[music playing] >>: We're in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York City in the section devoted to
the art of Ancient Egypt. And we're looking at an
enormous, granite sculpture. >>: This is a sculpture of
the female pharaoh Hatshepsut. >>: We think of pharaohs, that
is, ancient Egyptian kings, as male. And of course the
vast majority were. There had been a long tradition
in ancient Egypt of women assuming enormous authority in
the position of regent, that is as a mother or a member of the
royal family who would reign until a male ruler reached the
age where they could actually assume power. >>: Those women were very
powerful but Hatshepsut is unusual. She assumes the
authority of king, of pharaoh. She created a whole mythology
around her kingship that described her divine birth, the
way that an oracle had predicted that she would become king. She ruled Egypt for
more than two decades. She commissioned a
remarkable number of temples, of sculptures. She was interested in the
power of art to convey royal authority. >>: And no building speaks to
the authority of the king more than the mortuary temple. >>: The sculpture that we're
looking at was actually made for this mortuary temple. There anywhere
from six or eight or ten of these kneeling figures. There were also representations
of Hatshepsut as a sphinx which lined the center of the
lower courtyard of her mortuary temple. >>: And that temple is
an extraordinary place. It is built directly
against this vast cliff face. >>: I can't think of a more
dramatic environment for architecture. Those cliffs are towering and
their organic qualities are in such contrast to the regular
order and structure of the built environment. >>: This is hewn right
from the living rock. >>: And that sense of
permanence, that sense of stability that is expressed by
that wall of living rock is a perfect expression of the very
sense of stability that we think Hatshepsut and her dynasty
were trying to reassert after a period of instability. This was the
beginning of the new kingdom. >>: In ancient Egyptian history,
we talk about three major periods... the Old Kingdom, the Middle
Kingdom, and the New Kingdom, and these periods are separated
by periods we call Intermediate Periods. >>: These were periods of
relative chaos, often when Egypt was divided in its rule or
was ruled by external rulers. >>: The representations of
kingship in ancient Egyptian art are almost two millennia old by
the time we get to Hatshepsut and so what she can do is adopt
those forms to show herself as king. These forms were
easily recognizable. That is symmetry, its
embeddedness in the stone, we see that there is no space
between her arms and her torso or between her legs. There is a real sense of
timelessness but there are also more specific symbols. >>: The head cloth that she
wears is a symbol of the king that would have
originally been a cobra. >>: We have the beard that
we associate with kingship. >>: We're talking about
a visual language here. And this visual
language of kingship was male. In fact, there is no word for
queen in the Egyptian language. The term is king's
wife, or king's mother. >>: Her body is represented
in a relatively masculine way. Her breasts are
deemphasized, for example. She has got broad shoulders. >>: The inscriptions that were
on many of these sculptures use a feminine form and so the
representation itself is masculine but the identifying
words, the hieroglyphs identify her as female. About 20 years after Hatshepsut
died, the pharaoh she had been co-ruler with
systematically destroyed all images of Hatshepsut. >>: That would not
have been an easy matter. You wouldn't have simply
toppled the sculpture. It would have
shattered into so many pieces. This made of granite,
incredibly hard stone. It would have been very
difficult to produce and it would have been very
difficult to destroy. >>: Well, and not only that,
but Hatshepsut had commissioned hundreds of images of herself. So it would have taken a
long time to destroy these sculptures. This was an intentional act, but
we're not really sure why this happened. >>: We do know that the
fragments were discovered in the early twentieth century thanks
to an excavation undertaken by the Metropolitan Museum of
Art which is why they are here. And what we're seeing are a
series of monumental sculptures that have been put back together
but some of this is guesswork. We don't know if one particular
fragment goes with one sculpture
versus another. >>: So when we look at those
sculptures, we see her in a range of positions. In some she is kneeling. In some she is standing. In some she is seated. In some she is
represented as a sphinx. A king only would
kneel of course to a god. And that really helps us
place this sculpture along the processional path. >>: So once a year, there was a
ritual involving a sculpture of a god. Now we have to remember that for
Egyptians, the sculpture of the god was the embodiment of the
god and temples were houses for a god. So once a year the sculpture of
the primary god, Amun-Re, was taken from the temple in Thebes
on the eastern side of the Nile. >>: And carried across the river
on a ceremonial barque, on a shrine that was
shaped like a boat. >>: As though he were traveling
literally across the Nile from the eastern side, the land of
the living, toward the land of the dead, and he would be
carried up this causeway toward the temple and his primary
shrine in the mortuary temple at the very top center. >>: And that sculpture would
have been spent one night in that shrine before it would have
been returned across the river. >>: And so it makes sense
then that you would have this representation of Hatshepsut on
her knees making an offering, these two bowls or jars that she
holds are an offering to the god because the god passed in front
of these sculptures who are not just sculptures but
embodiments of Hatshepsut. >>: It's interesting how the
scholarship that surrounds this ruler has changed. Early in the twentieth century,
for example, the destruction of the images of this ruler were
associated with the idea that she was out of place, that she
was an usurper, and she was seen very much in a negative light. She is seen much more
sympathetically now in the early 21st century. >>: And there were women
before Hatshepsut who asserted themselves as kings, and there
were a few women after her, but Hatshepsut had enormous
power, enormous influence, the sculptures, the architecture
that she commissioned set an important standard and
inspiration for all the later work of the New Kingdom. Imagine walking past
these enormous sculptures of Hatshepsut. >>: This is all
about procession. This is all about pageantry. This is all about expressing
the power of the king. >>: Kneeling like this is not
something you can do for more than a minute or two. It's hard on the toes. It's hard on the knees. So this is a position that
someone would only take very temporarily and yet there is
something very eternal about the sculpture,
something very permanent. This is not a figure who engages
us, who is in the world, but who lives in the eternal. This is an image of a
king who is also a god. [music]