National Geographic Society (É.-U.) - When women ruled the world: six queens of Egypt

I n 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 Egypts 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.

Nitocriss story has everything: political intrigue, incest, fabulous Egyptian booby trapsand, most important of all, a beautiful young queen avenging her husbands 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 Nitocrisno burial location, no statuary, no texts, no monuments, nothingto prove that she was more than a historians 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 Nitocriss 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 footingparticularly when a crisis was under way.

We might forget that a culture so beautifulwith its golden masks and colossal statues, gods with crocodile heads, and hieroglyphs of whimsical complexitywas also ruthlessly authoritarian. We might also overlook that its toneovertly masculine, defined by pyramids and god-kings and obeliskswas 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 Egypts 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 goddessesSakhmet and Mut, Bastet and Isisdemanded that its adherents take the political acumen of women into consideration in the real world.