Um, pardon me. Let’s not forget the real story…
King Hatshepsut was not erased from history because she was a woman. There is no “patriarchal BS” going on. She was erased from history because Thutmose III was bitter that she had taken up so many years of what “should have been” his prime rule. She also re-opened trade with outside nations, which scared many Egyptians, who had a long policy of isolationism based on religious values. Also, she traced her lineage to the Egyptian mother goddess, who was goddess of ALL the gods and goddesses, which Thutmose III found threatening (he wasn’t her son, he was son of the and heretical.
The people loved her, however, so he couldn’t just erase her from the afterlife without a cause. So, he used the only thing he could— her affair with her lover. See, Egyptians believed in loyalty by the woman to her dead husband, so any affair after his death was worthy of death. So he used that as an excuse to ‘punish’ her, by which he really meant destroy her chances of coming back in the afterlife. So he erased her from all writing (because your name was your ticket to the after life), and kicked her out of her tomb into an unmarked one.
But then how do we know her name?
That, my friends, is the greatest love story of ancient Egypt.
Her lover found out about Thutmose III’s scheme to destroy her, so he detective’d her final resting place from servants and workers who had helped. Then he snuck in, a feat that, in their religion, meant he would be damned for eternity because he disturbed someone’s final rest. He broke into her tomb, and under a bench where nobody who came in after him could see, he chiseled her name so that she may go on to the afterlife.
