The 18th-Dynasty Egyptian Queen Who Ruled as Pharaoh for Two Decades and Whose Name Her Stepson Ordered Chiselled Off Every Monument Twenty Years After Her Death

Hatshepsut (c. 1507 – c. 1458 BCE) was the chief royal wife of Thutmose II of the 18th Dynasty. When Thutmose II died around 1479 BCE the heir, his son Thutmose III by a junior wife, was a small child of perhaps two years. Hatshepsut became regent. Within seven years she had taken the full pharaonic titulary in her own name and was being depicted in royal sculpture wearing the false beard and nemes headdress of a male pharaoh.

She ruled for approximately twenty-two years.

Her reign was peaceful and commercially successful. The expedition to Punt (probably modern Eritrea or coastal Sudan) in approximately 1463 BCE returned with thirty-one live myrrh trees, baboons, leopard skins, ebony, gold, and ivory. The expedition is recorded in detailed bas-relief on the walls of her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri. She also commissioned approximately 100 surviving statues, two granite obelisks at Karnak (one of which still stands as the tallest surviving Egyptian obelisk in Egypt at 28.5 metres), and a network of trade and diplomatic relationships across the Levant.

Her senior administrator Senenmut was, by 1470 BCE, the most powerful non-royal official in Egypt. His tomb at Deir el-Bahri contains the earliest known star map (a depiction of the northern sky with named constellations). The exact nature of his relationship to Hatshepsut — political, sexual, or both — is disputed.

Hatshepsut died around 1458 BCE. Modern dental and CT analysis of a mummy identified as hers in 2007 (KV60a in the Cairo Museum) suggests metastatic bone cancer with secondary infection, possibly precipitated by a topical skin medication that contained the carcinogen benzopyrene. She was about 50.

The erasure

Thutmose III ruled for an additional thirty-three years after Hatshepsut’s death. His own reign is one of the most successful in Egyptian history — he campaigned seventeen times into the Levant, established Egyptian control to the Euphrates, and is sometimes called the “Napoleon of ancient Egypt” in Victorian historiography.

The erasure campaign began approximately twenty years into his solo reign — around 1438 BCE. Thutmose III ordered Hatshepsut’s cartouches chiselled out of the visible monumental record. Her statues were broken up and dumped in pits near Deir el-Bahri. Her name was replaced on public reliefs with either Thutmose I, Thutmose II, or Thutmose III himself, depending on what the original inscription had recorded her as doing.

The motive is debated. The 19th- and early 20th-century interpretation — Thutmose III’s personal revenge for a stolen regency — has been progressively replaced by a more institutional reading. The 21st-century consensus is that the erasure was a dynastic rather than personal act: Thutmose III was removing the historical record of a non-male pharaonic precedent that might complicate his own son Amenhotep II’s succession. The timing supports the institutional reading. The campaign began approximately when Amenhotep II was reaching coronation age.

The chiselling was thorough but not complete. Many inscriptions on inaccessible interior temple walls, on the underside of obelisks, and on the back faces of statues that had been thrown into pits were not erased. The Deir el-Bahri temple — which had been substantially buried by the late Roman period — preserved the largest single surviving corpus of Hatshepsut inscriptions until the 19th-century French and German archaeological clearances.

What the modern record looks like

Hatshepsut entered the modern Egyptological record only in the 1820s. Jean-François Champollion identified her cartouche during his 1828–1829 Egyptian expedition but read it as a male pharaoh’s because the depictions wore the male beard. The female identification was made by the German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius in the 1840s.

The 1903 Metropolitan Museum / Egypt Exploration Fund clearance of Deir el-Bahri recovered approximately 200 fragments of Hatshepsut’s smashed statues from the pits where Thutmose III had dumped them. Conservators have reassembled about a dozen of the statues to display condition. The seated granite statue now in the Metropolitan Museum is one of them.

Hatshepsut is the longest-reigning female pharaoh in 3,000 years of recorded Egyptian history. Her stepson did not succeed in erasing her.