Hatshepsut: Daughter of Amun

CHAPTER 2-3

* * * *

The news of her father’s death came to Hatshepsut when she was in the palace garden at Men-nefer. She had been pacing the shady paths beneath the huge sycamores since the dawn, having woken with a start from a dream of falling off a precipice, her heart pounding, knowing that something was terribly wrong. Gradually the racing of her pulse slowed down and she lay listening to the first sounds of the day, the comforting sounds of the birds that this morning brought no comfort, the distant call of the herd boys on their way to the grazing fields.

She slipped into a light robe and padded on bare feet out of the building into the garden, standing for a long time gazing at the lily buds about to open, before seeking out the avenue of sycamores.

What was wrong? She felt as though everything in the Two Lands was off balance, off course, as though it were a boat caught in a current about to be dragged down into the white water and harsh rocks of a cataract. And then she heard them, the wailing, her father’s many wives raising their voices in the sound of mourning. Her father was dead.

She stood very still, and it was as though everything in existence stood still with her. It was very strange. In all the realms there was no movement. Pharaoh was dead. There was no Pharaoh to be the pivot for all the energies and forces of the many and varied realms. It was as though even the gods were dead.

Hatshepsut’s skin prickled with a chill of alarm.

Could this be? Could time suddenly cease and everything be frozen in this way at the death of a Pharaoh? What an awesome responsibility!

She longed for movement, for flow and change, and life. She called out to the gods, but none came to her. And then she felt the presence of the Mysterious Unseen One, the one who for her always seemed to be more accessible than the others though, paradoxically, by his very nature should be less so. The one her people called Amun, yet for her was beyond all the naming of names.

She saw no stylised figure, no powerful and numinous being, but suddenly her fear was gone and she had a wonderful and overwhelming feeling that everything had meaning and purpose and was as it should be.

The birds were moving in the sky again, and a bee alighted on a flower. The women were still keening, but she felt detached from their sorrow. Pharaoh was dead — yet Pharaoh lived. She shivered. What now? Her father had trained her like a man for responsibility, and she knew it would be she who would wield the real power in the land, yet her role would be a subsidiary one as Great Royal Wife to the half-brother for whom she had no love and very little respect. Her father should not have died so soon — she was not ready. She was angry with him for leaving her.

Ineni, her father’s favourite architect and friend, was approaching. She could see that his shoulders stooped more than usual, and his step was slow and heavy. She knew he was worrying about how he was going to tell her the news. Everyone was aware of the close relationship of father and daughter. Aa-kheper-ka-Ra had been ill more than once lately, but each bout of pain had passed, leaving him apparently as fit as he had ever been. He had left Men-nefer in good health the week before to visit the delta lands, and they had had no reports of illness.

The young girl, no longer a child, stood as still as a statue, watching the approaching figure. He reached her at last and stood looking into her eyes.

“You know?” he said.

“Yes,” she replied.

He looked around, wondering who had reached her before he had.

“No one,” she said quietly. “I just knew.”

“You heard the women?”

“Before that.”

He was not surprised. He had noticed on several occasions how her thoughts seemed to leap ahead, as though she had some private communication with the gods.

* * * *

The funeral barge of Aa-kheper-ka-Ra approached the quay at Waset to the accompaniment of solemn drumming, the royal praise-singers in the prow carrying the swelling majestic hymn that was sung at the death of a pharaoh, the royal praise-singers on the land echoing the theme, chanting his names and accomplishments, preparing the gods to receive this great being into their midst. He had been embalmed at Men-nefer, his capital, but was being brought to the western mountains of Waset to be interred for eternity, the first king to choose the valley beneath the great pyramidal mountain of Meretseger for his secret resting place.

Hatshepsut stood dry-eyed and unmoving beside her half-brother, Aa-kheper-en-Ra, now King. Her mother had already passed out of this realm, but the dead king’s secondary wives were making a great noise in the background. Hatshepsut bit her lip. She would have liked to sweep them all away, tossing them wailing into the desert to be swallowed up by the sand. How she hated their clinging, whining, hypocritical worship of him. He was hers — not theirs! How dared they pretend such grief when all they were concerned about was their status under the new regime.

Mutnofre stood a step or two behind her son — away from the other women. At least she had some dignity. Hatshepsut had always liked her more than the others. She had been her father’s favourite after her own mother. Mutnofre had helped him through the loneliness after Aah-mes died and had been almost a mother to Hatshepsut — or at least as much of a mother as the independent and spiky little girl would allow. Mutnofre was on the whole uncultured, but beautiful and naturally kind. It was not she who pushed her son forward against the other claimants, but Aa-kheper-ka-Ra himself who chose him for his heir. “As long as he is married to Hatshepsut,” he stipulated. “Hatshepsut must be at his side.” It was possible Aa-kheper-ka-Ra chose Mutnofre’s son for his very weakness, for with him Hatshepsut would be assured of a chance to use the skills he had taught her, whereas a stronger man might keep her in the background.

So here she was — at the side of Aa-kheper-en-Ra. One step behind him, in fact — and resenting it. Well, her great-great-grandmother, Aah-hetep, and her great-grandmother, Nefertari, had not been docile wives — and she would not be either.

She had not fully grasped her father’s death yet. She had been so busy with matters of state and her own personal problems with her half-brother that she had hardly been alone. But now, for a moment, as the crowds and even the wailing women hushed, and the great barge slid silently into the quayside, she looked into the eyes of grief and saw her own reflection there.

* * * *

That night she had a dream.

