By Destroying This Female Pharaoh’s Legacy, Her Successor Preserved It Forever
How the modern world came to understand Hatshepsut’s might
By Eleanor Cummins
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…
