I have read about the ways that Hatshepsut visually represented herself as a pharaoh, with the false beard and kilt etc., but I was wondering, when the very concept of pharaoh is male, how she was referred to when a pronoun was needed. Egyptian art is very formulaic, and so I could especially see an application of a male pronoun in a traditional inscription that no one thought to modify for the unconventional pharaoh. Of course, the other possibilities are that the problem was somehow avoided through circumlocutions or that not enough examples survived the obliteration of her inscriptions to draw conclusions.
Is there a particular policy we can see at work, or was it a question addressed on an ad hoc basis?
Hi there!
Hatshepsut was, as far as my knowledge reaches, actually very consistently referred to as female in writing. She was addressed by the gods in carvings as "daughter," used the title "Daughter of the Sun," and so forth. Although she is depicted in art as male, she is consistently and repeatedly indicated to be female via the texts accompanying the art.
Jean Francois Champollion, renowned decoder of hieroglyphs, actually had a very hard time wrapping his head around this fact. He encountered Hatshepsut's carvings (he mistranslated her name as Amenenthe) and was baffled by the fact that this king, whom he was convinced was male, was consistently surrounded by feminine titles and attributes. Here's one of his letters, quoted in Tyldesley's Hatchepsut:
[...] still more astonished was I to find on reading the inscriptions that wherever they referred to this bearded king in the usual dress of the Pharaohs, nouns and verbs were in the feminine, as though a queen were in question. I found the same peculiarity everywhere.