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By Root 655 0

Hatshepsut must have had the support of powerful forces in the state to hang on to power as long as she did. We have not yet tried to explain how she succeeded in this fantastic coup, which seized the throne of Horus for a woman; and in fact it is very hard to understand how she did succeed. She must have had that indefinable quality that is called “charisma”; it blazes at us now over a gulf of four thousand years, and we can imagine what the impact must have been firsthand. But personality alone is not enough to explain a phenomenon such as Hatshepsut. She must have had the help of powerful supporters.

The most influential of Hatshepsut’s adherents was a man named Hapuseneb, who was, early in her reign, both vizier and High Priest of Amon. One is tempted to see in this man the power behind the throne, the Cardinal Richelieu of the reign. It is hard to vizualize Hatshepsut in the role of Louis XIII; her husband, Thutmose II, might have fit the part better. But certainly a woman in her position needed all the help she could get, and Hapuseneb represented a lot of help. An interesting, and as yet unexplained, point is that a number of Thutmose I’s favored officials transferred their allegiance to Hatshepsut when she assumed joint reign with her nephew—Ineni the architect and Ahmose Pen-Nekhbet, the old soldier from El Kab, among others. Another of her officials had the unusual name “Nehsi,” which means “the Nubian.”

Senenmut’s name (below) and title, steward of Amon

The most intriguing of her supporters was a man named Senenmut (formerly read Senmut). He was a parvenu, an upstart, a nobody; he was not even particularly good-looking. His long aquiline nose and flexible, rather cynical mouth were distinctive rather than handsome. Who and what he was originally we do not know; he appears among the servants of the queen even before she proclaimed herself king—possibly before her husband, Thutmose II, died. From that time on, Senenmut’s meteoric rise to power parallels that of Hatshepsut. He held over twenty different titles, and he was singled out by the queen as was no other official.

Hatshepsut bolstered her position with propaganda as well as with picked allies. The propaganda was based on two major pieces of evidence, both of which are totally fictitious. One of them claimed that she had been chosen by her father as his successor and raised to the throne by his own hand. The other proposed the magnificent notion that she was the physical daughter of Amon-Re, the god.

There was nothing new about this idea; other kings were called “son of Amon” and “son of Re,” and the queenly title “God’s Wife,” which is first held by the mother of King Ahmose, certainly applies to the god Amon, the patron of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Theban Dynasties. Hatshepsut’s reliefs depict in some detail the process by which she became the daughter of the god. They are the earliest of this type of scene to survive, although the fiction must have been current earlier.

On the walls of the temple of Deir el Bahri we see the god on his way to visit the queen and God’s Wife Ahmose, Hatshepsut’s mother. “He [Amon] made his form like the majesty of this husband, the king Aakheperure [Thutmose I]. He found her [Queen Ahmose] as she slept, in the beauty of the palace. She awoke at the fragrance of the god, which she smelled in the presence of His Majesty. He went to her immediately.”

At this point Breasted, who first translated these inscriptions, primly breaks into Latin, but the sense is clear without any translation at all. Afterward, Amon made a little speech to the delighted queen: “Hatshepsut shall be the name of this my daughter, whom I have placed in your body. She shall exercise the excellent kingship in this whole land.”

Successive scenes show the matters, physical and religious, that have to do with the birth of the divine child. Khnum, the creator of men, is instructed by Amon to fashion the baby and its ka, or double, on his divine potter’s wheel. Both the little figures are unquestionably male—another of the unconscious slips of the