Listen to part of a lecture in an ancient history class.

That's your assignment for next week when we'll be finishing up our unit on the Sumerians. And we are going to get to that reading on the Hammurabi Code in just a minute. But first, I wanna urge you to sign up for the museum trip the art department is organizing. It's a great opportunity to see some of the Egyptian art will be reading about. In fact, many of the photos in your textbook are from the museum’s collection.

So if I can just ask you to indulge me for a moment, I want to talk about one of my favorite pieces from that collection, not just because it's a beautiful sculpture, but also because it's such a great example of how much a work of art can tell us about the society that produced it, which is especially important for studying ancient civilizations, where they're relatively few written documents and what we called the material culture of a society, the physical objects archaeologists uncover, is a major type of evidence, and in some cases, the only type, something to keep in mind when you tour other ancient art collections which I hope you'll do.

Okay, so before I show you this slide, I need to fast forward to a period in Egyptian history, known as the new kingdom. That's about 3,000 to 3,500 years ago, about 1,000 years after the great pyramids were built at Giza. But don't worry about the dates for now. We'll get to all of that in the coming weeks. Anyway, what I'm going to show you is this amazing statue of queen Hatshepsut. As we'll see later, Hatshepsut was one of a series of powerful pharaohs who brought Egypt in contact with other parts of the middle East and Africa, and who helped make this new kingdom, a period in which the Egyptian empire spread its political and cultural influence throughout the Mediterranean.

Now, Hatshepsut was not the first queen in Egypt. Usually queens were the wives of the pharaohs, the kings of Egypt. The kings, the men were the ones who had power. Although when a pharaoh died and his son wasn't old enough to become king, the queen would act as his protector or so called regent, ruling on behalf of the young heir, who would then rule along when he was old enough. And that was true for Hatshepsut at first. She was regent protector for her nephew Thutmose III after the death of her husband. But soon after becoming regent, she did something quite remarkable. She adopted the title of pharaoh, a title which meant absolute power over Egypt, but which was the title that only the kings of Egypt had used up to that time.

Now, this means that even after the young prince was old enough to rule or share his reign with Hatshepsut, she did, in fact, rule as pharaoh, exercising her powers, absolute monarch until she died for about all 15 years. So this was pretty amazing in the male dominated royal court to move beyond the role of regent to declare herself pharaoh. She clearly must have had the talent and skills to make such a bold move, because she seems to have gained the support of key officials.

What did this remarkable ruler look like? Let's take a look at this slide to see how she had herself represented. Now, for the most part, Egyptian statues, especially statues of public figures, like kings, queens, and regions, are highly stylized and symbolic. They're not supposed to show what a particular person looked like. Rather, they represented what the person stood for. In the case of pharaohs, first and foremost, a symbol of political power. So that here we see Hatshepsut wearing the distinctive headcloth called nemes, a symbol of royal authority. In fact, it probably looks familiar to you since pharaohs were always represented wearing the nemes. This was actually accurate because pharaohs did wear these headcloths in public.

Another feature common to pharaoh statues is the ceremonial beard. That's what you see here under Hatshepsut’s chin. The point is she didn't really have a beard nor did anyone think she did. But because it was the tradition for pharaohs to appear with such a beard, it became a purely ceremonial decoration. Another interesting thing about this statue is the position of the hands. We'll be talking later about the religious role of pharaohs in Egyptian society. They were believed to act as intermediary between the Egyptian people and their gods, like a type of priest or spiritual go between. So her hands, rather than holding weapons or anything to represent military or political power, they emphasize this role.