When Women Ruled the World summary

What do you do when your country’s new king is only two years old? You let his mother call the shots. That’s how Queen Merneith of Dynasty 1 came to rule Egypt. We know about her story from inscriptions in royal burial complexes, temples and monuments. The Palermo Stone, a famous fragment of a royal monument, lists her as King’s Mother – right alongside the male kings of Dynasty 1 through 5.

Young Merneith was no stranger to power. As the daughter of the revered King Djer, she grew up in the royal palace in Memphis and observed the king’s duties up close. When her father died, Merneith’s brother Djet took the throne and asked her to be his wife. You read that right: Merneith was now both the King’s sister and his wife.

As we’ve seen, incest wasn’t taboo for the ancient Egyptians. In fact, not only was incest a regular occurrence in the royal palace, but Egyptian royalty considered it the ideal strategy for reproduction – just as it did for patrilineal succession. After all, the myth of Isis and Osiris served as inspiration – a union that produced Osiris’s heir Horus.

And incest was a great way to “keep it in the family” when it came to royal power. Instead of marrying in another elite group who would suddenly want a bigger piece of the pie, wealth and power stayed within a close-knit family circuit.

A few centuries after Neferusobek’s dynasty was brought to its knees by the effects of inbreeding, Dynasty 18, led by warrior King Thutmose I, expanded Egypt’s borders into the Levant, crushing the mineral-rich provinces of Nubia and Kush.

Luckily, Thutmose I’s eldest daughter Hatshepsut, whom he appointed to the prominent office of High Priestess when she was just a girl, inherited her father’s determination and leadership skills. When Thutmose I died, Hatshepsut became the Great Royal Wife of her sickly brother Thutmose II. The new king Thutmose II accomplished little and died after only a few years of rule. A toddler born of his harem was then selected to be the next king. But Thutmose III’s biological mother was incapacitated, so Hatshepsut was chosen to rule in the boy’s stead.

Every year, half a million visitors flock to see the bust of Nefertiti at the Egyptian Museum of Berlin. The mysterious queen is revered for her beauty – but recent evidence suggests Nefertiti was more than just a pretty face.

King Amenhotep IV of Dynasty 18 took Nefertiti as his Great Royal Wife when she was perhaps only ten years old. He had inherited a peaceful and prosperous Egypt, whose people bowed eagerly to the will of their divine king. Little did they know that Amenhotep’s maniacal religious agenda would throw the country into disarray.

Hatshepsut’s enrichment of the elites and Akhenaten’s religious fanaticism led to permanent shifts in Egypt’s balance of power. In Dynasties 19 and 20, politics became more decentralized and the kingship opened up, allowing other families to marry into royalty. This meant less royal inbreeding and more competition among elite families. At the same time, Egyptians tried to curtail female authority, removing previous women leaders from the king’s lists and making sure that no woman held multiple royal titles.

This systematic suppression was the reason why Queen Tawosret had to use unorthodox measures to gain power. Tawosret was born in an internationalized Egypt, where mass migration and foreign influence led to an explosion of complexity in social and political relations. At around 2000 BC, she became the wife of King Seti II, who had just ascended to the throne. There was only one problem: in Lower Egypt, a Theben man named Amunmesses claimed to be king as well. Thanks to superior military resources, Seti II proved victorious in the civil war that ensued.

Egypt’s last queen is undoubtedly its most famous, although she wasn’t actually Egyptian. Cleopatra was a member of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, a Greek-Macedonian family that inherited Egypt after it was freed from Persian rule in 332 BC. The Ptolemies embraced Egypt’s system of divine kingship, combining it with the hypercompetitive political system of the Greeks. As a result, conspiracy and murder were rife.

At 14, Cleopatra was named co-ruler of Egypt by her father Ptolemy XII. When he died, he named his son Ptolemy XIII as successor. But Ptolemy XIII didn’t want to share the throne with his sister, driving Cleopatra into exile in Syria shortly after his accession.

Like many successful women, Cleopatra was relentlessly mocked by the men whose very power she threatened. The Romans ridiculed her for her excessive displays of wealth and emotional outbursts. Octavian accused her of being selfish, sexually manipulating Marc Antony for her own political benefit. She was the perfect scapegoat to convince the Roman Senate to wage war against one of their own. And yet Cleopatra is remembered because she nearly had it all.

Selfishness and emotional sensitivity are still common labels attached to women in power. The author argues that Hillary Clinton’s loss of the 2016 presidential election is a telling example of how women are still held back in progressive Western society for displaying ambition too openly, while men are rewarded for it. Moreover, strong leadership and the emotional sensitivity ascribed to women are often depicted as incompatible. But the ancient Egyptians understood that a woman’s emotionality, even her supposed indecisiveness, could be a political advantage in troublesome times.