Hatshepsut: The Pharaoh Erased So a Male Line Could Rule

On the stone walls of Deir el-Bahari, on the west bank of Thebes in Egypt, a king’s name once appeared. The name was Maatkare Hatshepsut. Around the fifteenth century BCE, she did more than act as a king’s wife or stand in for a child. She directed the state, organised trade, performed royal rituals, and built monuments that still stand more than 3,000 years later. After her death, stone workers returned. Her name was scraped from cartouches, her images were cut from walls, and her statues were broken and buried in pits. Later king lists skipped the years in which she ruled.

This was not the random damage of grave robbers. The chisels focused on images of Hatshepsut as king. Some images of her as a royal wife or woman survived. That selective destruction shows that the people who ordered it did not need to erase a person who had once lived. They needed to erase a more dangerous version of her: Hatshepsut as a woman who had proved that a female pharaoh could hold the throne while Egypt grew rich and stable.