Daughters of Isis - Joyce Tyldesley

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by Daughters of Isis- Women of Ancient Egypt (epub)


  The Royal Succession: Tuthmosis I to Tutankhamen

  7

  Female Kings

  The Heiress, Great in the Palace, Fair in the Face, Adorned with the Double Plumes, Mistress of Happiness, Endowed with Favours, at hearing whose voice the King rejoices, the Chief Wife of the King, his beloved, the Lady of the Two Lands, Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, may she live for ever and ever.

  Titles of Queen Nefertiti

  The Egyptians held remarkably consistent theories about kingship which remained generally unvaried from the beginning of the Old Kingdom until the Late Period, a time span of well over two thousand years. The monarch was the absolute head of all aspects of Egyptian secular life, and his word was law. His most obvious tasks, as administrator and defender of his country, were to protect his people, to maintain internal and external security and to preserve order and the general status quo. This is the aspect of kingship which perhaps approaches closest to our own perceptions of the term. In times of peace the king was held responsible for ensuring that all went well within Egypt, that the harvest was collected and sufficient food stored, that the impressive building projects continued and that the civil service functioned efficiently, overseeing the operation of the taxation and legal systems. In times of war he was expected to lead his troops bravely into battle, successfully defending his land against invaders and routing traditional enemies with spectacular victories. To help him achieve these ends the king employed a large and efficient bureaucracy and an equally large and efficient army, surrounding himself by loyal and trusted advisors who were often members of his immediate family.

  The importance of the pharaoh was not, however, limited to the performance of his secular obligations as the nominal head of a well-organized civil service and army; that was a function which could be done by any competent official. It was the very presence of a recognized king on the throne of Egypt which ensured the stability of the country. Maat, a broad concept which may be translated literally as justice or truth, was the term used by the Egyptians when referring to the ideal state of the universe.1 Maat had been established at the beginning of the world but was not permanent and could never be taken for granted; chaos or disorder was always lurking as an ever-present threat to stability. The king was personally responsible for the operation and maintenance of maat throughout the land, and indeed this formed an essential part of the contract drawn up between the king and his gods. The gods established the king on the Horus throne and endowed him with ‘life, stability and dominion’. They also controlled all natural phenomena, ensuring that the Nile continued in its annual inundation cycle and that the sun never failed to shine. In return, the king pledged to rule Egypt wisely, establishing temples for the gods and making sure that the offering tables were well provisioned with offerings. Thus was maat established. In lawless or kingless times the coming of a ruler would bring maat or order, while conversely there could be no maat without a pharaoh on the throne. The Egyptians could no more conceive of their country surviving without a king than they could imagine their agriculture surviving without the annual inundation.

  Fig. 31 The goddess Maat

  How the gods rejoice – you have strengthened their offerings. How the people rejoice – you have established their frontiers. How your forebears rejoice – you have enriched their offerings. How Egypt rejoices in your strength – you have protected her customs.

  From a Middle Kingdom cycle of hymns to King Senwosret III

  The king of Egypt was no mere mortal, he was a god incarnate. His divinity was universally and unquestioningly accepted by both himself and his people, and he was treated by all as the living embodiment of the god Horus and the son of Re or Amen-Re. He was divinely appointed by the gods, was the high priest of every temple in the land and, by observing the required daily rituals, he provided an earthly link between his people and the more inaccessible deities. This acceptance of divine kingship played an important part in the maintenance of stability throughout the Dynastic period. It both confirmed the absolute right of each monarch to the throne and reinforced the strength of the royal line by stressing the need for the correct dynastic succession. The survival of the kingship was seen by all as vital to the maintenance of the good relationship between Egypt and its gods, without which the country would founder, while the divinity of the monarch had the added bonus of making the king head of all religious practices, thereby preventing individual religious factions from gaining too much power. However, it was clearly understood that the king’s divinity was not absolute; he was subordinate to his fellow gods and did not himself hold their miraculous powers. He was expected to show them due respect, and the piety of the king was considered essential for a prosperous and successful reign: as Queen Hatchepsut wrote in an attempt to stress her divine links with her god-father Amen, ‘I am in very truth his daughter who serves him and knows what he ordains.’

  Throughout the Dynastic period the position of king of Egypt was always perceived as a man’s role. There seems to have been no specific ban on women succeeding to the throne but, with the exception of Manetho who records a King Binothris of the 2nd Dynasty during whose reign ‘it was decided that women might hold kingly office’, nowhere is it even briefly admitted that such a possibility could arise. The traditional stately duties of diplomat, soldier and priest were by convention masculine duties; any intentional disturbance of this natural order would certainly be going against maat. If, as often occurred, the king nominated his successor as his co-regent before his death, it would be seen as extremely unreasonable for him to select a daughter in preference to a son, particularly as the tradition of royal brother–sister marriages could involve the promotion of a wife above her husband. One of the practical aspects of polygamous royal marriages was to ensure that each king enjoyed the optimum circumstances in which to beget at least one male heir.

