THE GODDESS OF CREATION, HISTORY’S FIRST QUEENS & THE POWER OF REGALIA
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With spring having finally arrived and new life emerging all over, it seems timely to return to the beginning of creation ancient Egyptian-style, when the primeval waters gave way to reveal Neith the great creator who gave birth to the very sun itself.
As one of the key figures in our new exhibition ‘Cleopatra and the Queens of Egypt’, Neith is the first of five female deities presiding over our unfolding story of Egypt’s female rulers, culminating of course in Cleopatra VII. And as she was able to draw on some three thousand years of Egypt’s long history, we wanted to show how she could literally ‘look back’ at her predecessors for inspiration using our chronological ‘Timeline of Queens’ (above & below, with a nod to the graphics on our BBC2 ‘Egypt’s Lost Queens’ at 2 minutes into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmFM-rPerL4).
Designed as our take on the ancient ‘king lists’ originally set up at places like Karnak and Abydos, it suggests one of the ways in which Cleopatra would have known about these queens and female pharaohs, not only commemorated on temple walls but their names and images preserved on all kinds of artefacts, in the documents housed in temple libraries and those within the Great Library of Alexandria close to her palace (see: https://www.immortalegypt.co.uk/post/houses-of-books-houses-of-life-libraries-past-present-future).
Like all royal children of her dynasty receiving a superb education within this greatest of all libraries, Cleopatra was long remembered by Egypt’s own historians as ‘the virtuous scholar’ (above). For as well as her everyday Greek and at least seven other languages she was the first of her dynasty to learn Egyptian, not only giving her direct access to three millennia of her country’s written history but allowing her to speak directly to her subjects.
Likewise her understanding of Egypt’s millennia-old religion, allowing her to actively participate in its ancient rites by physically taking on the trappings of divinity so that “when she appeared in public she assumed a robe sacred to Isis, and was addressed as the New Isis” says Greek writer Plutarch. Originally with a crown representing the throne she passed down to each royal generation, Isis had become Egypt’s greatest female deity by Cleopatra’s time, having taken over the powers, titles and regalia (including crowns) of all other goddesses who themselves had played such a hugely important part in the lives of Cleopatra’s own predecessors.
For like Cleopatra with Isis, these earlier royal women similarly personified the goddesses through their own names, titles and appearance, something we wanted to highlight chronologically beginning some 5,000 years ago. So our first case is presided over by the gleaming outline of the aforementioned Neith, in many ways Isis’ ancestor, wearing the red crown of the North where she was mainly based. As the one who gave the life she could also destroy, Neith was both creator and war goddess, holding an ankh (life) sign in one hand and in the other her trademark bow and arrows with mace-shaped sceptre, imagery we intentionally reflect in the glass display case housing the actual weapons (above).
With a selection of first dynasty ivory arrowheads with red ochre tips to imitate blood, these were discovered in Egypt’s first royal cemetery at Abydos by the Egypt Exploration Society (EES, https://www.ees.ac.uk/) and presented to Bolton Museum (above). And arranged alongside are bronze arrowheads manufactured at Naukratis close to Neith’s cult centre Sais, again found by the EES and loaned by Bolton along with stone mace heads, the distinctive shape of one reflecting that found among Neith’s armoury (below). Such maces have also been discovered in both male and female burials of 4th millennium BC date, and using Perspex to replicate their original wooden shafts to clarify their use as weapons rather than simply ‘votive objects’, our experiments using stone replicas and pig skulls back in 2008 demonstrated their effectiveness (31 minutes into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHTa1yKcI0A).
Even the hieroglyph used in Neith’s own name symbolised weaponry (below left), comprising two arrows crossing a shield whose form was likened to the protective wings of the click beetle (Agrypnus notodonta). And with the insect’s association with the goddess further enhanced by its ability to escape danger by firing itself high into the air much like her arrows, we’ve been loaned a superb slate/siltstone bracelet carved as a series of such beetles, again discovered at the royal cemetery Abydos by the EES and now part of the world-class collections at Bolton where it proves very popular in our study day handling sessions (below right).
