Civilization VII Leader Spotlight: The History of Hatshepsut

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Hatshepsut returns to the Civilization series after a 20-year absence, first appearing in Civ 4 back in 2005, and now once more as a leader in Civ 7.

[00:00:09]>> Hatshepsut was the second ever woman to rule over Egypt as king and the patron of some of its most magnificent architectural wonders. My name is Paisley Trees and I'm an architectural historian of the Middle East.

[00:00:21]>> And I'm Dr. Crow, a literary and cultural historian working on the 19th century Middle East. It was actually during the 19th century that the rediscovered Hatshepsut became one of the most celebrated pharaohs, which is all the more surprising because 20 years after her death, her statues, in which she was often depicted as male, were toppled and buried, and her inscriptions were destroyed, and she was kind of written out of history. Within the 20 years of Civ 4 and Civ 7, in the time span, we have seen a flourishing of scholarship on Hatshepsut that has complicated much of what we thought we knew about her reign. And so in this video, we want to explore some of the new discoveries and reevaluations of Hatshepsut that have taken place between 2005 and 2025 and talk about how Civ 7 [music] responds to these changes.

[00:01:03]Hatshepsut reigned from 1479 BC until 1458 BC, so about 22 years, during what we now call the New Kingdom of Egypt. In the 19th century, Egyptologists divided the history of ancient Egypt into an Old, Middle, and New Kingdom, each separated by intermediate periods of disunity and civil war. The Old Kingdom was the great era of pyramid building and established the contours of the Egyptian state. The Middle Kingdom was marked by a flourishing of literature and culture and the first female pharaoh, Sobekneferu. It's important that Hatshepsut wasn't the first woman to rule Egypt.

[00:01:34]>> Yeah, that's right. Much of the precedent for Hatshepsut's reign was already established in the Middle Kingdom by Sobekneferu. Sobekneferu died without an heir, and the next dynasty of the Middle Kingdom was so weak that Egypt was again occupied, this time by invaders from the Levant called the Hyksos. And it was Hatshepsut's great-grandfather, Ahmose, who defeated the Hyksos and founded the New Kingdom.

[00:01:54]And some of the most famous pharaohs belong to the New Kingdom, figures like Nefertiti and Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, and later on the many, many pharaohs named Ramses. Yeah, and this is also the era when Egypt becomes really expansionist, really determined to never be again invaded by foreign powers. So while Egypt has always been kind of connected to its neighbors, now in the New Kingdom, Egypt becomes a regional empire, stretching all the way to Anatolia and Mesopotamia. So where does Hatshepsut fit into all of this? Well, she was the daughter of the third king of the New Kingdom, Thutmose I.

[00:02:27]And because the pharaoh was the embodiment of the creator and solar god, Amun-Ra, Hatshepsut could thus claim that her father, her symbolic father, was also Amun. And within the Egyptian royal family, it was expected that brothers should marry sisters. So when she married her brother, Thutmose II, and he ascended to the throne, she also became god's wife.

[00:02:45]>> And this is actually the name of Hatshepsut's leader ability in Civ 7. It gives her extra culture per age for every unique resource, as well as bonus production towards wonders and buildings in cities next to navigable rivers. So while the ability is called god's wife, it actually refers to her reputation as a great builder of monuments along the Nile after she finally took the throne for herself.

[00:03:08]>> Yeah, that's right. So Thutmose II dies in 1479 BC, and his son by another wife, Thutmose III, becomes king. But he was still a child at that time, so Hatshepsut took up the role of a regent.

[00:03:20]And this is actually quite a common arrangement in the New Kingdom. So why would the stepmom take the role and not the mother of the child?

[00:03:26]>> Because his mother was a was not of royal blood. Hatshepsut was the daughter of the pharaoh, so she also had that royal blood. While early on, Hatshepsut was content to reign in Thutmose III's name, she soon began to depict herself in kingly roles, although still using her old title of god's wife. And then in the seventh year of her reign, she began to depict herself as the pharaoh, including by abandoning feminine visual and symbolic signifiers for male ones.

[00:03:50]So on her statues from this period, although she's always addressed using feminine pronouns, she wears the false beard of male pharaohs, male dress, and performs male actions like smiting enemies using the Egyptian royal mace.

[00:04:01]And this was very different from Sobekneferu, who always was depicted straightforwardly as a woman.

[00:04:06]>> And you may already know the phrase false beard and royal mace because they are mementos in Civ 7. And I think alongside her monumental and architectural achievements, Hatshepsut is probably most famous for these gender-bending depictions.

[00:04:21]>> 20th century archaeologists really kind of found these to be so strange that they constructed a whole narrative about Hatshepsut being put on the throne and maybe a conspiracy in the palace, and that these depictions were there to fool people. And so when Thutmose III destroys her statues, it's seen as a sort of campaign of revenge against her.

[00:04:40]But there seems to be some problems with this story. Why did Thutmose wait 20 years to take revenge? And why would she still be referred to in inscriptions as a woman if the aim was to deceive people about her gender? And these are the lines in which historiography shifts in the '90s. Yeah, so in 2005, same year Civ 4 comes out, a huge exhibition was held at the Met Museum in New York, and a collection of essays was published all about Hatshepsut. And as the essays in this book argued, her male depictions were not meant to deceive people, but played with gender signifiers in transparent ways, all while retaining key aspects of her real person.

[00:05:16]>> And although the book came out only a week before Civ 4 did, we can see some of the preceding paradigm shifts in how she's depicted in the game.

