Hatshepsut Essay

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The Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut was a revolutionary building in The New Kingdom of Egypt. The Temple is located in Deir el- Bahari and was built from 1511-1480 BCE by a well-known architect of Egypt, Senmut. This temple was the first to break away from the solid mass structure, like the pyramids, and introduce volume that creates interior spaces in the New Kingdom. Its structure is fascinating because it combines a lot of important different features, such as colonnades and peristyle courts that make a detailed temple. It was a prominent symbol for the New Kingdom of architecture that paid close attention to the site and created interior spaces to occupy.
The Story of Queen Hatshepsut is quite interesting. Her husband, Thutmose II, passed away and the only heir to the …show more content…

She told Senmut that she wanted an earthly palace for Amon reminiscent of myrrh terraces of Punt, the mythical homelands of the gods. She wanted her temple to be as defining in history as her ruling.
The first defining quality to note on the temple of Hatshepsut is that it was built on a cliff. All the prior temples and structures built in Egypt were built primarily on flat land. It’s revolutionary because temples can now be built with the land, not around it. Almost a century prior to the building of the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut there is a pyramid adjacent, the mortuary temple of Mentuhotep. Mentuhotep’s temple is an “emblematic pyramid placed within a great hypostyle hall” and is “raised upon a terrace with both stories accompanied by exterior trabeated porticoes” (Norberg-Schulz, Egyptian Architecture, 11). It was a great temple for its time, and the trabeated portico used was the theme for lots of temples post New Kingdom, until Hatshepsut’s temple. With hers comes the idea of a series of porticoed terraces rising

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