Читать книгу Art History For Dummies - Jesse Bryant Wilder - Страница 114

The 18th-dynasty female pharaoh Hatshepsut ruled from 1473 BC to 1458 BC. She was the queen of her half-brother Thutmose II before becoming regent for her stepson Thutmose III and finally pharaoh after her husband’s death. During her 21-year reign Hatshepsut accomplished much, including:

 Cultivating peace instead of war, commissioning great building projects, and restoring monuments destroyed by the Hyksos.

 Completing the tombs of her father (Thutmose I) and husband (Thutmose II).

 Building an even more magnificent funerary temple for herself at Deir el-Bahri. Her tomb complex consists of tiered colonnades (rows of columns) and two long, sloping causeways (one formerly lined with sphinxes), which may have suggested her spiritual ascent after death.At the ends of the second colonnade, she built shrines to Anubis, the god of the underworld, and Hathor. Behind the upper colonnade were temples to Hatshepsut herself and her father, as well as to the chief gods Amun, the king of the gods, and Re, the god of the solar disk. These two eventually merged into one god, Amun-Re or Amun-Ra.

Hatshepsut was called “his majesty” and commissioned male-like images of herself like the Sphinx of Hatshepsut in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, metmuseum.org. By most counts, Egypt had only four queens in its 3,000-year history, so perhaps Hatshepsut needed to commission tough-guy images to survive in a man’s world. She was buried in the Valley of the Kings.