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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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...
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