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2009-10-01

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These are the words of Hatshepsut, the woman who declared herself to be King of Upper and Lower Egypt around 1500 BC. The words, from the introduction to my novel The Double Crown, are fictitious. The person is not. I shall proceed to trace some of the steps that I followed from history to fiction, by referring to some frequently asked questions.

1. I am often asked what made me write this story.

As a writer, I find the historical novel a particularly attractive genre, perhaps because I have also been an academic and the research element intrigues me, while the relative freedom of the fiction mode is creatively stimulating. But why this particular story? Well, I have been interested in ancient Egypt for many years. One day I encountered the outline of the Hatshepsut story in a book by Evelyn Wells about Nefertiti. It struck me as extraordinary. Just enough is known to have made me wonder about the parts of the story we do not know and probably never will.

1.1 With regard to Hatshepsut, the following facts which fascinated me are, I believe, not disputed:

• There was such a woman, and she reigned as primary pharaoh (king, not queen) for around 20 years; Egypt prospered and she instituted many building projects. Her famous funerary temple still stands.

• She was of noble birth, the daughter of the great queen Ahmose and Pharaoh Thutmose I.

• She married her half-brother, Pharaoh Thutmose II, and was his queen consort.

• After his death, she acted as regent for his son Thutmose by a concubine for a short period; the child was small when his father died, and was crowned by the priests, but was at first too young to reign.

• After about two years of regency, Hatshepsut had herself crowned and effectively kept him from acquiring absolute power until he was around thirty.

• As Thutmose III he became known as a great warrior pharaoh, later nicknamed the Napoleon of Egypt. So he was anything but a nonentity or a weakling. The complete opposite seems to have been the case.

• During his reign, but at least ten, or maybe even twenty, years after Hatshepsut's death, there seems to have been a drive to eliminate her from history. Her cartouches and images on buildings, obelisks and so forth were hacked out and statues of her were shattered and cast into a quarry. So, too, the names and images of men who had served her. Some of her buildings were destroyed and used for fill in new construction. Her name was omitted from the King Lists drawn up in Thutmose III's time.

This much is history, supported by credible evidence, deriving in the main from two primary sources: formal inscriptions on monuments, tombs and temples (the "living stone"), and more informal writings on materials such as papyrus and ostraca, while deductions about lifestyle and customs are, of course, also made from artefacts and ruins discovered in archaeological digs and from items stored in museums.

In my search for information I visited Egypt, went to the Cairo museum, saw Hatshepsut's funerary temple, and was fortunate to attend the exhibition entitled Hatshepsut: from queen to pharaoh presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2006. From the 1920s, archaeologists from this museum were instrumental in recovering and restoring artefacts from Hatshepsut's time and reinstating her name in history.

Of course I consulted numerous secondary sources, the most important of which were the excellent biography of Hatshepsut by Joyce Tyldesley and the publication by the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was based on the Hatshepsut exhibition, edited by Catherine Roehrig.

Yet by no means all of the questions that occur to a novelist are answered by historians, and there are, furthermore, differing evaluations of Hatshepsut's character and reign.

1.2 Five main questions occurred to me:

• What made Hatshepsut think she should and could be king?

• How did she succeed in having herself crowned?

• How did she manage to hold the throne until Thutmose was 30-odd years old, and what was the nature of their relationship?

• How did she reconcile the role of pharaoh, who was a god, with being a woman, who was a wife, later a widow, and a mother?

• What did the achievement of absolute power do to her?

The novel is structured around these five questions. Whether I succeeded in answering them convincingly is not for me but for my readers to decide. I shall provide one example: my response to the second question, as to how she convinced the priests to accept her as divine.

First, she claimed to have seen a vision in which she observed the god Amen approach her mother, the great Queen Ahmose, personified in the avatar of her earthly father, Thutmose I. This claim is a matter of record; it is depicted on the walls of her temple. She saw, so she said, the god impregnate her mother with a child that the god told her would be a daughter, Hatshepsut, who would one day reign over Egypt.

The following extract from the novel shows my thinking about the moves she made to achieve the Double Crown.

