Pages - Menu

▼

The Statue of Hatshepsut

This smooth, wide statue renders Hatshepsut in female attire, but she tires the nemes head cloth, a royal dimension ordinarily reserved for the ruling king. In the columns of text written beside her legs on the frontal of the throne, she has already taken the throne name Maatkare, but her claims and epithets are yet feminine. Thus, she is Lady of the Two Domains (Lands) and Corporate Daughter of Re. On the back of the throne, section of an special and obscure scene is preserved. At the left is the goddess Ipi, a particular deity depicted as a pregnant hippo with felid legs who wears a crocodile wrapped across her head and down her back and holds knives. This goddess was the shielder of pregnant women and of kids and thus would have been connected with the ruling queen. This mixture of attributes going to king and queen proposes that the statue follows from the time when Hatshepsut was making the changeover from Queen regent to coruler with her nephew King Tuthmosis III.
Earlier in 1920s the Museum's Egyptian Expedition hollowed many fragments of the statue close temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri in western Thebes. The body, however, had been assured in 1869 and was in the (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden) in Leiden. A new loan has let the parts to be reunited for the first time since the statue was broken in about 1460 B.C.E. Notice: A sensationof royal dignity, composure, and permanency is made by the facial expression, the static position, and the rectangular throne and higher base from which the regular and frontal figure comes out. Some cracks in the face, neck, and torso show ancient damage maintained by the sculpture. In fact, only the head of the statue, forearms, and pieces of the throne were excavated by the Museum archeologists. The body had already been assured in 1843 and 1845 by a German expedition and turned part of the accumulation of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. The Berlin museum incorporate to exchange the body of our statue for the body of a sphinx, likewise found by Metropolitan Museum archaeologists, that set the head of a sphinx statue in their museum, and so it was feasible to restore the Berlin and the New York statues to almost their basic lands. The left eye of the Metropolitan's seated queen Hatshepsut was lately restored by Museum curators. 
 
Related Pages: