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Mar. 26--The 18th Dynasty pharaoh Hatshepsut surely wins the prize for gutsiest cross-dresser of all time, if only because she played for the highest stakes. Hatshepsut ruled Egypt for two decades (from 1479 to 1458 BC), which makes her the first major female head of state - the first one we know about, anyway. While women could be leaders in ancient Egypt, a pharaoh was by definition male. So Hatshepsut had to invent a hybrid gender, presenting a challenge to the sculptors charged with translating her flesh into stone.
Hatshepsut's fluid identity is the focus of a captivating and opportune exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum that focuses both on the fruitful period of her reign and on shifting representations of the woman herself.
The daughter of one pharaoh, and queen to another, Hatshepsut ruled after her husband's death, acting as regent for a stepson. Up to that point, her trajectory was not unusual. Women had ruled Egypt before as "mothers of the king," keeping the dynasty intact while their young charges matured.
But while these caretaker queens were expected to step aside when the child came of age, Hatshepsut moved quickly to have herself definitively crowned. She didn't officially depose the boy, but ruled alongside him as senior co-pharaoh.
No one knows what drove her to this radical move, but it could never be reversed; pharaohs were gods and could not renounce their divinity. Hatshepsut's reign initiated an artistic flowering accompanied by stability, peace and prosperity.
The female king
Her transition from human queen to godly king can be tracked through changing representations of her body. One exquisite statue depicts her as a "Female King": The long, slender torso, delicate limbs and small, round breasts leave no room for doubt about her sex. Nor does the distinctive triangular face with its broad, high cheekbones, hooded eyes, narrow mouth and pointy little chin.
What sets the figure apart from other portraits of female royalty is the nemes (a head cloth worn only by male rulers) draped around her face. Beneath it, the pharaoh's piercing gaze indicates extreme self-possession and a propensity for power.
She adopts a nearly identical pose in "Hatshepsut as King," but in a gorgeous embodiment of ambiguous eroticism, she wears a man's clothes and inhabits a body that looks more like an adolescent boy's - except for the sprouting breasts. We recognize the face: heart-shaped and wide across the cheeks, tapered at the chin.
Instead of a thin sheath, the topless Hatshepsut wears a pleated kilt, beaded belt and a bull's tail between her legs, all emblems of male royalty. Yet the identifying inscription down the front of the throne makes clear that this is no man: "The Perfect Goddess, Lady of the Two Lands ... May she live forever!"
She has, in a way. Her heirs were all female potentates, from England's fiercely sexless queens, Elizabeth I, Victoria and Elizabeth II, to the iron-fisted Indira Gandhi, the tough Golda Meir, the iron-plated Margaret Thatcher and this country's power-suited senators. Women who lead wear neutralizing armor and present a scrupulously masculinized image.
The most extreme sculptures portray Hatshepsut as unequivocally male. In two of the biggest, from the mortuary temple she built at Deir el-Bahri in western Thebes (opposite modern Luxor), she kneels, holding a globular vessel in each hand. These colosssi have much more generic facial features than the earlier royal portraits. The idiosyncratic, catlike face has become blanker and more idealized; the willowy body has grown meaty and thick.
The pharaohs' calf muscles strain against her heavy thighs and her toes splay out gracelessly. The narrow, swelling chest of a queen has turned into the broad muscular barrel of a king. Her reassignment is complete.
Royal defacement
Hatshepsut's death occasioned no rupture in the orderly succession of power. The boy king Thutmose III had grown up and continued to govern on his own. Yet 20 years later, something snapped, and he initiated a rabid attack on Hatshepsut's legacy. His minions pulverized her monuments, hacked her name from inscriptions, and erased her image from temple walls. Subsequent Egyptian king lists omitted her name.
Hatshepsut lay buried until 1906, when the Metropolitan Museum's team began to excavate at Thebes. Led by Egyptologist Herbert Winlock, they discovered thousands of fragents in an ancient quarry, which they painstakingly reassembled into a multifaceted portrait of a forgotten monarch.
The posthumous spasm of violence against her is one of the great Freudian mysteries of antiquity. Or perhaps not, for when in our modern experience has a woman acquired power without fomenting an equally potent backlash?
WHEN & WHERE
"Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharoah. " Opens Tuesday, on view through July 9 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, Manhattan. For exhibition hours and admission prices call 212-535-7710 or visit www.metmuseum.org.
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Copyright (c) 2006, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.
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