Located on the western bank of the Nile, this is one of the most beautiful of the royal mortuary temples. The terraces were different then, with gardens of frankincense trees and other rare plantings brought from Punt, a place that appears in painted reliefs decorating the walls of one of the colonnades. (See below.) The name Deir el-Bahri derives from the former monastery built during the Coptic era. This temple was built by Queen Hatshepsut, stepmother of pharaoh Thutmose III, who became regent for the adolescent Thutmose III when Thutmose II, her brother died. As the first known female monarch, she ruled for about two decades, thus delaying the kingship of Thutmose III. It is not known how she died or was superseded. Many of her portraits were destroyed after her death, no doubt on orders from Thutmose III. In the surviving portraits she appears as a male pharaoh with royal headdress and kilt and sometimes even the false beard. Some inscriptions refer to her as male. Construction of the temple of Hatshepsut took fifteen years, between the 7th and the 22nd years of her reign. The site chosen by Hatshepsut for her temple was the product of precise strategic calculations: it was situated not only in a valley considered sacred for over 500 years to the principal feminine goddess connected with the funeral world, but also on the axis of the temple of Amun of Karnak, and finally, it stood at a distance of only a few hundred meters in a straight line from the tomb that the queen had ordered excavated for herself in the Valley of the Kings on the other side of the mountain.
Hatshepsut Egypt, Mortuary Temple, vikasacharya
