The buildings at the temple show signs of the dynastic troubles of the
time . In the main, the building is Hatshepsut's ; but the names of her father
Tuthmosis I,
and her brother and husband, Tuthmosis II, also appear, while her
other half-brother and possible husband, Tuthmosis III is represented in
addition, though in a very subordinate position .
Then it becomes evident that Tuthmosis III, on finally succeeding to the
throne after the queen's death, wreaked upon her work here, as elsewhere, his
vengeance for the subjection to which he had been reduced during the reign of
his masterful relative, and hacked out, so far as possible, her figure and her
cartouches from the reliefs .
Farther than this there is no need for us to go in the complicated
problem of " The Feud of the Tuthmosids ", as it has been called .
Nor was this the end of the mutilations which Hatshepsut's beautiful sculptures
were destined to endure .
When Akhenaten's religious frenzy against Amûn was at
its height, El-Deir El-Bahari did not escape the visit of his agents, who
carefully destroyed the figure of the hated god, and all references to him . Ramses
II later restored the wrecked reliefs, but, as might be anticipated, with much
inferior work .
Hatshepsut's
reliefs, therefore, have suffered double mutilation, from family hatreds, and
from religious prejudices ; they still remain, however, among the finest extant
specimens of 18th Dynasty work .
After its strenuous youth, the temple had a long
period of peace, which was scarcely disturbed by the restoration work of Ramses
II, and the intrusion of Meneptah's cartouche . Interest was revived in
Ptolemaic times, with results which could very well have been done without .
The innermost shrine, at the extreme west end of the temple, was then entirely
rebuilt, and the worship of two deified human beings, Imhôtep, the architect of
the Step Pyramid, and Amenhotpe, son of Hapu, the architect of King Amenhotep
III, was intruded in a place which had no connexion with either .
Nor
does the quality of the Ptolemaic reliefs in any way compensate for their
incongruity with the position in which they find themselves . They are clumsy
and ill-proportioned, and serve only to underline the decay of Egyptian art .
It has been possible, fortunately, to remove most of the impertinent Christian
additions to Queen Hatshepsut's great building ; but the barbarous wreckage
wrought by the fanatics of early Christian times cannot so easily be made good
. A certain amount of restoration has been found necessary in modern times to
preserve the precious reliefs from weather .
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