-
3.5 thousand years ago in Egypt,
-
a noble pharaoh was the victim
of a violent attack.
-
But the attack was not physical.
-
This royal had been dead for 20 years.
-
The attack was historical,
-
an act of damnatio memoriae,
the damnation of memory.
-
Somebody smashed the pharaoh's statues,
-
took a chisel and attempted to erase
the pharaoh's name and image from history.
-
Who was this pharaoh
and what was behind the attack?
-
Here's the key:
-
the pharaoh Hatshepsut was a woman.
-
In the normal course of things,
she should never have been pharaoh.
-
Although it was legal
for a woman to be a monarch,
-
it disturbed some essential
Egyptian beliefs.
-
Firstly, the pharaoh was known
as the living embodiment
-
of the male god Horus.
-
Secondly, disturbance
to the tradition of rule by men
-
was a serious challenge to Maat,
-
a word for "truth"
expressing a belief in order and justice,
-
vital to the Eygptians.
-
Hatshepsut had perhaps tried to adapt
-
to this belief in the link between
order and patriarchy through her titles.
-
She took the name Maatkare,
-
and sometimes referred to herself
-
as Hatshepsu,
with a masculine word ending.
-
But apparently, these efforts
didn't convince everyone,
-
and perhaps someone
erased Hatshepsut's image
-
so that the world forget
the disturbance to Maat,
-
and Egypt could be balanced again.
-
Hatshepsut, move over,
was not the legitimate heir to the thrown,
-
but a regent,
a kind of stand-in co-monarch.
-
The Egypitan kingship traditionally
passed from father to son.
-
It passed from Thutmose I
to his son Thutmose II,
-
Hatshpsut's husband.
-
It should have passed from Thutmose II
directly to his son Thutmose III,
-
but Thutmose III was a little boy
when his father died.
-
Hatshepsut, the dead pharaoh's chief
wife and widow,
-
stepped in to help
as her stepson's regent,
-
but ended up ruling beside him
as a fully fledged pharaoh.
-
Perhaps Thutmose III was angry about this.
-
Perhaps he was the one
who erased her images.
-
It's also possible that someone wanted
to dishonor Hatshepsut
-
because she was a bad pharaoh.
-
But the evidence suggests
she was actually pretty good.
-
She competently fulfilled
the traditional roles of the office.
-
She was a great builder.
-
Her mortuary temple, Djeser-Djeseru,
-
was an architectural
phenomenon at the time,
-
and is still admired today.
-
She enhanced the economy of Egypt,
-
conducting a very successful trade mission
to the distant land of Punt.
-
She had strong religious connections.
-
She even claimed to be the daughter
of the State god, Amun.
-
And she had a successful military career,
with a Nubian campaign,
-
and claims she fought alongside
her soldiers in battle.
-
Of course, we have to be careful
when we access the success
-
of Hatshepsut's career,
-
since most of the evidence
was written by Hatshepsut herself.
-
She tells her own story
in pictures and writing
-
on the walls of her mortuary temple,
-
and the red chapel she built for Amun.
-
So who committed the crimes
against Hatshepsut's memory?
-
The most popular suspect is her stepson,
nephew and co-ruler, Thutmose III.
-
Did he do it out of anger
because she stole his throne?
-
This is unlikely since
the damage wasn't done
-
until 20 years after Hatshepsut died.
-
That's a long time to hang on
to anger and then act in a rage.
-
Maybe Thutmose III did it
to make his own reign look stronger.
-
But it is most likely that he
or someone else erased the images
-
so that people would forget
that a woman ever sat on Egypt's throne.
-
This gender anomaly was simply
too much of a threat to Maat,
-
and had to be obliterated from history.
-
Happily, the ancient censors
were not quite thorough enough.
-
Enough evidence survived for us
to piece together what happened,
-
So the story of this unique powerful women
can now be told.