UCLA Egyptologist gives new life to female pharaoh from 15th century B.C.

No usurper, Hatshepsut was just really good at her job, according to new biography

By Meg Sullivan | October 08, 2014

By the time of her death in 1458 B.C., Egypt’s Pharaoh Hatshepsut had presided over her kingdom’s most peaceful and prosperous period in generations. Yet by 25 years later, much of the evidence of her success had been erased or reassigned to her male forebears.

Even after 20th century archaeologists began to unearth traces of the woman who defied tradition to crown herself as king, Hatshepsut still didn’t get her due, a UCLA Egyptologist argues in a forthcoming book. 

“She’s been described as a usurper, and the obliteration of her contributions has been attributed to a backlash against what has been seen as her power-grabbing ways,” said Kara Cooney, the author of “The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt.”

In the mainstream biography, due Oct. 14 from Crown Publishing, Cooney sets out to rehabilitate the reputation of the 18th dynasty ruler whom she considers to be “the most formidable and successful woman to ever rule in the Western ancient world.” To find a parallel, Cooney argues, one has to look to Empress Lü of third century B.C. China, Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great.

“Hatshepsut’s story needs to be carefully resurrected and her modus operandi needs to be dissected and analyzed in a more fair-minded way,” said Cooney, an associate professor of Near Eastern languages and culture in the UCLA College. “I see her as a person who created her position based on her ability to do the job rather than her desire for it.”

Examining the Lives of Ancient Egyptian Women

The case of an ancient Egyptian woman named Tjat

By Melinda Nelson-Hurst   •  09/02/2014 for the Biblical Archaeology Society

In the heart of Egypt, about 150 miles (ca. 240 km) south of modern Cairo near the city of Minya, lies a large and ancient necropolis at a site named Beni Hasan. This location has been popular among tourists and academics because several of its massive, rock-cut tombs have beautifully decorated tomb chapels that have survived for millennia. These tombs provide troves of information for scholars to analyze and debate, but today I’d like to focus on one minor person in one tomb: an ancient Egyptian woman by the name of Tjat.

Tjat appears in the tomb of Khnumhotep II (tomb 3), a local ruler from around the middle of the Twelfth Dynasty (ca. 1900 B.C.). You may have heard about this tomb before because of its so-called scene of Asiatics (people depicted in the typical way that the ancient Egyptians used to distinguish people to the northeast of Egypt)—figures who have been variously interpreted as everything from local nomads to immigrants from the Near East to Biblical figures. However, much less attention has been paid to the woman named Tjat who appears in prominent positions in four different scenes throughout this tomb and is labeled there as a “sealer” (sometimes translated “treasurer”).

Who was Tjat and why does she appear within this tomb? Because of her prominent place (and that of her children) within these scenes, as well as other factors, scholars have assumed for over a hundred years that Tjat was the mistress and/or second wife of Khnumhotep II, who in turn is assumed to be the father of Tjat’s children. However, having studied Khnumhotep II’s family in some depth, I began to feel compelled to reassess this interpretation of Tjat. Might we, as scholars, have been too quick to categorize this woman as a sexual partner of Khnumhotep II because she did not easily fit other familiar categories? I would certainly say, “yes.” While we will never be able to answer all of our questions about ancient Egypt with any certainty, it is only through close study of both the details and the wider social and historical contexts that we might come a bit closer to the ancient realities of life.

What happened to the missing mummies of Egypt's lost queens?

Joann Fletcher ventures through the temples of Egypt to uncover the 'lost queens' of ancient times

By Joann Fletcher7:00AM BST 04 Sep 2014

On 2nd February 1925, the photographer from the Harvard-Boston archaeological expedition was setting up his camera tripod on the rocky plateau of Giza close to the base of the Great Pyramid. Having some degree of difficulty in his attempt to get the legs on an equal footing, he dislodged what he assumed was a small piece of limestone, but which closer inspection revealed to be a fragment of plaster, the kind of plaster traditionally used in ancient times to seal up the entrance of a tomb.

With the same archaeological team having already made a series of spectacular discoveries at Giza over the previous 20 years, most notably a large group of superb statues of King Menkaure, builder of Giza’s third pyramid, this new discovery was so unexpected the excavation’s director George Reisner was still in the US. So the task of opening the tomb fell to his British assistant Alan Rowe and his Egyptian head foreman Said Ahmed Said, whose removal of the plaster covering revealed a 100 foot vertical shaft cut down into the limestone bedrock, filled solid with limestone masonry and yet more plaster. Only after a month when this had all been removed was it then possible for the archaeologists to descend to the very bottom of the shaft to reach the doorway, marked with the official seal of King Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid.

