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Welcome to Voices of Ancient Egypt, the podcast for people who don't just want to learn about ancient Egypt, but want to understand it on a deeper, more meaningful level. I'm Melinda Nelsonhurst, an Egyptologist with a PhD in the field and years of experience teaching at the university level, working in Egypt, and training students around the world to read real ancient Egyptian texts. I've spent decades studying the civilization in a traditional academic setting, so you don't have to. And so you can access knowledge that's usually locked behind academic walls. This podcast brings ancient Egyptian history, beliefs, and language to life and shows you that learning hieroglyphs is possible no matter your age, background, or schedule. So whether you want to read hieroglyphs in museums, on social media, or on your next trip to Egypt, you'll find the tools, stories, and encouragement to make it real right here. Let's hear the voices of the ancient world together. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Voices of Ancient Egypt podcast. Today we're gonna talk about a pharaoh, but a pharaoh who is maybe somewhat unusual, you could say, and likely one, though, that you have heard of, even if technically unusual, not lacking fame, and that is the female pharaoh Hatshepsuit. And she's well known today because of the fact that she is unusual. She was a woman, as I mentioned, female Pharaoh, when the role of Pharaoh was a male role. And we're gonna get into her history, how she ended up in that position, what happened afterwards, and so forth. And we're gonna talk about some of the text that she's left behind. And this is a sort of special preview of some of the things that we learned to read in my next level hieroglyphs program, Master Scribes. And if you enjoy this episode and learning to read these kinds of texts, then you're gonna want to check out the program at Masterscribes.com. As of recording, applications are open, but they are closing September 29th. So you'll want to make sure to head over to masterscribes.com and get your application in before they close. So Hatshepsuit, let's go back to sort of the beginning, I guess, and give a little overview of her reign before we get into talking about some of these texts. Essentially, she was the daughter of Pharaoh Tomoza I, and she was a daughter of his by his great royal wife. And in this time period, this is the period, the larger period we call the New Kingdom, or if we want to talk about sort of the smaller subperiod by dynasty, that's the 18th dynasty. And during this period, it was very common the pharaohs had many wives, and oftentimes, not universal, but oftentimes their great royal wife would be a member of the royal family, often half-sister. And so typically, again, there's always exceptions to this, so that's why I use a word like typically, the son of that pairing would be the next pharaoh. They would be the highest status of the male children that the king had. However, there are, of course, a lot of cases where there was no son with the great royal wife, um, and also cases where sons were still children, minors who needed regents to rule for them. And this is something that happened in Hatshepsut's life. So she married her brother, Tutmosis II, and she was his great royal wife in the next generation after her parents, and she had a daughter with Tutmosis II named Nefiru Re, but they had no sons. So when Tutmosis II died, and kind of on the early side, he'd only reigned for a small number of years, he was left with a son by a minor wife, and this son was basically still a toddler. So Tutmosis III became Pharaoh, but obviously could not rule at that age. If you've ever had a toddler yourself, you can imagine what that would be like. They already kind of seem like dictator tyrants at home, as it is anyway, right? So they needed a regent. And this is not something that was unprecedented in ancient Egypt. You have lots of cases where kings came to the throne and were too young to rule on their own, and so they would have a regent who helped. Typically, again, always exceptions, right? But typically the mother of the king would serve as regent. However, in this case, Hatshepsut, who was not his mother, but you could view her as either his aunt or his stepmother, or both, is the one who became regent. And there could be a lot of reasons for this. This could be because of her political connections, her history in the royal family, her role in the priesthood through her role in the family, and the fact that she had been the great royal wife, and she was the one who really had the best you could say pedigree in terms of her parentage and being the child of a great royal wife, and also descended from grandparents who were the Pharaoh and great royal wife. So Hatsapsu becomes regent for Tot Moses III. And during this time, it's a very prosperous time. Things go very well. There's a lot of monuments that have both of them on them. And at some point, maybe around year seven or so, it's a little hard to tell because our evidence is always, you know, not 100%. It's based on what survives. But around then, it seems, this is when Hatchhepsuit actually decides to, instead of being referred to as a regent on texts, now becomes