Hatshepsut

About Hatshepsut

Hatshepsut was a female pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty (r. c. 1479-1458 BCE), one of the few women to rule Egypt as king in her own right and the most successful and long-reigning of them. The daughter of King Thutmose I, she was the wife of her half-brother Thutmose II, and on his death she became regent for her young stepson and nephew Thutmose III, the son of Thutmose II by a secondary wife. Within a few years of the regency she took the full titles and regalia of a king, ruling as pharaoh in her own right for some two decades. To legitimize the rule of a woman as king, an unprecedented and theologically difficult thing, Hatshepsut grounded her authority in the claim of divine birth, asserting that she was the daughter of the god Amun himself, who had taken the form of her earthly father to conceive her. This claim, depicted in reliefs at her great mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, is the first surviving Egyptian royal divine-birth narrative.

Hatshepsut's reign was a period of prosperity, building, and trade rather than military conquest, and her monuments are among the finest of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, on the west bank at Thebes, designed by her official Senenmut and rising in terraces against the cliffs, is one of the masterpieces of Egyptian architecture, and its reliefs depict the principal events by which she justified and celebrated her reign, the divine birth from Amun and the great trading expedition to the distant land of Punt. She also erected obelisks at the temple of Amun at Karnak, among the tallest ever raised, and built the bark-shrine known as the Red Chapel, and her building program across Egypt was extensive. Her reign is documented above all through these monuments, which present her kingship in the established forms of pharaonic ideology adapted to the rule of a woman.

The legitimation of a female king required the resolution of a deep theological problem, for the Egyptian kingship was conceived in masculine terms, the king the embodiment of the male god Horus and the son of the gods. Hatshepsut addressed this problem in several ways: by the claim of divine birth, which made her the chosen daughter of Amun destined for the throne from before her birth; by the assumption of the full male regalia and titulary of a king, so that she is depicted in the kilt, the false beard, and the crowns of a male pharaoh; and by a careful presentation that combined feminine and masculine elements in her royal image. Her divine-birth reliefs at Deir el-Bahri are the principal expression of this legitimation, depicting the god Amun coming to her mother, the conception and birth of the divine child, and the recognition of the infant as the destined ruler.

After Hatshepsut's death, her stepson Thutmose III ruled alone and became one of the great warrior-kings of Egypt. Late in his reign, a campaign was undertaken to erase Hatshepsut's memory: her images were attacked, her names were chiselled out of her monuments, and her figure was removed from the official record, an act of damnatio memoriae that sought to obliterate the female king from history. The motives for this erasure are debated, whether political, dynastic, or theological, but its effect was to obscure Hatshepsut's reign until modern scholarship reconstructed it from the damaged monuments. The erasure of her name, in Egyptian thought, was an attempt at the theological annihilation of the deceased, the removal of the name that perpetuated existence, and the partial recovery of her memory in the modern era is the undoing of that ancient attempt at oblivion.

The Story

The story of Hatshepsut is the story of a woman who became king of Egypt and of the theology by which she justified her unprecedented rule. She was born a royal princess, the daughter of King Thutmose I of the Eighteenth Dynasty and his great royal wife Ahmose. In the ordinary course of Egyptian royal life she was married to her half-brother, who became King Thutmose II, and she bore him a daughter; but Thutmose II also had a son, the future Thutmose III, by a secondary wife, and on the early death of Thutmose II this boy, still a young child, became king. Hatshepsut, as the senior royal woman and the boy-king's stepmother and aunt, became regent, ruling Egypt on behalf of the child.

The regency might have ended when the boy came of age, but within a few years Hatshepsut took a step without real precedent: she assumed the full titles and regalia of a king, becoming pharaoh in her own right alongside, and in effect above, her stepson. She took the throne-name Maatkare and the full fivefold royal titulary, was crowned with the crowns of kingship, and was depicted in the dress and regalia of a male pharaoh, the kilt, the false beard, and the royal crowns. For some two decades she ruled as king, while Thutmose III, though nominally co-king, remained in her shadow until her death. The rule of a woman as pharaoh was an extraordinary thing, and Hatshepsut devoted great effort to its legitimation.

