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411 reviews for:
The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt
Kara Cooney
3.71 AVERAGE
411 reviews for:
The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt
Kara Cooney
3.71 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
slow-paced
I listened to the audio book version read by the author and it was so good. Kept my attention the entire time. ❤️ I would highly recommend.
Hatshepsut was an Egyptian princess who, upon the death of her powerful father, Thutmose I, managed to rise to power herself and rule Egypt not as a queen but as a king. Her reign (the middle 1400s BCE), long before the time of Nefertiti and Cleopatra, was unprecedented. She was a remarkable figure.
This book about her life is simultaneously fascinating and frustrating: the former because Hatshepsut is one of the most mysterious, intriguing figures of the ancient world and the latter because the book isn't what it purports to be: a biography of Hatshepsut. The book turns out to be more about the art and architecture (the temples, tombs, obelisks, statues, and engravings that Hatshepsut commissioned) and the religious rituals that Hatshepsut performed in her role as a priestess than about Hatshepsut herself.
The author readily concedes that we simply do not have much of the information about Hatshepsut that we would like: we know next to nothing about her personality or her relationships with her father, Thutmose I, her brother and husband, Thutmose II, her daughter, Nefrure, and her nephew and coregent, Thutmose III. We also know very little about Hatshepsut's political maneuvering--about how, exactly, she was able to position herself to rule as a king in her own right--and not merely as a regent for or coregent with Thutmose III but as the senior king--while Thutmose III was just a child. The Egyptians simply did not keep these types of records. Most of what we know of Hatshepsut comes from temple engravings and from the extent of her building projects and her statuary, but of her personal side, we know next to nothing.
Knowing so little about Hatshepsut, the author makes extraordinarily liberal use of words like "perhaps" and "maybe" and "probably", and she poses numerous questions asking what Hatshepsut must have thought or how she might have acted in various circumstances, but, of course, she can't answer these questions as the requisite records are just not available, but she still speculates (and she does have the background knowledge and historical training to make very educated guesses) about the answers. The pages of this book are filled with speculation and guesses.
Still, despite not finding the personal portrait of Hatshepsut that I was hoping to find, I did learn a great deal about this ancient Egyptian woman who, against all odds in a conservative, patriarchal society, managed to rule the most powerful nation in the world at that time as a king in her own right.
This book about her life is simultaneously fascinating and frustrating: the former because Hatshepsut is one of the most mysterious, intriguing figures of the ancient world and the latter because the book isn't what it purports to be: a biography of Hatshepsut. The book turns out to be more about the art and architecture (the temples, tombs, obelisks, statues, and engravings that Hatshepsut commissioned) and the religious rituals that Hatshepsut performed in her role as a priestess than about Hatshepsut herself.
The author readily concedes that we simply do not have much of the information about Hatshepsut that we would like: we know next to nothing about her personality or her relationships with her father, Thutmose I, her brother and husband, Thutmose II, her daughter, Nefrure, and her nephew and coregent, Thutmose III. We also know very little about Hatshepsut's political maneuvering--about how, exactly, she was able to position herself to rule as a king in her own right--and not merely as a regent for or coregent with Thutmose III but as the senior king--while Thutmose III was just a child. The Egyptians simply did not keep these types of records. Most of what we know of Hatshepsut comes from temple engravings and from the extent of her building projects and her statuary, but of her personal side, we know next to nothing.
Knowing so little about Hatshepsut, the author makes extraordinarily liberal use of words like "perhaps" and "maybe" and "probably", and she poses numerous questions asking what Hatshepsut must have thought or how she might have acted in various circumstances, but, of course, she can't answer these questions as the requisite records are just not available, but she still speculates (and she does have the background knowledge and historical training to make very educated guesses) about the answers. The pages of this book are filled with speculation and guesses.
Still, despite not finding the personal portrait of Hatshepsut that I was hoping to find, I did learn a great deal about this ancient Egyptian woman who, against all odds in a conservative, patriarchal society, managed to rule the most powerful nation in the world at that time as a king in her own right.
informative
medium-paced
I LOVED this book! Not only was it an excellent biography on Hatshepsut, it also discusses ancient Egyptian social issues concerning women that are prevalent today. For anyone wanting to learn about a powerful female figure in history this is the book for you!
