Hello Friends,
Queen Hatshepsut put on the false beard of a male pharaoh and ruled Egypt during the 18th dynasty. No doubt she had her reasons for giving up being a Queen and becoming a masculine figure of authority. The names she used as king were grammatically feminine participles, and were not hiding her female status. She was innovating the dynastic traditions or bending gender rules already.
Hatshepsut’s kingship was one of the most successful in Egyptian history. She was powerful. She led a military campaign. Trade flourished and Egypt grew wealthier. She built her famous temple at Deir el-Bahari in the Valley of Kings, Luxor.
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Hatshepsut’s
mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari in the Valley of Kings, Luxor.
The building has
three levels of smooth geometric lines set against the backdrop of rugged,
rocky natural mountains. The lower courtyard once had gardens of trees and
shrubs.
source: Google+
France Michard Knapp
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She added obelisks and a “Palace of Ma’at”
(Goddess of truth, justice, balance and morality) to the temple of Karnak. Hatshepsut
royal name was Ma’at-ka-re, “spirit of harmony and truth”.
The next pharaoh in the royal succession tried
to erase her name from history.
The modern day gentlemen who discovered her
mortuary temple and tomb judged her deviant reign by the prejudices of
their own minds. However, now researchers are changing their thinking about the
great Egyptian Queen and also King.
Next up, I have a link to an article written by Elizabeth
B. Wilson for the Smithsonian Magazine, which discusses the original soap opera
way of thinking about Hatshepsut and some possible
reasons why she declared herself king.
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Hatshepsut’s
Temple.
source: Google+
France Michard Knapp |
The Queen Who Would Be King
A scheming stepmother or a strong and effective ruler? History’s view of the pharaoh Hatshepsut changed over time
By Elizabeth B. Wilson
Smithsonian Magazine The Queen Who Would Be King
It was a hot, dusty day in early 1927, and
Herbert Winlock was staring at a scene of brutal destruction that had all the
hallmarks of a vicious personal attack. Signs of desecration were everywhere;
eyes had been gouged out, heads lopped off, the cobra-like symbol of royalty
hacked from foreheads. Winlock, head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s archaeological
team in Egypt, had unearthed a pit in the great temple complex at Deir
el-Bahri, across the Nile from the ancient sites of Thebes and Karnak. In the
pit were smashed statues of a pharaoh—pieces “from the size of a fingertip,”
Winlock noted, “to others weighing a ton or more.” The images had suffered
“almost every conceivable indignity,” he wrote, as the violators vented “their
spite on the [pharaoh’s] brilliantly chiseled, smiling features.” To the
ancient Egyptians, pharaohs were gods. What could this one have done to warrant
such blasphemy? In the opinion of Winlock, and other Egyptologists of his
generation, plenty.
The statues were those of Hatshepsut, the sixth
pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, one of the few—and by far the most
successful—women to rule Egypt as pharaoh. Evidence of her remarkable reign (c.
1479-1458 b.c.) did not begin to emerge until the 19th century. But by
Winlock’s day, historians had crafted the few known facts of her life into a
soap opera of deceit, lust and revenge...
♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
The video below is from the Irish Audio Project.(I ♥ listening to Irish people speak) It’s
a short radio documentary about the forgotten women of history called, AMAZING
GRACES - Hatshepsut, the 'She-King' of Egypt.
In 1828,
Jean-François Champollion discovered the partially erased name of a pharaoh,
accompanied by feminine titles and conjugation. He was very puzzled -
pictorially, the pharaoh was male, but hieroglyphically, he was a ‘she’.
Piecing
together the sparse clues, a story emerged that the woman pharaoh had kept her
step-son, the rightful heir, off the throne. Forgotten for thousands of years,
Hatshepsut, the She-King of Egypt, emerged two centuries ago as an evil,
power-hungry stepmother. However, using forensic evidence from the mummified
remains, discovered in 1989, the truth of Hatshepsut's life and reign emerges.
Enjoy your weekend.
♥ Ashlyn
