Wouldn’t it great to have a secret lair? Good guys like Batman and Superman have one. Bad guys like the Penguin or Gru (the evil villain in Despicable Me) also have one. It seems like everyone has a lair these days, a secluded place where you can hide out, make plans and train your Minions.
The Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut definitely has a lair-like feeling going on.
Dating from the mid-15th century B.C.E, the complex nestles at the foot of cliffs in a natural bowl on the West Bank of Luxor, Egypt. With its back to the wall, so to speak, the temple is protected from posterior attack – a key ingredient of a lair. With cliffs at your back, you can also dig tunnels and caves – all the better to hide your explosives, your secret labs, and your giant, planet-killing laser.
I doubt Hatshepsut had such modern considerations in mind. A female pharoah who had herself represented pictorially as a male – including the wearing of a false beard — (the world’s first cross dresser?), Hatshepsut served as co-regent with her nephew Thutmose III (c. 1479-1425 B.C.E).
By all accounts, she was pretty good at her job. During her 20 years as pharaoh, the country experienced immense prosperity, peace and prolific building.
Evidence suggests she died of cancer around 1458 BC, in her late 40s or early 50s. It wasn’t until the 19th-century that Egyptologists identified her and began restoring her legacy, uncovering thousands of statues in hidden pits.
Visiting Hatshepsut’s temple is a cool experience. Approaching from a stone walkway, you come upon the main temple complex via a long, broad ramp. The temple itself consists of series of pale columns and porticoes, cut directly into the cliff walls. Inside you discover all variety of figures, hieroglyphics and inscriptions—so well-preserved that they look like they were done yesterday.
I half expect Hatshepsut, herself, to appear from a tunnel in a cloud of dramatic smoke, stroking her fake beard, of course, and exclaiming, “So you have made it my secret lair, Mr. Bond. I have been expecting you. Come in, come in, have a drink—then prepare to die.”
There are worse ways to go, I suppose. But not today, Madame Hatshepsut!
(There’s something “naughty” about international traveling, isn’t there? Only a hundred or two years ago, if you wanted to visit some place truly exotic, you had to take a boat to get there. Even a hop across the pond to England took weeks on the Queen Mary. These days, you can fall asleep on your plane after watching a James Bond film or two, and BAM, you wake up in Cairo, or Borneo, or Kathmandu. This shouldn’t be allowed! I know for myself, while I was growing up, my family didn’t have the money for such sumptuous, opulent trips. In our age of inexpensive air travel, though, all sorts of crazy places that once might have felt “off limits” are pretty much wide open –IF you have the courage to overcome your own internal fears and restraints. What “lair” might you venture to visit if only you believed that you could?)