Hatshepsut Statues Survived Deliberate Erasure

Hatshepsut ruled Egypt from approximately 1479 to 1458 B.C. and became ancient Egypt's most successful female pharaoh. After her death, her successor and former co-ruler, Pharaoh Thutmose III, destroyed her statues in an attempt to obliterate her memory. During excavations at Hatshepsut's funerary temple in Deir el-Bahri in the late 1920s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art recovered numerous fragments of one shattered seated statue. The museum reunited those pieces with fragments held in Berlin in 1929 and restored the sculpture three times, most recently in 1993.

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