Evening Star Newspaper, January 12, 1930, Page 80

»— P THY. SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C. JANUARY 12, 1930. “QueenHat,” NewYork’sMostModernWoman She Lived Three Thousand Years Ago, But Had Most Up-to-Date Millinery, Gave Herself More Publicity Than Clara Bow, Chose to Have a Career in Preference to a Home, and Ruled as King in a Manner to Suit the Most Ardent Feminist of Today. BY GILBERT SWAN Sketched by George Clark. N Sunday afternoons a conglomerate and colorful crowd, quite typical of New York, inhabits the maze-like corridors and exhibit rooms of the Metropolitan Museum. e a ere are young artists in berets going in- m'lrt?y about zm.h sketch pads and notebooks. There are capering youngsters of all races, feigning an interest in study while finding in the reconstructed tombs a perfect setting for a game of hide-and-seek. There are ladies and lonrgnettes and there are studiously intense scholars. There are profes- sors who look like tourists and tourists who Jock like professors; there are distinguished scientists from abroad prowling about the rare exhibi and there are wanderers seeking shel om the cold; there are lovers keeping a rendezvous and there are mere Manhattanites just looking around. And all about peer the eyes of the ages, as if to give reminder that little is new under the sun—Ileast of all love and art! JUST to the right of the clicking turnstiles through which the crowds enter stone Pharaohs sle:p eternally. Idols, sphinxes and hieroglyphs; fantastic scarabs and ancient ornaments;. granite heads and ivory torsos; broken fragments of the far-away past—all are gathered in a few rooms. Somewhere in the darkened corners the old gods must gather and chuckle at the ways of man and the ways of fate. A flapper from the neighborhood meets her boy friend in the shadow of a mythological goddsss of love and dares to stroke hands . . . a spoiled brat slyly sticks his gum against an idol that once held the power of life and of death . . . two schoolgirls stand critically before a beauty of forgotten time and one says to the other: “Gosh, weren't they awful looking in those days?” They pass on. And oth:rs come. And others pass on and still others come. And some pass with a glance and some take out pencils and write in notebooks. Everywhere are the long, haunting shadows of yesterdays. In these shadows, if you are sufficiently in- terested to search about, can be found several images of Queen Hat-shepsut, who reigned over all of Egypt more than 3,000 years ago. To be sure, Queen Hat has been pieced together and sometimes a bit of her head is missing and sometimes a bit of her body. But her presence there at all is one of the fronies of the ages. The curse of King Thut-mose III has be- come a muffied whisper in time and space. So far away it is and so faint its echo that only the attuned ears of science have been able to hear it at all. For it was uttered more than 380 c>nturies ago. King Thut-mose had called upon his par- ticularly favorite gods to avenge the wrong done him by Queen Hat-shepsut, who was his stepmother. For she had usurped his throne and stripped him of his power. Whem his father—King Thut-mose II—died, the old King left the rulership in the hands of Queen Hat, with the understanding that she would turn over the throne to the young hneir when he came of age. IN the years before Thut-mose III was to foilow his father, she elaborately plotted to dispossess him. To begin with she was known far and wide for her beauty. It was inscribed of her that “to look upon her was more beau- tiful than anything; her splendor and her form were divine; she was a maiden beautiful and blooming.” And she was married to Thut-mose II, de- scribed as ineffectual, frail and mentally lack- ing. Queen Hat, on the other hand, was strong of character and purpose. However, she bore the King only daughters and when he died, the heir, born of a harem concubine, was the logical and only prospect for the throne of Egypt. BUT how, while the youth was growing, was Queen Hat to strengthen her regency so that the young King could not come into power? She called upon her favorite architect, Sen- mut, and a great temple was built to her favorite god, Amon, at Deir el Bahri. This temple was a medium for bolstering up her claims before both gods and men. Everywhere in the great Ilabyrinths she caused images of herself to be built—sphinxes and statues and granite heads and carvings. And there were carvings upon the wall to strength<n her pretensions., There were hun- dreds of carved scarabs, carrying such inserip- tions as these: “Divine of the Diadems,” “Favorite of the Goddnesses,” “Sovereign of Upper and Lower Egypt,” and- “Mistress of Two Lands.” Queen Hat-shepsut did a masterly bit of ad- vertising for herself. Then, after conniving with the wily Senmut, she suddenly announced herself as “King.” With this act her propaganda began in ear- nest. She had to put over the idea that she had been crowned as King through the wishes of the god Amon and the dscree of