Egypt and its Monuments by Robert Hichens

Place for Queen Hatshepsu! Surely she comes to a sound of flutes, a merry noise of thin, bright music, backed by a clashing of barbaric cymbals, along the corridors of the past; this queen who is shown upon Egyptian walls dressed as a man, who is said to have worn a beard, and who sent to the land of Punt the famous expedition which covered her with glory and brought gold to the god Amun. To me most feminine she seemed when I saw her temple at Deir-el-Bahari, with its brightness and its suavity; its pretty shallowness and sunshine; its white, and blue, and yellow, and red, and green and orange; all very trim and fanciful, all very smart and delicate; full of finesse and laughter, and breathing out to me of the twentieth century the coquetry of a woman in 1500 B. C. After the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu, after the great freedom of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur of its colossus, the manhood of all the ages concentrated in granite, the temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon me like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange, standing -- ever so knowingly -- against a background of orange and pink, of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette of the mountain, a gay and sweet enchantress who knew her pretty powers and meant to exercise them.

Hatshepsu with a beard! Never will I believe it. Or if she ever seemed to wear one, I will swear it was only the tattooed ornament with which all the lovely women of the Fayum decorate their chins to-day, throwing into relief the smiling, soft lips, the delicate noses, the liquid eyes, and leading one from it step by step to the beauties it precedes.