It took nineteen months from its first inception to the completion of her great obelisk and even so, when one thinks of its magnificent proportions, the work seems to have proceeded with wonderful celerity. Inscriptions by Senmut record the quarrying. Her brother’s name appears at the side. One face was covered with gold, which the queen is believed to have weighed out with her own hand. The beautifully carved centre was inlaid with electrum or silver gilt and related to herself. “Amen-Khnum Hatasu, the golden Horus, Lord of the two lands hath dedicated to her father, Amen of Thebes, two obelisks of Maket stone (red granite) hewn from the quarries of the South. Their summits were sheathed with pure gold, taken from the chiefs of all nations.” “His Majesty gave these two gilded obelisks to her father, Amen, that her name should live forever in his temple,” and adds towards the conclusion, “when Ra arises betwixt them as he journeys upward from the heavenly horizon they flood the two Egypts with the glory of their brightness.” Rosellini says, speaking of the fineness of the work, “every figure seems rather to have been impressed with a seal than graven with a chisel.” An inscription at the bottom states that it was erected to her father, Tahutmes I. This obelisk, with its mate, was to occupy a place in the centre court of the palace at Karnak. Dr. Naville, the explorer, discovered the burial chamber of Tahutmes in 1893 and a great altar erected by the queen.
In an inscription on part of the rock-cut temple of Speos Artemidos, south Beni-hasan, reciting her re-establishment of Egyptian power and worship after destruction by the Hyksos, Hatshepsut says: “The abode of the mistress of Qes (Kusae on west side) was fallen in ruin, the earth had covered her beautiful sanctuary and children played over her temple—I cleared and rebuilt it anew—I restored that which was in ruins and I completed that which was left unfinished. For there had been Amu in the midst of the Delta and in Hanar and the foreign hoardes of their number had destroyed the ancient works. They reigned ignorant of the god Ra.”
The temple of Deir-el-Bahri or “Dayre-el-Bahari,” its present Arabic name, was perhaps the greatest work of Hatshepsut’s life and enough of the ruins still remained for the clever French architect, M. Brune, to reconstruct its plan for us. The site was one that would have been chosen by the Greeks for a theatre, but the Egyptian dedicated it to what he deemed a higher object, the worship of the gods. Situated on a green plain, near the tombs of the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty, it was a magnificent natural amphitheatre on the shore of the river and, terrace by terrace, rose from the edge of the water to its steep background of golden brown rock, in which the inner temple, the “holy of holies,” was excavated. Of its structure Senmut or Sen-Maut was the presiding genius. The name “Dayre-el-Bahari” means North church, or monastery, and was, of course, applied to it in later times from the ruins of an old monastery which was yet young and modern beside the original erection. An avenue of sphinxes connected the landing for boats with the four terraces. These were supported by earth-works and stone and guarded by hawk-headed figures, in marble, bearing the uraeus. Columns also supported it, some of them polygonal in shape, with the head of the goddess Hathor as a capitol, and were later restored and kept in order till the time of the Ptolemies. “This temple,” says one writer, “was a splendid specimen of Egyptian Art history, whether we consider the treatment of the stone or the richness of the colored decorations,” and it was unique in design and differed from all others. In the inner recesses of the rock-cut chambers was a picture of the queen, representing her as sucking the milk of the sacred cow, the incarnation of the goddess Hathor, thereby intimating her divine origin.
Some sixteen or seventeen years after the death of Tahutmes II the cartouch of Tahutmes III becomes associated with that of Hatshepsut and then her brilliant career terminates, but the end is wrapped in mystery. Whether she voluntarily laid aside her royal power, which seems unnatural and unlikely, whether she met with foul play or whether she died a natural death, we know not The remains of many others of her family, more or less illustrious, were found, but hers were not among them. Her place of sepulture was discovered by Mr. Rhind in 1841 in a cliff side near her temple, but, strange to say, was again lost sight of, and her successor, showing plainly his feeling towards her, has constantly chiselled out her name. A party of modern travelers, however, claim to have rediscovered it.
Her cartouch, which may be seen in Baedaker and other works, seems comparatively simple, beside the more elaborate ones of other monarchs. It is a circle with a dot in the centre, a small seated female figure, wearing the plumes of a goddess and below two right angles joined. The three hieroglyphic signs are explained to mean “Ma, the sitting figure of the goddess of Truth, Law and Justice; Ka, represented by the hieroglyphic of the uplifted arms and signifying Life, and the sun’s disk, representing Ra, the supreme solar god of the universe.”
Many memorials of this great queen, spite of the efforts made to destroy them, remain to us. The ruins of the temple, the great obelisks, one of which is still standing, various statues and statuettes, many sun-dried brick with her cartouch and that of her father, some of which can be seen in our own Metropolitan Museum in New York, a cabinet in wood and ivory, her standard, her signet ring in turquoise and gold, in the possession of an English gentleman, and, most interesting of all perhaps, the remains of her throne chair, now in the British Museum. It is made of a dark wood, not natural to Egypt, and probably from the land of Punt. The legs are decorated with ucilisks in gold, and the carven hoof of some animal. The other parts are ornamented with hieroglyphics in gold and silver and one fragmentary royal oval in which the name of Hatasu appears and thereby identifies the owner of the throne.
Thus ends in comparative mystery, darkness and silence this brilliant life, of which we were long in ignorance.
Says Curtis in his charming “Nile Notes”: “The history of Eastern life is embroidered to our youngest eyes in that airy arabesque—an Eastern book cannot be written without a dash of the Arabian Nights—the East throughout hath that fine flavor.”