New Research Reframes the “Destruction” of Hatshepsut’s Legacy as Ritual and Reuse
For more than a century, the battered remains of Hatshepsut’s monuments have fueled a tidy story: a powerful woman ruled ancient Egypt, and her successor tried to wipe her from history. A new scholarly reassessment suggests the reality was less melodramatic and, in some cases, more practical.
Hatshepsut (ca. 1505–1458 BCE) was among the most formidable rulers of the 18th Dynasty, credited with reopening trade routes, commissioning ambitious building programs, and presiding over a period associated with stability and artistic innovation. After the death of her husband, Thutmose II, she initially served as regent for her young stepson, Thutmose III. Years into that regency, she assumed the full titles of pharaoh, presenting herself in the visual and theological language of kingship.
When archaeologists excavated her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri in the early 20th century, they encountered a landscape of damage: cartouches hacked away, obelisks and reliefs altered, and sculptures shattered into fragments. Earlier scholarship often attributed the defacement to a vengeful Thutmose III, who ultimately ruled after her. More recent interpretations have proposed broader political motives, including the need to secure a male line of succession or to neutralize the precedent of a woman occupying the throne.
In an article published last June in the journal *Antiquity*, Jun Yi Wong, a doctoral candidate in Egyptology at the University of Toronto, argues for a more layered explanation. Reexamining excavation records, Wong contends that Thutmose III did oversee the removal of Hatshepsut’s name and image from major temple walls, though he emphasizes that the motivations behind those actions remain contested.
Wong’s most pointed intervention concerns the statues. He proposes that some breakage was deliberate and ritual in character: repeated fractures at the neck, waist, and knees suggest what he describes as a “deactivation” intended to neutralize Hatshepsut’s spiritual power. In this reading, the damage functions less as personal animus than as a controlled act with religious and political implications.
At the same time, Wong argues that not all destruction should be read as intentional iconoclasm. Once statues had been “deactivated,” he suggests, they could be treated as inert material. Subsequent harm may have resulted from the repurposing of fragments as construction fill or raw building matter, a common practice across many ancient sites where stone was valuable and readily recycled.
Wong concludes that Hatshepsut likely faced more posthumous persecution than many rulers, but that Thutmose III’s interventions — largely concentrated in major temples — may have been driven by ritual necessity rather than straightforward hostility. The cumulative damage, in other words, may reflect a sequence: targeted alterations first, then centuries of incidental loss.
The argument aligns with a comment from Peter F. Dorman, an emeritus professor of Egyptology and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, who told the *New York Times* that many later changes amounted to a “scrubbing or re-ascription” of Hatshepsut’s male kingship, while her earlier portrayals as queen were often left untouched.
Taken together, the research complicates a familiar narrative. Instead of a single-minded attempt to obliterate Hatshepsut, the evidence points to selective edits to her royal identity — followed by the ordinary, unsentimental afterlife of stone in an ancient landscape where monuments were continually dismantled, reused, and rebuilt.
