Wikipedia:Peer review/Hatshepsut/archive1

Hatshepsut

I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to know how far it is off being GA status and how to improve this Level 3 vital article.

Thanks, Gingermead (talk) 19:49, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Comments from Z1720

Comments after a quick skim:

• I think the lede can be expanded
• The article uses a mix of sfn templates and ref tags. Suggest picking one citation style for the article.
• Second paragraph of "Changing recognition" needs an inline citation.
• "Official lauding" has short paragraphs. Can these be merged together? There's also some MOS:SANDWICH happening here.

Women in Green is a Wikiproject dedicated to improving articles about women to GA status. Consider posting a request on their talk page for editors to comment on this PR if you want additional thoughts. Z1720 (talk) 17:02, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Comments from A. Parrot

Many thanks for volunteering to improve this article! It's a very important one that the Ancient Egypt wikiproject's handful of dedicated editors haven't had the time to overhaul, so your efforts are very welcome.

Like a lot of articles that receive lots of views but not the sustained attention of experienced editors, this article contains a lot of good material but is haphazardly organized. In this case, it's so poor that the references section isn't even alphabetized, on top of containing several unused sources. Disorganization often leads to repetition, and the article was also pretty repetitive before you started removing the unsourced passages from the article. But the structure still needs to be reworked: e.g., the "nuanced legacy" subsection is bizarrely placed within a section that mostly discusses the technical details or reign-length and chronology.

My suggestion is to look at the structure of the most recently promoted FAs about dynastic pharaohs: the rulers of the Fifth Dynasty, whose articles have all been raised to FA status by User:Iry-Hor in recent years. Those articles generally have a large "reign" section that has subsections about the chronology of the reign and on the major accomplishments during that reign. Some of the topics that this article needs to cover don't have parallels in those articles, though. "Changing recognition", which is about the erasure of Hatshepsut should probably be positioned in the same place it's now in, following the sections on death and burial, but be given a clearer title. The kind of material that is now in "nuanced legacy" should probably go in a section at the end about modern assessment of Hatshepsut, or something along those lines.

Another point: you probably don't need to be told this, but the lead section is strangely short and does not provide an adequate summary of the article. Once you've reworked the article body, summarizing it in the lead should be pretty easy.

Reworking the body may be difficult. A good deal of it, particularly in the sections that deal with Hatshepsut's use of religious ideology, seems to have been written from a rather shallow understanding of ancient Egyptian culture, and I find a lot of the wording somewhat off-putting. (Several section titles are weird, including "trade routes" and "official lauding" in addition to "nuanced legacy" and "changing recognition".) I don't feel able to fully explain my problems with it here, but I can give you further input if you continue to work on the article. Feel free to call on me as a resource; I don't have many sources dedicated to Hashepsut specifically, but I have a lot of the reference works for Egyptian history on hand, as well as a lot of the key sources for the ideology of pharaonic kingship and how Hatshepsut used religious beliefs to support her claim to the kingship despite her gender. A. Parrot (talk) 17:38, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

@A. Parrot: Thank you very much for your speedy reply here! I appreciate the input of someone who knows what they're talking about in this topic area as I am a complete novice. I'm trying to give the article an overhaul right now; please let me know if I am making any mistakes in my edits.

I know you say you don't have many sources about Hashepsut specifically, but there are any sources in particular you would suggest to help improve the article or aspects of it as you say, I would greatly appreciate it Gingermead (talk) 20:08, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

It looks like most of the key sources are already included in the references, e.g., Roehrig 2005, Galán et al. 2014, the two books by Cooney, and standard reference works such as the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt and Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt. But if you want to know more about the ideology of kingship and how Hatshepsut's gender related to it, Dancing for Hathor: Woman in Ancient Egypt (2010) by Carolyn Graves-Brown makes for an accessible starting point.

There's another thing that the sources in the article touch on, though I'm not sure to what extent. The New Kingdom is the period of Egyptian history that produced nearly everything that ancient Egypt is famous for today, except the pyramids (which were already a thousand years old when it began). Yet even though Hatshepsut lived a few generations after the founding of the New Kingdom, it was in her reign that some of the defining traits of the period took hold. She seems to have pioneered the monumental construction projects that became de rigueur for later New Kingdom pharaohs, and she seems to have been responsible for some of the innovations in religious ideology surrounding the god Amun as well. Sources like Galán et al. probably say this at some point or other—I haven't looked through them thoroughly—but sometimes scholars will fail to explicitly say something that seems obvious but that we Wikipedians really need them to state explicitly so we can cite it. There's a book that I've been thinking about buying for years, Architecture, Power, and Religion: Hatshepsut, Amun & Karnak in Context (2012) by David Warburton, that does explicitly state how significant Hatshepsut's architectural and religious innovations were. It seems to be rather rambling and prone to making grandiose claims, but it is an RS, so if the other sources fail you on that front, maybe you can use it. A. Parrot (talk) 02:08, 17 January 2023 (UTC)