Divine Birth and Coronation Inscriptions of Hatshepsut

Context

Hatshepsut took the throne as the fifth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty during the epoch in Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom. The New Kingdom (the third major period in Egyptian history, following the Old and Middle Kingdoms) was inaugurated when Pharaoh Ahmose I and his brother, Kamose, defeated the Hyksos, who were a group of foreign rulers who had slowly begun to amass power and threaten native Egyptian rule. As a result of the threat of foreign rule, pharaohs of the New Kingdom turned more toward foreign expansion as well as political and military domination of the surrounding areas than their predecessors had.

The New Kingdom was a time of great imperial expansion, when Egypt saw its power spread outward from the banks of the Nile north along the Mediterranean coast into the Levant and south throughout Nubia (ancient Sudan). The Eighteenth Dynasty was the height of this growth. Egypt battled enemies in the north, extending its borders and controlling territory to the north as far as the Euphrates River, and it sponsored expeditions via the Red Sea south into Punt, a land far south of Egypt along the eastern African coast.

The Eighteenth Dynasty was also a time of religious upheaval. The most significant religious changes occurred after Hatshepsut's reign, when Pharaoh Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaton and instituted a religion based on worship of a previously minor god, Aton. However, even at the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty, records reflect the growing power of the god Amon-Re, a syncretized version of the creator god Amon with the sun god Re. Hatshepsut claimed to have been divinely born, with Amon-Re as her father. Because Hatshepsut was not the direct heir to the throne, the crucial link with Amon-Re that her divine birth gave her was an essential precursor to her coronation, showing clearly that she was deserving of the throne.