The Women Pharaohs History Keeps Forgetting

Granite sphinx of Hatshepsut, c. 1479-1458 BCE, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Hatshepsut is the best-known female pharaoh but was not the first or the last.

Most people who know anything about female pharaohs know two names: Hatshepsut and Cleopatra. Hatshepsut, the 18th Dynasty ruler who reigned for roughly 20 years in the 15th century BCE and whose successor attempted to erase her from the record. Cleopatra VII, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, who was Greek by ancestry but ruled as pharaoh and famously entangled herself with Caesar and Antony.

Both are genuinely significant historical figures. Both have also absorbed so much scholarly and popular attention that they have obscured a longer, stranger, and more interesting history of women who held or contested supreme power in Egypt. Several other women held the title of pharaoh, exercised independent royal authority, or ruled de facto if not always de jure. Most of them are known primarily to Egyptologists.

They deserve wider attention.

Neithhotep and the Question of Egypt’s First Ruler

At the very beginning of Egyptian history, in the period around 3100 BCE when Upper and Lower Egypt were first unified, there appears a name associated with the earliest royal tombs: Neithhotep. The name means “Neith is satisfied,” invoking one of Egypt’s oldest and most powerful goddesses.

For decades after the tomb’s discovery at Naqada in 1897, Neithhotep was assumed to be a king’s wife or mother her name appeared on seals alongside the name of Narmer, the traditionally identified first pharaoh of unified Egypt, and later with Aha, his successor. The size and construction of her tomb, however, was the problem. It was larger than the tomb of Aha. It contained royal regalia. The serekh (the rectangular enclosure symbol used exclusively for royal names) enclosed her name directly.

Ivory label from the tomb of Neithhotep at Naqada, showing her name within a serekh, c. 3100 BCE. Egyptian Museum, Cairo.

Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson, in his 1999 analysis of Early Dynastic Egypt, argued that Neithhotep may have served as regent or co-ruler during the transition between the reigns of Narmer and Aha potentially the first woman to exercise royal authority in Egypt. The evidence is not conclusive, and most Egyptologists are cautious about the claim. But the size of the tomb and the royal serekh are difficult to explain if Neithhotep was simply a consort.

Sobekneferu: The Undisputed First

Whatever the situation with Neithhotep, the first woman whose rule as pharaoh is unambiguously documented in the historical record is Sobekneferu, who reigned at the end of the 12th Dynasty, around 1806-1802 BCE.

Sobekneferu was the daughter of Amenemhat III and the sister of Amenemhat IV. When Amenemhat IV died without a male heir, she became pharaoh not regent, not queen consort, but pharaoh. She used the full royal titulary, including all five of the names that made up the formal royal designation. She is depicted in surviving statues wearing both male and female royal insignia, sometimes simultaneously, which is consistent with other women who held the pharaonic title and needed to negotiate between the gendered conventions of royal representation.

Her reign was brief approximately four years and marked the end of the 12th Dynasty. What happened after her death is unclear; the 13th Dynasty that followed saw rapid succession of mostly short reigning kings, suggesting political instability. Whether Sobekneferu’s reign was a symptom or a cause of that instability is not established.

Nefertiti and the Succession Mystery

Nefertiti is probably the most recognizable face of ancient Egypt after Tutankhamun, thanks to the famous painted limestone bust now in Berlin. She was the Great Royal Wife of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, who upended Egyptian religion by imposing the exclusive worship of the solar disk Aten. What happened to her after Akhenaten’s death around 1336 BCE is one of Egyptology’s most actively debated questions.

Several researchers, most prominently Nicholas Reeves of the University of Arizona, have argued that Nefertiti ruled as pharaoh under the name Neferneferuaten a female ruler attested in documents immediately following Akhenaten’s reign, before Tutankhamun’s accession. The identity of Neferneferuaten has been debated for decades; the candidates include Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s daughter Meritaten, and others.

The Nefertiti Bust, c. 1345 BCE, Neues Museum, Berlin. Whether Nefertiti ruled as pharaoh after Akhenaten remains actively debated among Egyptologists.

If Nefertiti did rule as Neferneferuaten, she would have been pharaoh for approximately two years between Akhenaten’s death and Tutankhamun’s accession. The evidence is circumstantial the name does not appear with explicit female grammatical markers in all contexts, and the identification relies on interpretations of damaged and incomplete texts. But the scholarly consensus has been moving toward Nefertiti or Meritaten as the most likely candidates, and away from a male Neferneferuaten.

Twosret: The Last of the 19th Dynasty

Twosret ruled at the end of the 19th Dynasty, around 1191-1189 BCE, in circumstances strikingly parallel to Sobekneferu five centuries earlier. She had served as regent for the child pharaoh Siptah and, when he died, claimed the throne herself. She used the full male royal titulary, constructed a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and appears in records as pharaoh.

Her reign was immediately followed by a civil conflict and the rise of a new dynasty under Setnakhte, who appears to have regarded Twosret’s reign as illegitimate her tomb was appropriated by Setnakhte and her cartouches partially erased, a pattern familiar from Hatshepsut’s history.

The repetition of this pattern across Egyptian history women take power in succession crises, rule effectively for brief periods, and then face posthumous erasure by their successors is itself significant. It suggests that female rulership was not simply accepted within Egyptian political culture but contested, and that the erasure was a deliberate political statement, not an administrative accident.

Cleopatra gets the fame. Hatshepsut gets the museum retrospectives. Sobekneferu, Twosret, Nefertiti (maybe), and Neithhotep (possibly) the women who preceded or bracketed them, who held the same title under harder circumstances mostly remain in specialist literature.

What I find most interesting about this history is not the individual women but the pattern. In each case, female rule appears at moments of succession crisis, when the dynastic line has faltered. Egypt’s political culture was not designed to produce female pharaohs, and it did not do so routinely. But when the system needed it, the option existed and the women who used it were capable enough that their successors felt the need to erase them rather than simply move on.

That raises a question I have not seen adequately answered: if these women were competent enough to rule, and competent enough to threaten the men who followed them, why did the erasure always seem to work? What does it tell us about ancient historical memory and about our own that the default position for thousands of years was to assume the pharaoh was male, even when the evidence of female rule was right there in the stone?

References

Fletcher, J. (2004). The Search for Nefertiti. Morrow.

Robins, G. (1993). Women in Ancient Egypt. British Museum Press.

Tyldesley, J. (1996). Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh. Viking.

Tyldesley, J. (2006). Chronicle of the Queens of Egypt. Thames & Hudson.

Wilkinson, T. A. H. (1999). Early Dynastic Egypt. Routledge.