The 18th-Dynasty Egyptian Queen Who Ruled as Pharaoh for Two Decades and Whose Name Her Stepson Ordered Chiselled Off Every Monument Twenty Years After Her Death
Hatshepsut ruled Egypt as pharaoh from approximately 1479 to 1458 BCE, the longest reign of any female ruler of ancient Egypt. About twenty years after her death her stepson Thutmose III ordered her cartouches systematically chiselled out of the public monuments she had built. Most of the erasures missed inaccessible interior surfaces, which is how Egyptologists reconstructed her reign in the 19th century.
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