By Destroying This Female Pharaoh S Legacy Her Successor Preserved It Forever
On a midwinter trek to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I went in search of room 115 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a North American home of the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut. I walked past the outcropping two or three times, before I finally found her—dozens of her, really—in a well-lit antechamber. From one statue, Hatshepsut’s limestone eyes smiled, catlike, through 3,400 years of history. From another, a jet black statue of the seated pharaoh, carved from the raven rock diorite, commanded attention even without a face....