her de- ceased royal father. She put upon the entire tale an air of the supernatural. In order to secure for herself the attention of the gods in “the next world” she set up innumerable reproductions of herself —the theory being that after death the gods would come visiting and would not forget the dead one. This was the reason why jewels and food and even furniture were placed in the early Egyptian tombs. But when she died, the vengeance of Thut- mose III descended upon her. CALLI‘NG upon his workers, the new King ordered that every trace of her be wiped from the earth. “Her name and her face shall forever be wiped from the memory of men and the gods™ —sSo went his curse. The temple was smashed into bits. And all the inscriptions and images and sphinxes were shattered. Then the destroyers dug a huge quarry nearby and into it tossed the fragments —Dbits of arms and legs and heads and bodies of granite and stone. But’ Thut-mose reckoned without the Sher- locks of modern science. Centuries sped by. Desert storms and rains and freshets swept many of the particles here and there. It seemed as though the good King's curse of ob- “What funny looking hats those old Egyptians wore.” literalon would be visited upon the selfish and ambitious Queen. Circumstances helped. The old necropolis workers in the vicinity of Thebes found the stone of this quarry handy. If they needed a bit of hard rock for a hammer head or some other purpose they went to the pit and took from it a discarded fragment. make matters still worse, an Egyptologist working on other ruins in the neighbor- hood used the quarry for a dumping ground and burisd the remaining sections of the tem- ple under some million cubic feet of debris. But something like a half dozen years ago or more, an expedition from the Metropolitan Museum, operating in this area, made a mem- orandum to investigate this quarry. At the head of this group of super-Sherlocks of the archeological world was Dr. H. E. Winlock. Already, unknown to the scientists, the curse of King Thut-mose III was being lifted. In spite of all the wrathful despoilation, the image of Queen Hat was being pieced together, like some fantastic jig-saw puzzle. When the Suez Canal opened, s visiting & flapper from the mghborhood meets her boy friend in the shadow of & mythological goddess of love and dares to stroke hands. prince had taken back to Holland as a mee mento an important link in the mystery. The peculiar trick of fate which led to the solution of this age-old puzzle 1s told in one of Dr. Winlock's Metropolitan Museum bulletins: “To say that a whole new chapter in the hise tory of Dier el Bahri temple began with us with influenza among our Arabs sounds like a bit of facetiousness—but it is the actual fact, At one time our headmen came down with fever and hacking coughs which naturally did not improve in the dust fog which hung over the scene of our work . . . the only thing to do—short of stopping work—seemed to be to find work out of the dust. “The east wall of the Hat-sheput temple was to the windward of the work for the time being, and as it had to be cleared some time or other, the Reis Hamid Mohammed was told to gather the scratch gang and clear the fallen stones that covered it.” ; ‘Thus were found thousands of bits of stones, comprising bits of a jig-saw which had scatter- ed other of its parts about the world. Some were already in Berlin, having been discovered by a German party of archeologists who had operated in the seection many years before. A head was found to fit a torso and a leg was found to fit a body and a-stand was found to fit a leg. The American party brought the mystery of many centuries to a final solution. Inscriptions were pieced together. But as the years went by another problem arose. Bits of a kingly crown were found which could not at first be accounted for. But within the past year, with Queen Hat finally pieced together a dozen times and with the ruins of her temple explained, it all becomes very clear to the scientists. THE Queen had desired to leave the impres- sion that she was “every inch 4 king™ Having usurped the throne from a king, she had sought to be a bit deceptive with both gods and men. Seh had masculinized herself in many of her statues and had placed upon her brow the regal crown. She had thrust herse!f into something like a Shakespearean role. And now, such being the irony of things, instead of being completely forgotten by time and men: instead of being blotted from all memory, as had been hoped for by the wronged King who cursed her, she has become the cen- ter of archeological interest. Hundreds of men have toiled under desert suns. The passionately devoted researchers have compared notes around the world and have bandied her name and her deseription; have written volumes of letters on the nature of the stone from which her face was . carved. 8Scores of excavators have been all about and missed her secret—quite by accident. Her odd story has been pieced together, bit by bit, even as her image. . (Copyright, 1930.)