Having been vouchsafed this vision, I knew that I had to make my destiny manifest to all. I would have to make my move and make it decisively. At once it was clear to me what I should do. I would make offerings directly to the gods. This is traditionally the task and prerogative of the Pharaoh, which he delegates to his priests but which no other mortal may carry out. It is the Pharaoh's sacred duty to satisfy the gods with divine offerings and to bring funerary offerings to the transfigured dead. I was well acquainted with the prescribed steps of the morning ritual, since I had been the God's Wife of Amen for several years, attending on first my father and then my husband when they as the divine sons of the sun-god acted as the link with the spirit world. Now I would carry out these steps in person.

I knew I had to win that confrontation on the Day of the Dead. The officiating priest on that fateful day was Hapuseneb, Chief Priest of Amen and a power in the land. As he came toward me, his white linen tunic emerging from the gloom, I knew that he intended to bar my way. He was attended by four assistant priests, one the lector who would chant the prescribed magic words. The Chief Priest was taller than I by a head, with broad shoulders; the right shoulder bare, the left one draped in a leopard-skin mantle. His skin was a deep shade of copper and, as he had not yet donned his huge ceremonial wig, his bald pate gleamed in the torchlight. Indeed, his entire body was completely hairless as priests must be to ensure complete cleanliness. His lashless eyes, green and protuberant, put me in mind of a chameleon, that small dragon that moves with such deliberation and changes colour to survive.

"I will break the seal," I announced, lifting my chin. The seal on the door of the inner shrine that holds the god may only be broken by the Pharaoh or his deputed priest. It is a most secret place, less accessible than that which is in heaven, more secret than the affairs of the Netherworld, more hidden than the inhabitants of the primeval ocean. I dropped my voice. "I am the son of Amen-Ra," I told him. "I have had a vision. The god himself begat me."

His smooth face expressed doubt. Had he had eyebrows he would have raised them.

"I have the backing of the Party of Legitimacy," I told him. "The nobles do not approve that the child of a concubine should be king when one of the pure blood royal is at hand." This was entirely true. Also the nobles knew that they might expect grants of land and other favours from my hand if I were the supreme Pharaoh, but nothing would be forthcoming from a young child manipulated by the priests. Hapuseneb was shrewd and he knew that the nobles, motivated both by greed and a resistance to the immense power of the priesthood, were formidable allies ranged at my back. He shifted slightly but he did not stand aside.

"The military are also with me," I went on.

This surprised him. He had underestimated me. "The military?"

At that time, I had not yet the services of Khani, who was in training at Memphis, but I had others who were my eyes and ears, particularly in the south from whence came so much gold. I learned the value of timely information early and I have always made sure that it is brought to me.

"There are signs of rebellion in the Land of Kush," I told him. "They scent a weakness in us. They do not believe that a small child and a queen who is merely a regent can hold the vassal states. That rebellion must be crushed decisively. General Pen-Nekhbet of el-Kab agrees. The Living Horus must smite our enemies."

Hapuseneb looked thoughtful. He said nothing, but much as he respected the aging general, I could guess that he found it difficult to view me as the Living Horus. I would have to do more to convince him.

"I have been inducted into the mysteries of Osiris," I reminded him.

He certainly had to know that my late father, may he live, had indeed done this when he was already weak with his final illness, at the time when I served as the God's Wife of Amen. These are secret matters of great significance and none but the Pharaoh and the Chief Priest may know of them.

"Yes, I do remember that," he murmured.

"My father the Pharaoh, may he live, expected me to reign," I insisted. "Otherwise he would not have inducted me."

Hapuseneb seemed to be wavering. He did not contradict me.

"I have the complete support of the nomarchs, of both the North and the South."

"Ah, yes. The nomarchs."

I could see that it was beginning to dawn on Hapuseneb that I had done my preparations with great care and thoroughness. He well knew that each of the nomarchs who ruled the forty-two nomes into which the land was demarcated had been called to my presence over the period since my husband the Pharaoh passed into the Afterlife. Having been offered sufficient inducements, they would support me with enthusiasm.

Hapuseneb shifted from foot to foot. Clearly he was feeling beleaguered.

