C A M I L L E P A G L I A
Hatshepsut (as her name is usually spelled) belonged to the long, illustrious, embattled Eighteenth Dynasty, which controlled Egypt for over 200 years. She was married to her half-brother, Thutmosis II, in the characteristic royal incest that would weaken or derange Egyptian ruling families down to the time of Cleopatra. Hatshepsut seems to have muscled her brother aside and seized power for herself. After his death in 1490 B.C., she was regent for his son, Thutmosis III, whom she kept in the shadows for 22 years while she ruled as pharaoh, a male role never usurped by any other Egyptian queen. Her strangely transsexual portraits show her with delicate female breasts and the kilt, headdress and ceremonial beard of a man. Sometime after the ascension of the imperialistic Thutmosis III following her death, Hatshepsut's name and image were brutally obliterated from the monuments and most royal chronicles. Her very existence was forgotten until European excavations began after Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798. Tyldesley suggests that male prejudice against an uppity woman accounts for both the campaign of vandalism against Hatshepsut's memory and the censorious comments of some mid-twentieth-century Egyptologists who, unlike the more reverential Victorians, have portrayed her as a castrating virago. But Tyldesley's argument fails to acknowledge the vicious political infighting that convulsed the ancient Mediterranean world for 3500 years. And surely ham-handed amateur psychologizing, in the wake of Freud, has mangled many a male reputation too. If Hatshepsut is, as Tyldseley claims, totally unknown in Europe, the same cannot be said for America, where the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York boasts a stunning collection of Hatshepsut's funerary sculpture. It was these gigantic stone sphinxes and votive statues that electrified me as a child and inspired me with the desire to be an archaeologist — my avid reading for which would be the foundation for my later scholarly work. Tyldseley's book is timely, since we are at a stage in feminism where abstruse theory is rightly being seen as a stupid waste of time and where practical problems must be addressed by traditional methods: historical inquiry and mastery of hard fact. The glass ceiling will not be broken by tremulous whiners and thin-skinned hysterics crying sexual harassment. Our future female leaders must study the nuts and bolts, as well as the inevitable slings and arrows, of politics — a cold, cruel game that only a few women like Hatshepsut, Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great have mastered. Very striking to American readers shellshocked by ideological warfare is Tyldesley's breeziness about charged racial matters. For example, in reference to a mural at Hatshepsut's massive funerary temple at Deir el Bahri recording a trade mission to Punt (probably Ethiopia), Tyldesley exclaims at the "grotesquely fat wife" of the Puntite king and quotes an early commentator who dubbed her "the ideal type of female beauty among the savage tribes of inner Africa". After the publication of Martin Bernal's "Black Athena" (2 vols., 1987, 1991), a confused and distorted exercise in propaganda that has become a central text of the Afrocentric movement in education, it is difficult to imagine a mainstream American publisher releasing a book on Egypt for a general audience without the obligatory, anxious flourish of soothing racial bromides. Tyldesley barely touches on the question of the racial composition of ancient Egypt that has so inflamed passions here. The extreme Afrocentric position, rejected by most reputable scholars, is that the Egyptians were uniformly black in the modern sense. Even Cleopatra, who was Macedonian Greek, has absurdly been alleged to be black. The Egyptian population was racially mixed, particularly in the south toward Nubia. Completely lost in this debate is what seems to me powerful visual evidence that the famous final figures of Hatshepsut's own Eighteenth Dynasty were indeed black: Ikhnaten, the brilliant pharaoh who invented monotheism and revolutionized Egyptian art; his elegant wife, Nefertiti; his formidable mother, Queen Tiy; and his short-lived son-in-law and successor, Tutankhamen, he of the tomb of treasures. Afrocentric claims that the Greeks "stole" Egyptian achievements in philosophy and science are mostly specious. But I certainly was taught in college that Greek art was heavily influenced by long-established Egyptian precedents, from which I developed the thesis of my first book, "Sexual Personae:" that the birth of the Western eye was in Egypt. Militant Afrocentrism has stirred up poisonous resentment against the supposed European suppression and erasure of Egyptian culture. In point of fact, it was Africans who almost immediately looted and smashed up the royal tombs and afterward neglected or stripped and dismantled the sacred monuments. The great Egyptian sites, including Deir el Bahri, Karnak and Abu Simbel, were piles of rubble buried in sand for 2000 years until Europeans took an interest in them. Rogues and cheats there certainly were among the early excavators of Egypt. But it was Europeans who painstakingly deciphered hieroglyphics and who first explored, mapped and catalogued the magnificent ruins of Egypt. Indeed, archaeology as a systematic technique of analysis and conservation ultimately descends from Greek science. Egypt and all of Africa deserve a much expanded place in the academic curriculum — but not at the expense of European intellectual history, which invented the very tools that multiculturalism needs to understand the world. Is Afrocentrism propoganda or scholarship? Join the discussion in Table Talk. |