The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s enormous, glorious show “Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh” begins in the Great Hall with the Met’s own colossal pink granite “Sphinx of Hatshepsut” (c. 1472-58 B.C.E.). One of the great pleasures of this exhibition, other than the fact that the show celebrates, for the first time, one of the greatest and least understood periods of Egyptian art, is that it frees up sculptures that can sometimes feel cramped in the museum’s well-endowed yet overcrowded Egyptian galleries.

“Sphinx of Hatshepsut,” like many other Met masterpieces included in the exhibition, has never looked better out of situ. Once part of a line of sphinxes that guarded Hatshepsut’s great mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, across the Nile from modern Luxor, the 11-foot-long sculpture now faces the center of the Great Hall. It depicts the queen/king as a sphinx with a lion’s body and a royal portrait head, commanding the entire space with grace and grandeur.

As with most ancient Egyptian art from the great pyramids onward, “Sphinx of Hatshepsut,” though it is a sculpture in the round, demands to be viewed centrally and frontally from each side, as if confronting a cube. Because the art was made for the gods (or as a ritual link to them) and meant to be experienced metaphorically, it was abstract rather than representational. Transitional movement between planes, or sides, that would reaffirm movement in three-dimensional space (the space of our living world) was abandoned in favor of the abstract – an affirmation of the afterlife.

The “Sphinx” balances extreme rest and extreme readiness – eternal, external power and inward, eternal calm. Viewed frontally, the thick, muscular body appears to swell and to ripple the surrounding space, a shudder that moves through the rib cage, the curved, fanning headdress, and the sinuous tail. The arms appear to claw at the base, and, as with the Great Sphinx at Giza, the body seems to shift both left and right of center, the haunches to lift as if beginning to pounce, and the eyes to stare for all eternity through you.

“Hatshepsut” comprises some 270 works, half of which belong to the Met. Here are monumental royal and small sculpture, reliefs, false doors, Hatshepsut’s sarcophagus, ceremonial objects, paintings, personal items, furniture, vessels, and jewelry. The installation is exhilarating: The gallery walls are painted a mild gray or a deep lapis blue, and the placement of the large sculptures, one of which dominates each gallery, gives them the sense of hovering or being suspended against an Egyptian-blue sky. The exhibition offers an exquisite journey through the 20-year reign, from c. 1479-58 BCE, of the Egyptian New Kingdom pharaoh Hatshepsut, Western civilization’s most important female ruler.

In patriarchal ancient Egypt, the pharaoh was believed to be the sun god Ra incarnate. The continuation of the universe (the daily movement of the planets, the change of the seasons, the annual flooding of the Nile) depended on the bloodline being transferred from father to son. After the un timely death of her brother, Thutmose II, Hatshepsut acted as regent for her young nephew-stepson, Thutmose III, and then as pharaoh-king and senior co-ruler with Thutmose. Although not the first or the last woman to rule Egypt, and certainly not as well-known as the later Cleopatra, Hatshepsut took full responsibility for the kingdom, which was then the largest and most powerful in the world. She was responsible for the longest female reign in Egypt – a flourishing period that was one of the greatest of Egyptian Renaissances in the areas of trade, expansion, and the arts.

For reasons that are not completely understood, the reign of Hatshepsut was erased from Egyptian history not long after her death. The existence of her reign, details of which are still being worked out, was not discovered until the 19th century. And many of the sculptures in the Met’s exhibition were originally damaged or completely broken into fragments.

Despite their broken or fragmentary state, these are masterpieces. One of the greatest works on view is “Hatshepsut as King,” a creamy limestone depiction of the seated pharaoh with subtle suggestions of breasts and carved flowing areas – spatial voids made magically solid – between her arms and chest and between her legs. Though the sculpture is badly damaged, its qualities of repose, royal strength, delicacy, and of a broadly spreading tranquility remain palpable. As with so much Egyptian art, the pharaoh is completely idealized and abstract: She appears to float, even though she is made of extremely heavy stone. At the same time, she feels natural, breathing, and alive – in part because of her equally wry and pensive yet inviting Mona Lisa smile.

Just as astonishing are the statues of Senenmut, Hatshepsut’s chancellor and royal tutor to the queen’s daughter, Neferure. Some depict him, in a traditional mother-and-child format, seated or standing and holding her as guardian. In “Senenmut Seated With Neferure,” she swells out of his chest like an inflating balloon, and she has the presence of a living organ outside his body. In others, he is beautifully pared down into slightly curving blocks that are covered with hieroglyphics, sculptural repositories in which the ka, or soul of the deceased, could eternally rest, and out of which the heads seem to emerge and float.

Nothing can substitute for the experience of a trip to Egypt, where you really feel as if you are in contact with the beginnings of civilization. Yet “Hatshepsut,” a truly exquisite and mysterious exhibition, is certainly powerful. Even if you frequent the Met’s Egyptian wing, as I do, you may feel over and over again that you are seeing these works for the very first time.

Until July 9 (1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).