The central instrument of her legitimation was the claim of divine birth. In the reliefs of her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, Hatshepsut set out a narrative of her divine conception and birth: the god Amun, the king of the gods, conceived a desire to father a child who would rule Egypt, and taking the form of King Thutmose I, he came to the queen Ahmose, Hatshepsut's mother, and conceived in her the divine child. The reliefs depict the meeting of the god and the queen, the modelling of the child and her ka by the creator-god Khnum on his potter's wheel, the announcement of the birth, the delivery of the divine infant, and the presentation of the child to the gods and her recognition as the destined ruler of Egypt. By this narrative Hatshepsut claimed to be the very daughter of Amun, fathered by the god and destined for the throne from before her birth, and the divine-birth reliefs are the first surviving Egyptian royal divine-birth narrative, a theological foundation for her kingship.

The claim of divine birth answered the deep problem of a female king. The Egyptian kingship was conceived in masculine terms, the king the embodiment of the male god Horus and the son of the gods, and the rule of a woman strained this conception. The divine birth made Hatshepsut the chosen daughter of Amun, destined for the throne by the god's own will, and it grounded her authority in the highest divine sanction. Together with her assumption of the full male regalia and titulary, by which she presented herself in the established forms of pharaonic kingship, the divine birth provided the theological and ideological basis for her unprecedented rule.

Hatshepsut's reign was marked by prosperity, building, and trade rather than by war. Her most celebrated enterprise was the great trading expedition to the land of Punt, a distant region to the south, probably on the coast of the Horn of Africa, reached by sea. The expedition, depicted in reliefs at Deir el-Bahri alongside the divine birth, returned with the treasures of Punt: myrrh and incense, including living myrrh-trees transported in baskets to be planted at the temple, together with gold, ebony, exotic animals, and other wonders. The Punt reliefs celebrate the wealth and reach of Hatshepsut's Egypt and present the expedition as undertaken at the command of Amun, the god to whom its treasures were dedicated, and they are among the most vivid and detailed records of Egyptian foreign trade.

Hatshepsut's building program was extensive and of high quality. Her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, designed by her favored official Senenmut, rises in colonnaded terraces against the cliffs of the Theban west bank, a masterpiece of Egyptian architecture that integrates the temple into its dramatic setting. At Karnak, the great temple of Amun, she erected obelisks among the tallest ever raised, their gilded tips catching the sun, and she built the bark-shrine of fine quartzite known as the Red Chapel. Across Egypt she undertook building and restoration, and her monuments are among the finest of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the material expression of a prosperous and confident reign.

After Hatshepsut's death, her stepson Thutmose III at last ruled alone, and he became one of the great warrior-kings of Egypt, leading campaigns that extended Egyptian power into the Levant and Nubia. But late in his reign a campaign was undertaken against the memory of Hatshepsut: her images were attacked, her cartouches chiselled out, her figure removed from the monuments, in a systematic effort to erase the female king from the record. The motives are debated, perhaps a late assertion of the legitimacy of the male line, perhaps a theological objection to the female king, perhaps a dynastic concern; whatever the cause, the erasure sought to obliterate Hatshepsut from history. In Egyptian thought the destruction of the name and image was the theological annihilation of the dead, the removal of the name that perpetuated existence and the casting of the deceased into oblivion, and the campaign against Hatshepsut was an attempt at this annihilation.

Yet the erasure was incomplete, and modern scholarship has reconstructed Hatshepsut's reign from the damaged monuments, recovering the memory that the ancient campaign had sought to destroy. The female king who justified her rule by divine birth, who sent the expedition to Punt and raised the obelisks at Karnak and built the temple at Deir el-Bahri, has been restored to history, her name spoken again and her reign understood, the partial undoing of the ancient attempt at oblivion. Hatshepsut stands as the most successful of the women who ruled Egypt as king, a figure whose unprecedented reign and its theological legitimation, and whose later erasure and modern recovery, make her among the most studied and most compelling of all the pharaohs.

Symbolism

Hatshepsut symbolizes the legitimation of unprecedented rule through divine sanction, the grounding of an extraordinary claim to power in the highest authority of the gods. The rule of a woman as king was without real precedent and theologically difficult, and Hatshepsut's claim of divine birth from Amun symbolizes the resolution of this difficulty through appeal to divine will, the female king made the chosen daughter of the king of the gods, destined for the throne from before her birth. Her legitimation symbolizes the power of divine sanction to authorize even the most unprecedented exercise of power.

The claim of divine birth symbolizes the divine origin of the kingship and the king as the offspring of a god. The narrative of Amun fathering the royal child symbolizes the sacred nature of the kingship, the king as the very child of the god, and Hatshepsut's use of this motif to justify her rule symbolizes the deployment of the theology of divine descent for the legitimation of a particular reign. The divine-birth reliefs symbolize the making-explicit of the king's divine origin, the first surviving narrative of the conception of a king by a god.

