Hatshepsut Temple

During the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, Hatshepsut was one of the most powerful women in the world. She was a strong-willed woman who ruled as pharaoh for 15 years. She was an important figure for women who were trying to gain a place in the society of that time.

It was very rare for a woman to become pharaoh but Hatshepsut was successful and is still remembered today by historians. She was a great ruler and her name is known for having re-established trade relationships that were broken by a foreign people who invaded Egypt in the Second Intermediate Period and disrupted all of the ancient trading routes.

She was also very successful in her building projects. She restored a number of temples and monuments that had been destroyed during this period and commissioned many others. She was an architect herself and was highly skilled. She erected twin obelisks in front of her temple at Karnak and made the building projects she commissioned much larger and more elaborate than any of her predecessors had done.

Her most famous building project was her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri which is still considered to be one of the most spectacular temples in all of Egypt. It is a unique collonaded design which is admired to this day by art historians.

The statues of her in her temple are a combination of figures from her mythology and the ancient Egyptian culture. They show her being surrounded by different gods, each of them representing a different aspect of the queen.

For example, in the first row of the statues are the goddesses Hathor and Isis who are presenting her to the god Amon. In the next scene of the colonnade there is another goddess Hathor with Hatshepsut and she is bringing her to Amon who is holding the child. Then in the next scene of the colonnade the frog headed goddess Haqt puts the breath of life into the baby's nostrils, and then the queen is surrounded by different gods with her and Amon is presenting her to the god of water Nephesus.

In the third scene of the colonnade we see Hatshepsut as she is seated on a lion-head couch, this is her father Amon's god and in front of her there are her goddesses who were her mother. Her mother was the god Khnum and her father was the pharaoh Amon.

She renamed herself Maatkare, which means truth and the soul of Re. This was her new name which she took in order to emphasise that she was a legitimate queen and to reassure the people that she was ruling properly.

When she was a young girl she had been a princess and was the daughter of Amon. She was a great queen who grew up in the palace and she had the support of her father Amon who was the patron god for Thebes.

She was the only female pharaoh of her era and her reign was long and successful. She reestablished trade with the far off lands to the east, the Punt to the south and the Aegean Islands to the north. She was very successful as a pharaoh and was able to re-establish all the relationships that were lost when the Hyksos people invaded Egypt. She re-established the ancient trading routes and built hundreds of monuments throughout the Nile valley.