queen of the nile; This month, the Met pays homage to Hatshepsut, the woman who dared to call herself Pharaoh.

Cleopatra might have learned a thing or two from Hatshepsut, her glorious predecessor. Born an Egyptian royal princess around 1500 b.c., she remade herself as Daughter of Re, the sun god, ruling the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, whose influence stretched from Nubia to the Aegean.

Tainted by Victorian ideas of feminine propriety, earlier scholars portrayed her as a rapacious usurper who seized power upon the death of her husband (and half-brother), Thutmose II, acting as regent for the young Thutmose III, his child by another woman. Soon she promoted herself to Pharaoh, and though she shared the throne with her stepson/nephew for fifteen prosperous years, she was the dominant figure.

Some 20 years after her death, Thutmose III shattered the colossal statues portraying her as king and struck her name from the magnificent monuments she had created. "That's a long time to wait if you're acting from spite," says Egyptologist Catharine Roehrig, suggesting instead mysterious political motives for the destruction. Roehrig is co-organizer of "Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh," a show surveying the immense flowering of art and design under Hatshepsut's rule and celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the department of Egyptian art at New York's Metropolitan Museum.

It was excavators from the Metropolitan who, some 80 years ago, uncovered two vast pits filled with broken statuary beside the spectacular memorial temple Hatshepsut had constructed at Thebes, with its terraced colonnades built into desert cliffs and open to ...