Palace or Slaughterhouse? The Function of the Room with a Window in the Hatshepsut Temple at Deir el-Bahari

The small room with a window situated in the south-east corner of the Upper Terrace of the Hatshepsut Temple at Deir el-Bahari has been interpreted by scholars to be either a slaughterhouse or a temple palace of the female pharaoh. Considering the axes of the Temple, the meaning assigned to the southern direction in connection with the solar theology, as well as the relief decoration preserved around the mentioned window, the paper proposes to reconstruct in the said space a symbolic residence of the deceased divine Hatshepsut, later turned into a palace of the sun god in its aspect of the day sun. Besides describing the changing function of the structure, it also looks into the transformation of the pharaoh into a divine being, the form of the sun god. Finally, the paper suggests possible original locations for some of the Hatshepsut statues, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.