[DR. KARA COONEY] This work, and you know, Kate said I've
looked at over 300 coffins.
Really when you put it with my dissertation
work, it's over 400.
And it's rather insane, and when one gets mired
in coffin studies, you're dealing with databases and
spreadsheets and copyright issues, and it's quite
time-consuming morass of data.
And so, it comes
(laughs)
as a great relief, a pause, a moment of reflection for
me to work on these trade books instead, to go from
one kind of work to another.
And this has worked quite well for me as an Egyptologist.
Sometimes I'm deep in the spreadsheet,
I'm trying to figure things out and using
academic jargon, many of you in the audience
know what I'm talking about, and other times I'm writing
for the public, and I'm trying to make Egypt relevant,
and I'm looking at the world, okay, let me put it this way.
An Egyptologist like Kate and I would never ask each
other why we study Egyptology, though we both know that it's
the question we've probably most commonly answered.
When did you decide to be an Egyptologist?
Why are you an Egyptologist?
But we both know that for whatever weird,
cracked, crazy reason, we see the world around us
better or best through the lens of the ancient world.
I don't know why, but I am able to
understand systems of government, economic systems.
I'm able to understand systems of power best by looking
at it through the lens of my beloved ancient Egypt,
and then applying it to the present day.
Not only that, Egypt affords us
an amazing gift, which is 3,000 years
of more or less the same governmental system,
same cultural system, same religious system, same language.
And within those 3,000 years you've got
a series of ups and downs.
You have boom and bust, you have collapse
and regeneration.
And we can see the human reactions to all of those.
That is an extraordinary gift to be able to say,
this is the way human beings react when X happens.
This is the way humans react when Y happens.
And so, I am here as an Egyptologist to tell
you that in this age of anti-intellectualism,
where people are saying, 'What good is a history degree?'
I'm like, 'Well, let me tell you.'
(audience members laugh)
Egyptology is incredibly useful, and it's useful for studies of
women, and women in power.
I teach a course at UCLA called Women in Power
in the Ancient World.
And I've been doing this class for the last five years.
And I spend half of the class on Egypt,
and then I spend a week on Persia, a week on Rome,
a week on China, a week on the Levant and Mesopotamia.
And I'm doing a comparative study on why we don't trust
women in the halls of power, why it is so very hard for women
to attain real political power.
And I'm not interested in this class or in this book about
women whispering something to the king behind the throne
trying to get what she wants.
I'm not interested in that kind of informal power.
I'm interested in formal expressions of political power.
When do we give it to women?
When do we not?
And Egypt is this strange and cracked place,
which I will discuss, that allows women into
power more regularly and systematically than anywhere
in the ancient world, and more regularly and systematically
than we allow into power today.
In the longer version of this talk that I do with the National
Geographic Institute Association group, I don't, what are they?
A society, that's what they are.
I have a whole discussion about how women do not have
power today, economically, politically, militarily,
or ideologically, and then I go into
the anthropological reasons for that,
what it's like in a hunter-gatherer society,
what it's like in an agricultural society.
And then we're all thoroughly depressed.
(audience members laugh)
And then I go to Egypt and I say, "But Egypt was able to
"surmount these obstacles and allowed women to power
in a way that no other agricultural society did."
And then I asked, 'Why is that?'
And I continue, and I hope this
haunts you as I go through six women who
achieved formal states of power in Egypt, I hope
the question haunts you, why do we in our society still
not allow women into power?
And why is this our reality?
(all laugh)
This is from before the last election, right?
You see Paul Ryan and you're like, 'No, no, this is,
you have to update this.'
And you're right, I do have to update it.
But nothing speaks to what I'm talking about now better
than the last Congress.
Because the last Congress was incredibly masculine,
incredibly white, lacked diversity on all fronts.
And it made me realize that when people are afraid,
because I think this country, right and left,
the thing that unites us the most is the fear that we are all
falling over the cliff, right?
That's what we can all agree on.
We may have completely different ways for how
to heal that problem, but we all are very afraid.
And when people are afraid, they often turn towards the
patriarchy, whatever that is, we can break it down.
