Sphinx of Hatshepsut
About 1479 to 1458 BC, Dynasty 18
Near the Temple of Dendur crouches a granite sphinx with the body of a lion and the face of a woman who ruled Egypt as king. Hatshepsut was the daughter of one pharaoh and the wife of another, and when her husband died she first governed for her young stepson and then took the full titles and regalia of a king herself. She reigned for about twenty years, one of the most successful rulers of the New Kingdom, and this sphinx guarded the approach to her great terraced temple at Deir el Bahri across the river from Luxor.
The face is unmistakably a portrait, with the same slender nose, arched brows and slight smile that appear in all her statues. She wears the striped royal headcloth and the false beard of a king, yet the features remain delicate and feminine. The lion's body is carved with a mane that falls in stylised locks over the shoulders, and the whole surface has been polished to bring out the flecked pink and grey of the stone. Traces of yellow and blue paint survive in places. The inscription on the chest gives her throne name, Maatkare.
After Hatshepsut's death her stepson Thutmose the Third ordered her monuments defaced and her statues smashed and thrown into a quarry pit near the temple. The Metropolitan Museum's excavators found the fragments there in the 1920s and painstakingly reassembled this sphinx and the other Hatshepsut statues in the neighbouring galleries. Together they form the finest group of her sculpture in the world and tell a story of ambition, erasure and rediscovery.
Did You Know? The sphinx was found broken into pieces in a pit where her successor had dumped it, and was rebuilt in the museum's studio.
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