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Hathepsut is one of the most famous figures of the old Egypt. In 1479 before our regent In the name of his young nephew Thutmose III. In 1473, she began to govern as a full -fledged pharaoh, becoming one of the exceptionally rare female sovereigns of civilization. More than three thousand years later, when archaeologists searched thousands of fragments of his statues, researchers largely supposed that his malicious successor had ordered the total destruction of his images. New research, however, has a more nuanced image.
The Egyptologist of the University of Toronto, Jun Yi Wong, suggests that a large part of the damage caused to the statues of the female pharaoh was the result of ancient Egyptian “deactivation” rituals and their use as materials for other constructions. Although Hatshepsut (pronounced “Hat-SHEP-FSOOT”) faced a political backlash after his death, Wong’s search challenges the dominant opinion that Thutmose III ordered the complete destruction of all the representations of his former regent with a malicious intention.
“After his death, the monuments of Pharaoh Hatshepsut (reigned c. 1473-1458 BC) were subjected to a systematic program of destruction, the most common manifestation of which was the erasure of his name and his image of the walls of the temple,” wrote Wong in a study Published today in the Revue Antiquity, of which he is the only author. “This law was launched by Thutmose III, its nephew and its successor (only reigns around 1458-1425 before JC), but the motivation behind it remains controversial.”
From 1922 to 1928, archaeologists searched numerous statues of Hathepsut near his mortuary temple in Deir El-Bahri, in Egypt. Given the damaged conditions of the figures, the archaeologist Herbert Winlock of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who directed the excavations, identified them as “exasperating relics of the spite of Thutmose”, as cited in the study.
However, Wong claims that “if Hatshepsut’s” broken face “has dominated popular perception, such an image does not reflect the processing of its statuary to all its extent.”
After studying the type of damage documented in unpublished field notes, the drawings, photographs and letters of the 20th century excavations, the Egyptologist underlines that many statues have been kept in a relatively decent state, with intact faces. The presumption is that if Thutmose III was determined to destroy the memory of Hathepsut, it would have been more meticulous in its destruction.
In addition, Wong argues that some of the statues of Hatshepsy are not different from the statues of other male Egyptian leaders, many of whom are no evidence of persecution after death. Other types of specific damage, the fragments dispersed with ruptures at the neck, knees and / or ankles are “supposed to be a form of” deactivation “intended to neutralize the inherent power of the statues”, wrote Wong.
In other words, the ritual was not intrinsically hostile. Certain damage may also have been caused or aggravated by the reuse of statues as a building material during subsequent periods. However, this does not completely deny the possibility that some of the damage is indeed linked to a political reaction.
“Unlike other leaders, Hatshepsut has undergone a program of persecution, and its wider political implications cannot be overestimated,” concluded Wong in a statement from Antiquity. “However, there is room for a more nuanced understanding of the actions of Thutmose III, which were perhaps motivated by ritual necessity rather than by pure and simple antipathy.”
In the end, the suggestion that Hathepsut was treated like other pharaohs who died after her death, despite the persecution, raises her on the throne as an even more extraordinary woman.
