Hatshepsut

Hatshepsut was the chief wife and half-sister of Pharaoh Thutmose II of the Eighteenth Dynasty. On his death around 1479 BCE she became regent for her stepson Thutmose III, then took the kingship herself in her own right by year seven of the regency. She ruled Egypt for approximately twenty-one years — the longest reign of any female pharaoh in Egyptian history.

Her reign was a period of unprecedented building and commerce. She commissioned the great mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari — three terraces cut into the cliffs of western Thebes — which remains one of the architectural achievements of the ancient world. She organized the first recorded long-distance trading expedition in the Egyptian record: a fleet of five ships to the Land of Punt (in modern Eritrea or Somalia), returning with frankincense, myrrh, gold, ebony, and live myrrh trees that she planted in the gardens of her temple. The reliefs at Deir el-Bahari record this expedition in detail.

She also conducted military campaigns in Nubia, the Levant, and Sinai, securing the borders of Egypt without incurring losses commensurate with the warrior-pharaohs of later dynasties. Her court produced significant literary and artistic work; her chief architect Senenmut was a commoner who, under her patronage, became one of the most powerful officials in Egypt.

Hatshepsut was crowned and depicted in male ceremonial dress with the false beard and nemes headdress of the pharaoh. Egyptian theology had no separate category for a reigning queen; the king-form was the form of legitimate sovereignty. After her death her stepson, who succeeded her, removed her name from the official king-lists and defaced her monuments — an attempted erasure that nineteenth-century Egyptologists undid by carefully reading the inscriptions she had carved.

She is honored here as the most consequential female pharaoh in the three-thousand-year Egyptian record.