Online Document Assignment 1

HATSHEPSUT

Depicting a Goddess-King

Artistic representations of leaders often reflect a society’s ideas about its rulers: their powers, their obligations, and their relationship to their people. Thus an eighteenth-century portrait painter might have sought to present George Washington as the embodiment of republican virtues. By the same token, a nineteenth-century British sculptor assigned the task of creating a monument to Queen Victoria might have striven to make the monarch a symbol of the power and virtue of Britain’s global empire. Both artists would have worked within their society’s artistic traditions, using the materials and conventions of their time and place to craft their images.

The Egyptian artists responsible for producing images of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut faced special challenges. Seen as a god-king, the pharaoh wielded power that went well beyond the right to enact laws, collect taxes, make war, and represent Egypt to the outside world. The pharaoh was the embodiment of truth and justice, was seen as responsible for the rise and fall of the Nile, and was the guarantor of the cosmic harmony that bound the Egyptians to the natural world and to the gods. In a sense, the pharaoh did not merely rule Egypt, but was Egypt. Given all of this, how should Hatshepsut be represented? The answer to this question was complicated by the fact that Hatshepsut was female. As is the case in most societies, Egyptians’ ideas about political authority and social order were shaped by their understandings of gender roles. Accordingly, what changes in conventional representations of the pharaoh’s power might be necessary to accommodate Hatshepsut’s gender? And what of Hatshepsut’s wishes: did she desire her people to ignore her gender, or did she seek to cast her femininity as a positive attribute? As you examine the evidence, consider what choices Egyptian writers and authors made when they depicted Hatshepsut, and what those choices tell us about the society in which they lived.

TO PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THIS DOCUMENT ASSIGNMENT: