The Woman Who Would Be King

The number of women who ruled, and ruled successfully, in the ancient world can be counted on one hand, and it can be argued that the Egyptian king Hatshepsut was the most successful of them all. In the book The Woman Who Would Be King Kara Cooney explores what we know about Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt from 1472-1458 BCE, and examines the possible narratives that follow this woman who we know very little about. She rose to rule in a society that didn't have a feminine version of the word king when she was twenty, increased the wealth of Egypt, commissioned an impressive number of monuments that were colossal in scope (the pic at the bottom is her temple of Djeser Djeseru, which was only one of her building projects. She also commissioned the rebuilding and construction of many new temples in stone and erected the two tallest obelisks that had been built at that time), and, yet, twenty years after she died her depictions on walls and monuments were systematically destroyed.

This book was amazing on so many different levels. The author analyzes what we know about Hatshepsut and then examines all the different possible reasons that events would have occurred the way that they did. Her knowledge of ancient Egypt is extraordinary, and she explains the lives of the people who lived in that time in a very accessible way.

It was so different from how things are here and now. The religion played a much larger part and the gods were thought to play a very personal part in every one's daily lives, and people could influence the cosmos through their interactions with them. For example, the book opens with the morning rituals that Hatshepsut would have performed when she was acting as the God's Wife of Amen. She would go to the temple and wake the god, Amen, who was embodied in a living statue. She would 'wake' him gently with chanting, bathe the statue, feed him by presenting food, and then she would complete his morning renewal. Its hard to describe this without sounding lewd, but for this last part she would bring him to climax using her hand (the statue featured an erect penis). And this wasn't considered weird. It was extremely necessary, so they believed, because Amen was reborn from his own seed every day and if he didn't orgasm he wouldn't be born the next day and the world would end.

This book was fascinating. The fact that we really can infer this much about someone who lived three thousand years ago just astounds me. I think it is very important as well, that we look back at the civilizations that came before and examine what led them to greatness, and what led to their downfalls. Ancient Egypt is one of the longest running civilizations that we have seen and, because of their extensive monument building and dry climate, we have an amazingly good history of them and the time periods they embodied. It is also interesting to examine their gender norms, especially as we rewrite our own. They didn't have the word queen, or even a feminine version of the word king, and yet there is very little evidence that they didn't embrace Hatshepsut as king, and she led one of the most gainful reigns in Egypt up to that time. It is important to examine her life, and learn what we can from her experiences. This book was wonderful.