The Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari

The mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, on the west bank of the Nile opposite modern Luxor, is one of the most distinctive monuments of Ancient Egyptian Civilization. Built of pale limestone rather than the sandstone of nearby Karnak, set against the dramatic cliffs of the Theban mountain in three broad terraced courts, the temple was an extraordinary innovation in pharaonic architecture and a deliberate political statement. It was the centerpiece of a building program that included the great obelisks at Karnak, a network of small chapels throughout the country, and the boldest experiment in royal self-representation ever attempted by a female pharaoh. The architecture is treated in more detail in The Architecture of Hatshepsut’s Temple.

A Queen Becomes a King

Hatshepsut was the daughter of Tuthmose I and the chief queen Ahmes. She became the principal wife of her half-brother Tuthmose II, who died after a short reign, leaving a young son (Tuthmose III) by a minor wife. As the king’s principal widow, Hatshepsut became regent for the boy, but within a few years she had taken the full titulary of a pharaoh, including the royal crowns and the false beard, and began a vigorous building and military program. Her reign lasted from about 1479 to 1458 BCE, although the exact year in which she assumed the kingship is still debated. Her story is told more fully in Hatshepsut: A Woman Becomes Pharaoh.

Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple was one of the most ambitious of her building projects. It is built on a site with a long history: an 11th Dynasty temple of Mentuhotep II, the founder of the Middle Kingdom, stood nearby, and Hatshepsut’s architects incorporated that older temple into the visual program of the new building, claiming a direct continuity with the kings of the reunified state.

The Site at Deir el-Bahari

Deir el-Bahari (Arabic for “the Northern Monastery”) is a natural bay in the Theban cliffs, dominated by a tall isolated peak called el-Qurn (“the horn”), the mountain that became the symbol of the Theban necropolis. To the south of Hatshepsut’s temple is the older temple of Mentuhotep II; to the north, a later Ptolemaic temple of Imhotep and a 20th Dynasty mortuary temple of Ramesses IV carved into the cliff. The whole complex is approached today by a processional avenue that runs roughly east–west, paralleling the layout of the temple itself.

The Three Terraces

The temple is laid out on three superimposed terraces, connected by ramps that rise in the center of the structure. The lower terrace is approached by an avenue once lined with sphinxes. At the back of the lower terrace, a colonnade of square pillars leads the eye up a ramp to the middle terrace, where the most important scenes of decoration are placed. A second ramp leads to the upper terrace, which was originally a small court with an offering chapel. At the very back, a rock-cut chapel was cut into the cliff, the holiest part of the temple, accessible only to the king and the high priest.

The whole structure is built in a single unified design, and the architect, generally identified as Senenmut, produced a building that broke decisively with the traditional axial layout of pharaonic temples. The effect is monumental and theatrical: the temple seems to climb the mountain, mirroring the ascent of the deceased king to the afterlife.

The Divine Birth Colonnade

On the south side of the middle terrace, a colonnade of square pillars preserves the famous Divine Birth Cycle, a series of reliefs in which the queen’s mother, Ahmes, is shown being visited by Amun, who has taken on the form of Tuthmose I in order to father Hatshepsut. The reliefs depict the announcement of the pregnancy, the birth of the princess, her presentation to the gods, and her naming as the future king. The text is one of the most elaborate statements of royal theology in pharaonic art. Its purpose is to legitimize Hatshepsut’s claim to the throne by showing that her father, the god Amun, had personally engendered her.

The Expedition to Punt

On the north side of the middle terrace, a second colonnade preserves the famous scenes of the Expedition to Punt, a trading voyage to the Horn of Africa that Hatshepsut organized in about the ninth year of her reign. Punt, a country whose location is still debated, lay on the Red Sea coast (probably in modern Eritrea or Somalia). The reliefs show the Egyptian fleet returning with goods: gold, ebony, ivory, leopard skins, incense trees, and, most famously, a group of incense trees that were replanted in the temple court at Thebes. The scenes also depict the chief of Punt, his wife (a notably obese woman), and a string of donkeys loaded with goods. The text preserves a poetic account of the expedition, the first extensive Egyptian account of contact with a sub-Saharan African kingdom.

One of the more striking things in the Punt colonnade is the botanically accurate depiction of the plants the expedition brought back. The Egyptians could paint ducks, scribes, and processions of soldiers with the schematic shorthand of convention, but when they wanted to be specific (as in the Punt reliefs) they could be precise to a degree that surprises modern viewers. The myrrh trees, the ebony, even the small fish in the harbor of Punt are all rendered with a care that a botanical illustrator would recognize.

The Royal Cult

Hatshepsut’s temple was, in technical terms, a mortuary temple, a temple intended for the cult of the deceased king, in which offerings would be made to ensure her eternal survival. The architectural link to the older temple of Mentuhotep II, just to the south, was deliberate. Like the founder of the Middle Kingdom, Hatshepsut was claiming to have reunified Egypt after a period of fragmentation. By building a temple that mirrored Mentuhotep’s in its overall form, she presented herself as a similar national unifier.

The temple contained chapels dedicated to Amun-Ra, Anubis, and Hathor, as well as a rock-cut sanctuary cut deep into the cliff at the back of the upper terrace. Two granite lions, once part of the processional way, still flank the entrance.

The Damnatio Memoriae

Early in the reign of Tuthmose III (around his 42nd year, c. 1457 BCE), a systematic campaign was carried out to deface the names and figures of Hatshepsut throughout Egypt, a process the Egyptians called damnatio memoriae. At Deir el-Bahari, her reliefs were hacked out, her statues smashed, and her cartouches replaced with those of her father and brother. For many years, this destruction led historians to underestimate her reign. The recovery of her monuments, beginning with the work of the Metropolitan Museum of Art under Herbert Winlock from 1911 to 1931, and subsequently the Polish-Egyptian Mission of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology from 1961 onward, has revealed the true scale of her building program and her political ambition.

Excavation and Preservation

The temple was first cleared in modern times by a French expedition in the 1850s and then by the Metropolitan Museum of Art under Herbert Winlock beginning in 1911. The Polish-Egyptian Mission of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology has been at work on the site continuously since 1961, with major projects on the Hatshepsut Temple Restoration Project in the 1990s and 2000s. The work has involved the careful restoration of the reliefs, the conservation of the painted decoration, and the consolidation of the cliffs behind the temple. The temple was the site of a major attack in 1997, after which security was tightened and a new visitor center was built.

The Legacy

Hatshepsut’s temple is unique in pharaonic architecture. The terraced design (three terraces climbing roughly 30 m / 97 ft up the cliff face), the dramatic setting against the cliffs, the integration of the older Mentuhotep temple into the new program, and the rich and politically charged decoration make it one of the great monuments of the New Kingdom. It is a building that cannot be confused with any other.

The Hatshepsut–Senenmut relationship has been the subject of speculation ever since Winlock’s day; some scholars have proposed a romantic liaison, though the textual evidence is thin. What is clear is that Senenmut’s prominence in the temple decoration (he appears in unobtrusive corners, with the princess Neferure on his lap) is unusual for a non-royal official, and Hatshepsut clearly trusted him with the most visible parts of her political program.