By destroying this female pharaoh's legacy, her successor preserved it forever. How the modern world came to understand Hatshepsut’s might.

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This photo illustration is based on a large kneeling statue of Hatshepsut.
The Met
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On a midwinter trek to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I went in search of room 115 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a North American home of the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut. I walked past the outcropping two or three times, before I finally found her—dozens of her, really—in a well-lit antechamber. From one statue, Hatshepsut’s limestone eyes smiled, catlike, through 3,400 years of history. From another, a jet black statue of the seated pharaoh, carved from the raven rock diorite, commanded attention even without a face.
But perhaps the most intriguing artifacts were those that envisaged the pharaoh that tried to usurp her, her nephew Thutmose III. On inspection, his form is different from his aunt’s: His face is flatter, broader, more masculine. But the distinctions are so minimal they’re almost nonexistent to an untrained eye. Looking into his mask, I ruefully remembered something Kara Cooney, a UCLA Egyptologist who has studied the intersection of gender and rule, had told me: “Her style was so pervasive, it just permeated everything.” Hatshepsut built Thutmose’s public appearance when he was just a boy. He may have grown up, consolidated power and systematically erased her, but he couldn’t wash away his own face, and by that time, it was already an avatar of Hatshepsut’s own.
Taken together, Hatshepsut’s many statues, temples, and burial grounds reveal a story of a rise to unprecedented power, and the physical propaganda she used to achieve such great heights. These strategies for visually cueing her stature are still in use today.
Like the Nile river on which the royal family’s rule depended, the course of Hatshepsut’s life was charted long before her birth around 1500 BCE. As the eldest daughter of King Thutmose I, she would train for the coveted position of “God’s Wife of Amen,” the personal priestess of Egypt’s primary god. When her brother Thutmose II assumed the throne, she would marry him and fulfill her greatest duty: producing the next pharaoh.
But something disturbed this plan.  (▪ ▪ ▪)

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