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The Romans made me a monster — seductress, schemer, foreign temptress who corrupted their generals. Their historians wrote that I used my body as a weapon. They did not consider that I spoke nine languages, commanded a navy, and ruled the wealthiest kingdom in the Mediterranean at the age of eighteen. The body was merely one of several instruments available to me.

This relief is closer to the truth than their accounts. It shows me as I presented myself to my own people: as pharaoh, in the tradition of the god-kings. Not a queen of Egypt. Pharaoh of Egypt. The distinction mattered enormously.