Hatshepsut
First off pronunciation: /hat SHep soot/.
Daughter, sister, wife, she became regent for the infant male heir, and then claimed she was a pharaoh, and she had statues with masculine traits of a beard, and erased the breasts. She rules for 21 years, 6 as regent and 15 as pharaoh. Her stepson tried to erase her after she died, at the end of his reign.
1500-1458 BCE, roughly, lived 37-47 years.
When I sit in meditation, I get all kinds of funny questions, like how old would Hatshepsut be if she was alive today? The oldest answer is 3,487. She was basically a thousand years older than the Buddha, who left us 2500 years ago.
I learned Sobekneferu ruled 3 centuries before Hatshepsut. The statue was stolen during WW2 and is presumably is some rich dudes home. Even so, the Met might have a Sobekneferu. They don't say it's her, just a royal woman. But it could be...
Semiramis was 824 BC–811 BCE in roughly Iraq in Assyria. Boudica was 60 ACE in England. Wu Zetian was 7th century ACE in China. Artemisia is Greece b. 520 BCE. Cleopatra's reign was 51–30 BC.
The Women Who Would Be King explained how Hatshepsut was perhaps the biggest female ruler of the ancient world, at the end. The backlash against her memory at the end of the next Pharaoh Thutmose III. There was retrenchment of the patriarchy at the end of his reign.
Links:
National Geographic via Archive.
I'm listening to: Cooney, Kara (2015), The Woman Who Would be King. This was an amazing book that I'll have to listen to again. It was great.
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