Kneeling Statue of Hatshepsut

Ancient Egyptian This large granite statue shows the female pharaoh Hatshepsut kneeling and offering two round vessels to the god Amun. The inscription indicates she presents Maat (truth, order, justice). She wears the full male pharaonic regalia: the nemes headcloth, shendyt kilt, and false beard. Despite the masculine dress, her features retain a subtly feminine quality.

It originally stood along the processional avenue on the middle terrace of her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, Thebes. Like all of Hatshepsut's monuments there, it was deliberately smashed by her nephew Thutmose III after her death. The Met's Egyptian Expedition recovered the fragments in the 1920s-1930s and reconstructed them with metal armatures and plaster fills.

The statue stands nearly 3 meters (about 10 feet) tall and is on view in Gallery 115 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a gallery devoted entirely to Hatshepsut's statuary.