a full king in her own right. So this is different than previous reigns where you had a female regent for a young king. There had been female pharaohs before, or at least one being Sobak Nephru from the 13th dynasty, perhaps also in the old kingdom, that's a little more debated, but not very many. And in this case, we have this situation again where the regent is not even the mother of the king, but she's a different royal family member, and she becomes king alongside Tutmosis III. Now, it's important to keep that in mind, what I just said. She becomes king alongside Tutmosis III, right? She's not pushing him off the throne and taking his place. That's not the situation. Instead, they're ruling as what we call co-regents. So this is a practice that had been around in Egyptian practice for a long time. It seems to have even been extremely common in certain time periods, like the 12th dynasty, where the son of the king would become co-regent before his father died. So they would have an overlap. So it is not unique to this pairing, although it is uh very unusual in terms of the fact that you do have, again, a woman and a man. This is this is potentially unique. So Hatshepsut rules alongside Tutmosis III as a full pharaoh. And because the role of king, the role of pharaoh, these are interchangeable terms, by the way. So if you hear me say pharaoh or king, they're the same thing. I don't mean anything different by the two different terms. She takes on this role. And the role of the king, the role of the pharaoh, is a masculine role in ancient Egypt. They just don't have a feminine equivalent for it. So in English, we have words like queen, which can mean the head of state. It can mean a female head of state, right? In ancient Egyptian, they don't have a term like that. So the women that we refer to as queens now in English, in Egyptian, the way they're described is based on their relationship with the king. So if they're a wife of the king, that's what they're called. They're called wife of the king. There isn't a separate word meaning specifically queen. Or they could be called the mother of the king, which is another thing we would probably call a queen or a dowager queen or something like that. And again, no separate word for this in Egyptian. She would just be mother of the king. Same thing where they don't really have prince or princess, it's son of the king, daughter of the king, etc. So royal family member terminology, all based on your relationship to the king. So because of that, Hathepsu, to be able to rule as a monarch, even in a co-regency with her nephew/slash stepson, she has to take on this masculine role of king of Pharaoh. And that's what she does. And so in texts, and also, of course, in the way she's depicted in art, so in carvings on walls, on statues, and stuff that you may have seen when you've gone to Egypt or you've visited a museum, she looks like a typical pharaoh for the most part. Sometimes her features are a little more feminine than the typical, but not a huge difference. She really takes on the standard regalia, the standard dress. She wears the kilt that male pharaohs wear. She doesn't wear the dress that she would have been shown wearing before when she was a regent or when she was married to the king, that kind of queen. So she takes on this full imagery of the king. And with this, she takes on the full titulary, that is the full set of names of a king. So kings in ancient Egypt very early on develop a titulary that involves five different names. So one of them is their birth name that they were actually given as a human child. The others they take on when they become king. And they have meaning to them. They're often related to sort of the political situation of the time and so forth. So Hatchapsu does this. She takes on a full five-name titulary. And we see these names all over her monuments. Everything from her giant obelisks at Karnak, which I'll talk about a little more in a moment, to rings that you could wear with her name on it, to jars and tools and implements that were buried as part of foundation deposits at her funerary temple at the site of Daryl Bahri. You've probably at least seen in pictures if you haven't been there in person. It's a beautiful colonnaded temple that's built into the cliffs opposite where the Valley of the Kings is. So if you go up over the cliffs on the other side is the Valley of the Kings behind there. And so she has her names put on all these things, just like any other pharaoh. Now, the only difference, I would say, is that sometimes she's referred to in the feminine. So sometimes she's referred to as the lady of the two lands instead of the lord of the two lands. This is the exact same word in Egyptian, by the way, except with a feminine ending, a T at the end makes it feminine. So in English, Lord and Lady might sound a little bit different than each other, but in Egyptian, it is the exact same word, simply with a feminine ending on it. But sometimes she has entirely masculine titles, entirely masculine pronouns used. So there's a real mix. There's no one-set rule for her. In some texts, she'll be referred to with feminine pronouns, in some she's referred to with masculine pronouns. So there's a little bit of fluidity in terms of how she's referred to, but