Egypt's most successful female pharaoh was almost erased from history.
Hatshepsut ruled Egypt for about two decades, around 1479 to 1458 BC, commissioned hundreds of building projects and sent a famous trading mission to the land of Punt. She was often shown with a pharaoh's false beard. After her death, her statues were smashed and her name chiselled away.
Hatshepsut was the daughter of Thutmose I and married her half-brother, Thutmose II. When he died, the throne passed to her young stepson, Thutmose III, and she ruled as his regent. By about the seventh year of his reign she had taken the full titles of a pharaoh and become senior co-ruler, back-dating her reign to his accession. She was not the first woman to rule Egypt in her own right, but she was the only one to do so in a time of prosperity, and she arguably held more power than her predecessors.
To rule in a male role, she adopted its symbols: the royal headcloth, the kilt and the ceremonial false beard. Early images show her as a woman; later ones increasingly present her with a man's body, and she described herself as both mother and father to the realm. Her reign was largely peaceful and prosperous. She was among the most prolific builders in Egyptian history, and her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari is her masterpiece. Its reliefs record an expedition to Punt that returned with 31 live myrrh trees and frankincense, which she reportedly ground into eyeliner, the first recorded use of the resin.
Late in the reign of Thutmose III and into that of his son, Amenhotep II, there was a concerted effort to remove her from the record. Her images and names were chiselled off, sometimes replaced with those of Thutmose I or II; her statues at Deir el-Bahari were smashed and buried in a pit. Egyptologists long assumed this was Thutmose III's revenge. Many now doubt it: the erasures came only near the end of Thutmose III's long reign, some scholars suspect Amenhotep II was shoring up his own claim, and some statue damage may have been routine ritual 'deactivation'.
In 2007 a mummy from tomb KV60 was proposed as hers, partly because a tooth found in a box bearing her name seemed to fit its jaw. Later analysis cast doubt on that match, so her identification remains uncertain.
Source: Wikipedia — Hatshepsut · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
