Hatshepsut crowns herself pharaoh
What happened
Hatshepsut began ruling as regent for her young stepson Thutmose III after her husband's death around 1479 BCE. In the seventh year of that regency she had herself crowned pharaoh outright, becoming one of very few women in three thousand years of Egyptian history to hold the full power of the position rather than a queen's supporting role. Statues increasingly showed her with a male pharaoh's traditional false beard and regalia, not to fool anyone about her sex, since her own inscriptions kept female grammar and her name meant Foremost of Noble Women, but because that regalia was what the office of pharaoh looked like. Her reign centered on trade rather than war, most famously an expedition to the land of Punt that brought home incense trees, ivory, and exotic animals; her temple at Deir el-Bahri, built to receive them, holds what historians consider the first known successful transplant of trees from one nation to another.
Why it matters
Hatshepsut proved a woman could hold the full authority of pharaoh for two decades of stable, prosperous rule, in an office and religious system built entirely around a male king as the living link between gods and Egypt. That her reign later had to be erased shows just how disruptive that proof was found to be by the men who came after her.
How we know
About twenty years after her death, Thutmose III backdated his own reign to erase hers from the official record and had her monuments defaced, and later king lists omit her entirely. Her existence and achievements survive because Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphs in the nineteenth century let scholars read the inscriptions inside her Deir el-Bahri temple, walls the earlier erasure had left standing even as her name was chiseled away.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Hatshepsut · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineAncient Egypt26 events · Three thousand years of pharaohs, from the first unification of the Nile valley to Cleopatra's death, and the two nineteenth and twentieth-century discoveries that let the modern world read and see it all again.View all →