Hatshepsut's assumption of the male regalia and titulary symbolizes the adaptation of the masculine forms of kingship to the rule of a woman. The kilt, the false beard, and the male crowns in which she is depicted symbolize her taking-on of the established image of the pharaoh, the presentation of the female king in the forms of the male kingship she occupied. This combination of feminine and masculine elements symbolizes the negotiation by which a woman could occupy the masculine office of king, the female ruler clothed in the symbols of the male pharaoh.

The expedition to Punt symbolizes the wealth, reach, and prosperity of Hatshepsut's Egypt and the dedication of its riches to the gods. The treasures of Punt, the myrrh and incense, the gold and exotic goods, brought back at the command of Amun and dedicated to the god, symbolize the prosperity of the reign and the piety of the king, the wealth of distant lands gathered for the service of the gods. The Punt reliefs symbolize the celebration of a reign of trade and plenty rather than war.

Hatshepsut's monuments symbolize the material expression of a confident and prosperous kingship. The temple at Deir el-Bahri, rising in terraces against the cliffs, the obelisks at Karnak among the tallest ever raised, the Red Chapel of fine quartzite, symbolize the wealth, ambition, and artistic achievement of the reign, the king's authority made visible and permanent in stone. The monuments symbolize the translation of the legitimation of the kingship into the enduring forms of architecture and art.

The erasure of Hatshepsut symbolizes the attempt at the theological annihilation of the dead and the power of the name and image in Egyptian thought. The destruction of her cartouches and figures symbolizes the effort to remove the name that perpetuated existence and to cast the female king into oblivion, the damnatio memoriae that in Egyptian belief was the true and final death. The partial recovery of her memory in the modern era symbolizes the undoing of that attempt, the restoration of the name and the reign that the ancient campaign had sought to destroy, the female king spoken of again and brought back from the oblivion to which she had been condemned.

Cultural Context

Hatshepsut belongs to the early Eighteenth Dynasty, the beginning of the New Kingdom, the period of Egypt's imperial expansion and of some of its greatest monuments. The dynasty had been founded a few generations before her by the kings who expelled the Hyksos and reunited Egypt, and under Hatshepsut and her successors Egypt became the dominant power of the ancient Near East. Her reign, a period of prosperity, building, and trade, falls in the early phase of this expansion, before the great military campaigns of her successor Thutmose III, and her monuments are among the finest achievements of the dynasty.

The rule of a woman as king was an extraordinary and problematic thing in Egyptian terms. The kingship was conceived in masculine forms, the king the embodiment of the male god Horus and the son of the gods, and though queens and royal women held important positions, the office of king was male. A few women had ruled or claimed to rule before Hatshepsut, in periods of dynastic crisis, but none had done so as successfully or for so long, and Hatshepsut's two decades as pharaoh, with a full program of legitimation and monumental building, made her the most successful female king of Egypt. The theological and ideological work required to justify her rule is a central feature of her reign.

The claim of divine birth was the principal instrument of this legitimation, and Hatshepsut's divine-birth reliefs at Deir el-Bahri are the first surviving Egyptian royal divine-birth narrative. The motif of the king fathered by a god, here Amun taking the form of the earthly father to conceive the royal child, would be used by later kings as well, but Hatshepsut's reliefs are the earliest surviving instance, a foundational document of the theology of the king's divine origin and of its use for the legitimation of a particular reign. The reliefs are a key source for the Egyptian conception of the divine birth of the king.

Hatshepsut's monuments are the principal sources for her reign. The mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, with its reliefs of the divine birth and the Punt expedition, the obelisks and Red Chapel at Karnak, and the Speos Artemidos inscription, in which she records her building and restoration work, document her reign and its self-presentation. These monuments present her kingship in the established forms of pharaonic ideology adapted to the rule of a woman, and they are the basis for the modern reconstruction of her reign, which the ancient erasure of her memory had obscured.

