When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt

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Why Women Don’t Rule the World

In the fifth century B.C., thousands of years after her lifetime, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about a certain Nitocris, a queen whose husband-brother had been murdered by conspirators. The young, beautiful woman claimed her revenge by inviting all the collaborators to a grand banquet in a fancy and newly commissioned underground hall. When the men were all happily eating and drinking, Nitocris ordered the floodgates opened through a secret channel, drowning them all in Nile waters. The rebels thus dispatched, her final act was to throw herself into a fiery pit so that no man could exact his retribution on her. (One wonders whether the fiery pit could have been any better than whatever torture they might have meted out.) Two centuries after Herodotus, the Egyptian priest-historian Manetho, compiler of Egypt’s most comprehensive history, included a section on Nitocris, adding that she had light skin and rosy cheeks, reigned alone for 12 years, and had a pyramid built in her honor.

Nitocris’s story has everything: political intrigue, incest, fabulous Egyptian booby traps—and, most important of all, a beautiful young queen avenging her husband’s murder with cleverness and bravery. Offing herself before they could take (presumably sexual) revenge on her makes her even more appealing. There is only one problem. There is no evidence from that time of Nitocris—no burial location, no statuary, no texts, no monuments, nothing—to prove that she was more than a historian’s fantasy. But her narrative fits some extraordinarily familiar patterns for well-documented female rulers of ancient Egypt: She was the last ruler of her family dynasty; she acquired power by marrying her own brother; she acted in fierce protection of her husband, her brother, her patriarchy; she resorted to deceit and trickery to gain power over her enemies; and she was misunderstood by her own people, who would erase her image from monuments around Egypt. Indeed, there is enough to Nitocris’s legend to suspect that what might seem like nothing more than a salacious story is actually composed of kernels of truth, embedded in a romanticized cultural memory that has come down to us in fragmented and dramatized form.

In one place on our planet thousands of years ago, against all the odds of the male-dominated system in which they lived, women ruled repeatedly with formal, unadulterated power. Like Nitocris, most of these women ruled as Egyptian god-king incarnate, not as the mere power behind a man on the throne. Ancient Egypt is an anomaly as the only land that consistently called upon the rule of women to keep its regime in working order, safe from discord, and on the surest possible footing—particularly when a crisis was under way.

We might forget that a culture so beautiful—with its golden masks and colossal statues, gods with crocodile heads, and hieroglyphs of whimsical complexity—was also ruthlessly authoritarian. We might also overlook that its tone—overtly masculine, defined by pyramids and god-kings and obelisks—was not just supported but enabled by its female foundation of power.

What about ancient Egypt allowed this kind of political and ideological power among the acknowledged weaker sex, plagued by pregnancy, nursing, monthly hormonal shifts, and menopause? It might seem incongruous for ancient Egypt’s authoritarian state to support potential threats to traditional masculine power. Perhaps ancient Egyptian women were made of stronger stuff, gifted with ability and ingenuity greater than women elsewhere. Or maybe the Egyptians were more tolerant and less threatened by female political rule because they had created a social system of gender balance through laws that supported land ownership and social freedoms for both sexes, allowing women decision-making power and access to divorce. Or perhaps the polytheistic Egyptian religion, reliant on the defensive strength of ferocious, bloodthirsty, and mercurial goddesses—Sakhmet and Mut, Bastet and Isis—demanded that its adherents take the political acumen of women into consideration in the real world.

Whether women are too hormonal, grudge-bearing, untrustworthy, self-interested, child-oriented, or simply too softly feminine to hold real power is certainly a topic of discussion still, underscored by the 2016 U.S. presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But these ancient Egyptian female rulers, though long dead, haunt us across the generations with their forthright presences, their intentions, and their unabashed authority, forcing us to question the reasons for their influence and continued relevance today. They demand we query why our grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and daughters are always swimming upstream, no matter how much they hustle. Why did women achieve such levels of formal power in ancient Egypt when so many others across time—up to today—have tried and failed?¹

ONCE UPON A TIME, there were women who ruled the world. Six of them—Merneith, Neferusobek, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret, and Cleopatra—climbed the highest and wielded the most significant power: not as manipulators of their menfolk, but as heads of state. Each started as a queen—a mere sexual vessel of their king—but each became the chief decision-maker, and five of them served as king outright. Though each woman must have had the gravitas, skill, intelligence, and intuition to rule, each was also put in power by an Egyptian system that needed her rule.