"Also the Vizier of the North is on my side," I stated. This was a telling point; there was no love lost between the two Viziers. I knew that Hapuseneb heartily disliked the Vizier Dhutmose, an essentially lazy sybarite who yet had enough ambition and greed to ensure that he ruled effectively. I stared intently into Hapuseneb's narrowed, doubtful eyes. "It could be that the Two Lands would benefit by returning to the former system," I suggested silkily. "One Vizier for the Two Lands. Possibly the duties of Vizier of the South as well as the Chief Priest of Amen will prove too much for you."

He flinched, having understood me perfectly. Of course he realised that the matter at hand was crucial. I had him pinned; by forcing this issue in front of the assistant priests at the entrance to the holy of holies, I was giving him no opportunity to prevaricate, to think of alternatives or to work out other moves.

I knew exactly what his considerations were: I had such powerful backing that I would probably gain the throne. If he continued to oppose me now I would henceforth be his implacable enemy, and he would lose power. If he threw in his lot with me, he would be allied closely to the Pharaoh. Better, perhaps, than being the shadowy manipulator of a young boy who had no powerful factions other than the priesthood backing him. Maybe he was also thinking that he would be able to manipulate me. I smiled.

"A vision?" he said. "The son of Amen-Ra?"

"The very seed of his loins," I affirmed. "The Living Horus."

He nodded reflectively. Then he stood aside. "Majesty will break the seal," he told the priests, who had been observing the encounter between us with their mouths hanging open. The lector priest began to chant the ritual words which must be faultlessly recited to be magical. The singing of the chantresses swelled around us. I handed over my basket, strode forward and broke the clay seal to the innermost shrine which had been put in place by the Chief Priest the previous day.

It was cool, very dark, and smelled musty. While the outer reaches of the temple are open and sunlit with brightly coloured paintings on the walls, the corridors grow narrower and darker as they lead inward to the shrine where the god lives. I walked forward and stood before the golden statue of the god in its niche. It seemed to me that its painted eyes regarded me with approbation.

Gently and reverently I took the god from his niche and, using the items passed to me by the assistant priests, I fed the god, robed him, rouged his face and adorned him with royal emblems. Outside the inner sanctum the chantresses rejoiced, their pure voices accompanied by the rhythmic rattle of sistrums and tambourines. The powerful scent of the flaming torches and the heady aroma of incense filled the interior of the shrine, driving out the mustiness.

The rites completed, a feeling of dizziness threatened to overcome me. My recent actions had inducted me into the ranks of the divine, a chain of living gods reaching back into the ancient past, all of whom had served to link the invisible and the visible. Through my life henceforth and through my spiritual strength I would sustain Khemet. It was an awesome task. (Heese 2009:126-30.)

1.3 How did I conceptualise Hatshepsut's character?

To conceptualise Hatshepsut's character, I looked at the lives of other powerful women in history, in particular Elizabeth I, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher. Although they were highly individualistic persons, they also had certain characteristics in common. Generally, such women had fathers who featured strongly in their lives, either because they were impressively powerful (as in the case of Elizabeth) or because they loved their daughters dearly and encouraged them to be achievers; or they had strong female role models (as in the case of Golda, whose role model was her elder sister). These women were intelligent and well educated. They had exceptional health and energy. They were very determined and, if need be, capable of being ruthless. They were persuasive communicators and inspiring leaders who were able to use and control powerful men. They were ambitious and believed in themselves, in fact, had a sense of calling, and did not allow the usual feminine roles of wife and mother to derail them from their purpose in life.

It seemed probable that, even several thousand years ago, a woman who reigned for two decades over Egypt would have had a similar nature.

1.4 What relevance could these ancient times have for us today?

Surely, one might suppose, the concerns of such an ancient civilisation must be of merely academic interest. Not so. No matter how long ago they lived, the ancient Egyptians were people like ourselves, and would certainly have been concerned with issues that engage us today: individual hopes and desires, interpersonal relationships, power structures, the place of human beings in the universe, the nature of the divine, what happens after death. The interest of a historical novel lies partly in picturing the ways in which another civilisation, another period, was different from our own, but even more the ways in which it was similar.

