from the hope to erase someone’s existence

The daughter of one pharaoh and the wife of another, Hatshepsut took the extraordinary step of declaring herself pharaoh alongside the young Thutmose III, for whom she was serving as regent. During her twenty-year rule, she built one of the greatest of all ancient Egyptian monuments, her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari near Luxor. Sometime after her death around 1458 BCE, Thutmose III set out to erase memory of her, so he razed the temple, and he desecrated every existing image of her in order to rob her of an eternal afterlife. Set against a majestic cliff, the temple radiates power even as a ruin. It is rising again under a restoration led by a Polish archaeological mission that has unearthed the roots of myrrh trees planted by Hatshepsut and mud from her reflecting pools. Perhaps these shards are both fragments of her limestone masterpiece and evidence of its violent destruction. The memory of Hatshepsut, which Thutmose III tried to erase, remains.

Christopher Noey in Deir el-Bahari