Reading the walls of Hatshepsut's temple at Deir el-Bahari

Punt's queen and her myrrh trees fill the south colonnade

In year 9 of the reign an expedition led by Nehesy sailed down the Red Sea to Punt. The portico shows it wall by wall. On the west wall the fleet arrives, then loads and sails home with cargo piled on deck. On the south wall Nehesy meets the elders of Punt, led by Parehu and his wife Ati, whom the caption calls the queen of Punt.

The Puntites' village stands among trees, its houses raised on stilts. Short captions label the goods: myrrh, ebony, ivory and electrum, with living myrrh trees carried to the ships in baskets. Gods and officials weigh and measure the haul. The block with the queen of Punt is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and a copy is set in the wall.

Amun fathers the king in the north colonnade

The north half of the middle terrace tells her birth as a myth. Thoth leads Amun to Queen Ahmose, Hatshepsut's mother. The god has taken the form of her husband, Thutmose I, and offers her the ankh, the sign of life. Then Amun orders the ram-headed Khnum to make the child. Khnum shapes her body and her ka, her life force, on his potter's wheel, and the frog-headed birth goddess Heqet holds out the ankh to both.

Khnum's name, ẖnmw, said "khnum", opens with the jug (W9). Amun, imn, is the reed (M17), the game board (Y5) and the water ripple (N35). About eighty years later Amenhotep III had the same story carved for himself in the birth room of Luxor Temple.

Two obelisks sail to Karnak on the lower terrace

In the south portico of the lower terrace a barge carries two granite obelisks from Elephantine, at Aswan, to the temple of Amun at Karnak. Rows of rowing boats tow it, and smaller boats carry priests who make offerings on the way. Édouard Naville, who published the scene in 1908, reckoned about thirty oarsmen to a boat.

The text over it is broken. It still mentions the cables tied at stem and stern and the voyage from Elephantine. One obelisk of Hatshepsut still stands at Karnak, its columns of signs giving her titles.

Hathor's chapel keeps Senenmut's only intact portraits

The chapel at the south end of the middle terrace belongs to Hathor, guardian goddess of this part of the West Bank. Its columns end in her face with cow's ears, and in the vestibule soldiers parade and boats row in her festival. Her name, ḥwt-ḥr, said "hut-hor", means "house of Horus" and is written as just that, a falcon (G5) inside a building (O6).

Senenmut, Hatshepsut's steward, put himself here too. Small kneeling figures of him, hands raised in praise, were cut in doorways and niches across the temple, where the open door leaves hid them during the rites. A column of text beside each gives a prayer to Amun "by the steward Senenmut". Mirosław Barwik of the Polish mission counts traces of over sixty. Thutmose III had them erased with her cartouches, and only four survive intact, in the niches of this chapel. Look for the arrowhead (T22), the water ripples (N35) and the vulture (G14) of his name.

See Senenmut's name sign by sign

Scraped outlines show where Hatshepsut stood

Late in the reign of Thutmose III, about twenty years after her death, her figures and names were cut from these walls. The reason is still argued, and most scholars tie it to the succession of his son, Amenhotep II. The masons worked unevenly. On the west wall of the Punt portico her figure was replaced by six standards. Elsewhere a cartouche was recut for Thutmose I or Thutmose II. In the Anubis chapel, with its fluted columns, the painted offerings and the jackal-headed god keep their colour, and in scene after scene the king offering to him is a scraped blank.

A second kind of damage looks much the same. Under Akhenaten, about a century later, Amun's figures and name were hacked out across Egypt. Some were restored here under Ramesses II, among them the Amun before the sacred bark in the Punt portico.

Her daughter Neferure is harder to find. A carved head cut from the walls in the 19th century, now in the Egypt Centre in Swansea, was identified by Kenneth Griffin in 2018 as Neferure, God's Wife of Amun. Her name is the sun disc (N5) above three heart-and-windpipe signs (F35).

Feminine endings give the king away

Her throne name, Maatkare, mꜣꜥt-kꜣ-rꜥ, "Truth is the ka of Ra", fills the oval with three signs: the sun disc (N5), the seated goddess Maat (C10) and the raised arms (D28). The birth name starts with the front of a lion (F4) and the noble on a chair (A51).

The grammar is the better clue. She is drawn with a king's kilt and false beard, and the tall Osiride statues of her on the upper terrace wear a god's beard. The words beside her often keep a woman's endings, marked by the bread loaf (X1). Champollion noticed nouns and verbs in the feminine on her monuments, as if for a queen, next to a bearded king. Her erasers noticed too. In places they scratched out only the feminine pronouns and endings and left the rest of the text standing.

Write Maatkare in a cartouche

Morning sun suits the east-facing walls

The temple faces east, so the low morning sun crosses the terraces and picks out the shallow relief. Where the carving has worn flat, the paint often still shows the sign. Restorers have worked here since 1961, and many scenes mix old blocks with plain new stone.

For a cartouche, fill the frame with the camera and let it box the signs. On a scraped oval, take a photo and trace what is left of each sign over it.

Read a cartouche with the camera

Questions

People in this article

• Hatshepsut c. 1473–1458 BC
• Senenmut Hatshepsut's steward and architect, c. 1473–1458 BC
• Neferure Princess, daughter of Hatshepsut, c. 1473–1460 BC
• Thutmose III c. 1479–1425 BC
• Thutmose I c. 1504–1492 BC
• Thutmose II c. 1492–1479 BC
• Amenhotep III c. 1390–1352 BC
• Akhenaten c. 1352–1336 BC
• Ramesses II c. 1279–1213 BC

Where to see it

• Temple of Hatshepsut (Deir el-Bahari) site
• Karnak Temple site
• Luxor Temple site
• Egyptian Museum, Cairo museum
• Valley of the Kings site
• National Museum of Egyptian Civilization museum

More to read

• Dahshur: Sneferu's pyramids and the marks their builders left Dahshur pyramids: Sneferu's Bent and Red Pyramids, the painted gang marks and dates on their blocks, and the Middle Kingdom finds now in museums.
• Hieroglyphs in the Great Pyramid: the work gangs who wrote Khufu's name Pyramid of Giza hieroglyphs: no carved texts inside the Great Pyramid, but red work-gang marks naming Khufu above the King's Chamber, and what they say.
• The temple of Seti I at Abydos: what to read on its walls Temple of Seti I, Abydos: its raised reliefs and Ramesses II's sunk ones, the seven chapels, the king list, the Osiris halls and the helicopter signs.