Three colonnaded terraces cut into a cliff wall at Deir el-Bahari — the mortuary temple of the woman who ruled Egypt as king.
The Temple of Hatshepsut is built straight into the base of a sheer cliff at Deir el-Bahari, on the Luxor west bank. Three wide terraces rise on ramps, each fronted by a plain colonnade.
It looks nothing like any other ancient Egyptian building. People routinely describe it as modern-looking, and the comparison is fair.
The architecture is the reason. Where almost every other Egyptian temple is a dense sequence of enclosed halls, this one is horizontal, open and severe — long lines of square pillars answering the horizontal strata of the cliff behind it. The relationship between the building and the rock is the design.
The Punt colonnade on the middle terrace carries one of the most interesting relief sequences in Egypt: a record of a trading expedition to the land of Punt, with the ships, the cargo, the incense trees being carried aboard in baskets, and portraits of the Puntite ruler and his wife.
And there is the story. Hatshepsut ruled as pharaoh in her own right in the 15th century BC, was depicted as a king, and was systematically erased from monuments after her death — her name chiselled out, her images destroyed. You can see the damage on the walls. It is one of the few places where you can watch a political decision being carried out on stone.
Hatshepsut was regent for her young stepson Thutmose III and then took the full titles of a pharaoh. She reigned for roughly two decades, in a period of prosperity and trade rather than conquest.
The temple was designed by Senenmut, her chief official, and built against the cliff opposite Karnak — deliberately aligned with it across the river.
Senenmut is a story in himself: a man of modest origins who accumulated more titles than almost any official of the New Kingdom, tutor to the royal daughter, with a tomb nearby whose ceiling carries one of the earliest astronomical charts known. His closeness to the female king fed gossip even in antiquity — a famous piece of period graffiti says so crudely — and speculation ever since.
The cliffs here kept one more secret: in 1881, in a tomb shaft just south of the temple, the mummies of many of the New Kingdom's greatest rulers — Seqenenre, Thutmose III, Ramesses II among them — were found stacked together, hidden by priests centuries after their burials, when the Valley of the Kings could no longer be protected.
After her death, her monuments were attacked and her name removed from king lists, apparently in the later reign of Thutmose III. The temple was later used as a Coptic monastery, which is the origin of the modern name Deir el-Bahari, meaning northern monastery.
Early morning. By mid-morning the rock face radiates heat and the terraces are punishing.
Opening hours: Daytime hours with seasonal variation.
Opening hours and ticket prices may change. Please confirm the latest details before visiting.
The village of the men who cut and painted the royal tombs — the most completely documented community to survive from the ancient world.
The southern valley of the Theban necropolis, where queens and royal children were buried — and where the finest painted tomb in Egypt is cut into the rock.
A sunrise flight over the west bank — temples, tombs, sugar cane fields and the Nile, from a few hundred metres up.
The mortuary temple of Ramesses III — the best-preserved painted colour of any large temple in Egypt, and almost always empty.
Two enormous seated statues standing in a field — all that is easily visible of what was once the largest temple in Egypt.
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