But this positivist story conceals some darker twists and turns. These Egyptian women were power brokers, to be sure: educated for complex tasks and supreme leadership, ready to hold the highest position, able to see and move the pieces on the board. But viewed through another lens, they were utterly powerless, mere pawns of a patriarchal system over which they had no control and could never hope to alter in the long term. Allowed into positions of real and formal authority, in the end their power was a short-term illusion each time it occurred. These female kings were mere placeholders for the rightful masculine leaders who were too old or too young to rule—or hadn’t been born yet. Often, the men who came after them erased or omitted their names from the formal king lists of monarchs created by the royal temple.

In the long run, ancient Egypt was no less cruel and oppressive to women than every other complex society on Earth—but, here, they snatched the gift away after graciously bestowing it. So even ancient Egypt—the only state that consistently allowed female rule—suffered a woman leader only when it had to, expunging her from the eyes of her people as soon as possible.

To understand this strange and contradictory tale of unadulterated female power wielded by poorly remembered women over an extraordinary 3,000-year run of ups and downs, let us turn to the women themselves. If we follow their stories, their decisions, their circumstances—if we attempt to see into their private and public lives—then maybe we can comprehend how they ascended to the highest echelons of political power in the richest and most successful land of the ancient Mediterranean and North African world, only to be harshly judged for taking the power that had been freely given to them.

Merneith, one of the earliest embodiments of female power from ancient Egypt, ruled during Dynasty 1 (3000–2890 B.C.), at the dawn of the Egyptian nation-state, when kingship was new and brutal. She never took on a formal position, but she appeared in king lists as the person who ruled on behalf of a son thrust into the position of king too young. Eleven dynasties later, Neferusobek of Dynasty 12 (1985–1773 B.C.) gave structure to the power Merneith had held only through the men and boys around her. She was the first woman who took the Egyptian kingship as her formal title, ruling alone for about four years. Neferusobek achieved what Merneith could not.

Hatshepsut of Dynasty 18 (1550–1295 B.C.) created the most powerful female kingship Egypt had ever seen. Hers was a reign marked by accomplishment, clever strategizing, empire building, and prosperity. But the next king was not her son; indeed her lack of male offspring was what made her kingship necessary. Without a son to keep her legacy intact, her name was removed from the religious and historical record, her images scratched away, her statues smashed to pieces. Her rule was seen as a threat to the men who came after her—the very men she had personally placed into positions of power.

A century later, Nefertiti, also of Dynasty 18, would have heard stories of the audacious Hatshepsut. Nefertiti had to try a different tack to power, one that defended and shielded not only her femininity, but her identity. It is no surprise that Egyptologists still argue about whether Nefertiti achieved the kingship at all. She effectively did it in disguise, setting Egypt on a path to recovery after a period of great turmoil. Nefertiti is remembered to us as a great beauty, a chiseled face of loveliness and sensual desire. But she may have been much more if recent investigations are correct.

During Dynasty 19 (1295–1186 B.C.), another woman—Tawosret—found access to power through her husband, an unrelated royal heir, and brutal civil unrest. When she became king, Tawosret took a road neither Hatshepsut nor Nefertiti had dared tread upon. She ascended the throne unprotected by father or husband or son. Tawosret boldly stood alone as sovereign, eschewing secret identities, new names, or masculinization. Her tomb in the Valley of the Kings shows her as a female king, but that sepulcher would be taken over by the very same man who had her violently removed from power.

