Hapshepsut, Large Kneeling Statue
Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1929
Hatshepsut, one of Egypt’s few female pharaohs, would understand. Twenty years after her death, her nephew and successor Thutmose III smashed her statues and erased her name from the public record, to the consternation of early 20th-century archaeologists reconstructing Egyptian chronology. The Met’s simulacrum of Hatshepsut’s temple is filled with her pieced-together images, including this Large Kneeling Statue (ca. 1479–1458 B.C.E.), which depicts her as a male pharaoh.