DescriptionThis graceful, life-size statue depicts Hatshepsut in female attire, but she wears the nemes headcloth, a royal attribute usually reserved for the reigning king. In the columns of text inscribed beside her legs on the front of the throne, she has already adopted the throne name Maatkare, but her titles and epithets are still feminine. Thus, she is "Lady of the Two Lands" and "Bodily Daughter of Re." On the back of the throne, part of an enigmatic scene is preserved which probably consisted of two back-to-back goddesses. The goddess has the body of a pregnant hippopotamus with feline legs and a crocodile tail appears behind her legs. Although this resembles Taweret, the goddess who protects women and children, it is probably Ipi, a royal protector who appears in the same position on a statue of the Seventeenth Dynasty king Sebekemsaf I (ca. 1575 B.C.) in the British Museum.

 

In the early 1920s the Museum's Egyptian Expedition excavated numerous fragments of the statue near Hatshepsut's temple at Deir el-Bahri in western Thebes. The torso, however, had been found in 1869 and was in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden. A recent loan has allowed the pieces to be reunited for the first time since the statue was destroyed in about 1460 B.C.E.

ProvenanceHead and lower body excavated by the Museum. Acquired by the Museum in the division of finds, 1929. Torso on loan from the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, The Netherlands.