Hatshepsut

• 1. Introduction

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  Hatshepsut ruled Egypt for roughly twenty-one years and nine months, and then someone tried to make sure history forgot her entirely. Her statues were smashed and buried in pits. Her name was chiselled from stone walls. The achievements she had built were reassigned to the men who came before and after her. For centuries, when scholars looked at the temple she constructed at Deir el-Bahari, they saw inscriptions referring to a bearded king with nouns and verbs written in the feminine, and they could not make sense of what they were reading. Who was this person? How did a woman become pharaoh of Egypt? And why did someone go to such extraordinary lengths to erase her? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Daughter Made Pharaoh

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  Hatshepsut was born between 1505 and 1495 BC as the eldest daughter of Thutmose I and his great royal wife, Ahmose. When her father died, she married her half-brother and father's heir, Thutmose II, at the age of fourteen or fifteen. The two had at least one daughter together, Princess Neferure, who carried the title "King's Eldest Daughter" -- a title that implies a second daughter may also have existed, though she appears to have died young.

  When Thutmose II died, the throne passed to a boy named Thutmose III, who was only two years old. He was not Hatshepsut's son but her stepson, the child of a secondary wife. Hatshepsut stepped in as regent. That arrangement, by Year 7 of Thutmose III's reign, around 1472 BC, had quietly transformed into something far more consequential. Hatshepsut had assumed the full position of pharaoh alongside him, adopting the complete royal titulary and sharing his existing regnal count, which effectively back-dated her own accession to Year 1.

  Thutmose III was designated the junior coregent, identified with Horus. Hatshepsut took the senior role, identified with Osiris. She was not a queen ruling in a king's absence. She was pharaoh.

• 3. Wearing the Beard

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  To hold pharaonic authority in a society built around male kingship, Hatshepsut constructed a public identity that drew on both male and female symbolism. In official representations, she wore the Khat head cloth topped with the uraeus, the traditional false beard, and the shendyt kilt -- the full regalia of the pharaonic office. Statues show her with physically masculine traits, broad shoulders, and the musculature of a male pharaoh.

  Scholars are careful to note that these images were understood as symbolic rather than as evidence of cross-dressing or androgyny. She performed religious rituals that had previously been reserved for kings, corroborating that she had genuinely assumed roles her predecessors treated as male. She also emphasized maternal qualities alongside these masculine attributes, conveying the idea that she was both mother and father to the realm.

  To further anchor her claim, the priests told a story of divine birth. In this myth, the god Amun goes to her mother Ahmose in the form of Thutmose I. Hatshepsut is conceived. The god Khnum then forms a body and ka for her, and the goddess Heket leads Ahmose to the place of birth. Reliefs depicting each step in this story were carved at Karnak and inside her mortuary temple. The Oracle of Amun also proclaimed that it was Amun's will for Hatshepsut to be pharaoh, and she had those words carved into her monuments: "Welcome my sweet daughter, my favorite, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Maatkare, Hatshepsut. Thou art the Pharaoh, taking possession of the Two Lands."

  Inscriptions on her mortuary temple walls went further, depicting her late father declaring her his chosen successor with the words: "This daughter of mine, Khnumetamun Hatshepsut -- may she live! -- I have appointed as my successor upon my throne... she shall direct the people in every sphere of the palace."

• 4. Building and Trade

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  Hatshepsut's reign brought Egypt a period of prosperity and general peace, and she used it to build on a scale few pharaohs matched. She commissioned hundreds of construction projects throughout Upper and Lower Egypt, employing the architect Ineni, who had also served her father, her husband, and the royal steward Senenmut.

  At Karnak, she erected twin obelisks at the temple entrance that were, at the time of their construction, the tallest in the world. Only one still stands upright, and it is the second-tallest ancient obelisk still standing today. The other toppled and broke in two. A later commission for two more obelisks to celebrate her sixteenth year as pharaoh ran into difficulty when one broke during construction; a third had to be quarried as a replacement. The broken original was left behind at its quarrying site in Aswan, where it remains today, known as the Unfinished Obelisk.

  She built the Temple of Pakhet at Beni Hasan in the Minya Governorate. The cavernous underground structure was cut into the rock cliffs on the eastern side of the Nile. Greek visitors during the Ptolemaic period called it the Speos Artemidos, seeing in the lioness goddess Pakhet a match for their own hunter goddess, Artemis. The temple carries a long dedicatory text that scholar James P. Allen has translated, containing Hatshepsut's famous denunciation of the Hyksos.

  Hatshepsut also sent a trading expedition to the Land of Punt. Her delegation returned bearing thirty-one live myrrh trees along with frankincense and other luxuries. She had the charred frankincense ground into kohl eyeliner -- the earliest recorded use of the resin for that purpose. The expedition was commemorated in relief at Deir el-Bahari, which preserves a notably realistic depiction of Queen Ati of the Land of Punt. Shortly after the Punt expedition, she also sent raiding expeditions to Byblos and the Sinai Peninsula, though the details of those missions are largely lost.

  The crown of her building program was the mortuary temple complex at Deir el-Bahari, located directly opposite the city of Luxor. Whether the architect was the Overseer of Works Senenmut or the High Priest Hapuseneb remains unclear. Its focal point was a structure called Djeser-Djeseru, meaning "the Holy of Holies", and it is regarded as one of the masterpieces of ancient architecture.