[00:05:24]>> In the details, there's actually some very interesting things. So the crown that she wears here is called the khepresh. It's actually the battle crown of the pharaoh. Though in the game, she's wearing a feminine sheath dress, when we look at the carvings and paintings where Hatshepsut is wearing the khepresh, we see that she's actually bare-chested and colored in red, which is a traditional color for men in Egyptian art. And I think this gets at the change that had taken place in historiography just a few years earlier.

[00:05:49]It was not a matter of Hatshepsut having to pretend to be a man, but rather that she was playing with gender signifiers, mixing and matching different symbols and forms of identification in her various representations. And so maybe to show how our understanding of Hatshepsut has changed in 2005, we actually look at how she's depicted in Civ 7. She appears much less androgynous than she did in Civ 4. She wears the nemes, which is the striped royal headcloth, but that was a unisex garment. And unlike the tunic-like clothing she wore in Civ 4, here she's much more clearly wearing a dress, and her hairstyle, which is kind of two locks of hair draped over her shoulders, was also very characteristic of elite women during that period.

[00:06:27]>> So this is a much less gender-bending depiction than Hatshepsut of Civ 4. But this doesn't mean that historiography has retreated from exploring the richness of her gender representations.

[00:06:39]One of the main interventions that's been made by scholars in recent years has been to critique this idea that gendered representation in ancient Egypt necessarily corresponded to what we think of as a personal identity. So as the scholar Uros Matic notes, the Egyptian idea of the body was not limited to a single corporeal entity, but also included painted or sculpted images and multiple types of souls. And in life, but especially after death, a body's gender was fluid and changed according to context. Kelly Ann Diamond has argued that royal women, for instance, temporarily became both male and female after death so they could give birth to their afterlife.

[00:07:13]>> And so when we remember that many of the famous images of Hatshepsut were from her mortuary temple, the reason for her novel combinations of gender signifiers becomes a lot clearer. And as Egyptologists remind us, when we put these images back into the contexts they were meant to be originally read in, we understand that it's a matter of visual grammar that Hatshepsut can be depicted as male. So for instance, when she was depicted as a male pharaoh next to Thutmose III, it was to show that she was a co-ruler and not his wife. But this didn't necessarily say anything about how she actually dressed or understood herself.

[00:07:50]>> Yeah, and likewise, there were ritual contexts which required Hatshepsut to have a wife. But as she was a widow, she instead had her daughter, Neferure, fulfill this role. But this didn't mean they were actually married or that she was trying to deceive anyone. It was really more a matter of decorum and maintaining royal tradition. And that brings us to the question of why Thutmose III waited so long to destroy her statues.

[00:08:11]New scholarship strongly suggests that actually there was no bad blood between them, with Thutmose III continuing to include their years as co-rulers together in his reign and building his temples alongside hers. It seems that it was the need to legitimate Thutmose III's successor, Amenhotep [clears throat] II, that may have inspired the destruction of her names and statues. Amenhotep II was born of non-royal mother, and thus his unstable position may have inspired an attempt to simplify his lineage and forestall any challenge from other royal bloodlines. So Hatshepsut's depiction in Civ 7 responds to new scholarship that places a lot less emphasis on finding her supposedly authentic appearance or gender identity, and is much more concerned with how she skillfully adapted and modified Egyptian tradition to the circumstances of her rule. So a lot more focus has been on the lasting legacies of her rule and the survival of her innovations even past the iconoclasm of Amenhotep II.

[00:09:07]>> And this is where I think Hatshepsut's ability in Civ 7 also reflects recent historiography. For example, the additional culture she gains for unique resources is a reference to the enormous peaceful trade mission she sent to the land of Punt, likely in today's Somalia.

[00:09:22]Not only was the idea of sending such a trade expedition new, but it left lasting legacies in Egyptian culture.

[00:09:28]And actually, it is a narrative event you can trigger in Civ 7 when playing Hatshepsut. Mhm. For example, we can look at her famous mortuary temple located across the Nile from the city of Luxor. Many scholars have proposed that in abandoning the traditional Egyptian idea of an enclosed solid structure in favor of an open colonnade, she may have been inspired by Minoan architecture in today's Crete. She also adopted older forms, being the first to introduce the processional way lined by sphinxes, which would be adopted by later pharaohs as well. And of course that interest in other cultures wasn't only peaceful. So for instance during her reign, but especially during the reign of Thutmose III and afterwards, we start to see depictions of prisoners of war and enslaved captives from foreign lands in Egyptian art. Although Egypt had always been a highly stratified society, its transformation into an outwardly imperialistic state made it even more obvious than before. But what is great about a series of long-lasting as civilization is that we can see how it changes and evolves alongside our historical understanding. And over the course of the 20 years between Civ IV and Civ VII, we can have hundreds of new articles, books, conference papers, and archaeological discoveries that alter our way of looking at a historical figure like Hatshepsut. Civ IV came out just as an old idea that Hatshepsut was a puppet leader or that she tried to fool people into thinking she was a man was being radically revised. And Civ VII now comes out as a new generation of scholars are examining some of the assumptions about gender and identity that underlay the new consensus. And that's really the historical method at work, constantly asking ourselves how do we know this? Why do we think this? And just like Civ always going back to our old favorites to see if we can approach them again in a new light. We'd like to extend our thanks to Firaxis for sponsoring this video. And we'd love to hear from you in the comments. Maybe you can tell us who is your favorite repeated leader in Civ VII. Please leave a like or comment below letting us know.

[00:11:20]And thank you and see you next time.