Susan Tallman compares two exhibitions on ancient Egyptian art to ask what public monuments actually preserve. A sweeping survey in San Francisco shows the remarkable continuity of pharaonic imagery; a Boston exhibition follows three rulers whose attempts to control their legacies came undone.
- Hatshepsut took the title of king and used its visual grammar, including the false beard. Decades after her death, her successor erased names and smashed statues—possibly to protect his son’s succession.
- Amenhotep III built on a colossal scale, but later rulers reused his monuments as their own.
- Akhenaten remade royal religion around the Aten and commissioned startlingly intimate images of his family. After the old gods returned, his temples were dismantled and his name disappeared from official king lists.
The irony is material: objects tucked away in tombs survived while the grand public campaigns for eternal renown were broken, repurposed, or forgotten. Tallman’s essay makes the politics of monuments legible without treating any ruler’s preferred image as the whole historical record.