Temple of Hatshepsut

A name cut out of the wall

Throughout the temple; easiest to find on the middle-terrace colonnades, in the offering scenes

Clean, deliberate hollows where a figure or a name used to be — sometimes a neatly emptied oval where a cartouche sat, sometimes a standing figure hacked back to its outline — with the scene around it left completely untouched.

Fact — the erasure, and its thoroughness. Uncertain — the motive. Specialists disagree, and the evidence for when the work was done argues against the familiar personal explanation.

This was careful work, not vandalism. Whoever did it knew exactly what to remove and left everything else alone. That is what makes the motive worth arguing about — and the popular version, a jealous successor striking at once, is the reading the dating fits worst.

The Punt reliefs, which read like a report

Middle terrace, the south colonnade

In the Punt reliefs, look for ships, incense trees and houses raised on supports. These images present the expedition through the conventions and priorities of a royal monument.

Fact — the reliefs and what they depict. Uncertain — where Punt actually was; the location is still debated.

Egyptian temple relief normally shows the ideal — the king, enormous, defeating whatever needs defeating. This shows an event, with details about ships, cargo and people that survive nowhere else.

Columns with a face on all four sides

The south end of the middle terrace — the chapel of Hathor

Columns whose capitals are carved as a woman’s face with cow’s ears, repeated on each of the four faces, standing in front of a small dark chapel cut into the rock behind them.

Fact — the chapel and the Hathor capitals. Interpretation — the reasoning behind placing it here.

Hathor’s presence here is not decoration. She was the goddess of this part of the western mountain and of the dead who lay in it, and placing her chapel inside the temple ties the queen to her.

The older temple next door

Look south from the lower or middle terrace, over the wall

A lower, far more ruined terraced building with a forest of column stumps and a broad ramp: the mortuary complex of Mentuhotep II, five hundred years older than the temple you are standing on.

Fact — both buildings, their form and their dates. Interpretation — that the earlier one was the model for the later.

The neighbouring temple of Mentuhotep II offers an earlier approach to building against the same cliffs. Comparing the two is useful; the exact influence on Hatshepsut’s architects is an interpretation.