Vatican Museums

This sandstone stele was erected at the behest of Queen Hatshepsut to commemorate improvement and restoration works in West Thebes. The scene depicts the queen with a blue crown, in the act of offering two globular vases to the god Amon-Ra. She is accompanied by her nephew, the future pharaoh Thutmose III, who wears the white crown of Upper Egypt.
The daughter of Thutmose I and the wife of Thutmose II, following the death of her husband Hatshepsut reigned as co-regent with her very young nephew-stepson Thutmose III, son of Thutmose II and a secondary princess. After a few years the Queen claimed royal titles and attributes, proclaimed herself pharaoh and governed autonomously for twenty-two years. Upon the death of the queen, Thutmose III resumed the throne, condemning his aunt-stepmother to an inexorable damnatio memoriae and ordering her name and likeness to be erased from every monument that represented her as pharaoh.
The stele entered the Vatican in 1819, and dates from the period of the “co-regency”.