One problem that I show Hatshepsut to be particularly exercised about, is how to balance the ideal of Ma'at (good order and righteousness) with the demands of keeping her kingdom safe and holding on to her throne. This is a crucial moral test, and in the end she feels that she fails it. It is possible to depict a struggle of conscience such as this only in the context of a moral framework that accepts the notion of individual responsibility. Ancient Egypt was ahead of many subsequent societies in so far as it did accept this notion.

Hatshepsut's struggle with her conscience is very similar to a crucial issue in our own time. I suggest that it is precisely the question that vexes rulers today: how to balance ideals of freedom and the rule of law with the requirement of keeping their nations safe against terrorists. Not a simple problem, neither several millennia ago nor in our own time. Golda Meir struggled with it. So, too, did George W Bush; and now Barack Obama is confronted by the same question.

1.5 Where did I find a model for the language?

From the very beginning I felt that the language of this story needed to be appropriate, in the sense that it should suggest a bygone time. In English there are any number of examples of this kind of rhetoric, including, for example, the King James version of the English Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and period novels such as those of Sir Walter Scott. Since English literature was my field of specialisation, I was steeped in writings such as these. I have said elsewhere that this novel is the Old Testament meets Ivanhoe. But in fact, my primary source was the English translation of The Papyrus of Ani, which is, I understand, the best known extant version of The Book of the Dead, a document of enormous importance to Egyptians.

I'll illustrate by means of three examples of how I used this source:

• The Song of the Godlike Ruler
• The Ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth
• Hatshepsut's thoughts when she is alone in her temple, thinking of Senenmut after his death.

The Song of the Godlike Ruler appears in the third scroll (chapter 3), together with a song about love, advising the lover to cherish his beloved because life is short. The love song is well known to Egyptologists. If anyone knows the Song of the Godlike Ruler I will be surprised, since I invented it. It may well sound somewhat familiar to anyone who knows The Papyrus of Ani, because I constructed it from phrases that I found there. I used the English translation by EA Wallis Budge, which was first published in 1895 - fortunately, otherwise it might have cost me rather a lot in copyright fees.

The last part of the song goes like this:

Aye, His Majesty was a godlike ruler.
He came forth as Atum.
He held the Black Land in his hands,
He held it safe.
He triumphed over evil.
He was a shining one clothed in power.
And all the people praised him.

It does not rhyme, but neither did early English poetry, and I think one could easily imagine these words being sung to the accompaniment of a harp.

I have seen various versions of the Ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth that the new pharaoh must carry out for his father, for example in Wilbur Smith's novel River God, but none as beautiful as the words in The Papyrus of Ani, of which I used a shortened version:

I have come to embrace thee. I am thy son Horus.
I open for thee thy mouth.
I open for thee thy nostrils that thou mayest breathe.
I am thy son, I love thee.
I open for thee thy two eyes. Also thy two ears.
The dead shall walk and shall speak,
And thy body shall be with the great company of the gods.
I quicken thy heart, so that thou mayest live.
Neither heaven nor earth can be taken away from thee,
For behold, thou wilt rise again without fail and for ever.

This is magnificent poetry. And my feeling was that it should not be imbedded in ordinary, crass modern English. That would have been banal.

My third example of how I used words from The Papyrus of Ani relates to Hatshepsut's thoughts when she is alone in her temple, thinking of Senenmut after his death - the funerary temple which, I firmly believe, Senenmut built for her. In this temple, at the place known today as Deir el-Bahri, there are numerous images of him. (They really do exist, and were placed there, in inconspicuous places, with her permission according to an inscription that can still be read.) I made her angry with him for getting married without her knowledge (this is my invention) and I made her order his tomb to be denuded and his body thrown to the crocodiles. Thus, of course, denying him a place in the Afterlife.

(As a matter of interest, this is the only instance I know of in a novel of a love affair involving first a break-up and then a reconciliation after one of the partners has been dead for years. It is possible only within a belief system such as the ancient Egyptians had.)

