Temple of Hatshepsut

Djeser-Djeseru, "Holy of Holies", is built straight into the cliff wall at Deir el-Bahari — three colonnaded terraces rising on long ramps, the top one cut back into the rock itself. Against a 300-metre limestone face burnt orange by afternoon sun, the effect is less like a building than like something the cliff produced.

It reads as startlingly modern, and it is: nothing else in Egypt looks like this. The architect, Senenmut, hid a small portrait of himself behind a door in one of the upper shrines, where the queen would not have seen it.

There is no shade on the terraces at all. Early morning, before the light goes flat and the stone starts radiating heat.

Hatshepsut ruled for about two decades in the 15th century BCE, first as regent for her stepson Thutmose III and then as pharaoh outright — taking the full titulary, and in official art the false beard and male form that the office required. Her reign was prosperous and, unusually, largely peaceful; the Punt expedition she commemorated here was a trading voyage, not a campaign.

The erasure

Roughly twenty years after her death, her images and cartouches began to be chiselled out — from this temple, from Karnak, from her monuments generally. Statues were smashed and dumped in a pit beside the causeway. For a long time this was read as personal revenge by Thutmose III, but the timing undercuts that: he waited two decades, and he left much of her work standing. The more likely explanation is dynastic housekeeping — securing his own son's succession by removing an irregular female precedent from the record.

The attempt failed. The smashed statues were excavated in the 1920s and reassembled, and Hatshepsut is now among the most recognisable pharaohs of them all.

A recent footnote

In February 2025 the tomb of her husband and half-brother Thutmose II was identified nearby — the first royal tomb found in the Theban hills since Tutankhamun's.