When Egyptologists excavated the site of Deir el-Bahri in Luxor in the 1920s, they were shocked to find that the statues of ...

When archaeologists first started unearthing statues of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut in the 1920s, they noticed ...

Shattered depictions of Hatshepsut have long thought to be products of her successor’s violent hatred towards her, but a new ...

Scholars have long believed that Hatshepsut’s spiteful successor wanted to destroy every image of her, but the truth may be more nuanced.

After her death, Hatshepsut’s names and representations such as statues were systematically erased from her monuments.

Egyptologists have long claimed the statuary of Hatshepsut in Luxor was wantonly destroyed, it may have been "ritually deactivated" instead.

Research suggests the destruction of her statues "were perhaps driven by ritual necessity rather than outright antipathy." ...

Yi Wong re-examines the destruction of Hatshepsut's statues, suggesting ritualistic deactivation rather than revenge by ...

The fact that the statues of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri were deactivated normally while statues of her at other sites were more violently attacked suggests that Thutmose III may have felt that he ...

However, many of the statues survived in relatively good condition, questioning the idea that the destruction was motivated by Thutmose III's animosity towards Hatshepsut.

Reassembling the statue fragments of Hatshepsut. Credit: Harry Burton / The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Egyptian Art Archives (M10C 58) The idea that Thutmose III ordered a violent and ...