Is there a mummy in a coffin, in a sarcophagus somewhere? Can I... Show me the mummy. We have actually three sarcophagi, plural of sarcophagus, which she made. She was only buried in one of them. She made one for her dad, and she had one she just didn't use. But I cannot say for sure that we found her mummy, although some Egyptologists believe we have. So there's a story that in 1903 howard carter of tootin common fame he found a tomb with a mummy in it that was rediscovered in 1989 by an american egyptologist called donald wrighton and recently an egyptian egyptologist called zahi

hawass believes he has identified in that mummy the body of Hatshepsut based on a tooth, a mysterious tooth that was lost, put in a box. The box had Hatshepsut's name on it, and the tooth was reunited with the mummy of this woman. She's rather a large lady. Whether she is Hatshepsut, we cannot be sure. The DNA't survived uh well enough um but her hand position is the hand position of a queen of egypt not a pharaoh um so i'm rather skeptical that it was a hatchet suit personally yeah she she doesn't sound like the like modest type but what if some psycho rearranged her hands before she got really really hard maybe and the dead don't bury themselves so you can't always have your wish true so we have had

shepsoot maybe because we have a mystery tooth in a box but maybe the hand justice are wrong perhaps she's a plus size icon from history but we don't know so let's let's leave the question mark hanging but speaking of slight mysteries connecting the ancient world to the modern day, Kima, can you guess which modern musical icon thinks that she is the reincarnation of Hatshepsut? Madonna. Good guess. Gaga. No, it's Tina Turner.

That's femme. Hatshepsut is a heroine to Tina Turner. That tells us that Hatshepsut has a 20th century reputation. How has that happened? In terms of the way that she was written about in the 19th century and 20th century, how was Hatshepsut understood then and how do we think of her now? Oh gosh, Greg, this is such a problem. So much of what we know or think we know about the past is through the lens of people in the 19th century who tend

frankly to be pale male and stale and so that is definitely the case with Hatshepsut because she's as I've already alluded to painted as this wicked stepmother character who Timo's the third really hates so one of the early, very significant Egyptologists, Jean-Francois Champollion, Frenchman who deciphers hieroglyphs, denied that she could even be a woman. He just assumed it was a man who was acting weird, acting as regent on behalf of Chimboraz II,

obviously. But then my favourite is an American Egyptologist, a guy called William C. Hayes, who described Hatshepsut in 1953 as shrewd, ambitious, and an unscrupulous woman, painting her as a total schemer who stole the throne. Shrewd, from that you go, obviously a woman.

Obviously. People aren't calling dudes shrewd. So it just goes to show that any evidence, we've got lots of evidence but it's how you put it together and in the 19th century it tended in the early 20th century tended not to be very positive for poor old Hattie so Kima you've heard plenty about Queen Hatshepsut or as Campbell calls her Hattie today so where do you stand on Hatshepsut are you a fan I think that she's an icon I think that she's a hero I think sending loads of full-grown men across the country with a ship that they like

half built and flat pack and then have to fully construct just to go get you some trinkets and whatnot so you can see them rich and fancy i think that's iconic um like yes like waste hundreds of men's lives like do it you know so i think that's great all right the nuance window this is where uh keema and i take a sort of sit back and savour our luxury imports from Punt, our panther skins and our golden myrrh. And we allow Dr. Campbell to tell us something we need to know about Shepsoot for two uninterrupted minutes. And today, Campbell, you're telling us about your very own Indiana Jones fantasy moment, although hopefully with better care for the artefacts, because Indiana, as much as I love him.

A bit slapdash. A bit slapdash, yes, let's be honest. So, Dr Gamble, two minutes, the nuance window, starting now, please. A few years ago, I was going through the storerooms of Manchester Museum and I am a big fan of sculpture. That's my main research topic. And I had seen this beaten up lower part of a very fine sculpture in indurated limestone, almost like marble, covered in hieroglyphs. And I'd always wondered about it because I was trying to translate the hieroglyphs. And one day, a German colleague, a late great Egyptologist by the name of Rainer

Hennig, came in and he was interested in titles people held. And I pointed the statue out to him and I said, Professor Hannig, I just can't work out what's going on here. The statue says it is given as a gift of the king. And the number of statues that were expressly said to be given as gifts of pharaohs to non-royal people is actually very small. But then together we worked out that it wasn't given as a gift of the king at all. It was given as a gift of the god's wife. Now we've met the god's wife. God's wife is a hat-ship suit. And suddenly all the other inscriptions fell into place and the titles held were all titles held by Senenmut. And when the penny dropped, I am not kidding you, it was the professional highlight of my life. And I thought, oh my God, it's a statue of Senenmut,

who is, as I've told you, very well known in Egyptology. Until that moment, he was known by 25 statues. Now there is 26, including the Manchester fragment. But the really interesting thing is, the statue was found in a temple right next to Hatshepsut's at Diyar al-Bakhri that was already 500 years old by the time she came to the throne. So it's likely her architect, Senenmut, based the design for her much more impressive temple

on this earlier predecessor. And she was trying deliberately to echo that earlier ancestor so that was the most exciting moment of my life amazing what a story so juicy and it's like oh did people forget him are people gonna let us see what he looks like is he a hottie that's what we want to know historical hottie most definitely all that is left for me to say is a huge thank you to my guests in history corner we've had the fantastic dr campbell price from manchester museum thank you campbell my pleasure i've gone places

with keema today that i never thought possible and in comedy corner we have the magnificent keema bob thank you keema there's a lot going on on this earth so thanks for showing me a bit of it absolute pleasure and to you lovely listener join me next time as we set off on another fact-finding expedition to another mysterious land of historical wonders and maybe come back with some frankincense. Who knows?

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