mummies, curses, and exploration were published. Roger Luckhurst situates this within a cultural trend of what he calls Egyptian Gothic, "a set of beliefs or knowledges in a loosely occult framework" developed in response to British anxieties about the rule of Egypt. One common plot in these narratives was the "Mummy’s Curse", which "follows the basic plot structure of misappropriation of tomb artifacts with fatal consequences following the protagonist home and features the explicit warning 'beware of the Mummy’s Curse'”; often these artifacts were possessed by some supernatural element. Mummies were often the focal point of these stories, usually of noble rank, because most of the mummies being discovered in the nineteenth century were pharaohs. There was an emphasis on the idea of perfect preservation and beauty; mummies were unraveled at museum exhibitions in British museums, and audiences were amazed by their "almost perfect condition". Because of their preserved beauty, female mummies in Victorian fiction were often eroticized objects of desire. Queen Hatshepsut Though Queen Tera is an entirely fictional character, she bears many resemblances to Queen Hatshepsut, a pharaoh in Ancient Egypt. Hatshepsut ruled Egypt from 1479 BC to 1458 BC, one of the first and few female rulers. She married her half-brother, Tuthmose II, who ruled from 1492 BC until his death in 1479 BC. At this point, Hatshepsut became regent to Tuthmose's son, by a concubine, her half-nephew. Rather than being regent to the toddler king, however, Hatshepsut took the throne and declared herself ruler. However, because Egyptian kingship was intrinsically masculine, Hatshepsut publicly transformed her feminine self; all statues and "images of her after her coronation show her as a man—wide shoulders, trim hips, and no hint of breasts". About twenty years after her death in 1458 BC, her name and image was removed from temple walls, and many of her statues were destroyed. Dorman argues that this was not personal animosity, but rather an attempt to eradicate any hints of an unconventional, female ruler, "best erased to prevent the possibility of another powerful female ever inserting herself into the long line of Egyptian male kings". The tomb of Queen Hatshepsut was discovered by Howard Carter early in 1903, the same year as the publication of The Jewel of Seven Stars, in the Valley of the Kings—similar to the Valley of the Sorcerer, where Tera is found in the novel. The similarities between the two, Hebblethwaite