She was standing on the very lip of the cliff that overlooked the ancient temple of Mentu-hotep which nestled in against the mountainside at Serui. Far below her she could see the neat pattern of the almost ruined temple and beyond it the narrow desert plain becoming suddenly and startlingly green in the irrigated fields bordering the river. Across the Nile she could see the faint outline of the great Temple of Amun at Ipet-Esut and the obelisks her father had raised. She felt that there was something she had to do. Something was expected of her. Something beyond duty.

She frowned, and forgetting where she was, took a step forward.

She began to fall. Now she was caught in the nightmare she had had the night her father died — she was falling off a precipice. And in her dream she had believed that if she reached the bottom she would not wake up. She would be dead.

“I want to live!” she cried. “Whatever I have to do —I’ll do it! Just let me live!”

Suddenly she was caught in strong and powerful arms. She was safe ... she was soaring ... she was lifted up beyond the desert and the mountains, beyond the city with its flags fluttering above the entrance pylons of so many mighty temples.

“You will live, my beloved,” she heard a deep voice say, though she could not turn her head to see who spoke. “You will live and build me a temple more beautiful than any in the world. In that temple there will be a threshold between the realms. Your step will be light, my daughter, my wife. Your step will cross that threshold with ease. You will know all there is to know in the two worlds, and you will do my work upon the earth. As a sign of your commitment to me and me alone—”

“I’ll sacrifice a hundred bulls,” she interrupted, “gazelles, cranes, snow-white kids.”

“Not those, my child. Not those. That would be too easy. I ask more than that.”

“What do you want?” she asked eagerly. “Tell me. I will sacrifice anything if I might freely cross the threshold between the realms and be with you, yet still be ‘in the flesh’. I will be your right arm upon the earth! I will make you honoured above all other gods in the Two Lands!”

Although she still could not see his face, she felt that he smiled as a fond parent might smile at a favourite child.

“Shut your eyes,” he said quietly.

She felt that she was now standing on firm ground and that the arms of the Great Being were no longer around her.

Tentatively she opened her eyes a crack, then completely.

She was standing in a shrine dedicated to Amun, not yet built, as far as she knew. In front of her was an altar of gleaming white alabaster.

She knew that it was on this altar she must make her sacrifice. But what? She had no priests with her, no animals to slaughter, no bowls or baskets of food. Nothing.

She was clad in a simple white sheath of linen, her feet bare, her hair unbound. On her arm she was wearing the bracelet her father had given her when she was a child as a secret pledge that she would one day rule the Two Lands. It was a fine piece of work — lapis lazuli, turquoise and carnelian set in silver, more precious than gold.

“Oh no!” she thought, as it dawned on her the mysterious god was demanding this of her. Why?

“He wants it because I don’t want to give it,” she thought. “He wants it because it is my promise of worldly power, my attachment to my ambition to rule the Two Lands. I have to choose between worldly power and true spiritual enlightenment.”

She knew that in these crucial moments her whole life was in the balance.

“I’m not ready,” she whispered. “I’m not ready.”

She fingered the jewelled silver on her arm, turning it round and round. The bracelet seemed heavier than before. She turned to go, still clutching it. Then she turned back — and with a sudden impulsive gesture she tore it off her arm and laid it on the white stone altar. As she did so, a shaft of light came from above and illuminated it so vividly it seemed to dissolve ...

Above her the winged shape of Nekhbet, the vulture, hovered, holding in her claws the circle of completion, the circle of infinity.

Hatshepsut did not look up, but turned and ran.

It seemed to her she ran down a thousand thousand white alabaster steps until ... until ...

She woke up, startled, in her own bed.

She knew this dream had not been like other dreams. She looked at her arm: the bracelet was not there. She leapt up and called her maids. Sleepily they came to her. They denied seeing the bracelet anywhere but on her arm. She shouted at them to search, and search they did.

“I must find it,” she thought frantically. “If I don’t, it means I am committed. I want more time to think. I’m not ready. Surely I’ve just mislaid it?”

All day the women searched, harried by an increasingly anxious and hysterical Queen.

That night it was found. One of her women who had not been at the palace that day had taken it to be repaired. The craftsman who brought it back to Hatshepsut was startled by her expression as she put it back on her arm. Was she not pleased with the workmanship?

Although she had been frightened and dismayed when she believed she had committed herself to Amun, now that she was not committed, she was disappointed. Had the whole thing been no more than a dream, after all?

She determined then and there to build the temple Amun had asked her to build. The temple that would outshine all the temples in the Two Lands and carry her far beyond the dust and flies of this earth, beyond the Fiery Lake, beyond the Forty-Two Assessors, beyond the Seven Gates, beyond the Hall where her heart would be weighed against the feather of Maat before Osiris, beyond the stars in Ra’s mystic boat.

She would record all her deeds in everlasting stone, checking and counting the processions of priests as they filled her storehouse for eternity with magical replicas of familiar things. She would carve images of her body and her soul upon the walls of his temple, so beautiful, so powerful, that, mirrored in eternity, she would live with him forever. She would write such things in stone that her name and the name of her god would never be forgotten by the thousands upon thousands of generations of people who lived after her.

Her temple would be celebrated by all who saw it.

Djeser Djeseru: Most splendid. The temple of Myriads of Years. It would be called the Great Seat of Amun, his horizon in the west. Its great door would be fashioned of black copper, inlaid with figures of electrum. All its doors would be real cedar, wrought with bronze. Its floor would be wrought with gold and silver, its beauty like the horizon of heaven. There would be a great shrine of ebony from Nubia, the stairs beneath it, high and wide, of pure alabaster from Hatnub. It would indeed be the palace of the god, his enduring horizon of eternity, wrought with gold and silver to illuminate the faces of all with its brightness.[3]

And when this was done, Amun her Father would see that she had been faithful to him though she had also been faithful to her calling as worldly ruler of the Two Lands.