As she stands there in the temple and looks at his creation and at the images of him that are still there, I wrote:

By the tears of Isis, I thought, what have I done? In my fit of destructive rage, I had your tombs stripped and your grave goods dispersed and your statues and images destroyed; most terrible act of all, I had your mummy taken from its resting place and given to the crocodiles. In my fury I tried to wipe out your name and bar your way to eternity. Have I condemned your Ka to wander forever homeless, forever seeking sustenance and finding none? Have I banished you to barren darkness? Or worse, to a never-ending battle through the dread Duat? Senenmut, what have I done to you?

Yet here you are still; your images are here, your name is engraved on these walls. Statues of you still exist intact. While there are such representations of your bodily form, you are not lost, you cannot be lost. You cannot be destroyed.

And here I incorporated words from The Papyrus of Ani to express her thoughts, only somewhat shortened, and including Senenmut's name:

My heart prays for you: May Horus open your mouth. May all the shining beings see you, may they hear your name. Oh, you judges of the Afterlife, take the man Senenmut unto yourselves; let him eat what you eat, let him drink what you drink; let him live upon that which you live upon; let your boat be his boat, let him net birds in the Fields of the Blessed, let him have running streams.

What I tried to do as a writer, was to create a rhetoric, a style, that did not contrast baldly with these marvellously expressive phrases.

1.6 Has Hatshepsut's mummy ever been found?

In 1903 Harold Carter, of Tutankhamen fame, discovered two mummies in an insignificant tomb designated as KV60. The smaller mummy was in a decaying sarcophagus that identified it as that of Sitre, known as Inet, royal nurse. It was brought to the Cairo museum. The larger one was uncoffined and unidentified and remained lying on the floor until 2007. It was thought that the larger one might have been royal, because the position of its arm suggests the typical royal burial position. But since the two mummies came from such an undistinguished burial place, the larger one lay nameless for decades. Then Dr Zahi Hawass decided to reinvestigate the mystery surrounding Hatshepsut for a television special to be aired by the Discovery network and his team moved the second mummy from KV60 to Cairo for a careful examination. It is the only mummy Dr Hawass ever removed from the Valley of the Kings.

With the mummy, some artefacts from the tomb were also brought to Cairo. One of those was a small wooden box that bore the cartouche of Hatshepsut and contained a liver. A CT scan also revealed a tooth in the box. An expert study of the scans of the tooth and of several female mummies showed that the unidentified woman from KV60 was indeed missing a tooth. Furthermore, the hole in the jaw and the type of tooth that was missing were an exact match for the loose one in the box. So Egyptian authorities declared it to be mummy of the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut. This person was obese and had red-gold hair. She had damaged teeth and may have suffered from diabetes and cancer.

Many questions still remain unanswered, though. Did she die a natural death? This is not yet clear. If not, who killed her? Why and by whom were her monuments and statues desecrated? The same questions apply to Senenmut (whose mummy, incidentally, has never been found). There are other questions that have never been answered: Was Senenmut her lover? Did he ever marry? Was he the mastermind behind her accession?

The novelist has more freedom than the scholar to imagine plausible answers to these and other questions about these people who lived so long ago. In contrast to the scholar, who studies and analyses dusty remnants, the novelist's primary aim is to give these people who lived so long ago the kiss of life.

Selected sources

Assmann, Jan. 1995. Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom. London: Kegan Paul.

Breasted, JH. 1924. The History of Ancient Egypt. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Budge, EA Wallis (trans and ed). 1967 (1895). The Egyptian Book of the Dead (The Papyrus of Ani). New York: Dover.

Fletcher, Joann. 2004. The Search for Nefertiti. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Harris, Nathaniel. 1997. History of Ancient Egypt. London: Chancellor.

Heese, Marié. 2009. The Double Crown. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau.

Johnson, Paul.* 1974. Elizabeth: A Study in Power and Intellect. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Johnson, Paul.* 1999. The Civilization of Ancient Egypt. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Roehrig, Catherine H (ed). 2006. Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Tyldesley, Joyce. 1998. Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh. London: Penguin.
Wells, Evelyn. 1965. Nefertiti. London: Robert Hale.

* Paul Johnson made me aware of the importance of the concept of individual conscience to the ancient Egyptians and I thank him for that.