They turn towards what makes them feel safe,
that decisive masculine power.
They turn towards this same way of doing things,
or they even turn towards an authoritarianism,
which is the subject of my next book,
which I don't have time to talk about either.
But it interests me that the way fear makes people turn
towards certain directions of power and that females
have nothing to do with them.
So, now we come to this topic of women in power in ancient
Egypt and why this was such a systematic and regular thing.
Now, keep in mind I'm gonna be talking about six women,
five of whom became nothing less than leaders of
state, king, right?
And I'm not talking about the dozens of other women that acted
as regent for a young king.
Coming in, pulling the strings of the government, and then
when that boy is old enough, stepping back into the shadows,
letting him run the show.
I'll be talking about one and a half, in a sense.
But I'm leaving those women out of this discussion and focusing
on the women that were able to take that kind of power
and move it a step beyond.
But this is a place that allows women into power so often that
we need to question why that is.
And so, I am led to a map.
In my class, Women in Power
in the Ancient World, I usually start with
a map of each region.
And I show the map
And I say, oh, this doesn't
look so great.
Can you guys kind of see it, more or less?
The Nile is there, you get some understanding
of what's going on.
Is this place unitable?
Is this place protected?
Is this place geographically in tune with the allowance
of female power?
Seems a strange question for me to ask, right?
How can you look at a map and know that females will
be allowed into power or not?
Well, you actually can.
And the more I taught the class Women in Power in the Ancient
World, the more I realized, oh, my goodness, you know,
you can look at a map and decide, will women be able
to rule in this place?
Now, Egypt is a very different and special geographic region.
Unique.
It is protected on all four sides.
It's got deserts on east and west, on the east,
you can add the Red Sea just to make a little harder to invade,
Mediterranean Sea to the north, and then down to the south
where you have this artery of the Nile cutting through
the desert, and of course, the Nile is the only reason
anything exists in Egypt at all, it's a gift of that Nile.
In the south, at a place called Elephantine,
and then five or six times further south, you have
these giant granite boulders in the middle of the river.
So, even if you wanted to bring some naval invading
force with all your ships straight up the river,
you'd hit those granite blocks and you and your
naval force would have to take the boats out of the
river, go around and just carry them around the boulders,
put them back in the water, and then head up north again.
So, even the South is protected.
This is a place that does not suffer foreign invasion very
often for most of its history.
It is a place where different ethnicities,
and different languages, and different religious
systems coming into this place for most of its pharaonic
history, this is quite rare.
Until the invasion of a series of empires,
starting with the Assyrian, going with the Babylonian,
then the Persians, then Alexander the Great,
this place existed in a microcosm of safety,
where you can have the same language,
the same religious system, the same government
for over 3,000 years.
This is a very special and protected place, a place where
warlording is not the norm.
Compare this in your minds to what you hear in the news
about Syria, Mesopotamia, what we would call Iraq, or Rome,
or Greece in the ancient world.
There you have places that are much more competitive
and geographically do not have the same barriers that
this place has protected.
War lording pays dividends.
You will be rewarded for raising an army, marching into Babylon,
taking out the king, and claiming that city
as your own, and you know, you might just win.
Whereas here, war lording is
discouraged either geographically from
the outside in, but it's also discouraged within.
Because within you have this Nile that floods its
banks when it's doing it as it's supposed to.
Egyptians would tell us there's a way it should work
(laughs)
And a way it shouldn't.
Not too much flooding, not too little flooding.
But every year it floods its banks and it leaves behind this
thick layer of rich Nile silt.
You sprinkle your seeds on it, you let your animals and your
children run on it, and just, you know, a couple weeks
later you have fat, juicy kernels of wheat and barley.
Herodotus in the 5th century visited this place and he's
like, 'Damn, this is insane.'
He's like, "In Greece we have to move the rocks and then we
have to plow and it's so hard."
In Egypt, you're just
like, la, la, la.
(audience members laugh)
And everyone's drunk and there's too many people
and nobody has to work that hard, and it's awesome.
That creates a kind of society too.
