But by Winlock’s day, historians had crafted the few known facts of her life into a soap opera of deceit, lust and revenge.Īlthough her long rule had been a time of peace and prosperity, filled with magnificent art and a number of ambitious building projects (the greatest of which was her mortuary, or memorial, temple at Deir el-Bahri), Hatshepsut’s methods of acquiring and holding onto power suggested a darker side to her reign and character. 1479-1458 b.c.) did not begin to emerge until the 19th century.

The statues were those of Hatshepsut, the sixth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, one of the few-and by far the most successful-women to rule Egypt as pharaoh. What could this one have done to warrant such blasphemy? In the opinion of Winlock, and other Egyptologists of his generation, plenty. In the pit were smashed statues of a pharaoh-pieces “from the size of a fingertip,” Winlock noted, “to others weighing a ton or more.” The images had suffered “almost every conceivable indignity,” he wrote, as the violators vented “their spite on the brilliantly chiseled, smiling features.” To the ancient Egyptians, pharaohs were gods. Winlock, head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s archaeological team in Egypt, had unearthed a pit in the great temple complex at Deir el-Bahri, across the Nile from the ancient sites of Thebes and Karnak. Signs of desecration were everywhere eyes had been gouged out, heads lopped off, the cobra-like symbol of royalty hacked from foreheads.

It was a hot, dusty day in early 1927, and Herbert Winlock was staring at a scene of brutal destruction that had all the hallmarks of a vicious personal attack. Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from its original form and updated to include new information for Smithsonian’s Mysteries of the Ancient World bookazine published in Fall 2009.

The woman who would be king