Hatshepsut took the throne from her stepson Thutmose III, who had her statues smashed and her images erased two decades after her death

Thutmose II died while his son Thutmose III, born to another wife, was a child. Hatshepsut, the dead king's widow and half-sister, ruled for the boy as regent from about 1479 BC. By about year 7 of his reign she had been crowned pharaoh, with Thutmose III as junior co-ruler, and her reign was counted back to year 1. She died around year 22, about 1458 BC, and Thutmose III then ruled alone. In his year 42, about two decades after her death, a campaign removed her from the record. Her reliefs were chiselled out. At her temple at Deir el-Bahri, workers broke her statues with sledgehammers and stone blocks and dumped the pieces in a quarry and in a pit now called the Hatshepsut Hole. The work stopped when Amenhotep II became king, and much of it was left half-finished. The Metropolitan Museum of Art funded excavations at Deir el-Bahri under Herbert Winlock from 1911 to 1936^†. In 2007 Zahi Hawass announced that a mummy from tomb KV60 was "very likely" Hatshepsut, because a loose molar from a box found in the royal cache DB320 fitted a gap in its jaw. Later study reported the tooth as a lower molar and the gap as an upper one^†. On 3 April 2021 the mummy identified as Hatshepsut was moved to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo.