Written by:
Colleen M. Lee
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this Issue of Curve:
18#5
We girls have always wanted a female Indiana Jones. Now we have one in Dr. Kara Cooney—and she’s hotter than Indy. Dr. Cooney is an Egyptologist, the author of The Cost of Death: The Social and Economic Value of Ancient Egyptian Funerary Art in the Ramesside Period, a Digging for the Truth team archaeology expert on the History Channel and host of the documentary Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen on the Discovery Channel. The documentary searches for the lost tomb of Hatshepsut, one of Egypt’s most powerful pharaohs. The surprising element is that Hapshetsut is a woman who posed as a man to rule over the beginning of Egypt’s golden age—and the riches that King Tut would inherit.
Why is Hatshepsut so important?
She’s important, right, because it was a major discovery that identified her mummy and her mummy had never been identified before. Her images had been erased. Some people had assumed that her mummy had been burned or destroyed, they’d tried to erase her from the very afterlife existence that she may have wanted. So finding her mummy and making that link was a big deal for a lot of people and especially for the public. I think it really fired up the public imagination in a new way. Everybody loves Egypt. Everybody knows about King Tut and Cleopatra, to add another image or face to that story, I think, just fired up the imagination even more. Especially a female face.
Is she also important because of a woman’s role back in her day, and what she accomplished?
This is a big question because, when you think about ancient history [you want to] look at other female rulers. There’s got to be some, and there aren’t any. And then you’re like, “OK, why is that?” In an agriculturally based society, like ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia or ancient China—any ancient civilization—you can go anywhere in the ancient world, women do not share power with men. You only see a woman becoming powerful with the rise of the nation-states. In the ancient world, masculine power was everything and a woman had no place in that. Well, what about Cleopatra? Cleopatra was the end of her line, the end of a Greek line that was ruling in Egypt who was taken out by the Roman Empire. So that’s not really a very good argument because the line died with her, and you do see women taking power in the ancient world during times of civil war, when the women have to go off and fight the battles.
Would you consider Hatshepsut a B.C.E. drag king?
B.C.E. drag king, let’s see. Absolutely. A B.C.E. drag king—there’s no other way to put it, because, to fulfill her role religiously and socially—she had to become a man. At least in the way that she represented herself and [in] very formal rituals. So that’s not to say that she walked around the palace topless all the time and tried to pretend to be a man, it means that in her ritual activity as Pharaoh, as King, she had to become a man.
Is there any evidence or history that shows Cleopatra in men’s clothing?
Cleopatra didn’t go that route and this is interesting. A woman in the ancient world [had] two choices. She can become masculine and try to live that fiction or she can use her sexuality, and Cleopatra went the second route. So if you look at the choices that she made, Caesar comes over to Egypt, she’s like, “Oh, Caesar, great. I’m going to meet Julius Caesar” and she bears him children. So she actually has a child with him and tries to solidify her power using her sexuality as a woman and has children with Julius Caesar.
Want to read more of Dr. Kara Cooney’s interview and to learn more about Hatshepsut and Egypt? Look out for more in a future issue of CURVE magazine.
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