After Tawosret, female power lay dormant in Egypt for a thousand years. In a land where women had repeatedly risen to the top, achieving ever greater heights, Egypt fell to foreign empires, obstructing the female authority that kept the people of the Nile protected when everything fell apart. Then Cleopatra VII entered the scene. She almost doesn’t belong on this list of ancient Egyptian queens, being a member of a Macedonian Greek ruling family (the Ptolemaic Dynasty lasted from 305 B.C. to 30 B.C.). But she too ruled Egypt, and likely knew of the great women who had sat on Egypt’s throne before her. Her ascent to leadership clarifies Egypt’s penchant for feminine rule as a necessary aid to shore up a weakened regime. Her entrée to power was through the men around her—father, husbands, brothers, lovers, sons. Cleopatra was a master tactician who understood how to manipulate her relationships to the benefit of her ambitions and of Egypt. If anyone in our story could have achieved genetic legacy, it would have been Cleopatra, via her children with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony. Her supposed obsession with glamour, greed, wasteful spending, and poor military strategizing have all ensured her place in history as a failure—but she was perhaps Egypt’s greatest female ruler.

Egypt’s political system allowed these women to rule—in fact, demanded they step into the arena of power—and it is that mystery we will attempt to solve by examining the strategy of each queen.²

The Egyptians certainly recognized that men were superior in terms of physical strength and biological economics (reproduction outside of one’s body is both handy and efficient). But they also understood that leadership by a woman was always preferable to throwing in one’s lot with a warlord. Most of the women in this book achieved power not through violence but through political consensus. As a rule, women recognize that their position is fragile; Egyptian female rulers understood the need to constantly shore up their power, rather than beat their chests and bang the war drums. This rendered them essential in moments of crisis. In calamitous times, women were invited into power instead of allowing violent men to exacerbate the discord. Relying on female leadership replicated the mythologies of ferocious goddesses protecting their dynasties: Isis shielding her son Horus from his homicidal uncle or Hathor protecting her father Re-Horakhty from rebels. Egyptian society elevated its queens, allowing them to rise up to the top precisely because a woman doesn’t usually resort to military conquest and fractious aggression.

This doesn’t presume that Egyptian female rulers were peaceful, however (Hatshepsut ordered brutal crackdowns on Kush; Tawosret probably played a part in the assassination of a chancellor and maybe even a king). But, in general, these female leaders didn’t tend to foment war against their own. (Cleopatra is a notable exception, but when she raised an army it was against a brother who was trying to kill her, not against the Egyptians themselves.) But, overall, these women were the cautious choice for a circumspect and prudent Egypt when it seemed that all hope was lost.

The Egyptians were light-years ahead of us in their trust of female power. Indeed, many of us have become cynical, knowing that our society is not post-gender any more than it is postracial. We can lament that the system is rigged, that there is nothing a woman can do to change society for the better, that all the biases against female power are already encoded into our DNA, that some of the most powerful women in American society have already been completely erased or forgotten because they don’t fit traditional feminine values (think Janet Reno or Janet Yellen). We can bemoan the fact that we have demonized the women who demonstrate ambition (think Hillary Clinton), and that our society is unspeakably cruel to women, shaming them for their age, their looks, their weight, their height, their voices, their hair and makeup. We can complain that women are some of the worst critics of other women, that girls willfully denigrate other girls to maintain their social power. We may be a 50/50 society in terms of gender, yet women do not hold 50 percent of the power. We say it’s because of the patriarchy, because it was never an even playing field to start with. But when the cynical voices rise, ancient Egypt calls out from the past, reminding us that there was once a society on this planet that valued a woman’s calmer, more nuanced political skills.

Why are we so hostile to female rule yesterday and today, so rancorous to female ambition for power? How does that aversion take shape? Because we are not just talking about Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and Tawosret, but also Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, and Elizabeth Warren—all of whom have been discredited as erratic, drama-prone, inconstant, deceitful, opaque, flighty, illogical, even evil, ruled only by hot flashes and full moons.

I have been teaching a class at UCLA called Women and Power in the Ancient World for four years. In 2017, for the first time, I didn’t have to convince my 200 undergraduate students of gender disparity. I used to document this phenomenon with slide after slide, illustrating the lack of women in leadership positions in Fortune 500 companies and modern government, unequal pay across the board, and the blatant lack of religious leadership by women within Jewish-Christian-Islamic-Mormon traditions in the world (not to mention within global Buddhist or Hindu leadership). But the 2016 U.S. presidential election revealed a visceral opposition toward women in power that did all the explaining for me.

