In the 1920s, while excavating for tombs at Deir el-Bahri in Luxor, archaeologists were confronted with a baffling crime scene: thousands of smashed statues and desecrated reliefs of Hatshepsut, one of ancient Egypt’s few, and most successful, female pharaohs.

During the 15th century B.C., Hatshepsut (pronounced hat-SHEP-soot), the daughter of the Pharaoh Thutmose I, had carried out one of antiquity’s most audacious political power plays. Following the sudden death of her husband-brother, Thutmose II, she appointed herself regent for her young stepson, Thutmose III, a child born of a lesser queen. Several years into the regency, Hatshepsut seized the throne; she ruled for nearly two decades, cementing her legitimacy by cultivating the persona of a living god and styling herself “Lord of the Two Lands.”

Scholars of the 19th and early 20th century typically portrayed her as a wicked stepmother of the distant past — a usurper whose political acumen was framed as villainous. Egyptologists initially maintained that Thutmose III, who succeeded Hatshepsut, ordered the destruction after her death in a fit of spiteful erasure. But by the 1960s, the breakage was attributed to an orchestrated program initiated some 25 years later.

But lately, Hatshepsut has been receiving a reputational makeover, reimagined by scholars as a masterful diplomat whose reign was one of artistic innovation and economic growth. A recent study in the journal Antiquity further softens her image.

Jun Yi Wong, a doctoral candidate in Egyptology at the University of Toronto, reassessed decades of excavation records, including unpublished notes, photographs and field reports. He concluded that some of the damage to Hatshepsut’s statues was not the handiwork of Thutmose III, and that the actions Thutmose III did take were less brutal than previously assumed.