Scientists Just Found Evidence That Ancient Egypt Had a Female King 5,000 Years Ago
Over 5,000 years ago, a royal named Meretneith was the big boss of ancient Egypt. She was long known as a major player during the First Dynasty, which scientists figured out because her tomb was loaded with enough gold and rich stuff to put her on par with male pharaohs. But just how important she was during her time wasnβt exactly known.
Now, according to new research published in Prague Egyptological Studies, she was pretty important because she was a full-blown King of Egypt. Β
The discovery started with an old black-and-white picture of a mud jar stopper dating back to the 1940s. An Egyptologist named Walter B. Emery found 13 of those stoppers in Saqqara, an Egyptian village home to an ancient mausoleum filled with Egyptian royalty. He claimed the hieroglyphs featured Meretneithβs name wrapped in a serekh, the official royal emblem reserved exclusively for legitimate rulers. Academics have long argued that the photo quality was simply too terrible to make such a definitive claim. Modern researchers just proved Emery right.
The research team partnered with a digital technician at Macquarie University to clean up the blurry picture to give themselves a crisp and clear view of the ancient ink. The results confirmed that Emery was right β Meretneith shared the same royal mark as male kings, meaning that she was a king herself, not just some power player sitting on the sidelines watching someone else rule.
This makes Meretneith the second recorded female ruler in Egyptian history to sport the serekh. Her rule was pretty interesting in itself, as she shifted roles from co-regent alongside King Djer to an interim ruler to the mother of another king. She was Girl Boss-ing it long before that cringy term ever existed, which she would have actively rejected anyway, since part of what makes her fascinating is that the researchers say she actively rejected the common titles associated with governing.
