Divine Birth and Coronation Inscriptions of Hatshepsut

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Hatshepsut was royal by birth, the daughter of King Thutmose I and his principal wife, Ahmose. Typically, in ancient Egypt the throne would pass to the eldest son of the pharaoh and his principal wife. In this case, Thutmose and Ahmose had no sons who survived childhood. The crown prince was Thutmose II (the son of Thutmose I and a lesser wife, Mutnofret). Marriages between half siblings were common amongst members of the royal family as a way of preserving the bloodline; therefore, Thutmose II and Hatshepsut were married. They had one child together, a daughter named Neferure. As they had no sons, at Thutmose II's death the throne passed to Thutmose III, who was the son of Thutmose II and a lesser wife, Isis. Because Thutmose III was quite young at the time of his father's death, Hatshepsut served as regent prior to her coronation around 1473 BCE. Hatshepsut never remarried, although evidence of a close relationship with one of her officials, Senenmut, has led some scholars to speculate that theirs may have been an intimate relationship. Senenmut served as the royal tutor for Neferure, and several statues depict him holding Neferure.

Although women in Egypt, especially in the royal family, could hold prestigious titles and important positions, the pharaoh was male, and the power of royal women was officially limited. Prior to her coronation, Hatshepsut had held the important titles of Great King's Wife and God's Wife of Amon. But after the death of her husband, Hatshepsut's power increased. Given that she was, in effect, ruling and the underage Thutmose III was probably not heavily involved, it makes sense that Hatshepsut would have wanted the title of pharaoh to go along with the responsibility of rulership. She was an effective ruler and led several military campaigns, in at least one of which, in Nubia, she may have fought. She also had commissioned a trade expedition to Punt, and it was commemorated on the walls of her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri. Her divine birth, also depicted at Deir el-Bahri along with her coronation, confirmed that she had been ordained as royalty by the gods even before her birth.

Conceptually, however, Hatshepsut's reign posed a problem for Egyptian society. The office of pharaoh was a male position, and the royal insignia that marked the pharaoh included a beard. Hatshepsut solved this by having herself depicted as a male, with a beard and royal (male) dress. Her inscriptions continued to refer to her as female, but the depictions of her while she was a pharaoh showed a male.

After Hatshepsut's death, an effort was undertaken by Thutmose III to efface her name from many of her monuments. The female pronouns used to refer to her were scratched out, and her images were chipped or hacked out. In some instances, her representations were replaced with other representations; for instance, her cartouche (an oval or oblong figure surrounding a monarch's name) was often replaced with that of her husband, Thutmose II. While some scholars have referred to this as a damnatio memoriae, or an attempt to erase Hatshepsut's memory and therefore her existence, Thutmose III's erasure of Hatshepsut was inconsistent. Additionally, the effacing of the monuments was not done immediately after her death. In fact, it may have occurred as many as twenty years later, suggesting that it was not an immediate reaction to invalidate her reign.

Controversy surrounding Hatshepsut was once more reawakened in 2007, when Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities announced that the body of Hatshepsut, whose whereabouts for centuries had been unknown, was placed in storage in the Cairo Museum after its removal from a sealed tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Many royal mummies of the New Kingdom had been moved from their original tombs by Egyptian priests toward the end of the New Kingdom for protection against tomb robberies, and several bodies had been frequently misplaced and mislabeled. A box, known to be from Hatshepsut's tomb and labeled with her name, contained a tooth that matched a gap in the jaw of the mummy now suspected by Hawass and others to be the body of Hatshepsut.