Hatshepsut In Kara Cooney's The Woman Who Would Be King

atshepsut is a name that many of us have never heard of, nor learned to pronounce. She was a great leader of ancient Egypt in the 18th dynasty. She was one of the few ancient women to acquire such power and deserves credit for all of achievements. Kara Cooney wrote, “The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt:” to provide an insight into the life of an extraordinary female leader who is often greatly overlooked. Cooney very much admires Hatshepsut’s elegant and strategic rise to power along with her successful incumbency. The biography commemorates her life from birth to death, her ascension to the kingship, and the impact of her reign and the reasoning behind its blatant dismissal. While Egyptian history is typically

She did really well in context to making the book easy to understand as well as stay engaged in. Cooney provides a helpful family tree to clarify any confusion on Hatshepsut’s lineage, as well as a map of Hatshepsut’s funerary temple, and a few pages of photographs of some statues and temples that she had built. In the “Authors Note” section located in the very beginning of the book, Cooney makes it very clear that she will be conjecturing the human elements and emotions of Hatshepsut’s story and there is not actual recording of any of these being necessarily accurate. She says, “I have to break many rules of my Egyptological training in order to resurrect and reanimate Hatshepsut’s intentions, ambitions, and disappointments, by engaging in conjecture and speculation, and creating untestable hypotheses as I attempt to fill out her character and decision making processes (even though I document my sources and accentuate my uncertainties). Any supposition on my part is warranted, I believe, because Hatshepsut remains an important example of humanity’s

Ancient Egyptian leaders typically tend to be of the more commonly known leaders of the ancient world; probably because they’ve left behind such a vast amount of archaeological artifacts and written history for us to study compared to many ancient civilizations. But even so, the influence of ancient Egyptian women is often vaguely discussed or reduced to their failures and promiscuity. The commonly highlighted women in history are the ones that can be categorized alongside characters such as, Julia, daughter of Octavian, who was exiled for being a harlot, or Cleopatra is well known for her flings with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, faced military defeat, committed suicide, and became the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty. While Hatshepsut was not the first or last woman to become regent or ruler of Egypt, she was the only to do so during in a time of peace, without direct blood to the boy king, and within the margins of religious and ideological constraints, all whilst walking a fine line as not to be seen as, “self motivated”. She upheld important roles her entire life and was a strategic and effective ruler. Even though she was one of the most prosperous leaders of ancient Egypt, after she died and her reign ended, her nephew / step son Thutmose III attempted to completely erase her from Egyptian History by destroying many of her temples and much of her statuary. Although