Dynastic History|Deir el-Bahari — Reading the Wreckage of Hatshepsut's Statues

Through the 1920s the Metropolitan Museum's expedition under Herbert Winlock dug in front of Hatshepsut's terraced temple at Deir el-Bahari and brought up thousands of fragments of her statues. Winlock read them as the leavings of Thutmose III's spite, and that reading held for a century: a stepson erasing a stepmother.

In 2025 Jun Yi Wong went back to the excavation records and published the result in Antiquity. Many of the faces, he found, had survived intact. The architectural Osiride figures showed methodical dismantling of a kind consistent with reuse as material, and the heads — the least reusable part — were the best preserved. The pattern looks less like rage than like the ritual deactivation of statues recorded at other Egyptian sites, followed by later scavenging.

The mission that works at the temple makes a related point: the older interpretations owed something to assumptions about Hatshepsut's gender, and the erasures on her walls are layered rather than single. Cartouches are often only partly cut, sparing the god's name inside them; some scenes were attacked again in the Amarna period and restored afterwards; more damage came with later iconoclasm. Chiselling out a reign across a building on this scale is a work order carried out by gangs over weeks, not a fit of temper — which is what makes the question of who ordered it, and when, worth asking rather than assuming.

The Polish-Egyptian mission founded in 1961 by Kazimierz Michałowski still documents and rebuilds here. The solar cult complex opened to visitors on 22 February 2015, the main sanctuary of Amun-Re on 9 December 2017, two further rooms on 9 February 2023.

📸 Cover: the temple below the Theban cliff, Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons