Why Did Egypt Try to Erase Hatshepsut, the Woman Who Ruled as Pharaoh?

Hatshepsut was erased because her successors needed the story of the throne to run through men. She ruled Egypt as a full pharaoh for roughly two decades in the fifteenth century BC, but late in the reign of her stepson Thutmose III, and continuing into the reign of his son Amenhotep II, her name and images were systematically removed from monuments. Scholars do not agree on a single motive. The leading explanations are that Thutmose III wanted his own succession to look as if it passed directly from his father, that the erasure shored up his legitimacy, and that a female king was an uncomfortable break with the idea of royal order. The surprising part is that the erasure came long after she died, and that it failed: today she is one of the best-known rulers of ancient Egypt.

A king's daughter in the Eighteenth Dynasty

Hatshepsut was the eldest daughter of Thutmose I and his Great Royal Wife, Ahmose. She married her half-brother Thutmose II, her father's heir, when she was around fourteen or fifteen, and the couple had a daughter named Neferure. Her name means roughly "Foremost of Noble Women".

She also held the office of God's Wife of Amun, a powerful religious position at Thebes. That detail matters. It meant that, before she ever wore a crown, she already had a network among priests and officials, and some modern historians argue that this elite support is what made her rise possible.

From regent to pharaoh

When Thutmose II died, the new king was Thutmose III, the son of a secondary wife and only about two years old. Hatshepsut began to govern as his regent around 1479 BC. For a long time, Egyptologists assumed she stayed a regent. Modern scholars instead think that by about Year 7 of the boy's nominal reign she had taken the full kingship, and that she then back-dated her own accession so that her years were counted from the start.

The result was an unusual double reign. Thutmose III was not removed; he remained king in name, but as the junior partner. In her statues, she was shown larger than him to make the ranking clear. She was not the first woman to rule Egypt on her own account, since Sobekneferu had done so centuries earlier, but she is the most famous.

The false beard: disguise or job title?

The image most people know is Hatshepsut with the royal headcloth, the cobra on her brow, the kilt and the false beard. Her portraits changed over time, moving from clearly female forms to masculine ones, and some reliefs were even re-carved to look more masculine.

It is tempting to read this as a woman hiding her sex. Most scholars do not. They see the regalia as symbols of the office, the uniform of kingship, rather than an attempt to pass as a man. Her inscriptions kept feminine grammatical forms, and her very name told any Egyptian she was a woman. In other words, she was claiming the job, not denying who she was.

She also borrowed religion. Reliefs told a divine birth story in which the god Amun, taking the form of Thutmose I, fathered her, and texts from her reign claimed that her father had named her as his successor.

Myrrh trees from the land of Punt

Her most celebrated achievement was a trading expedition to Punt, a land on the Red Sea route, in Year 9 of the reign. Her delegation brought back 31 living myrrh trees along with frankincense. The voyage is shown on the walls of her temple at Deir el-Bahari, including a memorable picture of Queen Ati of Punt. Goods recorded from Punt included myrrh, ebony, ivory and incense, and the trees planted in the temple courtyard are often described as one of the first known transplants of living plants between nations.

The expedition was trade, but it was also publicity. By carving it into stone, she turned a commercial voyage into proof that the gods favoured her rule.

A builder on a grand scale

Hatshepsut built more than most rulers before her. At Karnak she raised twin obelisks at the temple entrance, at the time the tallest in the world; one still stands. In Year 16 she ordered two more, and one cracked in the quarry at Aswan, where it still lies as the famous "Unfinished Obelisk".

Her masterpiece is the mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari, rising in terraces against the cliffs on the west bank at Thebes. Its architect is uncertain. Her close official Senenmut, the steward who also tutored her daughter, may have overseen it, as may the high priest Hapuseneb. Senenmut's exact relationship with the queen has been the subject of gossip for a century, but the sources do not settle it.

How did she die?

Hatshepsut probably died in Year 22 of Thutmose III, around 1458 BC; a stela from Armant dated to that year marks the start of his sole rule. In 2007 Zahi Hawass announced that an unnamed female mummy from tomb KV60 was very likely hers. The key clue was a loose molar found in a box inscribed with her name, which seemed to fit a gap in the mummy's jaw.

That identification is not airtight. In 2011 researchers reported that the tooth came from a lower jaw while the mummy was missing an upper molar, which cast doubt on the match. So the popular theories about her cause of death, including an infection after a tooth extraction or a cancer, all depend on the mummy really being her.

The erasure, step by step

Here is the twist that most people miss. The attack on her memory did not start the day she died. It came toward the end of Thutmose III's long reign and continued under Amenhotep II. Her cartouches were chiselled out, replaced with the names of Thutmose I or Thutmose II, smoothed over, or hidden behind new stonework. Her statues at Deir el-Bahari were smashed and dumped in a pit, and some monuments at Karnak were walled up.

A delay of twenty years argues against simple personal revenge. If Thutmose III hated her, why wait? That is why scholars prefer political explanations. One view is that he wanted the official line of kings to run cleanly from his father to himself. Another is that the erasure was a way to secure his own legitimacy and that of his son. A third is that the target was the very idea of a female king. There is even a practical suggestion: reusing her monuments saved the cost of new ones. Some recent research also argues that her statues were ritually "deactivated" rather than smashed out of hatred.

The World History Encyclopedia stresses a related point: a pharaoh was supposed to uphold ma'at, cosmic order, and a woman on the throne broke with tradition in a way that later kings may have found dangerous as a precedent.

How the forgotten pharaoh came back

The erasure was thorough but not complete. When early Egyptologists studied her temple, they were puzzled by reliefs that seemed to show male kings while the texts used feminine grammar, a muddle sometimes called the "Hatshepsut Problem". Her name had survived in hidden inner rooms, and fragments of her broken statues were later recovered from the debris dumped near the temple.

Over the twentieth century, her reign was pieced back together. The American historian James Henry Breasted called her "the first great woman in history of whom we are informed". The attempt to delete her ended up making her story more memorable: a woman who took the throne, ruled through peace and trade, and was later edited out by the men who followed.

Learn with Hatshepsut: English phrases about power and memory

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to wipe someone from the record	to remove all trace of them	Later kings tried to wipe her from the record.
to take the reins	to take control	She took the reins when the king was still a child.
to rewrite history	to change the official story	The erasure was an attempt to rewrite history.
to stand the test of time	to last a long time	Her temple has stood the test of time.
behind the scenes	out of public view	Senenmut worked behind the scenes.

Try this: Write three sentences about a leader you admire, using "take the reins", "behind the scenes" and "stand the test of time".