Although the rock-cut rectangular chamber which lay beyond was only 15 by 8 feet, the archaeologists could see ‘the dazzle of gold’ through a small gap at the top of the doorway. They could also see the chamber was crammed full with all manner of wonderful things whose inscriptions, initially read with the aid of binoculars and later at close quarters, revealed the contents had belonged to Khufu’s mother, Queen Hetepheres (c.2600 BC). With her status as queen mother making her ‘first lady’, at that time of greater importance than the king’s wife, she was certainly the most important woman to her son Khufu since the first tomb he built at Giza was for her, located “in the most important point in his own royal cemetery” noted Reisner’s colleague Noel Wheeler.

The business of death

Book review: “Mrs Tsenhor: A Female Entrepreneur in Ancient Egypt”, by Koenraad Donker van Heel

By Nadia Ismail

Death was big business to the Ancient Egyptians, with their tombs and reliquaries also providing some of the best information on their life and culture. In the intriguing new book, “Mrs Tsenhor: A Female Entrepreneur in Ancient Egypt”, Koenraad Donker van Heel introduces readers to Tsenhor, “sister of Horus”, a strongly spoken and highly independent working woman who made her fortune through the industry of death.

Born in 550 BCE in Karnak, Tsenhor is described as one of a family of chaochytes, hired to bring offerings on behalf of families to the dead in their tombs on the west bank of the Nile. Tsenhor inherited her work from her father, Nesmin, and continued this work alongside her second husband, whom she is described as having married on equal terms.

In exchange for her work, Tsenhor received food items, high quality farm land, foods amongst other things. Such was the demand for the services of chaochytes like Tsenhor, that she amassed not only a house that she could afford to restructure, but she also owned at least one slave and amassed an array of assets to her name. All this was done with little male input.

However, with a good chunk of surviving evidence, either unclear or written in a form of hieroglyphs that only a few Egyptologists can understand, van Heel has a tough job of creating a solid story around Tsenhor.

Knowing Nubia

Ancient African Kingdoms on the Nile: Nubia; Edited by Marjorie Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Salima Ikram and Sue D’Auria; ‫Cairo‬: AUC PRESS, 2012. Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah

For a long time, the very notion of Nubia, the “Land of Gold” as the ancient Egyptians called it, was an eccentric Egyptologist’s pipe dream. Nubiology as a separate academic discipline, independent of Egyptology was unknown. The very notion of Nubiology was frowned upon. Nubia was an Egyptian appendage at best.

New hypotheses, though, attest to Nubian civilizations being the origin of ancient Egypt. In other words, the ancient Nubians were the progenitors, and their cattle-based culture, the precursor of the Egyptian civilization. 

The designation Nubiology was coined by the Polish archeologist and Egyptologist Kazimierz Michalowski who is also acknowledged and internationally acclaimed as the founder of Nubian studies as an academic discipline in its own right.

On a visit to Meroe last year I was astounded by the beauty of the ancient Nubian pyramids. Most are much smaller in size than their Egyptian counterparts, and especially when compared to the Giza pyramids. Yet, two facets of ancient Nubian pyramids stood out. First, was the fact that there were far more pyramid in Sudan than in Egypt. There are 300 pyramids in Sudan, while there are only 100 pyramids in Egypt. Second, and even more startling is that there are almost as many pyramids constructed specifically for ancient Nubian queens, or rather queen-mothers, as for kings.

It is reasonable to presume that the status of royal women in ancient Nubia was far more significant than in ancient Egypt. The royal consorts were not particularly powerful in ancient Nubia. The Queen-Mother, being the king’s biological mother, his maternal aunt or sister often assumed that role. Moreover, many royal women ruled as queens in their own right and were socially accepted as such.

Berenice II and the Golden Age of Ptolemaic Egypt - A Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2014.03.12

Dee L. Clayman, Berenice II and the Golden Age of Ptolemaic Egypt. Women in antiquity.   Oxford; New York:  Oxford University Press, 2014.  Pp. xii, 270.  ISBN 9780195370898

Reviewed by Elizabeth D. Carney, Clemson University

During the peak of Alexandrian literary culture, Ptolemaic poets and intellectuals celebrated the life and virtues of Berenice II, daughter of Magas, king of Cyrene and wife of the third Ptolemy, Euergetes. Nonetheless, dynastic violence, not the glamour and renown generated by supportive poets, characterized the beginning and end of her life. Magas had arranged for her to marry the future Ptolemy III, but after Magas’ death, Berenice’s mother instead compelled her to marry Demetrius the Fair. Young Berenice killed the bridegroom her mother had chosen (she supposedly had found him in bed with her mother) and then took herself off to Alexandria to marry her father’s preferred groom, by now Ptolemy III. Berenice had six children by Ptolemy III, but soon after her husband’s death, Berenice’s son Ptolemy IV arranged his mother’s murder.

Dee Clayman has created the first lengthy study of Berenice’s career and place in literature. Clayman’s background and scholarship has been, primarily, in Hellenistic poetry so, not surprisingly, this study’s strength lies in analysis of the many texts that mention or allude to Berenice, though Clayman also deals with Berenice’s actions and policies, to the degree that the poor and largely absent narrative sources permit.

