Why were Queen Hatshepsut's statues destroyed in ancient Egypt? We may have the answer.
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Reported by Live Science:
For the past 100 years, Egyptologists thought that when the powerful female pharaoh Hatshepsut died, her nephew and successor went on a vendetta against her, purposefully smashing all her statues to erase her from public memory.
Now, a new study finds that's not quite the case. Although many statues of Hatshepsut were intentionally broken, the reason behind their destruction has nothing to do with her gender or even blotting out her existence, an Egyptologist says. Rather, Hatshepsut's statues were broken to "deactivate" them and eliminate their supposed supernatural powers, according to a study published Tuesday (June 24) in the journal Antiquity.
Hatshepsut (who ruled circa 1473 to 1458 B.C.) was a pharaoh known for commissioning a beautiful temple built at Deir el-Bahri, near ancient Thebes (modern-day Luxor), and for ordering a successful voyage from Egypt to a land known as "Punt," whose precise location is now a matter of debate. She was the wife and half sister of pharaoh Thutmose II (reign circa 1492 to 1479 B.C.) and was supposed to act as regent for her stepson Thutmose III. However, rather than serving as regent, she became a pharaoh in her own right, with Thutmose III acting as a co-regent who had limited power.
After Hatshepsut died, many of her statues were intentionally broken, including at the site of Deir el-Bahri, where archaeologists in the 1920s and 1930s found broken remains of her statues buried in pits. It was believed that these were broken on the orders of Thutmose III after Hatshepsut died, as a form of retribution. However, the new study suggests that these statues were in fact "ritually deactivated" in the same manner that statues belonging to other pharaohs were.
In the study, Jun Yi Wong, a doctoral candidate in Egyptology at the University of Toronto, examined archival records of the statues from Deir el-Bahri that were found in the 1920s and 1930s. Wong found that the statues were not smashed in the face and didn't have their inscriptions destroyed. Instead, they were broken at their neck, waist and feet — something seen in statues of other Egyptian pharaohs during a process that modern-day Egyptologists call "ritual deactivation."
Read more here.