Women and power
to assert her authority through art and architecture: when commissioning promotional portraits, she deliberately decided to be depicted as a man. The granite Sphinx of Hatshepsut here (originally one of several guarding her mortuary temple at Thebes) is a perfect example. Her beard, generally seen in Egyptian art as a sign of sovereignty, is an explicit example of how she is rejecting femininity to assert power in a society where masculinity was essentially a synonym for power. This also demonstrates a notable difference between how historical and divine women were perceived within the royal promotion in Egyptian art.
Granite Sphinx of Hatshepsut (c.1479-1458BC.) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Around 100 years later, Nefertiti was Queen consort to Pharaoh Akhenaten. Her royal representations present a sharp contrast to Hatshepsut as both unidealized and unashamedly a woman. Nefertiti was portrayed as a powerful figure in instances like the detail on the first limestone relief here below (left), which displays her smiting Egypt’s enemies – an action typically reserved for (male) Pharaohs. The
figure here below (right) of Nefertiti at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin is another powerful example of a woman representing royal
power. Nefertiti is shown in an advancing position, suggesting confidence and purpose. Interestingly, she is portrayed with exposed breasts, her gender unabashedly visible to all
Relief found in Hermopolis, now at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
who passed. This showed that she must have felt just as capable of portraying royal power as a man. Akhenaten was establishing a new monotheistic religion centred around Aten whose epithet was ‘the mother and father of all humankind’. Akhenaten apparently wanted to mirror this femininity in his depiction – this demonstrates how for Akhenaten, femininity was empowering, tying him closer to Aten and thus emphasizing his royal legitimacy. Nevertheless, this was a very unique and brief period of ancient Egyptian art, which mirrored the religion at the time, and both Akhenaten’s ‘heretic’ views and art style were soon abandoned.
Nefertiti figure at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin.
Another interesting civilization which yielded evidence for a historical woman expressing imperial power was 7th-century BC Assyria. King Aššurbanipal’s Queen consort, Libbali-Sharrat, is seen in the relief here (overpage), often known as ‘the Garden Party’ relief. The scene is set after the Assyrian victory over Elam in 683BC. The head of the defeated Elamite king is hanging from a tree branch, so
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