Home > Work > The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt
1 " In a world where seasons of planting harvests and inundation ruled life and death, it was imperative to bring the gods into daily life to help things along. The more a king invested in festivals of cyclical renewal, the more prosperity the gods bestowed. But if the gods were ignored, bad floods would result, and that meant meager planting and poor harvest, which led in turn to drought, pestilence, disease and death. "
― , The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt
2 " Male leaders are celebrated for their successes, while their excesses are typically excused as the necessary and expected price of masculine ambition. "
3 " Hatshepsut was, as far as we can tell, not a seducer of great generals in charge of legions, for the practical reason that there existed no men greater than she. "
4 " She and everyone else in the palace were afflicted by these maladies. This constant, inescapable physical suffering is the greatest difference between us and the ancients, even making allowance for the vast disparities of society, language, culture and circumstance, and it is certainly a chief obstacle when it comes to our understanding of their motivations. Perhaps if our outlook on life were shortened to twenty-five years, and if we lived in constant discomfort and anxiety over our very survival, we could know them better. "
5 " Egyptians enacted their politics through the rituals of religion, "
6 " Hatshepsut remains an important example of humanity’s ambivalent perception of female authority. "
