by Morgan McGill —

Students packed the Chao Auditorium Thursday night to hear about the mystical, ancient Egyptian woman who came to rule, not as a queen, but as king.
“The Woman Who Would be King” is a book about Hatshepsut, an Egyptian woman who named herself King of Egypt in ancient times despite everything her heavily male-dominated culture believed. She had to disguise herself as a man to reign over Egypt, but is known as one of the most powerful, successful women in history according to the book’s author, Kara Cooney.

“You have to call her ‘King’ because the word for ‘Queen’ in ancient Egypt just means wife of a king, Cooney said. “I was drawn to her because so few people even remember her name. I’m sitting on U of L campus parking lot right now getting ready to go over and give my talk and if I stopped anybody walking along here and said, ‘You know about Jezebel? Oh yeah. You know about Cleopatra? Oh yeah. What about Hatshepsut?’ And then nothing, right?”

Cooney got her PhD in Egyptology at John Hopkins University and now teaches Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA. Students and professors from every corner of U of L flooded the basement of Ekstrom Library to listen to Cooney talk about Hatshepsut.

“There’s a part of me that looks at what I do and I think, ‘well that’s really weird,’” Cooney said. “There’s always enough to study and I never get bored.”

Although she has been to Shri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia, Turkey, Italy, Mexico, Israel, Egypt and Palestine to co-produce a TV show called “Out of Egypt,” she still thinks Egypt, out of all of these, is the farthest place she can go because it is like she is time-traveling back to ancient times.

Cooney is motivated to acknowledge the women from history who were successful so women today can learn from them and follow their powerful examples.

“I wanted to resurrect [Hatshepsut] and make her remembered again,” she said. “The women who are successful, who do everything right, are the women that we don’t tell stories about. Those are the women we forget.”

She believes the women we remember most are those who have fallen or been defeated, but if we took the time to study the women who were successful, like Hatshepsut, as much as we study the women who were failures, women in today’s society could achieve greater things.

Although King Hatshepsut confidently took the throne as King and ruled as a male, she was never solely in charge. Cooney describes her difficult kingship in saying, “As the reign went on, she had to increasingly masculinize herself and she did have to bind her breasts…She had a royal beard tied on to her face to give her that masculine aspect and she ruled alongside another male. So she took the throne as King when the king on the throne already was about eight or nine years old. She always ruled with another.”

Cooney says that if the modern woman can learn anything from Hatshepsut, it is that life is unfair and a woman cannot show “naked ambition” as a man can, without receiving harsher judgement.
“If a woman can understand that, she can often transcend it.” she said. “I think if you look at the way she approached an uphill battle and still managed to obtain the highest division in the land in all the ancient world, that’s something we can learn. Hatshepsut, who made [Egypt] better than she found it–she expanded the borders and built fabulous structures and statues. She’s the one who did everything so perfectly other people took credit for it. And that’s why they don’t remember her name.”

“The Woman Who Would be King” not only gives its readers insight into the phenomenon of a woman king in ancient Egypt, but it presents an influential heroine who fought for her power so that the name of her people would not be forgotten. This book shows diligence and confidence can ultimately promote the power of an individual, no matter that individual’s gender, nor what a culture says about his or her right to do so. In the words of Kara Cooney, “Long live the king!”​