The introduction provides a brief sketch of Berenice’s life, her role in contemporary poetry (particularly Callimachus’ “Lock of Berenice”), overviews of relevant historical and literary sources, a discussion of Ptolemaic image-making (Clayman does not want to characterize it as “propaganda”), the methodology of her approach, and a note on conventions about dating, spelling, and naming employed in her monograph.

Pyramid-Age Love Revealed in Vivid Color in Egyptian Tomb

By Owen Jarus, LiveScience Contributor   |   November 15, 2013

She was a priestess named Meretites, and he was a singer named Kahai, who performed at the pharaoh's palace. They lived about 4,400 years ago in an age when pyramids were being built in Egypt, and their love is reflected in a highly unusual scene in their tomb — an image that has now been published in all its surviving color.

Inside a tomb dating back to the age of the Pyramids in Egypt held this image, an embrace between a priestess and her husband, a singer in the pharaoh's palace. The image has been recorded by researchers in full color.

Credit: Photo by Ms. Effy Alexakis, copyright Macquarie University Ancient Cultures Research Centre

The tomb at Saqqara — which held this couple, their children and possibly their grandchildren — has now been studied and described by researchers at Macquarie University's Australian Center for Egyptology. Among the scenes depicted is a relief painting showing the couple gazing into each other's eyes, with Meretites placing her right hand over Kahai's right shoulder.

Such a display of affection was extraordinary for Egypt during the Pyramid Age. Only a few examples of a face-to-face embrace survive from the Old Kingdom (2649 B.C. to 2150 B.C.), the time period when the couple lived and pyramid building thrived, said Miral Lashien, a researcher at Macquarie University. "I think that this indicates very special closeness," Lashien told LiveScience in an email.

How Did Female Genital Mutilation Begin?

by Rossella Lorenzi 

United Nations Member States recently approved the first-ever draft resolution calling for a global ban on female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C).

Hailed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a major step forward in protecting women and girls and ending impunity for the harmful practice, the text is expected to be endorsed by the UN general assembly this month.

How did the practice begin anyway?

Although theories on the origins of FGM abound, no one really knows when, how or why it started.

"There's no way of knowing the origins of FGM, it appears in many different cultures, from Australian aboriginal tribes to different African societies," medical historian David Gollaher, president and CEO of the California Healthcare Institute (CHI), and the author of "Circumcision," told Discovery News.

Used to control women's sexuality, the practice involves the partial or total removal of external genitalia. In its severest form, called infibulation, the vaginal opening is also sewn up, leaving only a small hole for the release of urine and menstrual blood.

While the term infibulation has its roots in ancient Rome, where female slaves had fibulae (broochs) pierced through their labia to prevent them from getting pregnant, a widespread assumption places the origins of female genital cutting in pharaonic Egypt. This would be supported by the contemporary term "pharaonic circumcision."

The definition, however, might be misleading. While there's evidence of male circumcision in Old Kingdom Egypt, there is none for female.

Were ancient Egyptians the first feminists?

by Cristen Conger

The Greek­ historian Herodo­tus trav­eled extensively throughout the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, documenting their histories and cultures. When he arrived in Egypt in the fifth century B.C., he witnessed some unusual social dynamics. Whereas the Greek women in his homeland were expected to perform household duties and oversee domestic affairs only, Egyptian society permitted far more freedom for females. Women traded agricultural goods in the marketplace while the men wove at home, Herodotus marveled.

Thanks to smoky-eyed Cleopatra, the notion of liberated, powerful women in ancient Egypt isn't that hard to accept. Even the delicate features of Nefertiti's bust exude an air of authority and confidence. In addition to Herodotus' observations, some Egyptologists have also heralded gender equality in ancient Egyptian culture. Accounts of women receiving the same pay for labor as men, details of legal rights for women and the representation of powerful female deities seem to point to a vaguely feminist culture that valued males and females uniformly. What's more, by the time of Herodotus' visit to Egypt, five women had sat on the throne (Cleopatra shared it with Mark Antony in the 1st century B.C.):

• Nitokret: 2148 - 2144 B.C.
• Sobeknefru: 1787 - 1783 B.C.
• Hatshepsut: 1473 - 1458 B.C.
• Nefertiti: 1336 B.C.

The stories of these women's ascent to power also highlight certain limitations enforced on women in ancient Egypt. More than the others, Hatshepsut abandoned her femininity to fulfill her desire for power. The daughter of Pharaoh Tuthmosis I, became queen after marrying her half-brother, Tuthmosis II. When her husband died following a brief reign, Hatshepsut became the regent of her young nephew Tuthmosis III. Realizing that she had to strike while the metaphorical iron was hot, Hatshepsut adopted male garb and declared herself the new pharaoh. She wore a man's kilt and false beard and took on a new name, Maatkare. In return, Hatshepsut left behind a legacy of success during her 20-year rule. She oversaw the construction of the Deir al-Bahri temple, one of the wonders of the ancient world. The female pharaoh also led important trade expeditions into modern-day Somalia, never before accomplished by a woman.