Chapelle Rouge

Eventually, in addition to the reliefs and paintings of barques, model copies were placed in the tombs of pharaohs, royalty, and all who could afford to provide one for their burial.

The chapel consisted of two rooms, a vestibule, and a sanctuary, which were raised on a diorite platform and could be accessed using short ramps on either side.

The Userhat-Amun was a small-scale wooden boat covered in gold that bore an enclosed shrine in which the Amun statue was placed to be protected from the public view.

The structure, decoration, and complex history of the Chapel divulge secrets about the reign of Hatshepsut and the Egypt of the eighteenth dynasty.

Thutmose III married the daughter of Hatshepsut, Neferure, to continue the royal lineage, but she and their offspring failed to survive his reign.

During the ceremony, in the presence of this anonymous ruler, an oracle speaking the words of Amun makes the announcement that Hatshepsut is to become the pharaoh.

Hatshepsut and her royal daughter by Thutmose II already held important positions in the religious and political administrations of the country.

One interpretation of this relief is that the king is the living Thutmose III, and that by steering a barque containing the sacred emblems of Hatshepsut toward the site of her mortuary temple, he is officiating her movement into the realm of becoming a deity.

Some blocks from the Chapel are decorated with three sets of scenes in which an unnamed God’s Wife of Amun is shown performing her duties.

One block shows the God's Wife and a priest performing a ritualistic burning of the names of Egypt's enemies in an attempt to destroy them.

Yet another shows the God's Wife, as chief priestess, leading a group of male priests to the temple pool to be purified and then following Hatshepsut into the shrine in which she performed sacred rites in front of the statue of Amun.

Because of these carvings on the walls of the Red Chapel, archeologists have been given an insight to the active role the God's Wife of Amun played in religious practices.

Two obelisks are shown tied to sledges and towed on a sycamore wood barge toward Thebes by a fleet of twenty-seven boats powered by eight hundred and fifty oarsmen.

The larger of the obelisks commemorated Hatshepsut's Sed festival, which occurred at approximately the same time as the Chapel was built in the sixteenth year of her reign.

Because it is known that Hatshepsut built the obelisks of the Wadjet Hall, the Palace of Ma’at, and the Eighth Pylon, among others, it has been presumed that the scenes on the Chapel show the creation and erection of some of these monuments.

In the text that accompanies the relief, Hatshepsut asserts that her divine father, Amun, came to her and told her to raise the obelisks in dedication to him.

Along with these reliefs, the exterior façade of the Chapel was decorated with the parallel scenes of receiving the crowns of Hatshepsut and of Thutmose III.

Shown with the same pointed nose that was characteristic of depictions of Hatshepsut, Thutmose III also is pictured participating in the processions of the Beautiful Feast of the Valley and the Opet Festival.

Representations of Thutmose III sometimes are accompanied by feminine pronouns and he is shown twice walking alongside Hatshepsut's soul, her ka.

It originally was thought that the destruction of the chapel was part of the proscription of Hatshepsut that occurred beginning in year 42 of Thutmose III's reign.

New research has shown evidence of additions to the top blocks of the shrine that show Thutmouse III without Hatshepsut and claiming the chapel as his own.

This phenomenon has caused some archeologists to believe that the attacks against the images of Hatshepsut occurred after the Red Chapel had been deconstructed and the blocks had been stacked so that they could be reused in other building projects.

Except for the lack of need because of new placement that hid surfaces, the theory that the Chapel was not demolished maliciously also may be supported by the fact that Thutmose III and his son did not force the reliefs of Hatshepsut to be re-carved as were many of the other monuments.

A reconstruction model of how the chapel probably looked during Hatshepsut's reign was completed in 1997 by a group of French and Egyptian restoration experts.