The death of Hatshepsut, the identification of her mummy (KV 60), and the proscription (damnatio memoriae) by Thutmose III, including the timing, scope, and proposed motivations

A 7-mark response needs the scope, the timing, the pattern, and the motivation debate.

Scope

Hatshepsut's name and image were systematically removed from many monuments. Statues at Deir el-Bahri were smashed and dumped in the Senenmut Quarry (around 200 fragments recovered by the Metropolitan Museum). Cartouches were erased; figures in reliefs were chiseled out; royal names were replaced with those of Thutmose I or Thutmose II.

Selective pattern

Not total. Inaccessible cartouches (atop obelisks, internal sanctuaries) often survived. Reliefs showing Hatshepsut as queen rather than king were sometimes left intact. The pattern suggests targeted removal of public kingly memorialisation.

Timing

Older interpretation: proscription began immediately after death, reflecting Thutmose III's personal resentment. Modern revision (Charles Nims 1966; Peter Dorman 2005): proscription began late in Thutmose III's reign, after year 42 (c. 1437 BC, roughly 20 years after death), continuing under Amenhotep II.

Succession motive

The late dating aligns with preparation of Amenhotep II for succession. Removing the visible record of a female pharaoh secured the masculine succession line.

Theological motive

A female pharaoh contradicted standard Egyptian kingship theology (Horus, the falcon king).

Not personal animus

Personal vendetta would have begun in year 22 (immediately after death), not year 42. The 20-year gap argues against revenge.

Historian

Dorman ("The Proscription of Hatshepsut," in Roehrig 2005) is the canonical reassessment. Markers reward scope, selective pattern, late dating, and the institutional motive.

A 4-mark "outline" needs the date, the mummy, and the cause.

Date

Hatshepsut died around 1458 BC, in regnal year 21 or 22 of Thutmose III. The last attestation of her name dates to this period.

Tomb

Hatshepsut had two tombs: an earlier one she prepared as Great Royal Wife of Thutmose II (now lost) and KV 20 in the Valley of the Kings (a complex shaft tomb she shared with her father Thutmose I).

KV 60 and the mummy identification

Two unidentified female mummies were found in tomb KV 60 (a small Valley of the Kings tomb) by Howard Carter in 1903. In 2007 Zahi Hawass and a research team announced an identification: a CT scan of the mummies, combined with a tooth found in a small wooden box bearing Hatshepsut's cartouche (in the Deir el-Bahri cache), matched the dental gap in one of the mummies. The mummy is now displayed in Cairo as Hatshepsut.

Cause of death

The 2007 study found signs of obesity, dental abscesses, and bone metastases consistent with cancer (probably bone cancer or metastatic carcinoma). Death was probably from disease and complications rather than from violence.

Markers reward the date, KV 20, the 2007 identification, and the disease hypothesis.

1 mark: identifies the mummy's tomb location (KV 60, found by Howard Carter in 1903).
1 mark: identifies the physical evidence used (CT scan showing an obese, middle-aged female with a missing molar and a matching dental socket).
1 mark: identifies the tooth-in-the-box evidence (a wooden box inscribed with Hatshepsut's cartouche, from the Deir el-Bahri cache, containing a single tooth that matched the gap in the jaw).
1 mark: names the lead investigator and year (Zahi Hawass, 2007).

Marker's note: full marks require BOTH the CT/dental evidence and the named investigator/year; a response that only describes obesity without the tooth-and-box link caps at 2-3 marks.

1 mark: identifies that Hatshepsut prepared an earlier tomb as Great Royal Wife of Thutmose II (now lost/uncertainly located).
1 mark: identifies KV 20 in the Valley of the Kings as her royal tomb, and that she had her father Thutmose I reburied there with her.
1 mark: identifies the quartzite sarcophagus evidence (a sarcophagus originally cut for her but re-inscribed for Thutmose I, suggesting a planned joint burial).

Marker's note: rewards specific named evidence (KV 20, the sarcophagus) over a general "she was buried in the Valley of the Kings" statement.

1-2 marks: describes the content of the source (a dated inscription on a site where Hatshepsut's name has been erased).
1-2 marks: assesses usefulness - stratigraphic/inscriptional dating evidence of this kind is what allowed Charles Nims (1966) to argue the proscription began late (after year 42), not immediately after Hatshepsut's death in year 22; it directly ties an erasure to a datable context.
1-2 marks: assesses reliability/limitations - a single graffito is illustrative rather than conclusive on its own; historians corroborate dating across multiple monuments (Deir el-Bahri, Karnak, the Red Chapel) before drawing a conclusion; provenance and the reconstructed nature of any single example should be treated cautiously.

Marker's note: top responses explicitly use the terms reliability and usefulness, link the evidence type to Nims's actual argument, and avoid treating one source as proof of the whole 20-year gap.

1 mark: states the old view (proscription began immediately after Hatshepsut's death in year 22, read as personal revenge).
1-2 marks: states the revised dating (Nims 1966; Dorman 1988, 2005 - proscription began late in Thutmose III's reign, after year 42, roughly 20 years after her death).
2 marks: explains the significance - a 20-year gap is inconsistent with a spontaneous act of personal hatred (which would appear immediately), and instead lines up with the period when Amenhotep II was being groomed for succession, supporting an institutional/succession motive over a personal one.