Lending a suitably regal tone to this first display case, the trio of royal women represented by its contents are all linked to Neith, beginning with the first named woman in human history: Egypt’s queen Neith-hotep. Meaning ‘goddess Neith is content’, her name was written inside the same early cartouche (‘serekh’) as that of a king (below), in this case her husband Narmer, first king of a united Egypt.
And with Neith-hotep’s name found on clay seal impressions of the type we’ve replicated for display, a very rare surviving image of the woman herself may be part of the so-called Narmer Macehead, on which an enthroned King Narmer faces an enigmatic individual inside a carrying chair of a type used to transport divine statues and clearly the royal women who embodied them (below left). As this swathed figure peers out through heavily outlined eyes, this is echoed by our display of the green malachite eye paint worn at this time (below right), alongside a sheet of ancient linen used widely as wraparound clothing whose fineness denoted status.
Although the wife of a king, Neith-hotep wielded even more power as the mother of Narmer’s successor Hor-aha, the all-important maternal role reflecting goddess Neith’s role as mother of the sun. Yet beyond the esoteric, Neith-hotep’s name written in a kingly serekh signifies she also wielded political power, and as regent for a third king, her grandson Djer, their names are part of inscriptions discovered in 2012 in Sinai’s Wadi Ameyra (below). Recording expeditions to mine copper and turquoise, sent out by Egypt’s rulers, Neith-hotep’s name is accompanied by that of Djer whose image as a falcon smashes down enemies with a mace.
And in a culture where size was everything, the ‘outstandingly large’ tomb created for Neith-hotep was far larger than that of husband Narmer. With its 21 chambers originally accommodating her burial (of which nothing remained), huge quantities of grave goods were itemised on small bone labels so precisely that even the number of beads on her necklaces were recorded. Despite ransacking in ancient times, a succession of French, German and British archaeologists still retrieved around 900 objects between 1897-1904, from pottery and stone vessels to jewellery made from gold, semi-precious stones, shell, glazed ceramic and ivory, a most striking example of ivory and slate plaques replicated for our displays (below).
Following Neith-hotep’s eventual interment in this grand tomb presumably during the reign of her grandson Djer, his daughter in turn shared the same link to the creator goddess via her name. Meaning ‘loved by Neith’, Merneith is the second of our trio of queens featured here, the great-granddaughter of Neith-hotep and Narmer, likely married to her brother King Djet and certainly the mother of the next king Den. For not only was a clay seal naming ‘King's Mother Merneith’ found in Den’s tomb at Abydos, a small ivory fragment again found at Abydos shows a monarch holding the ‘heqa’ crook sceptre seated on the lap of the figure behind (below left).
Interpreted as a ‘likely depiction of Queen Meret-Neith as regent for King Den’ (https://www.academia.edu/43151110/), so repeating the example of Neith-hotep and grandson Djer, Merneith’s maternal pose would find its ultimate expression with goddess Isis with son Horus on her lap, a role skilfully deployed by Cleopatra some three thousand years later. And so too Cleopatra’s adoption of the pharaoh’s double crown. First worn by a ruler on an ivory fragment found in Den’s Abydos tomb (above right), the serekh in the centre names Den, although the remaining figure may well be Merneith once more shown behind Den’s missing image (discussed by JP Patznick at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339536632).
Adding more evidence to the likelihood that Merneith was Egypt’s first female pharaoh, such a portrayal certainly supports the fact that her name appears on lists of Egypt’s earliest kings beside whom she was buried at Abydos in a tomb “in no way inferior in size, design and furnishings in comparison to those of her [male] predecessors and descendants” (Visualizing an Ancient Egyptian Queen) (above left). And like theirs featuring two huge stone markers discovered in 1900 by the EES (above right), its archaeologists may have found no trace of human remains in its burial chamber but stated that “it can hardly be doubted that Merneith was a king”, at least until realising he was a she and demoting Merneith to ‘queen’.
So with her tomb recently re-excavated by a German-Austrian team to find out more, thousands of new finds include part of Merneith’s intact wine cellar (below left), valuable evidence for the way in which Egypt’s monarchs were using wine to demonstrate status from the earliest times (https://www.immortalegypt.co.uk/post/wine-in-ancient-egypt-i) and represented in the exhibition via large pieces of Merneith’s vessels from the original EES excavations (below centre & right).