• 5. Erasing a Pharaoh

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  Toward the end of the reign of Thutmose III and into the reign of his son Amenhotep II, a systematic campaign against Hatshepsut's memory unfolded. Her cartouches were chiselled from stone walls. Her statues at Deir el-Bahari were torn down and in many cases smashed and disfigured before being buried in a pit. At Karnak, an attempt was made to wall up her monuments entirely. Erasure methods ranged from complete destruction of her name and image to smoother patchwork jobs that simply covered her cartouches, to full replacement, inserting Thutmose I or II where Hatshepsut once appeared.

  For a long time, scholars assumed Thutmose III was acting out of resentment -- a kind of ancient version of the Roman practice known as damnatio memoriae. Egyptologist Donald Redford challenged that reading, arguing the erasures were a political necessity rather than a product of hatred. He pointed out that in dark recesses of shrines and tombs, where ordinary eyes would never go, Hatshepsut's cartouche and figure were sometimes left intact.

  Historian Joyce Tyldesley proposed a more strategic motive: Thutmose III may have wanted to position himself as the direct successor of Thutmose II, erasing any record that a female co-ruler had stood between them. More recently, some researchers have suggested the destruction of her statuary may not have been iconoclasm at all, but rather a routine ritual deactivation of funerary statues.

  Suspicion has also fallen on Amenhotep II. His claim to the throne was not strong, and he had motive to discredit a lineage that complicated his own. His reign is marked by efforts to suppress the roles of royal women more broadly; he declined to record the names of his queens and eliminated powerful titles like God's Wife of Amun. Some of those titles were restored by his own son, Thutmose IV.

• 6. Lost and Found

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  When 19th-century scholars began interpreting the inscriptions at Deir el-Bahari, they faced a puzzle that baffled the field for decades. The French hieroglyphic decoder Jean-Francois Champollion described the confusion plainly: he saw what appeared to be two male kings, one of them known as Thutmose III, repeatedly depicted with all the insignia of royalty -- but wherever the inscriptions referred to the bearded, robed figure beside him, the nouns and verbs were in the feminine. "I found the same peculiarity everywhere," Champollion wrote.

  Sorting out the chronology of the early Eighteenth Dynasty became a central problem in late-19th and early-20th-century Egyptology. This tangle of confusion over the succession of Thutmose I, II, III, and the unnamed female ruler eventually acquired a name: "the Hatshepsut Problem."

  Physical evidence began to fill in the picture slowly. A 1935-36 Metropolitan Museum of Art expedition working on a hillside near Thebes discovered pottery jars in the tomb of Ramose and Hatnofer. One jar bore the stamp of the "God's Wife Hatshepsut," two others carried the seal of "The Good Goddess Maatkare," and one was dated to "Year 7." These jars had been sealed into the burial chamber by debris from a nearby tomb, providing undisputed proof that Hatshepsut had been acknowledged as pharaoh -- and not merely regent -- by Year 7.

  In 1903, Howard Carter cleared tomb KV20 in the Valley of the Kings, originally quarried for Thutmose I and likely the first royal tomb built there. Hatshepsut had extended it with a new burial chamber and planned a double interment for herself and her father. Later in the same season, Carter also discovered tomb KV60, which contained two female mummies. One was identified as Hatshepsut's wet nurse. The other went unidentified for more than a century.

  In spring 2007, Egyptologist Zahi Hawass removed the unidentified mummy -- designated KV60A -- and transported it to Cairo's Egyptian Museum for examination. The mummy was missing a tooth. In the Royal Mummy Cache at DB320, a wooden canopic box bearing Hatshepsut's name had earlier been found to contain, among other things, a single molar. The space in the KV60A jaw matched the tooth. Hawass concluded the KV60A mummy was very likely Hatshepsut. A complication arose in 2011, however, when the tooth was re-examined and found to be a molar from a lower jaw, while the KV60A mummy was missing an upper molar, casting doubt on the identification.

• 7. What Her Reign Meant

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  Egyptologist James Henry Breasted described Hatshepsut as "the first great woman in history of whom we are informed." That assessment has shaped how scholars approach her ever since, though the picture has grown more complicated as research has deepened.

  Kara Cooney has argued that Hatshepsut was essentially elevated by Egypt's elite class to serve their own interests. Her prior record as a High Priestess and her successful management of the succession crisis made her a useful instrument for those nominally serving under her. During her reign, the elites gained significant power and wealth alongside her.

  Hatshepsut also broke one pattern that had governed female rule before her: she managed to hold power as regent for a stepson, not a biological son. Previous female rulers had only been permitted that role for their own children. By using that regency to build temples and accustom the public to female authority, she ensured that when the Oracle declared her king, acceptance followed more readily.

  Her depictions shifted visibly across her reign. Early images of Hatshepsut were traditionally feminine, using yellow paint and a full-body gown. Later images mixed these with masculine attributes: the atef crown, a beard, and eventually the red paint, bare torso, and muscles of a male pharaoh, with inscriptions shifting between male and female pronouns. She was the sixth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and her last dated attestation as pharaoh falls on the 2nd of III Peret, Year 20, around the 22nd of May 1459 BC. The stela erected at Armant records the beginning of Thutmose III's sole rule on the 10th of II Peret, Year 22, corresponding to the 16th of January 1458 BC.