She had a loving relationship with her parents and assumed the prestigious title of "God's Wife of Amun" before either parent died. After the death of her father in 1492 BC she married her younger half-brother Thutmose II and assumed the title of Great Royal Wife.

Thutmose II had two daughters with Hatshepsut, Nefrure and Meritre.

Upon Thutmose II's death, the throne passed to Thutmose III and Hatshepsut—as the boy king's aunt and stepmother—was selected to be regent until he came of age. As Thutmose III approached his majority Hatshepsut had herself crowned Pharaoh around 1473 BC, taking the throne name Maatkare.

As Pharaoh, Hatshepsut commissioned an expedition to the Land of Punt and reestablished the trade networks that had been disrupted during the Hyksos occupation of Egypt (the Second Intermediate Period), the wealth of the 18th dynasty—that has become so famous since the discovery of the burial of Tutankhamun—began to be collected.

Although many Egyptologists have claimed that her foreign policy was mainly peaceful, there is evidence that she led successful military campaigns in Nubia, the Levant, and Syria early in her career.

Hatshepsut was a builder pharaoh. As pharaoh she initiated building projects that were grander and more numerous than any of her New Kingdom predecessors. She employed two great architects: Ineni, who had worked for both her husband and father, and the royal steward Senemut.

Like most pharaohs she had monuments constructed at the Temple of Karnak. She had twin obelisks, at the time the tallest in the world, erected at the entrance to the temple. One still stands today; the other has since broken in two and toppled. Karnak's Red Chapel, or Chapelle Rouge, was intended as a barque shrine and may have originally stood between the two obelisks. She later ordered two more obelisks to be made to celebrate her sixteenth year as pharaoh. However one of the obelisks broke while being made, causing a third to be made to replace it. The broken obelisk was left at its quarrying site in Aswan, where it still is today, and has proven valuable in learning how obelisks were quarried.

The masterpiece of her building projects was her mortuary temple complex at Deir el-Bahri. It was designed and implemented by Senemut on a site on the West Bank of the Nile close to the entrance to the Valley of the Kings. The focal point was the Djeser-Djeseru or "the Sublime of Sublimes", a colonnaded structure of perfect harmony. Djeser-Djeseru sits atop a series of terraces that once were graced with gardens andis built into a cliff face that rises sharply above it. Djeser-Djeseru and the other buildings of the Deir el-Bahri complex are considered to be among the great buildings of the ancient world.

Hatshepsut had a tomb constructed in the Valley of the Kings, but her mummy had never been identified until 2008.

In 2008, through CAT Scan techniques the mummy of Hatshepsut was identified. A broken tooth that was contained in a conopic chest, clearly associated with her burial, but moved to the mummy caches, was matched to the mummy of the obese female mummy found in KV 60. Hatshepsut will now be restored to her proper place with the other Pharaohs in the Egyptian Musem's Royal Mummy Display.

Play Hatshepsut's Word Search Puzzle Game at Suzie Manley's Egyptian Word Search Games

Akhenaten | Amenemhet III | Cleopatra VII  | Hatshepsut |
High-Priest Ranefer |  King Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye |
Horemheb | Khafre | Menkaure |  Narmer | Smenkhkare |
Montuemhat | Nefertiti | Pepi I | Queen Ankhesenamen | 
Queen Tetisheri | Ramesses the Great | Ramesses III |
Senwosret III |  Seti I | Taharka |
Tutankhamen | Tuthmosis III |

Copyright Information: Unless otherwise noted, text for Famous Egyptians is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/