In 2017, the revelations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against women by scores of powerful men in America brought the imbalance of power between the sexes into even starker relief. It’s gotten personal. And nasty. Misogyny now has a face, but we avoid looking directly at its smudged, dirty visage as much as possible. New revelations of sexual harassment and assault committed by yet another man in authority appear every day—and yet we want to drop the hot potato of misogyny, desperate to talk about something else. Political scandal. Collusion with the Russians. Trump Hotel profits. Evangelical apologists. Everything and anything so that we don’t have to talk about how we feel about females in politics; so we don’t have to stand up for women like Angela or Hillary or Elizabeth; so we don’t have to openly face how little power women have in our society and why they have such a hard time getting it; so we don’t have to pinpoint how the American people took down Hillary Clinton through personal attacks based on phantom suppositions of misdeeds, including pizza parlor child-prostitute rings, rather than evidence. And so our pessimism continues to grow. None of the allegations of Donald Trump’s personal flaws in this realm—his womanizing, past and present, a porn star among them, or the possible distributions of hush money to those many women—have swayed his base. Our hostility toward strong and empowered females is everywhere. What is it that we are afraid of?

If we put pictures of Theresa May, Angela Merkel, and Hillary Clinton alongside pictures of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Barack Obama, what might we notice about our unbidden responses, our own (mis)perceptions of power in men and women? Are they old or young? Are they sexy? (Did that question disturb you?)

Sexual value is social value to human beings, whether we openly admit it or not. A man can breed into his seventies. He essentially remains genetically useful until the end of his life; thus his political power can be rewarded, if he so chooses, with more sexual partners as a social bonus that many leaders still cash in on. By contrast, a woman in her fifties, sixties, or seventies can provide no such sexual value to society through reproductive viability; thus no female leader can take on more sexual partners because of her power. The very idea of an older woman—say, Margaret Thatcher—with a bevy of boyfriends is not only laughable; it is aberrant, perverted. But when Donald Trump bragged to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women, many dismissed it as locker room banter—and yet he is the oldest president the United States has ever had. The older female is a crone—old, useless, discardable. Although we don’t want to contemplate women’s visages absent of beauty, the faces and bodies of older men in power have been normalized. Donald Trump is still considered deserving of his beautiful wife, many decades younger than he is. And shirtless Vladimir Putin, riding an ATV or working out at the gym, is a man who continues to use his sex appeal for political advantage.

Even if some of us might feel pride when we consider powerful women’s achievements and the strength of their convictions, their authority often comes across as scary, angry, shrewish, or aggressive when compared to that of male leaders. Whether we want to admit it or not, voting a woman into office makes most Americans feel uncomfortable, even threatened, because she appears more strident and shrill and bossy than her male counterpart, according to countless sociological studies.³ And so we come back to the stark reality in which we live: In modern history, few women have ascended to the position of political head of state in countries around the globe; few women find positions of power in the world’s military systems; few women manage to become CEOs in economic powerhouses; and a female pope or Dalai Lama is unimaginable.

The end result of this discussion is that most of us—male or female—feel a hell of a lot more comfortable if a man tells us, decisively (even derisively) what to do. We are more likely to feel safe and protected if a man, rather than a woman, is ordering us into a war. And a man will be judged less harshly than a woman for strident speech and powerful arm gestures while firing up a crowd.

Simply put, modern female leaders are far more distrusted than their counterparts were in the ancient Egyptian world. And that is what I would like to examine in these pages: what female power has been in the past and what it can become in the future.

A long time ago, in a land far, far away, women called the shots with a regularity that stuns and confuses historians. Egypt fostered female ambition, knowing it would set its people on a cautious and steady course and save their world for millennia to come. Let’s take a look at how these women were able to launch themselves to the pinnacle of their society.

