The story of Hatshepsut finally started being pieced together in the 1920s. Archaeologists from the Metropolitan Museum of Art found two pits near Luxor filled with many broken bits of statues. The statues had been installed in a magnificent temple that Hatshepsut had built. Workmen of yore had toppled them and dragged them to the edge of a pit. There they attacked the statues with sledgehammers and rocks. Then they dumped the broken fragments into the pit.
The archaeologists found that numerous inscriptions and carvings had been destroyed chiseling out Hatshepsut’s name and image. The workers seemed to have removed Hatshepsut’s name and face, and not the inscriptions that described the events of her reign. She doesn’t appear on any of the kings’ lists, which are the ancient records of all the pharaohs and their dynasties. Cleopatra would never have heard of her. Hatshepsut had literally been defaced.
But in a society where the illiteracy rate was between 95 and 99 percent, it was inevitable that some mentions of Hatshepsut would be missed. Many of the guys who were sent into the temple to remove Hatshepsut’s name seemed not to have tried hard enough. The surviving inscriptions told a remarkable story.
Hatshepsut took the throne in around 1478 BC, in a period that historians call the Eighteenth Dynasty. (The same dynasty would later include some of the best-known names in Egyptian history, including Akhenaten, the “heretic king,” and his son Tutankhamun.) Hatshepsut was the daughter of a pharaoh and then the principal wife of that pharaoh’s son (who was her own half brother). Then her husband died, leaving a young son by a secondary wife. Hatshepsut served as co-regent with the toddler for a short time. Then she took the throne in her own name.
She reigned for nearly two decades. She thrived, and Egypt thrived. She built monuments across the length of Egypt, most notably in Thebes. There she commissioned obelisks and statues and her masterpiece, the immense temple that Champollion explored.
How to explain the violence directed against her images? The order to remove all evidence of Hatshepsut’s existence came from her stepson, Tuthmosis III, who succeeded her on the throne. It was his name — or sometimes the name of Hatshepsut’s father, Tuthmosis I — that replaced Hatshepsut’s in her cartouches. There are two different views that have been advanced to explain the motive.
One view is that Hatshepsut had to be eradicated because the very notion of a female pharaoh violated the natural order. Such an aberration had to be denied as if it had never been. Other scholars insist that the explanation had more to do with dynastic politics than with revulsion. They point out that Tuthmosis III reigned for twenty years before he issued his anti-Hatshepsut decree. That seems a long time to put a vendetta on hold. The real issue, according to these skeptics, was who would rule next. Some historians believe that there were rival candidates. One was Tuthmosis’s son; the others were more closely related to Hatshepsut and therefore boasted better bloodlines. What better way for Tuthmosis to smooth the way for his own son to succeed him than by ensuring that no rival could stake a claim of his own?
Even if all Hatshepsut’s statues had survived intact, we would not know what she looked like. This is because, in Ancient Egypt rulers were depicted as idealized types rather than individuals. Kings who had grown old and feeble were portrayed as young and imposing; so were little boys who happened to have inherited the throne. Archaeologists have devoted endless hours to piecing together Hatshepsut’s vandalized statues. Hatshepsut is depicted sometimes as male, sometimes as female, and sometimes as a female with the traditional trappings of male authority, including a royal goatee.
The best of the statues are treasures of world art. The most striking of all is an eleven-foot-long, seven-ton granite sphinx with Hatshepsut’s face (and royal headdress and beard) and a lion’s body which is kept at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was created more than three and a half millennia ago, at a site six thousand miles from its present home. Much of its story remains a mystery. But what we do know, we owe to Champollion noticing a tiny letter T, in a place where it did not belong.
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