I only gave this book three stars for two reasons. One, I was not the biggest fan of the writing style. I wished that Cooney had organized the book better. Two, I think this book might not have been as enjoyable if I didn't already have a knowledge of ancient Egypt and the 18th dynasty.
With that said, read it! You will not regret it!
I only gave this book three stars for two reasons. One, I was not the biggest fan of the writing style. I wished that Cooney had organized the book better. Two, I think this book might not have been as enjoyable if I didn't already have a knowledge of ancient Egypt and the 18th dynasty.
With that said, read it! You will not regret it!
informative
informative
medium-paced
A comprehensive look at basically everything that we know about Ancient Egypt's longest-ruling female monarch, documenting the context of her birth, how she even got into a place where she could effectively rule, and how her male successor worked to erase her legacy (though probably not out of a sense of revenge and more out of a desire to make life easier for his own successor, as Cooney notes). Cooney sticks to the historical record that we have, and takes a lot of pains to highlight when she is engaging in conjecture, why she has to and why she reaches her conclusions, and why this isn't any different than male historians who've painted Hatsheput as this evil and conniving woman.
Full disclosure: I requested an ARC of this book and was approved for it.
I’m an Egyptologist, so it’ll be no surprise if I reveal that I have been quite eager to get my hands on this book. The author is not a new name to me – in fact I reviewed her tv series a few years back (I’d recommend it to beginners wholeheartedly, though it didn’t really offer anything new to me) – and a new biography of Hatshepsut is definitely a cause for excitement. The last Hatshepsut biography I’ve seen was Joyce Tyldesley’s Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh in 1996, which I recall as being rather dry. Events in Egyptology have moved on rather a lot since then, especially with the advent of new genetic testing techniques which has recently been shaking up what we know about Egyptian mummies and their familial relationships to each other. A brand new biography of Hatshepsut has been long overdue.
From the beginning, Cooney sets a very modern slant on the biography, questioning why Hatshepsut’s story is so little known when she was one of the very few successful female rulers in the ancient world. Kleopatra VII’s name is far more widely recognised, globally. Why is this? Cooney proposes that this is a result of an extensive human history of patriarchy and misogynistic gender roles; Kleopatra VII, so often unfairly stereotyped as an insidious seducer using her feminine wiles to secure her grasp on power and oriental opulence, fits into a patriarchal narrative of an ambitious woman who dares to go out of her perceived place as a woman by reaching for power, and ultimately getting what she deserves; whereas Hatshepsut does not neatly fit into this narrative because she was a wholly successful female ruler for twenty-two long years, little opposed, widely supported, and lacking a lurid sticky end. So argues Cooney. Cooney has a strong case, and this new modernist perspective on both Hatshepsut herself and how Egyptologists in the past have interpreted her story, sheds some long overdue fresh light on its subject. However, like so many things in history, I would point out that there are other reasons why Kleopatra VII is remembered more than Hatshepsut – Hollywood’s big budget movie starring Elizabeth Taylor being one of them, another reason being that the ability to read Latin, and thus Roman authors’ hostile accounts of Kleopatra VII, has never been lost, as opposed to Egyptian hieroglyphs which remained an opaque mystery until Champollion’s decipherment in 1822.
Cooney further argues, in relation to Hatshepsut’s relative obscurity, that the monarch provided a puzzle to historians and Egyptologists who first attempted to tell her story, and even amongst many of the general public today:
“How does one categorize a female leader who does not follow the expected course of disaster and shame, one who instead puts everything to rights in the end, in a way so perfect that her masculine beneficiaries just sweep her victories under the rug and ignore her forever?... Female rulers are often implicitly branded as emotional, self-interested, lacking in authority, untrustworthy, and impolitic.”