The erasure of Hatshepsut's memory after her death, undertaken late in the sole reign of Thutmose III, is a notable episode in the cultural history of the reign. The attack on her images and the chiselling-out of her names sought to remove the female king from the record, an act of damnatio memoriae whose motives, political, dynastic, or theological, are debated. In Egyptian thought the destruction of the name and image was the theological annihilation of the dead, and the campaign against Hatshepsut was an attempt at this annihilation. The study of Hatshepsut draws on her damaged monuments, on the divine-birth and Punt reliefs, and on the scholarship on the Eighteenth Dynasty, female kingship, and the legitimation and erasure of her reign, which together have recovered the memory that the ancient campaign sought to destroy.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

A woman who occupies a throne conceived in masculine terms faces a structural problem every tradition has solved differently: she can claim divine descent that supersedes gender, she can adopt male regalia and perform the office as a man performs it, she can rule through a male title while being known as female, or she can construct an entirely new category. Hatshepsut used the first two solutions simultaneously. The comparison reveals not that female rule is universal but that the theological work required to justify it is always specific to what each tradition most fears to blur.

Chinese — Empress Wu Zetian's Legitimation Through Buddhist Prophecy (Tang dynasty, r. 690–705 CE; Da Yunlun jing forgery, 690 CE)

Wu Zetian, the only woman in Chinese history to rule as emperor in her own right, legitimated her authority partly by commissioning Buddhist monks to produce a sutra, the Da Yunlun jing, which prophesied that a female bodhisattva would become a universal monarch. The structural parallel with Hatshepsut's divine-birth narrative is the use of religious textual authority — rather than military conquest or dynastic genealogy alone — to justify a woman's occupation of an office conceived as masculine. Both women worked the available divine-sanction language to reframe their anomalous position as cosmically intended. The divergence is in the source of sanction: Hatshepsut claimed direct divine fathering by Amun, making her anomaly disappear by making her more divine than any male rival; Wu Zetian used prophecy, making her rule the fulfillment of a text. Divine birth claims the office by identity; Buddhist prophecy claims it by destiny.

Mesopotamian — Kubaba of Kish, the Female Tavern-Keeper who Became King (Sumerian King List, c. 2000 BCE)

The Sumerian King List records that in the Third Dynasty of Kish, one Kubaba, a tavern-keeper, became king and reigned a hundred years, the only woman in the entire list. No divine birth or gender-crossing regalia is invoked — she simply appears as king in the record, without legitimating narrative. The structural divergence from Hatshepsut is instructive: the Mesopotamian tradition could record a female ruler without providing a theology to explain her, while the Egyptian tradition required an elaborate legitimating narrative. Whether this reflects Kubaba's actual historical standing or the King List's compression of oral tradition is debated, but the absence of justification in the Sumerian record is itself significant. Egypt found the female king theologically so problematic that it generated the first surviving royal divine-birth narrative to address it; the Sumerian tradition, at least in its record, simply noted the fact.

Japanese — Empress Suiko and the Regency Behind the Throne (Nihon Shoki, 720 CE)

Empress Suiko (r. 593–628 CE), the first of eight Japanese female sovereigns, ruled with the regent Prince Shotoku as co-administrator, supporting the introduction of Buddhism and the promulgation of the Seventeen-Article Constitution. The legitimating framework was not divine birth or male regalia but the Confucian and Buddhist tradition's sanctification of the virtuous ruler — and the practice of dual-rule that distributed governance between the empress and her male regent. The structural contrast with Hatshepsut is the distribution of authority: Suiko maintained female rule alongside male ceremonial administration, splitting the office; Hatshepsut absorbed the full male titulary without sharing the executive power. Japanese female sovereignty was mediated through co-rule; Egyptian female sovereignty was performed as complete male impersonation.

Roman — The Erasure of Agrippina Minor from Imperial Coinage (54–59 CE; Tacitus, Annales XIV)

Agrippina Minor appeared briefly on Roman imperial coinage facing her son Nero on equal terms after his accession — an assertion of shared authority without precedent. Tacitus records that within years her image was removed from the coinage and she was murdered. The convergence with Hatshepsut is in the mechanism of erasure: where Hatshepsut's cartouches were chiselled from stone, Agrippina's image was removed from currency and her name suppressed. Both cultures wielded the erasure of the name and face as the instrument of political annihilation — and in both cases the erasure was imperfect, the obliterated women surviving in the very monuments that tried to silence them.

Modern Influence

Hatshepsut has become among the most celebrated of all the pharaohs in the modern world, famous above all as the woman who became king of Egypt, and her reign and her later erasure have made her a figure of enduring interest. She is regularly featured in books, documentaries, and exhibitions on ancient Egypt, often as the prime example of a powerful female ruler in the ancient world, and her story, the rise of a woman to the kingship, the legitimation by divine birth, the prosperity of her reign, and the attempt to erase her memory, has a dramatic appeal that has carried her into the popular imagination far beyond the study of Egyptian history.

