Statue of Thutmose III

For roughly the first 20 years of his reign, the king shown here ruled mostly in name. Thutmose III came to the throne as a child, and his aunt and stepmother Hatshepsut took the royal titles and governed beside him. After her death he spent much of the next two decades at war, leading campaign after campaign into Syria and Canaan, and had the record of them carved on the walls around the sanctuary of Amun at Karnak. This statue comes from that same temple. The museum dates it to the reign as a whole, from 1479 to 1425 BC.

He wears the shendyt kilt, the nemes headcloth and the cobra on his brow, and between his legs hangs a bull's tail attached to his belt, a sign of his strength. On the sides of the throne, the lotus and the papyrus, plants of Upper and Lower Egypt, are knotted around the hieroglyph that means to unite. Under his feet lie the Nine Bows, the traditional enemies of Egypt, and the museum reads all of it as the king holding the Two Lands together and guarding them against foreign peoples.