rejectedprincesses:

Hatshepsut: the Unforgotten Princess (1508-1458 BCE)

This Rejected Princess definitely falls under “too awesome”: Hatshepsut, arguably the greatest pharaoh in history. Forget Cleopatra, King Tut, or Nefertiti – Hatshepsut was the jam. 

You’d be forgiven for not knowing about her, though. Thanks to a sustained campaign by her successors to erase all traces of her reign, it was not until fairly recently that she came back to historical prominence. She was re-discovered due to the fact that her time in power saw such an incredible proliferation of architecture, statues, and art that it proved impossible to scrub mention of her from *everything*. So much of her work has survived to present day that almost every major museum in the world has at least one piece from her. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has an entire room devoted to her.

All this, despite the fact that she ruled for less than twenty-two years, fifteen hundred years before the birth of Jesus.

In fact, speaking of Jesus – you know the myrrh that the wise men brought to his birth? Almost certainly due to Hatshepsut importing it 1500 years earlier, in the first recorded attempt to transplant foreign trees.

Moreover, she did her own PR. In order to solidify her claim to the throne, she spread word that her parents were told by the gods that she was to be pharaoh. The official story was that, at the gods’ behest, her mother gave birth to her in a LION’S DEN. To quiet the gossip at court, she began her rule wearing men’s clothing, including the pharaoh’s false beard. Once they stopped flapping their gums, she went back to wearing whatever the hell she wanted.

Art notes:

• She’s got the pharaoh’s beard, flail, and crook – with the flail tucked away, since she was more a shepherd than a slavedriver.
• I forgot the uraeus (serpent) on the headband though! Major oversight!
• She is standing in front of The Temple of Hatshepsut, an actual temple that survives to this day.
• The lion around her leg is a callback to her aforementioned PR campaign.
• The angle of the drawing is super-distorted, I know. I may go back and fix it at some point. I was trying something new, the idea being that the world bends to her.

(thanks to Jenifer Castellucci and Amanda Klimek for help with corrections on this!)