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Updated: May 20, 2025
It was after a conversation with the statue of Amen in the dusk of the sanctuary, that Queen Hatshepsût despatched her squadron to the shores of the Land of Incense. Theoretically, the divine soul of the image was understood to be the only miracle worker; practically, its speech and motion were the results of a pious fraud.
See The Fayûm and Lake Moeris. Major R.H. Brown, R.E. Officially, this temple is attributed to Thothmes III., and the dedicatory inscription dates from the first year of his reign; but the work was really that of his aunt and predecessor, Queen Hatshepsût. See also an exact reduction of this design, to scale, in Mr. Petrie's work A Season in Egypt, 1887, Plate XXV. Chenoboscion.
Hatshepsût, however, in order to bring in her obelisks between the pylons of Thothmes I., opened a breach in the south wall, and overthrew sixteen of the columns which stood in that spot. Thothmes III., probably finding certain parts of the structure unworthy of the god, rebuilt the first pylon, and also the double sanctuary, which he renewed in the red granite of Syene.
The subsequent scenes at Deir el-Bahari include the leading of queen Aahmes by Khnum and Heqet to the birth-chamber; the great birth scene where the queen is attended by the goddesses Nephthys and Isis, a number of divine nurses and midwives holding several of the "doubles" of the baby, and favourable genii, in human form or with the heads of crocodiles, jackals, and hawks, representing the four cardinal points and all bearing the gift of life; the presentation of the young child by the goddess Hathor to Amen, who is well pleased at the sight of his daughter; and the divine suckling of Hatshepsut and her "doubles". But these episodes do not concern us, as of course they merely reflect the procedure following a royal birth.
Political women have played a great rôle in Egypt from Hatshepsut and Cleopatra to the Christian wife of Aziz, the princess royal who engineered the downfall of Hakim, and the black mother who dominated Mustansir; and it was a woman who was the first queen of the Mamluks. At the second battle of Mansura in 1249, she took Louis prisoner.
To convey such masses, and to place them in equilibrium, was a sufficiently difficult task, and one is at a loss to understand how the Egyptians succeeded in erecting them with no other appliances than ropes and sacks of sand. Queen Hatshepsût boasts that her obelisks were quarried, shaped, transported, and erected in seven months; and we have no reason to doubt the truth of her statement.
Several exhausted or abandoned quarries have been transformed into votive chapels; as, for instance, the Speos Artemidos, which was consecrated by Hatshepsut, Thothmes III. and Seti I. to the local goddess Pakhet. The most important limestone quarries are at Tûrah and Massarah, nearly opposite Memphis.
The obelisks of Karnak are mostly hidden amid the central courts; and those of Queen Hatshepsut were imbedded for seventeen feet of their height in masses of masonry which concealed their bases. These are accidental circumstances, and easy of explanation.
The whole presented the appearance of a vast rectangle placed crosswise at the end of another rectangle. Thothmes II. and Hatshepsût covered the walls erected by their father with bas-relief sculptures, but added no more buildings.
The word means the people or the country 'at the back of' in other words, at the back of 'the Very Green, as the Egyptians called the Mediterranean. So that the Keftians with whom the merchants and courtiers of Egypt grew familiar in the times of Hatshepsut and Tahutmes III. Were to them the men 'from the back of beyond' the farthest distant people with whom they had any dealings.
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