definitely kept within the larger standard of how you refer to a king and how kings are talked about on monuments, what they're doing. So for example, she's shown giving offerings to the gods, such as Amun Re, and she's shown doing her kingly duties in other ways. She is referred to as being actually even the child of Amun Re in the scenes at her temple at Daryl Bakri that we refer to as the scenes of her divine birth. She's commemorated there also for her great feats and opening trade routes, such as to the land of Punt, where they brought back lots of myrrh trees and other exotic items. This was such a big event, so special, in fact, that she takes up a huge amount of the decorative space in her temple to show it and to show what Punt looked like and what were all the things were that they brought back from there. And overall, Hatshepsut's reign is a prosperous one. She has a lot of building projects, as I mentioned, trade routes and so forth, and possibly some military expeditions too. We just don't have super, super good evidence for that, but we have like little hints of it. And one of the things she did in her building projects is erect two of the tallest obelisks at the Temple of Karnak in what's now modern Luxor. And they are enormous. If you've ever been to Karnak, you have absolutely seen these. One is still standing, the other collapsed sometime in ancient times, and parts of it have been recovered. They were down on the ground level for a long time, but just a few years ago, partially part of it was erected upright again. But before this, you could see the top section of it actually sort of propped up but on its side at our level. So not quite eye level necessarily, but basically at a good level where you could see it pretty well. And because of this, there are some good photos of it. And this is one of the things that we have worked on in Master Scribes, in level one of Master Scribes. My students have read this obelisk, the one that fell down, a big, huge portion of it. And it's an interesting monument because it has a bunch of the things we talked about on it, right? It has not just Hatch Epsuit on it, but also Top Moses III. So she continues to include him on her monuments in a lot of different ways. Again, this goes back to the point that a lot of times people miss this, that she's not pushing him aside and saying, I am the only king, and we're just not going to talk about him. No, they're both on things like true co-regents. And so you see them on the obelisk on different sides in different sections. Some of them feature Hatshepsuit and other sections feature Tutmosis III. It's pretty equal, actually, over most of the sides in terms of how they're referred to and how often they show up. So they're both, for example, shown and described with titles like Lord of the Two Lands before their throne names. And in this case, they actually do use Lord for Hatshepsut in some places at least. And in some places, they do use feminine versions for her as well. It depends. Not necessarily for that specific title, it's not what I meant, but I mean like with pronouns, for example, she can be sometimes referred to with feminine ones here. So in one section, for example, she's referred to as the daughter of Rey of his body rather than son of Rey of his body. But you can find her in some places, of course, with the masculine equivalent too. And on one side at the top, on the pointed section, so you could think of it as sort of the pyramidion, the top of the obelisk, Hatshepsut is shown being crowned by Amun Rey himself. And this is a theme you see a lot in her reign. Part of probably trying to make her reign acceptable is the real heavy emphasis on the god Amun Rey and him selecting her, as well as also her father Tutmosis I supposedly selecting her to be king. So on this particular section of the obelisk that my students have been reading in level one, it says that Amun Rey says, I have given the kingship of the two lands and the office of Atum to my daughter, Ma'at Kare. Ma'at Kare being the throne name of Hatshepsut. He finishes by saying, like what she desires. So in other words, he's done just what she wanted, and that is he has given her the kingship of the two lands, that is, of Egypt, and the office of the creator god Atum. So in other words, the king of everything, the king of all of Egypt. And this is just one of the many texts that we read in Master Scribes, including others from Hatchevsu, such as on small ointment jars that were found at her temple, Daryl Bakri, and others. And if you enjoyed this episode and you want to be able to read these kinds of texts for yourself, you should head on over to masterscribes.com and submit your application today. The program is currently open for applications, but they do close on September 29th, so you'll want to get your application in. There's also limited spaces which may run out before then. So I would get your application in sooner rather than later. And I will personally review your application. I review all applications. And then if we find a good mutual fit, I will get back to you with your invitation to join. And I can't wait to see all of the progress you're going to make and all of the text you're going to read in Master's Guides. Until next time, stay curious.