Qualla: Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut

Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hamerani, CC BY-SA 4.0. She was a woman, and she ruled Egypt as a king. To make the case, Hatshepsut built her answer in stone against the cliffs of Deir el-Bahari, where the desert wall climbs nearly five hundred meters to the peak of El Qurn. Three vast terraces step up out of the rubble at the cliff's foot, linked by ramps, fronted by clean rows of columns that echo the limestone ridges behind them so closely that temple and mountain seem to have grown together. The Egyptians called it Djeser-Djeseru, the "Holy of Holies." Carved across its walls is a divine birth and a royal coronation, a careful argument that the throne was hers by lineage and by the will of the gods. It is one of the most admired buildings of the ancient world. It is also a monument that her own family later tried to make disappear.

Image: Hamerani | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut: The Architecture of an Argument

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GT1976, CC BY-SA 4.0. Hatshepsut took the throne around 1479 BC, first as regent for her young stepson Thutmose III, then as full pharaoh in her own right. Her temple was built over more than a decade, its plans revised again and again, until it resolved into something no Egyptian had quite seen befor...

Image: GT1976 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut: The Erasure

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC0. About two decades after Hatshepsut died, the campaign against her memory began. Under Thutmose III, by then a great pharaoh in his own right, her name and image were systematically attacked across the temple. Workers scratched out feminine pronouns, chiseled away her titles, repl...

Image: CC0

Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut: Procession and Restoration

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aligatorek, CC BY-SA 3.0. In its prime the temple was the climax of a yearly spectacle. During the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, priests carried the sacred barque of Amun from Karnak across the Nile, up the long causeway lined with more than a hundred sphinxes, and into the sanctuary, where the god re...

Image: Aligatorek | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut: November 1997

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MusikAnimal, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the morning of 17 November 1997, the temple was the scene of one of modern Egypt's worst attacks. Six gunmen entered the terraces and killed sixty-two people, fifty-eight of them foreign visitors and four of them Egyptians, over a span of roughly forty-five minutes. The victim...

Image: MusikAnimal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut: What the Stone Remembers

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mr rnddude, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is a strange justice in the temple's survival. The pharaoh who tried to erase Hatshepsut could not erase the building; it was too large, too embedded in the cliff, too useful to later kings who restored what Akhenaten defaced. The chiseled-out cartouches and the smashed sta...

Image: Mr rnddude | CC BY-SA 4.0