The stand out example of a well-known, successful female monarch in the modern consciousness is, of course, Elizabeth I of Tudor England, and it’s worth comparing the two for a moment. Elizabeth categorised herself as both mother to, and wedded to, her people, and encouraged the building up of her public figure as the pious Virgin Queen, the prosperous, and popular, Faerie Queen – the bounty and flourishing of England, it is suggested through this idealised characterisation, is magically manifested through the monarch, or through divine favour smiling on the monarch’s piety. Elizabeth was a master propagandist – and interestingly, so too was the Hatshepsut Cooney reveals. Cooney explores at length Hatshepsut’s enormous propaganda campaign to facilitate her unconventional assumption of kingship. Monumental and religious building works proclaim Hatshepsut as a pious daughter of the god Amun, assuming power only in his name, because the god himself chose her to rule. Reliefs depicting the expedition to faraway Punt advertise Hatshepsut’s success as a ruler, bringing exotic bounty and riches to Egypt – surely a visible sign of the favour of the gods. The key differences between these two extraordinary women who lived 3000 years apart is that Hatshepsut already had an heir, her nephew, Thutmose III, with whom she shared the throne, the limelight, and increasingly the power – Elizabeth famously refused to name an heir, keeping power focused firmly in her own hands – and Elizabeth used her gender as an asset of international politics, putting her eligibility to England’s use, but ultimately unable to marry due to general fear of foreign influence or factional favouritism – Hatshepsut too, as a royal woman of Egypt, was unable to marry again after her husband’s death, and not even able to put herself forwards as a marriageable candidate – no foreign influence could be brought to bear on the Egyptian throne through a royal woman marrying outside the country, and a child of this unconventional female king could not be accepted, as a threat to her nephew and co-king – although, in Hatshepsut’s case, Cooney argues the queen had plenty of opportunity to find private romantic happiness. But I digress in this interesting comparison, since Cooney does not touch upon it in the text.
As for Hatshepsut’s love life, it should be noted that whilst Cooney believes Hatshepsut had ample opportunity to pursue a private arrangement, there is in fact no evidence of such a relationship, or who might have been her romantic partner. The Egyptologist community has widely discussed Senenmut in such a role in the past; a man of obscure family origins who surprisingly rose to astronomically high office under Hatshepsut’s auspices, Senenmut was also permitted to depict himself on monuments as being especially favoured by Hatshepsut, and having a close connection with the royal family through his role as tutor to Hatshepsut’s daughter Neferure – some have even suggested that Senenmut, not Thutmose II, was in fact the girl’s father, though Cooney rubbishes this idea. But despite these obvious signs of favour, ultimately a romantic relationship cannot be inferred. Useramun, a vizier of noble birth, was permitted by Hatshepsut to inscribe the sacred Book of Amduat in his tomb, something usually reserved only for royalty – from which we might equally suppose a romantic relationship, but with ultimately just as much lack of definitive proof aside from Hatshepsut’s extraordinary favour. Ancient Egypt enthusiasts may be scratching their heads wondering about that rock graffiti at Deir el-Bahri that’s supposed to depict Senenmut and Hatshepsut in the carnal act, carved by some gossipy workmen. The simple fact of the matter is though, as Cooney points out, neither figure is labelled with a name, nor is the subservient figure in the scene adorned with any of the symbols of office of kingship. Cooney not only provides a more social, modern history of Hatshepsut, but she devotes time to busting old myths that have long been discarded by the Egyptological community but still persist in the popular imagination; among them, the idea that Hatshepsut set out to steal the throne from her nephew’s rightful claim, or that Thutmose III set about destroying her monuments in a fit of righteous anger after her death.
Cooney acknowledges from the start that;
“My Egyptological work on social life has enabled me to re-create Hatshepsut's world as best I can and thereby to know her better.”
Cooney adds that so much evidence is lost from this period, or exists only in the official propaganda of monumental building works, that in recent times Egyptologists have focused too much on a history of Hatshepsut’s monuments rather than the woman herself, reluctant to fill the gaps in history with speculation about Hatshepsut’s motivations and opinions and turning instead to the tangible but unrevealing evidence of the monuments. I have to say, I agree with Cooney on this, even though I admit to being professionally reluctant to ascribe to ancient individuals thoughts and feelings that are ultimately unknowable, and I feel that this new social history with a gendered consideration of Hatshepsut’s life is just what the subject needs. From the perspective of a reader and an Egyptologist, I prefer the social approach, and at the very least, even if this book is not well-received by the Egyptological community (I await the reaction of my colleagues with baited breath), I think most will welcome the fresh take on Hatshepsut and the opportunity for fresh debate in this area.
Cooney states openly from the outset;
“Many historians will no doubt accuse me of fantasy: inventing emotions and feelings for which I have no evidence. And they will be right.”