Hatshepsut has become an icon in the modern interest in women and power, frequently cited as one of history's notable female rulers and a figure of female achievement in a male-dominated world. Her successful occupation of the masculine office of king, her extensive building program, and her prosperous reign are regularly presented as a remarkable instance of female authority in antiquity, and she figures in popular and scholarly discussions of women in power in the ancient world. The interest in her as a female ruler has made her one of the best-known of all Egyptian monarchs.

The erasure of Hatshepsut's memory and its modern recovery have made her a central case in the study of damnatio memoriae and the politics of memory. The ancient attempt to obliterate the female king from the record, and the modern reconstruction of her reign from the damaged monuments, illustrate both the Egyptian belief in the power of the name and image and the work of modern scholarship in recovering a memory that was deliberately destroyed. Hatshepsut is a standard example in discussions of the erasure of historical figures and the recovery of suppressed history.

Hatshepsut's monuments, above all the temple at Deir el-Bahri, have become among the most admired and most visited of all Egyptian sites. The terraced temple rising against the cliffs of the Theban west bank is one of the masterpieces of Egyptian architecture and a major destination, and its reliefs of the divine birth and the Punt expedition are among the most studied and reproduced of Egyptian art. The obelisks at Karnak and the Red Chapel are likewise celebrated, and the monuments of her reign are central to the modern appreciation of Eighteenth Dynasty art and architecture.

Within Egyptology, Hatshepsut remains a major subject of study, treated in the scholarship on the Eighteenth Dynasty, female kingship, royal legitimation, and the divine-birth narrative, as well as in the study of her monuments and the campaign against her memory. The exhibition catalogues and monographs on her reign have presented the modern reconstruction of her kingship, and she is analyzed for her place in the history of the New Kingdom, the theology of her legitimation, and the problem of her erasure, ensuring that this female king, who justified her rule by divine birth and built among the finest monuments of her age, continues to inform the modern understanding of Egyptian kingship, the divine birth of kings, and the recovery of a memory that the ancient world had sought to destroy.

Primary Sources

The primary sources for Hatshepsut are her own monuments. The mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri (c. 1473–1458 BCE), on the west bank at Thebes, is the richest source: its reliefs depict the divine-birth narrative, the Punt expedition, and the king's offering rituals. The divine-birth cycle occupies the southern end of the middle colonnade and is the first surviving Egyptian royal divine-birth narrative, depicting Amun's visit to the queen Ahmose, the modelling of the child by Khnum, the birth, and the presentation of the infant to the gods. These reliefs are published in Édouard Naville, The Temple of Deir el Bahari, 6 vols. (Egypt Exploration Fund, 1895–1908), the standard epigraphic record, and translated in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II: The New Kingdom (University of California Press, 1976), pp. 25–29, where the divine-birth cycle is given with commentary.

The Punt expedition reliefs (middle colonnade, northern portico) depict the sea voyage, the chief of Punt and his wife, the loading of myrrh trees and goods, and their presentation to Amun; they are published in Naville's volumes and discussed in Karl-Joachim Seyfried, 'The Land of Punt,' in Catharine H. Roehrig (ed.), Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), pp. 82–86. This catalogue of the 2005 Metropolitan Museum exhibition is the most comprehensive modern scholarly resource for Hatshepsut's monuments and reign.

The obelisks at Karnak, including the still-standing southern obelisk (c. 1457 BCE), bear inscriptions in which Hatshepsut describes her commission and her piety toward Amun. The texts are collected in Kurt Sethe, Urkunden der 18. Dynastie (Urk. IV, 358–367; Akademie Verlag, 1906–58), the standard critical edition of Eighteenth Dynasty inscriptions, and translated in James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. II (University of Chicago Press, 1906), §§319–342. The Speos Artemidos inscription (reign of Hatshepsut, rock-cut chapel near Beni Hasan) records her building and restoration work and attacks those who had damaged earlier monuments; it is translated in Lichtheim, vol. II, pp. 25–29.

For the erasure of Hatshepsut's memory, the evidence is the systematic defacement of her images and cartouches across her monuments, documented and analyzed in the essays in Roehrig (ed.), Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh (Metropolitan Museum, 2005), especially the contribution by Cathleen A. Keller on the erasure campaign (pp. 267–269). The dating of the erasure to late in the sole reign of Thutmose III is argued in the same volume.

