It's to the best of our knowledge from PRX.

I'm Anne Strange Champs.

For thousands of years, women ruled the world.

But today we barely know their names.

Why?

To find the ancient Egyptian queens of old, you have to always have an eye to reconstructing what was removed.

But sometimes you're able to see that she's escaped destruction.

This is Karakuni.

She's an Egyptologist, and today she's our guide,

to places where you can still see traces of those ancient queens.

The best example is Hachepsut's wonderful chapel called the Red Chapel,

and it's in the temple at Karnak in the open-air museum. So it's outside. There's palm trees above you. The birds are chirping.

You get to go inside of this newly reconstructed chapel made of Red Portsite Stone.

There you see her in all of her glory, walking with her nephew, doing temple rituals.

You can almost smell the incense.

You can feel like you're in one of the offering halls with the chanting and the sister.

But for centuries, even the memory of Hatshepsut was erased by the men who followed her. There's another part of Karnak where the Egyptians believed the God himself would have dwelt.

In these rooms, Hatshepsut's figure has been Egyptians believe that God himself would have dwelt.

In these rooms, Hatshepsut's figure has been chiseled so completely that you just see these chisel marks in a vague human form.

The legs are still vaguely there. the arms are still vaguely there.

She's just a ghost of herself.

And it's almost like she's behind this chiseling trying to get out.

...