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Hatshepsut’s reign is well known for its ignominious end. The attack on her memory is an integral part of her story. But many traces of her image remain. This sculpture is one of a few that has survived essentially intact. Many others have been carefully pieced back together – and, in some cases, substantially restored – from a huge number of fragments found in pits outside the female pharaoh’s ‘mansion of millions of years’ called Djeser-Djeseru (‘Holy of Holies’), at the site known today as Deir el-Bahri in western Luxor.
This example is one of a pair, its mate being more extensively restored and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Hatshepsut is depicted as a sphinx, a human-lion hybrid favoured by Egyptian kings since the Fourth Dynasty. Framed by the leonine mane, which radiates from the face in lines almost like the striped royal nemes-headcloth, the face is the only human feature. Both the Cairo and New York sphinxes are made of limestone and show evidence of having originally been painted yellow, with details of the mane and beard in blue. This strongly indicates that the divine nature of the queen is being represented. Although yellow is associated with females (in contrast with red-brown for males), the colour equally connotes gold; deities were said to have golden flesh and hair of lapis lazuli.
Indeed, the maned appearance and strikingly large beard were inspired by Middle Kingdom forerunners: a set of at least eight granodiorite examples made originally for Amenemhat III and found at Tanis (see AE 149). This is typical of Hatshepsut’s artisans: taking inspiration from the past to create suitably majestic images of her kingship. Hatshepsut championed innovative statuary forms and arrangements, including the first major ‘avenue of sphinxes’: as many as 120 sphinx sculptures – mostly made of sandstone or red granite – flanked the approach to the Temple of Djeser-Djeseru. Evidence for the emplacements for this avenue survived to be recorded on maps in the early 1800s. Recent restorations at the temple aim to reconstruct at least part of this avenue to suggest its intended appearance.
Further recent research has shown that, rather than necessarily being motivated by a zealous hate campaign, the damage attested on this and many other statues of the female pharaoh, is evidence of a gradual deactivation and repurposing of stone for use in other structures over time.
Image: Karl Harris