Plutarch does not mention Hatshepsut, but Herodotus, Histories II.100 (Loeb, trans. A.D. Godley, 1920), records that Egyptians told him that no woman had ever been king of Egypt — a statement that reflects the success of the ancient erasure and gives the measure of how thoroughly Hatshepsut's memory had been suppressed in the classical period.

Significance

Hatshepsut is significant as the most successful and long-reigning of the women who ruled Egypt as king, a female pharaoh who occupied the masculine office of king for some two decades and undertook a full program of legitimation and monumental building. Her reign is the principal instance of successful female kingship in Egyptian history, and her resolution of the theological and ideological problems that the rule of a woman posed makes her a central figure for the study of Egyptian kingship and its adaptation to unprecedented circumstances.

Hatshepsut is significant for her divine-birth narrative, the first surviving Egyptian royal divine-birth narrative. Her claim to be the daughter of Amun, fathered by the god who took the form of her earthly father, is the earliest surviving instance of the motif of the king fathered by a god, a motif that later kings would also use, and her reliefs at Deir el-Bahri are a foundational document of the theology of the king's divine origin and of its deployment for the legitimation of a particular reign.

Hatshepsut is significant for what her reign reveals about the legitimation of power and the negotiation of the masculine office of king by a woman. Her assumption of the male regalia and titulary, her claim of divine birth, and her careful royal self-presentation illustrate the means by which a woman could occupy and justify the kingship, and they illuminate the Egyptian conception of the kingship as a masculine office and the work required to adapt it to a female ruler. Her reign is a case study in the legitimation of unprecedented rule.

Hatshepsut is significant for the monuments of her reign, among the finest of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The temple at Deir el-Bahri, the obelisks and Red Chapel at Karnak, and her broader building program are major achievements of Egyptian art and architecture, and they are the principal sources for her reign and its self-presentation. Her monuments are central to the modern appreciation of New Kingdom art and to the reconstruction of her kingship.

Hatshepsut is significant, finally, for her erasure and its modern recovery, a case central to the study of damnatio memoriae and the politics of memory. The ancient attempt to obliterate the female king from the record, the chiselling-out of her name and the attack on her images, illustrates the Egyptian belief in the power of the name and image and the theological annihilation that their destruction was meant to effect. The modern reconstruction of her reign from the damaged monuments, the recovery of the memory that the ancient campaign sought to destroy, is the undoing of that attempt at oblivion, and it makes Hatshepsut a compelling example of both the destruction and the recovery of historical memory.

Connections

Hatshepsut is bound most closely to Amun, the king of the gods whom she claimed as her divine father, and to the theology of the divine birth of the king. Her claim to be the daughter of Amun, depicted in the reliefs of her mortuary temple, was the central instrument of her legitimation, and her reign was marked by great building and dedication in the service of the god.

Hatshepsut connects to the broader Egyptian tradition of royal legitimation through divine sanction, a tradition expressed also in the dream-narrative of the Dream Stela of Thutmose IV and the prophecy of dynasty in the tale of Djedi. Her divine-birth narrative is the first surviving royal divine-birth, an early and influential instance of the legitimation of the kingship through the claim of divine descent.

The theology that Hatshepsut's rule strained connects her to the living pharaoh as Horus, for the kingship as the embodiment of the male god Horus posed the problem that the rule of a woman had to overcome. Hatshepsut's assumption of the male regalia and her claim of divine birth were the means by which she occupied the masculine office of king.

Hatshepsut connects to the monuments of her reign and to the broader world of New Kingdom art and architecture, including the obelisks she raised at Karnak among the tallest ever erected. Her temple at Deir el-Bahri, her Red Chapel, and her obelisks are among the finest achievements of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the principal sources for her reign.

Through the erasure of her memory, Hatshepsut connects to the Egyptian theology of the name, the ren, whose destruction was the theological annihilation of the dead, and to the practice of damnatio memoriae by which the names and images of the condemned were removed from the monuments. The campaign against her memory was an attempt at this annihilation, and her modern recovery is its undoing.

Finally, Hatshepsut connects to the broader theme of the king as the maintainer of order and the builder of monuments, and to the prosperity, trade, and building that marked her reign. Her expedition to Punt, her extensive building program, and her presentation of her kingship in the established forms of pharaonic ideology connect her to the wider world of New Kingdom kingship and to the role of the king as the prosperous and pious ruler who served the gods and maintained the order of Egypt.

Further Reading