Cooney is right. The text is filled with Cooney’s postulations about what Hatshepsut’s reasoning may have been for this decision or that decision, or what she may have been thinking when this or that event happened in her life. Reading the text I don’t think anyone would mistake that Cooney is saying Hatshepsut did think this or feel that, but she will receive criticism for hypothesizing in this manner. Archaeologists are notoriously reluctant to speculate about beliefs – the highest tier of what we can know about the past, and the hardest to access, since unless a person wrote down their thoughts this is ultimately unknowable and lost to us – and even when written down, the ancient historian has to be supremely cautious, taking into account the biases of the writer and the potential for propaganda or unreliable accounts. Indeed, as an Egyptologist I feel ethically obligated to stress what Cooney admits openly – these scenes throughout the book are supposition and should not be taken as the final word on the character or nature of Hatshepsut. That disclaimer out of the way, I’d like to applaud Cooney for being bold enough to make use of such supposition. Whilst there’s no way to know for sure, such speculations are not just plucked out of thin air, rather they are reasoned and considered possibilities built on the foundation of what we do know about Hatshepsut and the environment and circumstances in which she moved, and thus are supported by a certain degree of likelihood, even if they’re ultimately unprovable, and I would be reluctant to set any of the scenarios Cooney postulates in stone (forgiving the pun). Nevertheless, as such, I personally feel that this approach is a worthwhile and valuable contribution to the Egyptological community, since it has the potential to fuel healthy debate and bring us closer to our subject, and that overcaution in such matters may be ultimately limiting to the field as a whole.
Whether The Woman Who Would Be King is well-received by the rest of the Egyptological community remains to be seen, and may be a matter for personal ideology in regards to how we approach archaeology and ancient history. However, I have no doubt that it will go down well amongst a wider readership. Cooney’s writing style is fluid, lucid, and engaging, making it a perfectly enjoyable read for a mass audience, and her subject, Hatshepsut, is not so obscure that the casually interested history enthusiast won’t be drawn in to this book.
All in all, highly recommended, and it gets my Egyptologist’s official seal of approval. ;)
8 out of 10
informative
medium-paced
I won this book as a Goodreads first reads give-away. The book is about the reign of King Hatshepsut who ruled Egypt first as regent to her toddler nephew, Thutmose III, and then as co-king with him. Kara Cooney writes in the Author's Note at the beginning of the book that due to the length of time and the Egyptians superficial methods of reporting on a ruler's reign, there was a lot of conjecture in the book. This was distracting at times since the author would propose one theory for a large portion of a chapter and then end with...but maybe that person was already dead by that time or maybe the complete opposite reasoning was behind a particular outcome. She does this a number of times with Hatshepsut's daughter Nefrure, who was maybe being raised to succeed her mother when the tide changed against her. Or maybe she was dead.
I did like the book. It seems very well researched and it is an interesting defense of a woman that wielded great power for over twenty peaceful years. The author mentions many times how suspicious early Egyptologists where of her reign...assuming that she was a power-hungry bitch that stole the throne from the rightful heir. Nevermind that he was 2 or 3 years old at the time and quite unable to rule. Nevermind the fact that she was a successful ruler that greatly increased the wealth of Egypt during her reign. Nevermind the extensive building that she sponsored. There seems to be no evidence that she was not considered a good ruler and a great deal of evidence showing that she was the reason her dynasty was able to continue. When Thutmose III finally did elect to have her erased from the records, he intentionally did not do a complete job (taking out only references to her as King) and waited 20 years after her death to even do this. It seems likely he was motivated more to try and shore up the line of succession for his heir than to get rid of the evil usurper.
Overall though, I feel that the book would have made more sense at times if it were a well researched work of historical fiction than as a history book filled with so much theory.
I did like the book. It seems very well researched and it is an interesting defense of a woman that wielded great power for over twenty peaceful years. The author mentions many times how suspicious early Egyptologists where of her reign...assuming that she was a power-hungry bitch that stole the throne from the rightful heir. Nevermind that he was 2 or 3 years old at the time and quite unable to rule. Nevermind the fact that she was a successful ruler that greatly increased the wealth of Egypt during her reign. Nevermind the extensive building that she sponsored. There seems to be no evidence that she was not considered a good ruler and a great deal of evidence showing that she was the reason her dynasty was able to continue. When Thutmose III finally did elect to have her erased from the records, he intentionally did not do a complete job (taking out only references to her as King) and waited 20 years after her death to even do this. It seems likely he was motivated more to try and shore up the line of succession for his heir than to get rid of the evil usurper.
Overall though, I feel that the book would have made more sense at times if it were a well researched work of historical fiction than as a history book filled with so much theory.