CHAPTER 1

Queen of Blood

From the very beginning of Egypt’s formation as the world’s first regional state, female rule was not only permitted, but required. This differentiated Egypt from other parts of the ancient world. A country protected by expansive deserts, stormy seas, and Nile cataracts, it was not threatened by constant invasions and massive changes of population, allowing the same religion, social structure, culture, and language to flourish and develop, in a strange petri-dish experiment, for almost 4,000 years. The result was an extraordinarily risk-averse society with few regicides or coups. Instead of being rewarded for highly competitive warlording, Egyptian elites found more incentive to go along with the pyramidal social structure and the status quo, even to the point of sacrificing their own lives—or those of their children—to see the kingship continue intact. Egypt would always be different from any other state in the Mediterranean, North Africa, or the Near East because its unique geography and topography forged the most perfect and stable divine kingship the world has ever known.

The ancient Egyptian king was unassailable—geographically, culturally, religiously. Even his name identified him as such: nefer netjer, the perfect god. The first kingship had passed from the god Osiris to his son Horus, making each Egyptian king the living manifestation of the falcon god Horus ever after. The king was divine, even in human form, and his lineage was meant to follow from father to son forever. To protect this transfer of power when it was threatened, the female was essential because her emotionality—her perceived violent temper, scheming, magical abilities, motherly love, sexual desire—was the very tool necessary to protect the next king. A mother would be least likely to raise arms to compete with her own son. A wife, sister, or daughter would be closest to the king without acting as a potential political threat. This is why the richest and most fabulous tombs surrounding the king, from the earliest to the last dynasties, were usually of females. Queens were even given pyramids of their own in Dynasties 4 through 6 (2613–2181 B.C.) as well as Dynasty 12 (1985–1773 B.C.). The queen’s power didn’t compete with the patriarchy but rather supported it, providing it with strong foundations. For the ancient Egyptians, the masculine and the feminine were two sides of the coin of power. Queens were the king’s best assets.

This inclusion of the female as an essential part of working government shaped Egyptian mythology and ideology as well. The scattered narrative fragments of Osiris, Horus, and the goddess Isis—from the Pyramid Texts to the Coffin Texts, private prayers, and mythological tales—are ancient, forged when kingship was developing along the Nile, when feminine power played a new and integral role in the running of the state, protecting the king from harm but also allowing the legal and just transfer of power from father to son.

The queen mother was the arbiter and protector of this divine and most delicate transition. Indeed, in the last temples dedicated to the divine feminine, in holy places like Dendera’s Temple of Hathor, we see carefully crafted and detailed imagery of Isis helping Osiris to be reborn, in all its sexual glory. We see the god reaching out his hand to his erect member ready to re-create himself through sex with himself—but it is Isis who manufactures the circumstances for this miracle of self-re-creation to happen at all, facilitating and receiving the god’s seed to make the next generation of kings, to conceive Horus, the god of kingship himself. It was Isis who bred and bore Egyptian kingship. It was Isis who acted as the magician who pieced her broken husband Osiris back together after his brother Seth had cruelly cut him up into dozens of pieces. She is the alpha and omega of Egyptian kingship.

The Narmer Palette, a flat stone with figured decoration made around 3000 B.C., is one of the earliest documents of Egypt’s mighty kingship, and it is surmounted by images of the divine feminine. We see a cow goddess with curved horns. She bears no name on the stone palette; she might represent one of the cow goddesses Bat or Hathor. Whatever her name, it is she who fed, nurtured, and installed King Narmer’s power. It is she who looks over him from the heavens and grants her support to his kingship.

The earliest written mythology for the divine feminine is found in the Pyramid Texts, first written down in Dynasty 5 (2494–2345 B.C.), in which the goddess is a mother, lover, daughter, bringer of food, provider of protection, the one who awakens the dead king, and the spark for the resurrection of kingship. Here Horus, as the heir of Osiris, finds his place; the chief actors are male, the system undoubtedly patriarchal, but these kings can succeed only because of the feminine, because of Isis and her kind. Just as the ideology of smiting justified the king’s public execution of those viewed as dehumanized enemies, the ideology of Isis raised the status of the royal woman as fierce protector of the king (her husband, brother, or son), as well as purveyor of magic, fertility, and even apotropaic violence that orbited the monarch. But this same ideology must have supported the idea that the king needed female companionship in death, encouraging the sacrifice of hundreds of women, in addition to men, during the earliest dynasty of Egyptian kings. Their integral connection to kingship was, for many individual Egyptian women, also their undoing.

