Hatshepsut, King of Egypt

LC control no.	n 79075097
Descriptive conventions	rda
Personal name heading	Hatshepsut, King of Egypt *Browse this term in* LC Authorities or the LC Catalog
Variant(s)	Hatshepsut, Queen of Egypt Hatasu, King of Egypt Hatchepsout, King of Egypt Hatchepsut, King of Egypt Hatschepsut, King of Egypt Hatshepsout, King of Egypt Hâtshopsîtû, King of Egypt Maʼat kare, King of Egypt Maatkare, King of Egypt
Other standard no.	6cf901b0-8028-4cf0-8a77-2003e12857e5 cnp00551940 38761 0000000095189141 67741469 Q129234
Associated country	Egypt
Profession or occupation	Pharaohs Kings Queens
Found in	Naville, S. H. Hâtshopsîtû. Ratié, S. La reine Hatchepsout, 1979: t.p. (la reine Hatchepsout) Lacau, P. Une chapelle d'Hatshepsout à Karnak, 1979- : v. 2, t.p. (Hatshepsout) Tyldesley, J. Hatchepsut, 1998. Britannica online, December 1, 2023 (Hatshepsut, female king of Egypt (reigned in her own right c. 1473-58 BCE) who attained unprecedented power for a woman, adopting the full titles and regalia of a pharaoh. Hatshepsut, the elder daughter of the 18th-dynasty king Thutmose I and his consort Ahmose, was married to her half brother Thutmose II, son of the lady Mutnofret. Since three of Mutnofret's older sons had died prematurely, Thutmose II inherited his father's throne about 1492 BCE, with Hatshepsut as his consort. Hatshepsut bore one daughter, Neferure, but no son. When her husband died about 1479 BCE, the throne passed to his son Thutmose III, born to Isis, a lesser harem queen. As Thutmose III was an infant, Hatshepsut acted as regent for the young king. For the first few years of her stepson's reign, Hatshepsut was an entirely conventional regent. But, by the end of his seventh regnal year, she had been crowned king and adopted a full royal titulary (the royal protocol adopted by Egyptian sovereigns). Hatshepsut and Thutmose III were now corulers of Egypt, with Hatshepsut very much the dominant king. Hitherto Hatshepsut had been depicted as a typical queen, with a female body and appropriately feminine garments. But now, after a brief period of experimentation that involved combining a female body with kingly (male) regalia, her formal portraits began to show Hatshepsut with a male body, wearing the traditional regalia of kilt, crown or head-cloth, and false beard. To dismiss this as a serious attempt to pass herself off as a man is to misunderstand Egyptian artistic convention, which showed things not as they were but as they should be. In causing herself to be depicted as a traditional king, Hatshepsut ensured that this is what she would become.) <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hatshepsut> World history encyclopedia website, December 1, 2023 (Hatshepsut (r. 1479-1458 BCE) was the first female ruler of ancient Egypt to reign as a male with the full authority of pharaoh. Her name means "Foremost of Noble Women" or "She is First Among Noble Women". She began her reign as regent to her stepson Thutmose III (r. 1458-1425 BCE) who would succeed her. Initially, she ruled as a woman as depicted in statuary but, at around the seventh year of her reign, she chose to be depicted as a male pharaoh in statuary and reliefs though still referring to herself as female in her inscriptions. She was the fifth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty during the period known as the New Kingdom (c. 1570 to c. 1069 BCE) and regarded as one of the most prosperous and the era of the Egyptian Empire; Thutmose II died while Thutmose III was still a child and so Hatshepsut became regent, controlling the affairs of state until he came of age. In the seventh year of her regency, though, she changed the rules and had herself crowned pharaoh of Egypt. She took on all the royal titles and names which she had inscribed using the feminine grammatical form but had herself depicted as a male pharaoh) <https://www.worldhistory.org/hatshepsut/> Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum website, December 1, 2023 (Hatshepsut, 1507 BCE - 1458 BCE; Hatshepsut was the first female pharaoh to rule Egypt with the full power of the position. She ruled for twenty years. Hatshepsut was pharaoh during the Eighteenth Dynasty. After the death of her husband, Thutmose II, Hatshepsut didn't claim the title as pharaoh of Egypt right away. Instead, she was regent on behalf of her stepson (born to a secondary wife), Thutmose III, who was a young child at the time. After less than seven years, however, Hatshepsut took the unprecedented step of assuming the title and full powers of a pharaoh herself, becoming co-ruler of Egypt with Thutmose III. She claimed to be the child of Amun and transformed herself into a king by wearing the symbols of kingship. She emphasized her right to rule through her bloodline; Hatshepsut also took a new name, Maʼat kare, sometimes translated as Truth (maʼat) is the Soul (ka) of the Sun God (Re). The key word here is maʼat--the ancient Egyptian expression for order and justice as established by the deities. Maintaining and perpetuating maʼat to ensure the prosperity and stability of the country required a legitimate pharaoh who could speak--as only pharaohs could--directly with the deities. By calling herself Maʼat kare, Hatshepsut was likely reassuring her people that they had a legitimate ruler on the throne) <https://egyptianmuseum.org/explore/new-kingdom-ruler-hatshepsut> The female pharaoh Hatshepsut, via Metropolitan Museum of Art website, December 1, 2023 ("This graceful, life-size statue depicts Hatshepsut in female attire, but she wears the nemes--headcloth, a royal attribute usually reserved for the reigning king. In the columns of text inscribed beside her legs on the front of the throne, she has already adopted the throne name Maatkare, but her titles and epithets are still feminine. Thus, she is 'Lady of the Two Lands' and 'Bodily Daughter of Re'"; "In more public areas, such as the processional way into the temple, colossal sphinxes (31.3.166), kneeling (30.3.1) and standing statues (28.3.18) represent Hatshepsut as the ideal king, a young man in the prime of life. This does not mean that she was trying to fool anyone into thinking that she was a man. She was merely following traditions established more than 1500 years earlier. In fact, the inscriptions on the masculine statues include her personal name, Hatshepsut, which means 'foremost of noble women,' or a feminine grammatical form that indicates her gender") <https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544849> Hatshepsut, from queen to Pharaoh, 2005, viewed online December 1, 2023: page vii (Having achieved kingship, she was officially acknowledged as a female pharaoh, although in conformity with the Egyptian ideology of rulership she was often represented in art as a man) page 4 (Hatshepsut was not the first woman in Egypt's history to take on the role of king; Today, debate continues over what circumstances allowed or compelled Hatshepsut to become king) page 5 (Hatshepsut's queen's tomb, made for her before she became king; Hatshepsut's king's tomb) page 87 (With the accession of Thutmose II, who was both her half brother and her husband, Hatshepsut acquired the normal queenly titles Great King's Wife and God's Wife of Amun) page 88 (During the early years of her regnancy, Hatshepsut had herself portrayed in the tradition garb of a queen, often grasping the distinctive insignia of the God's Wife of Amun; But it seems clear that Hatshepsut's control over the mechanics of government, hers by default since the death of her husband, eventually required ideological expression as well, and relatively early on she devised a prenomen for herself, the equivalent of a coronation name: Maatkare; It is at this point, when she acquires kingly titles and crowns, that Hatshepsut's kingship may be said to begin) <https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Hatshepsut_From_Queen_to_Pharaoh>