but once brightly painted low reliefs that cover many walls of the
complex. In addition to representing great deeds, the reliefs also
show Hatshepsut’s coronation and divine birth. She was said to be
the daughter of the god Amen-Re, whose sanctuary was situated on
the temple’s uppermost level. The painted reliefs of Hatshepsut’s
mortuary temple constituted the first great tribute to a woman’s
achievements in the history of art. Their defacement after her death
is therefore especially unfortunate.
HATSHEPSUT’S PORTRAITSAs many as 200 statues in
the round depicting Hatshepsut in various guises complemented the
extensive relief program. On the lowest terrace, to either side of the
processional way, Hatshepsut repeatedly appeared as a sphinx. On
the uppermost level, sculptors represented the female pharaoh
standing or seated or in the form of a mummy. At least eight colossal
kneeling statues in red granite lined the way to the entrance of the
Amen-Re sanctuary.
The statue in FIG. 3-21suffered the same fate as most of Hat-
shepsut’s portraits during the reign of Thutmose III. It was smashed
and the pieces were thrown in a dump, but the portrait has been
skillfully reassembled. Hatshepsut holds a globular offering jar in
each hand as she takes part in a ritual in honor of the sun god.
(A king kneeled only before a god, never a mortal.) She wears the
royal male nemes headdress (compare FIGS. 3-11to 3-13) and the
pharaoh’s ceremonial beard. The agents of Thutmose III hacked off
68 Chapter 3 EGYPT UNDER THE PHARAOHSI
n 1479 BCE, Thutmose II, the fourth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty
(r. 1492–1479 BCE), died. His principal wife (and half sister),
Queen Hatshepsut (r. 1473–1458 BCE), had not given birth to any
sons who survived, so the title of king went to Thutmose III, son of
Thutmose II by a minor wife. Hatshepsut was named regent for the
boy-king. Within a few years, however, the queen proclaimed herself
pharaoh and insisted that her father Thutmose I had actually chosen
her as his successor during his lifetime. Underscoring her claim, one
of the reliefs decorating Hatshepsut’s enormous funerary complex
(FIG. 3-20) depicts Thutmose I crowning his daughter as king in the
presence of the Egyptian gods. Hatshepsut is the first great female
monarch whose name has been recorded. (In the 12th Dynasty,
Sobekneferu was crowned king of Egypt, but she reigned as pharaoh
for only a few years.) Hatshepsut boasted of having made the “Two
Lands to labor with bowed back” for her, and for two decades she
ruled what was then the most powerful and prosperous empire in
the world.
Hatshepsut commissioned numerous building projects, and
sculptors produced portraits of the female pharaoh in great num-
bers for display in those complexes. Unfortunately, Thutmose III
(r. 1458–1425 BCE), for reasons still not fully understood, late in
his reign ordered Hatshepsut’s portraits destroyed. In her surviving
portraits, Hatshepsut uniformly wears the costume of the male
pharaohs, with royal headdress and kilt, and in some cases (FIG.
3-21) even a false ceremonial beard. Many inscriptions refer to Hat-
shepsut as “His Majesty”! In other statues, however, Hatshepsut has
delicate features, a slender frame, and breasts, leaving no doubt that
artists also represented her as a woman.
Hatshepsut, the Woman Who Would Be King
ART AND SOCIETY
3-21Hatshepsut
with offering jars,
from the upper court
of her mortuary temple,
Deir el-Bahri, Egypt,
18th Dynasty,
ca. 1473–1458 bce.
Red granite, 8 6 high.
Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York.
Many of Hatshepsut’s
portraits were destroyed
after her death. Conser-
vators reassembled this
one, which depicts the
queen as a male pharaoh
with false beard, consis-
tent with inscriptions
calling her “His
Majesty.”1 ft.the uraeus cobra that once adorned the front of the headdress.
The figure is also anatomically male, although other surviving
portraits of Hatshepsut represent her with a woman’s breasts. The
male imagery is, however, consistent with the queen’s formal as-
sumption of the title of king and with the many inscriptions that ad-
dress her as a man.
TEMPLE OF RAMSES II The sheer size of Hatshepsut’s mor-
tuary temple never fails to impress visitors, and this is no less true of
the immense rock-cut temple (FIG. 3-22) of Ramses II (r. 1290–
1224 BCE) at Abu Simbel. In 1968, engineers moved the immense
Nubian temple nearly 700 feet—an amazing feat in its own right—
to save it from submersion in the Aswan High Dam reservoir. Ram-
ses was Egypt’s last great warrior pharaoh, and he ruled for two-
thirds of a century, an extraordinary accomplishment in an era when
life expectancy was far less than it is today. The pharaoh, proud of
his many campaigns to restore the empire, proclaimed his greatness
by placing four colossal images of himself on the temple facade.The
portraits are almost eight times as large as Hatshepsut’s kneeling
statues and, at 65 feet tall, almost a dozen times the height of an
ancient Egyptian, even though the pharaoh is seated. Spectacular
as they are, the rock-cut statues nonetheless lack the refinement of
earlier periods, because much was sacrificed to overwhelming
size. This is a characteristic of colossal statuary of every period and
every place.