Hatshepsut

The Metropolitan Museum of Art drew me in for the second night in a row, this time for a curatorial talk (aka show and tell) on the Hatshepsut exhibit.

There were so many people at the talk that it was probably worse than visiting the exhibit on a regular day. But Hatshepsut is interesting. She was married to one Pharaoh, and the stepmother of the next Pharaoh. But after her husband died, her stepson was too young to take over. So she was Regent for a while... then decided that she would be co-Pharaoh. So she took on all the kingly titles, and had statues of herself with the fake beard that all Pharaohs wore, etc. She kept that up for about 20 years. After her death, when her stepson got to be Pharaoh by himself, he systematically obliterated all of her cartouches (in some places, they are simply rubbed out of the stone, in other places, his cartouche is carved into the depression left by rubbing out her cartouche) and smashed or removed her face and form whenever possible.

This much of the story was familiar to me. But the interesting thing is that archaeologists have recently learned that this was not done until 20 years after her death. So it does not appear to be simple hatred or revenge. There was something else going on, but nobody knows what. Incidentally, one of the things that has allowed them to figure out that it was Hatshepsut's cartouches being obliterated (rather than those of some other Pharaoh), is that the feminine symbols in the rest of the inscriptions were generally left intact.

It was also interesting to hear the curator talk about how the Met gets its exhibits. When a statue is fragmented, and another museum has the other fragments, the museums apparently negotiate and often swap things. For example, where the Met had the face of a larger-than-life seated Hatshepsut statue, and the Berlin Museum had the rest of the body, the Met traded a small, intact figurine of Hatshepsut to get the rest of the body. In another similar case, a Danish (I think) museum had the body, and the Met had the face. But a trade could not be made because the body was a gift to the people of Denmark from their former king -- the museum had no right to trade it. So the Met and the Danish museum worked out a time-sharing agreement, where they reassemled the face and the body, and send it back and forth across the Atlantic every 3 to 5 years. (So far, this many-ton statue has made the trip 2 or 3 times.)