Ironically, then, a female could rule only in the most unequal of social systems, which could demand such human sacrifice: the most totalitarian and authoritarian of governments, in which giant behemoth statues are built and enemies are executed publicly and brutally, splattering the king himself with the blood and brains of his dispatched enemies. A queen existed only to support the patriarchy, to link father to son in an unbroken line of succession. (And that is the dark side of Egyptian queenship; it was not a sisterhood to promote other females or to broaden inclusive participation in government, but a mechanism to buoy up one man, and one man only.) Egyptian royal women helped to ensure the power of an exclusive and elite group—and thus the power of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. They guaranteed prudence, safety, and protection.

In ancient Egypt, female power made a dramatic entrance when kingship was new and the state was in its first glimmers of formation. When the chosen successor to the kingship was too young to rule on his own, presumably after the untimely death of the king, it was decided that the child’s mother would rule in his name. When the boy was old enough and mature enough to act on his own, the woman would elegantly, and discreetly, hand over the reins to her son. Allowing the woman to exercise power for a young sovereign was a perfect way to protect the patriarchal order, if only temporarily. Egyptologists call this a regency system, and the ruling woman a regent. The Egyptians never formalized the position with a title but used it unerringly to maintain dynastic succession without a break in the line or an invitation to conflict between men.

In such circumstances in most other places in the ancient world, rivals backed by armed forces would have swooped in, killed the king’s son and close family, and taken over. But Egypt, with its protected borders, rarely experienced invasions from abroad. Military competition was generally not a means of advancing one’s place internally, either (particularly during times of prosperity and functioning government). Egypt would develop into a safe and prosperous country, growing grain with little effort from the rich farmland inundated every summer season by the Nile. No more than a handful of kings were murdered over its long history.

It was, in fact, the perfect breeding ground for an invulnerable divine kingship to be forged. Only here, where one was rewarded—richly—for keeping eyes downcast and going along with the status quo, where money grew as easily as stalks of grain, where invading armies were always stymied by the desert sands that surrounded this massive riverine oasis, could such a profound belief in the sanctity of the king’s person have developed without political pushback or cynicism. People are happy to do what they’re told if there is plenty to go around; Egypt was so prosperous in agricultural and mineral wealth—gold, electrum, granite, turquoise, and carnelian—that armed competition among its people was not commonplace. The prudent and cagey Egyptian elites maintained their divine kingship at all costs over three millennia, more or less, of native rule—even when a king died unexpectedly, leaving a mere boy in charge of this most powerful country.

Even if the Egyptians denigrated the ruling potential of a woman because of her sex (and there is no indication that they ever did), it was in their best interest to allow educated, elite women to rule, if only to protect their prosperous, even easy, lifestyle, which suffered few outside competitors for the throne. If invasion from beyond was not a threat, then all one had to control were potential dangers from within. Thus, it was less perilous to allow the accession of an inexperienced and weak king than to end the dynasty and change the ruling family, which in turn would upend the administration—the thousands of officials, courtiers, and priests who held wealth and power in ancient Egypt. No one wanted to risk losing such easy riches.

By this logic, no one was interested in allowing an uncle to make decisions on behalf of his underage nephew-king. That uncle was a clear inside threat, potentially destabilizing a carefully balanced system of elite families. Egyptians understood that men are the most likely aggressors in human society, and that an uncle’s interest would be best served by killing the young monarch and crowning himself in his place. The safest alternative was to allow women related to the young king into power—a tactic the Egyptians employed repeatedly.

In places like Mesopotamia or Syria, it made sense for the ruling elites to support an able-bodied and mature man as the