An archaeologist has studied broken statues of Queen Hatshepsut—one of the few women to rule as an Egyptian pharaoh, 4,000 years ago—and found that they were not attacked during the persecution of her memory, as previously believed, but ritually “deactivated”. 

The statues were excavated during the 1920s at the ancient site of Deir el-Bahri in Luxor, 500km south of Cairo.

“Because these statues were discovered in highly fragmentary condition, it was assumed that they must have been violently broken up by Thutmose III (her nephew and successor), perhaps due to his animosity towards Hatshepsut,” says Jun Yi Wong from the University of Toronto and author of the research paper, published in the journal Antiquity.