RULE LIKE AN EGYPTIAN.(Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh)

A thing is mysterious if you don't know what or how to feel about it, and wish you did. Mystery is a lack not of information but of meaning. Indeed, greater knowledge of certain subjects can intensify rather than soothe emotional itchiness about them, as witness the exhibition "Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh," at the Metropolitan Museum. Hatshepsut led Egypt for two decades, during one of its imperial peak periods, the Eighteenth Dynasty, close to thirty-five hundred years ago, first as regent for her stepson and nephew, Thutmose III, and then as the officially co-ruling but apparently unimpeded king--she assumes male attributes in her later depictions, including the distinctive headdress and ceremonial beard. (Evidence survives for just six female kings of Egypt; most of them, except Hatshepsut and, of course, Cleopatra, had reigns brief and obscure.) She governed well, by all accounts, and fostered copious, innovative art and architecture, exalting herself and her favorite gods. (Her hieroglyph-packed cartouches style her the Horus, Golden Horus, Two Ladies, Son of Re, Lord of the Two Lands, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Hatshepsut-united-with-Amun.) Why--and why no sooner than about twenty years after her death--did Thutmose III undertake to eliminate all trace of her, smashing statues, effacing inscriptions, and rewriting history with such vigor that her existence would be reestablished only in the nineteenth century? That's a little mystery curled within the immense mystery that is ancient Egypt. If "the past is a foreign country," as Leslie Poles Hartley wrote, Egypt's is a foreign world. We thrill to it as children, our innocence a passport which age revokes.

Other bygone civilizations have their historians, scholars, and curators. Egypt has Egyptologists, a specialty with roots in ancient Egypt itself. Catharine H. Roehrig, of the Met's Department of Egyptian Art, who is the show's chief curator, remarked to me that Khaemwas, a son of Ramses II, who lived in the twelfth century B.C., deserves to be thought of as history's first archeologist, having undertaken expeditionary research into his country's already venerable and recondite past. (Roehrig said that she dates her own vocation to the gratifying success of an oral report on King Tut that she gave in the seventh grade.) It makes sense that the West's rediscovery of ancient Egypt coincided with the rise of the art museum. Egyptology provided forms, as well as material, for the new secular temples and repositories. Regarded in a certain light, ancient Egypt was a culture of living museums--incessantly maintained, periodically refurbished, and kept up to date with contemporary developments. The Egyptians were pertinacious keepers of lists, and recorders of methods and procedures. They meant for the things they made to last forever. Granted, the contents of a formerly sealed tomb are diminished when transferred to a windowless gallery, but a little effort of imagination makes good the loss. And a swarm of viewers on a weekend afternoon may lack the dignity of the religious processions which marked the Egyptian calendar, but those people, too, are united in a kind of devotion. As children, we get it. What grows on us after our childhoods, dolefully, is a sense of the overwhelming sovereignty of death, beyond the one wonderfully projected by the Egyptians for their own eternal habitation. When the tombs were broken open, there was no one to protest. Were there curses? If so, they didn't work, though we sometimes feel, guiltily, that they really should have.

The show presents almost three hundred objects--statues and reliefs, sarcophagi and architectural fragments, paintings and manuscripts, vessels and implements, jewelry and amulets--in spotlighted splendor, but it is both less opulent and a lot more interesting than the usual "Treasures of So-and-So" archeological exhibition. (People who rate these affairs by carat count may be mollified by the sumptuous loot from a tomb of three of Thutmose III's wives.) The curators stick to their subject ...