Then following the end of Egypt’s first ruling dynasty we move on to the third in our queenly trio: Hetepheres I, ‘she whose every command is carried out’. As the daughter, wife, mother and grandmother of successive kings, she really did embody the power passed down to each generation of rulers, even forming the link between two successive dynasties as the daughter of last king of the 3rd dynasty and the wife of Snefru, first king of dynasty 4.
Yet Hetepheres’ key role was as mother of the next king Khufu. With his final resting place the famous Great Pyramid at Giza, here he built her tomb before starting on his own, presumably requiring her goddess-like presence in order for his own spirit to be reborn and explaining why his vast pyramid is directly aligned behind her tomb which lies closer to the sunrise which triggered rebirth (below left).
As an imposing location we explore in ‘Egypt’s Lost Queens’ (6 minutes into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmFM-rPerL4), so too the tomb’s lavish contents (above right). Found intact by an American team in 1925 and recently moved from the old museum in Cairo to the new Grand Egyptian Museum, this includes Hetepheres’ alabaster sarcophagus found empty with the assumption she’d originally been buried with husband Snefru at Dahshur where her body had been robbed and destroyed. But since no-one had dared inform her son Khufu, its suggested that he unknowingly reburied an empty coffin when he ordered her reburial close to his own at Giza.
For there was certainly no sign of robbery in Hetepheres’ Giza tomb whose sealed entrance shaft gave way to spectacular contents including a pair of gilded thrones, one with the repeated shield and crossed arrows of goddess Neith (above & at https://hmane.harvard.edu/recreating-throne-of-egyptian-queen-hetepheres). Her golden bed had a gilded canopy with linen curtains, not only to shield her from the sun and insects but from the gaze of mere mortals, in much the same way gods’ statues were concealed within their shrines. Recalling the inscription at the temple of Neith in Sais claiming “I am all that has been, is, and will be. No mortal has ever lifted my veil”, Greek writer Plutarch adding that Neith was by his day ‘the same as Isis’, such curtained canopies were also required when cult statues were carried aloft in procession. And here too Hetepheres’ divine status was emphasised by her ebony wood carrying chair, its inlaid gold inscriptions both naming and portraying her in several small portraits complete with bracelets at her wrists (below right).
Yet Hetepheres’ love for such jewellery is even more obvious in a golden portrait featuring multiple bracelets up each forearm (above right & centre), 20 of which were found in her tomb in their own gilded box (below left & 9 minutes into: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmFM-rPerL4). With 10 per arm graded in size from wrist to elbow, each has butterflies of lapis, turquoise and carnelian set in silver which recent research reveals had been imported from the Greek Aegean (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X23001530#b0170).
Although hardly likely to have access to the originals, 16 displayed at the Grand Egyptian Museum (above) and the others gifted to Boston Museum by the Egyptian Government, an exact replica was made for us as a gift by Egyptian craftsmen and now takes pride of place in our first display case in Barnsley.
As hard evidence that Egypt and Greece were already in direct contact by the Pyramid Age, this stunning bracelet perfectly demonstrates in a single object that Cleopatra’s mixed Greek-Egyptian heritage was simply the culmination of cross-cultural contact stretching back over two and a half thousand years, echoing the comment when looking at another queen’s imported Aegean bling that “there’s rather more to this jewellery and frocks business than at first meets the eye….” (44 minutes into Egypts Lost Queens).
News of the ‘Cleopatra & the Queens of Egypt’ exhibition events will soon be appearing at https://www.barnsley-museums.com/whats-on/cleopatra-and-the-queens-of-egypt-exhibition and on Immortal Egypt’s social media sites. Jo is also speaking in Bolton as part of their otherwise sold-out April study day, details at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/animals-in-ancient-egyptian-religion-tickets-1985041583813, with a Stephen and Jo double act part of the full study day repeated in June for which some tickets are still available at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/boltons-egypt-spring-study-day-animals-in-ancient-egyptian-religion-tickets-1984866401839 Jo and Stephen are also appearing on 16th May as part of the ‘Peopling the Past’ event for Scarborough’s Big Ideas by the Sea, with details at: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/bibts/peopling-the-past-what-can-we-learn-from-the-dead/e-kqdpeq
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