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The tombs which preserve best the figures of the Keftiu are those of Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra. That of Sen-mut is the earlier, though only by a generation, or perhaps rather less. He was the architect of Queen Hatshepsut, the man who planned and executed the great colonnaded temple at Deir-el-Bahri, and who set up Hatshepsut's gigantic obelisks.
As yet they are lifeless, but the symbol of Life will be held to their nostrils by Heqet, the divine Potter's wife, whose frog-head typifies birth and fertility. When Amenophis III copied Hatshepsut's sculptures for his own series at Luxor, he assigned this duty to the greater goddess Hathor, perhaps the most powerful of the cosmic goddesses and the mother of the world.
So the voyage of discovery had ended in a great success. But Queen Hatshepsut's purpose was only half fulfilled as yet. In a nook of the limestone cliffs, not far from Thebes, her father before her had begun to build a very wonderful temple, close beside the ruins of an older sanctuary which had stood there for hundreds of years.
Queen Hatshepsût's famous expedition is represented in a series of coloured bas-relief sculptures on the walls of her great temple at Deir el Baharî, reproduced in Dr. Dümichen's work, The Fleet of an Egyptian Queen, and in Mariette's Deîr el Baharî.
Monsieur Naville points out the extraordinary resemblance in detail which Hatshepsut's myth of divine paternity bears to the Greek legend of Zeus and Alkmene, where the god takes the form of Amphitryon, Alkmene's husband, exactly as Amen appears to the queen; and it may be added that the Egyptian origin of the Greek story was traditionally recognized in the ancestry ascribed to the human couple.
He is seated before a potter's wheel which he works with his foot, and on the revolving table he is fashioning two children with his hands, the baby princess and her "double". It was always Hatshepsut's desire to be represented as a man, and so both the children are boys.
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