  I know that I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too.

  Queen Elizabeth I rallying her troops at the approach of the Spanish Armada

  There are few societies which will allow a woman to accede to the throne in preference to a man. Nor have there ever been many such societies. The handful of women who have been permitted by their communities to rule have generally been tolerated because of the absence of a suitably qualified male candidate and they have therefore been perceived as acting, at least ostensibly, on behalf of a male relative. There have certainly been powerful women in the histories and legends of past societies – for example, the Greeks Antigone and Clytemnestra and the Romans Livia and Agrippina – but these women were exceptional, often forced beyond their normal circumstances to act in an atypical and unfeminine manner. Even in countries where the monarch is merely a figurehead and not expected to make important decisions of state, kings are regarded as the norm, queens regnant a deviation from the norm. Thus, in almost all the monarchies of present-day Europe the first-born son succeeds to the throne, automatically taking precedence over his elder and possibly more suitable sisters; although this may be regarded by some as unfair it is nevertheless accepted by all the countries concerned. The ability to rule, no matter how nominally, is almost universally perceived as a male attribute, and in this respect females are definitely accorded a secondary role in the royal family. The explanation for this blatant discrimination is usually found within the society’s interpretation of the function of kingship and its view of the proper role of women.

  As a general rule societies accord women the right to rule at times when there is no clear male heir to the throne, although in a well-established royal family this situation is less common than might be imagined: in England, for example, only six queens in the past five hundred years have inherited either their father’s or uncle’s crown.2 Women are also accorded the right to assume positions of leadership at times of national unrest or disturbance, often replacing or avenging a deposed or murdered husband, son or father. Although royal women are generally consig
ned to a passive role and are expected to act via men, such strident behaviour in a good cause generally meets with the approval of society. In almost all cases ruling queens come from within the existing royal family. Non-royal men have managed to claim thrones by aptitude, cunning or force, but this is virtually unheard of for non-royal women who rarely have either access to wealth or control over troops.

  Only three remarkable women are definitely known to have ruled Dynastic Egypt as kings, each one taking the throne, as might be expected, under highly unusual circumstances. Three further women may have acted as queens regnant, although the evidence relating to their reigns is both flimsy and inconclusive in all three cases. The biographies of Queens Meryt-Neith, Nitocris, Sobeknofru, Hatchepsut, Nefertiti and Twosret are given below.3 Unfortunately, our understanding of all six women is very patchy. Only Hatchepsut reigned for long enough to make a clear impact on the archaeological and historical record; unluckily she also made a strong impact on her people to the extent that much of the evidence relating to her rule was deliberately effaced and destroyed after her death. The earliest putative queen regnant, Meryt-Neith, ruled at the start of the Dynastic age and is known principally from her funerary monuments, while the memory of her 6th Dynasty successor, Nitocris, has become entangled with many romantic myths and legends to the extent that the truth behind her reign is difficult to ascertain. The remaining two queens, Sobeknofru and Twosret, ruled only briefly at times of civil disruption and were followed by periods of near anarchy, leaving us with few monuments and written records with which to reconstruct the events of their reigns. The Egyptian king lists have provided some confirmation of the surviving archaeological evidence relating to these ladies while later historians, such as Manetho, Herodotus and Strabo, have all made interesting, if occasionally rather unlikely, contributions to our understanding of their reigns.

  Two important facts connect these six queens: they were each queen-consort and therefore probably of royal blood and, with the possible exception of Meryt-Neith, as far as we are able to tell, they each failed to produce a son. All six women, no matter how dominant their personalities, must have had the support of male members of the establishment. Three of the queens followed a very similar career track. Nitocris, Sobeknofru and Twosret all took the throne during periods of disruption when maat was absent from the land and there was no obvious male successor, and all three reigned for less than three years before being followed by periods of lawlessness and a change of dynasty. History has generally regarded these three reigns as brave attempts to perpetuate the royal succession against all odds. Hatchepsut’s long rule is more of a puzzle as she proclaimed herself co-ruler with the acknowledged heir to the throne at a time when there was no clear or obvious need for a woman to assume power. The reasoning behind this action is now obscure. She is, however, the only queen regnant whose solo rule was not followed by a period of lawlessness. Queen Nefertiti presents us with even more of a conundrum. There is no incontrovertible evidence that she ever ruled Egypt but several intriguing clues hint that she may have been a co-regent with her husband either under her own name or under a name which has also been attributed to a young prince. Between them the stories of these six women contain elements of intrigue, mystery, power and death.

  Queen Meryt-Neith – 1st Dynasty

  We have no direct proof that Meryt-Neith ever ruled as king, and she is not included on any of the surviving king lists. However, Meryt-Neith lived at the very dawn of Egyptian history, a time whose written records are both sparse and somewhat obscure. There is certainly a strong body of circumstantial evidence which suggests that she may have actually taken the throne; evidence which, if related to a man, would surely be accepted as confirmation of her reign.