Marker's note: rewards explanation of WHY the gap matters (the causal link to motive), not just restating the two dates.

Band 6 requires a sustained, evidence-based argument that directly answers "to what extent", not a narrative retelling of the reign.

Thesis: the weight of the chronological and pattern evidence supports an institutional motive (securing Amenhotep II's succession and restoring conventional male kingship theology) over personal revenge, though the destructive scope shows the act was not purely dispassionate administration either.

Argument line 1 - the late dating. Source C's statuary was found smashed and dumped, consistent with a deliberate campaign, but Nims (1966) and Dorman ("The Proscription of Hatshepsut," in Roehrig 2005) date the bulk of the erasure to after Thutmose III's regnal year 42, some 20 years after Hatshepsut's death in year 22. A personal-revenge motive (Winlock, Hayes - the earlier "usurper queen" school) predicts an immediate reaction; the evidence shows a two-decade delay.

Argument line 2 - the selective pattern. Cartouches high on obelisks and in internal sanctuaries were often left untouched; images of Hatshepsut as queen (rather than as king) frequently survived; her tomb KV 20 was not desecrated and she continued to receive ancestor offerings. This selectivity points to a targeted removal of her public claim to kingship, not personal hatred of her as a person.

Argument line 3 - the succession timing. The erasure coincides with Amenhotep II's preparation for the throne. Removing the visible precedent of a legitimate female king protected the succession of Thutmose III's son and reasserted the Horus-kingship ideology that a female pharaoh had disrupted.

Counter-argument - the scope was still severe. Around 200 statue fragments (Metropolitan Museum excavation) show real destructive intent, not mere bureaucratic tidying; some hostility or at least deliberate humiliation cannot be entirely ruled out, so a purely "clinical" institutional reading may understate the violence of the act itself.

Model paragraph: "The twenty-year gap between Hatshepsut's death in her twenty-second regnal year and the onset of large-scale erasure after Thutmose III's forty-second year is the strongest evidence against a personal-revenge explanation. As Dorman argues, an act of spontaneous hatred would be expected immediately, not after two decades of stable co-existence in memory; the timing instead aligns precisely with Amenhotep II's accession preparations, suggesting the proscription served a dynastic-legitimacy function."

Marker's note: Band 6 responses name Nims and Dorman for the late dating, contrast this with the older Winlock/Hayes personal-hatred reading, use the selective pattern and the Senenmut Quarry evidence as specific support, and reach a substantiated judgement on "to what extent" rather than describing both views neutrally.

A Band 6 extended response treats the proscription as an event in the history of EVIDENCE, arguing its consequences for what survives and for how she has been read. Plan plus model paragraph.

Thesis

The proscription was highly significant on both counts, but unevenly: it thinned and distorted the record without destroying it, because erasure was selective, late and incomplete; its greater damage was interpretive, seeding two millennia of tradition in which Hatshepsut was either invisible or explicable only as an illegitimate intruder.

Line 1: what the proscription did to the record

From late in Thutmose III's reign (after year 42 on Nims's dating) her kingly names and images were hacked out, her obelisks walled up at the base, statues from Djeser-djeseru smashed and buried in pits, and her name omitted from later king lists such as the Abydos list. The written record of her kingship that later ages inherited was therefore curated by her successor.

Line 2: why evidence nonetheless survives

The selectivity is itself evidence: images of Hatshepsut as queen and God's Wife were generally spared, the walling-up of the Karnak obelisk protected its inscriptions, and the buried statue fragments were preserved for the Metropolitan Museum excavations of the 1920s to recover. Erasure aimed at her KINGSHIP, not her existence, which is a key argument for the dynastic-legitimacy interpretation over personal hatred.

Line 3: consequences for interpretation

Absent from the king lists, she reached later tradition only as Manetho's garbled "Amensis"; when excavation restored her in the 19th and early 20th centuries, scholars confronting the erasures read them as evidence of a hated usurper, producing Winlock's and Hayes's hostile portraits. The proscription thus wrote the first interpretation of Hatshepsut as well as deleting her.

Line 4: the modern reversal

Nims's redating of the erasures to after year 42 dissolved the revenge narrative (twenty years is a long wait for rage), and Dorman and Tyldesley reread the proscription as succession politics protecting Amenhotep II's line. The same act of destruction, redated, now supports the opposite reading of her reign.

Model paragraph (line 3)

The proscription's deepest effect was on the questions historians thought to ask. Scholars who uncovered the hacked reliefs at Deir el-Bahri in the early 20th century reasoned backwards from the vandalism: so thorough an erasure, they assumed, must answer a proportionate crime, and the "vain usurper" of Winlock's reports was born from that inference. The evidence for her offence was in fact evidence only of her successor's policy, but for half a century the distinction was invisible. Not until Nims showed in 1966 that the erasures began some twenty years after her death did the revenge reading collapse, and with it the character it had invented.

Conclusion

Significant twice over: the proscription filtered the evidence and then framed its interpretation; a strong answer closes by noting that its selectivity and lateness are now among the best clues to the politics of Thutmose III's court.

Marker's note: "evaluate the significance" wants consequences argued, not the story of the erasures retold. Band 6 answers connect named evidence (the walled-up obelisk, the statue pits, the Abydos list, Manetho's Amensis) to named interpretive shifts (Winlock and Hayes to Nims 1966 to Dorman and Tyldesley), and give a weighted verdict.