Several ancient stone blocks were unearthed earlier this year in the remains of a previously unknown building by an Archaeological team from the German Archaeological Institute on the Island of Elephantine, Aswan, Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities announced this week.
The discovery of the blocks is notable because a number of them depict Queen Hatshepsut as a woman in the early part of her reign which lasted from 1473 B.C. to 1458 B.C. In the latter part of her reign, she was depicted as a man. The building remains are thought to be a way station for the festival barque of the god Khnum. Khnum is usually depicted wearing a ram’s head and is one of the earliest of Egypt’s deities, the god of the source of the Nile River.
It is thought that because several of the blocks show her being presented as the queen, the building was erected during the early part of her reign before she began ruling as a male pharaoh. The only other buildings to be found representing the early part of her career are in Karnak. But this discovery will certainly add to our knowledge of the queen.
Queen Hatshepsut ruled for 15-years with her stepson/nephew Thutmose III after her husband, the pharaoh Thutmose II, died of some sort of hideous skin disease. Thutmose III, perhaps to get from under the clutches of his stepmother, went off to fight wars, becoming known as the “Napoleon of Egypt.”
It really was unusual for a woman to rule as pharaoh of Egypt. Egyptologist Ian Shaw noted in his book “Exploring Ancient Egypt” (published in 2003), “In the history of Egypt during the dynastic period (3000 to 332 B.C.) there were only two or three women who managed to rule as pharaohs, rather than wielding power as the ‘great wife’ of a male king.”
What is amazing about the woman is her audacity to rule as a man. Her reign indicates she was one of the greatest builders in one of Egypt’s greatest dynasties, building and renovating temples and shrines from the Sinai to Nubia. In the temple of the great god Amun at Karnak, there are four obelisks erected by Queen Hatshepsut, and they are among the most magnificent monuments ever built.
It seems like the queen was afraid of not being remembered because she commissioned hundreds of statues of herself, and left accounts of her lineage, titles, and her history in stone. On one of the obelisks in Karnak, Queen Hapshepsut expresses her concerns. The inscription reads: “Now my heart turns this way and that, as I think what the people will say. Those who see my monuments in years to come, and who shall speak of what I have done.”
Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief archeologist, said in 2007 that Egypt’s female pharaohs seem to capture our imagination. He cited Queens like Nefertiti and Cleopatra, saying, “But it is perhaps Hatshepsut, who was both a king and a queen who was most fascinating. Her reign during the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt was a prosperous one, yet mysteriously she was erased from Egyptian history.”
And when she died at the age of 50 from bone cancer, Thutmose III went about systematically attempting to erase any visual evidence of the Queen. He outlived her by 40 years, and in that time, he had her statues thrown into the quarries, replaced her face on wall reliefs with the face of his father, Thutmose II, and even defaced any images of her courtiers.
But time doesn’t erase everything, as we now are learning more and more about this remarkable woman who dared to rule Egypt as a woman and as a man. When Howard Carter opened King Tutankhamun’s grave in 1906. In the tomb were two female mummies, one was believed to be Hatshepsut’s wet nurse and the other remained unidentified until recently.
In 2007, Dr. Zahi Hawass brought the mummy of the unidentified woman to Cairo’s Egyptian Museum for testing. According to further testing, Hapshepsut, the previously unidentified woman in King Tut’s tomb was identified after a tooth known to belong to the queen matched with the larger of the two mummies, suggesting the queen was obese with rotten teeth and pendulous breasts.