  The problem of Meryt-Neith first came to light in AD 1900 when Petrie, excavating an impressively spacious tomb included among the burials of kings at the royal necropolis of Abydos, recovered a large carved funeral stela. This bore the name ‘Meryt-Neith’ and, although it lacked the customary royal Horus name, was unquestioningly accepted as a male king’s funerary stela. On the basis of this evidence Meryt-Neith was identified as a king, possibly the third ruler of the 1st Dynasty. Only later did it become apparent that the name is actually female, literally meaning ‘Beloved of [the goddess] Neith’, and that the hitherto unremarkable king was, in fact, a woman. Instantly, on the basis of cultural expectations rather than sound archaeological evidence, Meryt-Neith was re-classified as an unusually powerful queen-consort.

  We now know that Meryt-Neith was provided with an additional funerary monument at the northern royal burial ground of Sakkara. Here she also had a solar boat which would enable her spirit to travel with the god of the sun in the Afterlife, an honour normally reserved for the king. The curious custom of building two tombs, one in Lower Egypt close to the capital of the newly unified state and one in Upper Egypt, the homeland of the ruling dynasty, was peculiar to the early kings of Egypt; although logic dictated that they could only ever be interred in one tomb they seem to have felt the need to have two funerary monuments, one serving as an actual tomb and the other as a dummy tomb or cenotaph.4 At the moment Meryt-Neith is the only woman known to have been commemorated in this way, and this again strongly suggests that she may well have been a ruler or at least a co-regent rather than a consort. Following contemporary custom, each of her tombs was surrounded by the subsidiary graves of at least forty attendants while a further seventy-seven servants were buried in a neat U-shape – presumably around three sides of a now-vanished building – near her Abydos monument. The attendants buried at Sakkara were all interred with objects symbolizing their trade, so that the shipbuilder was provided with a model boat while the artist was buried with several pots of pigment.

  Queen Nitocris – 6th Dynasty

  Fig. 32 Cartouche of Queen Nitocris

  Nitocris presents us with exactly the opposite problem to that posed by Meryt-Neith. Tradition records that the good and beautiful Queen Nitocris was the first woman to reign as king over Egypt, and many fantastic and romantic legends have become entangled around her name. However, although selected details of her life were preserved by the historians Manetho and Herodotus, and despite the fact that her name is clearly included among the Old Kingdom monarchs of the Turin Canon, there is no definite archaeological evidence to show that a Queen Nitocris ever existed. She has left us no inscribed monuments, and has no known tomb. Experts are generally divided over her life, some declaring her to be a true king, while others classify her as a mere legend.

  The 6th Dynasty King Pepi II is reputed to have ruled Egypt for over ninety years. His long reign was marked by a gradual decline in the stability of the country and when, following his death, there was no obvious successor to his crown, there was a phase of general unrest which eventually degenerated into the unruly First Intermediate Period. During this unstable episode the throne was occupied by a succession of little-known kings with very short reigns – a clear indication that all was not well within Egypt. The Turin Canon records that ‘Nitokerti’ was the second or third of these kings after Pepi II, reigning for precisely ‘two years, one month and a day’ at the end of the 6th Dynasty. Manetho describes Queen Nitocris as ‘the noblest and loveliest woman of her time, rosy-cheeked and of fair complexion’. Confusing his Queen Menkare-Nitocris with King Menkaure of the 4th Dynasty, he believed that she had completed the construction of the third pyramid – presumably at Giza – and had at the appropriate time been entombed within it. He assigned to Nitocris a reign of twelve years. Eretosthenes, translating Nitocris’s name into Greek as ‘Athena is victorious’, allotted her a shorter reign of six years.

  The Queen’s much admired rosy complexion (rhodophis in Greek) has led to a certain amount of confusion between Nitocris and a beautiful but infamous courtesan of the 26th Dynasty; a woman named Rhodophis or Dorchia who lived in the Egyptian city of Naukratis. Many improbable stories have been transferred from Rhodophis-Dorchia to ‘Queen Rhodophis’
. One such Cinderella-like tale recorded by Strabo tells us how, while the beautiful Rhodophis was bathing in the Nile, an eagle snatched away her discarded sandal and flew with it to the royal residence at Memphis. The king was sitting in the palace gardens as the bird passed overhead, and the sandal dropped from the eagle’s grasp directly into his lap. On examining the sandal the king became so enchanted by its delicate shape and perfume that he at once started a nationwide search for its owner. Eventually Rhodophis was discovered at home in Naukratis and was given a royal escort to Memphis. There the impetuous king fell head over heels in love with his beautiful subject and at once made her his wife. After her death the grieving king buried his queen in a great pyramid. A second and considerably less romantic legend affirms that the evil Queen Rhodophis haunts the third Giza pyramid, appearing naked and beautiful to drive demented all who are unfortunate enough to behold her.

 

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