It creates a society where you don't need to warlord because
you don't have the same kinds of scarcity that you have in
Mesopotamia, or the Levant, or Greece, or Rome.
And so, warlording on the inside is discouraged as well.
And indeed, we compare Egyptian politics to Greece or
Rome at our peril.
Because regicide in Egypt, you can count them on the
fingers of one hand, the ones that we know about.
This is a very rare and unusual thing.
This is a place that geographically and
culturally has developed the most perfected form
of divine kingship the world has ever seen,
where you might have problems in the kingship,
there could be an issue with the succession,
and the king dies early after only ten years of
rule and he leaves an eight-year-old son of
his choice behind, in addition to
many other sons, but he leaves this
eight-year-old behind.
And in any other part of the world,
in Mesopotamia or Greece or Rome,
the guy holding the bloody knife
who just killed the eight-year-old and all
of the eight-year-old's family hold it up
And he's like, 'I'm king next!'
And everyone's like, "You are.
"good for you.
You're king."
And in Egypt, everyone throws
themselves to the ground and they're
like, 'Dear eight-year-old, what would like us to do?'
I have an eight-year-old boy,
(audience members laugh)
Who was born under the full moon of Taurus.
And I didn't use to believe in that stuff until I had a
kid who was born under the full moon of Taurus and now,
trust me, I understand what willfulness means and how it
is given to us by the God.
(audience members laugh)
But I did not want that kid in charge of my house,
let alone my nation, right?
So, you have to come up with a different method that's gonna
keep this divine kingship safe and fun in Mesopotamia,
the Levant, Greece or Rome.
If you let a kid rule, you're gonna have somebody older
come in and make decisions on his behalf and you're probably
gonna have a man do so.
What's gonna happen if an uncle of the kid comes in
and rules on his behalf?
The brother of the dead king.
I have a saying amongst my students at UCLA.
It's a very useful saying.
It's very short.
Many of you may have heard it before.
You've heard me speak.
And the saying is two words, and it is because testicles.
(audience members laugh)
I say it so much that a grad student made me
a t-shirt that says, 'Because testicles,'
and then she put the hieroglyph for the penis on it.
I'm like, "I can never
wear this shirt.
"What do you expect?
(audience members laugh)
I can't."
(audience members laugh)
So, I just lovingly put it aside, and it was just in a
drawer, and I can never wear it, in sparkly glitter
paint, whatever.
(audience members laugh)
But because testicles, you can't have the uncle
of the young kid come in and be the decision maker.
I'm not saying he's necessarily going to assassinate the kid.
But the chances are higher, right?
It is riskier.
Whereas if you have a woman come in, mother of the kid,
maybe the aunt, we'll discuss, it's going to be less risky.
And this brings up the other thing I want to haunt you as
we're talking about this.
Do women rule differently from men?
In some way, and the way I hear yeses and often I'll hear nos.
And I don't think we as a society have completely
figured this out yet because we don't let them rule.
So, we don't know what the options are yet.
But the Egyptians believed that women ruled differently.
And the Egyptians, to keep this system
running and to keep it safe, systematically allowed
the woman to come in to keep the divine kingship
safe, to keep it working.
And here's the most uncomfortable part
of working through this book, working
through the female power.
I'm not here to write a revisionist history for you.
I'm not here to make you feel happy and cushy with
rainbows and puppy love about the women of the past.
I am here to tell you the truth as a historian.
And the uncomfortable truth for me, having gone through all of
these women, is that it is in the most authoritarian state
on the planet, with the most perfected divine kingship
that we see female power.
Only there.
It is where female power is forced upon its people
that it is most accepted.
It is in the most unequal of social situations,
the most pyramidal of social situations, that
female power is allowed.
Otherwise, if you go to Greece or Rome, let's go
to the Greek Democratia.
Very broad understanding of power.
Everyone who's a citizen has a say in their assembly, right?
One man falls, another man takes his place.
Women have no say in this society and in this culture.
Women have so little political power and men have so much that
there's actually a political sexual understanding to
male love in Greece.
That true love,
(laughs)
If you read your Greek texts very carefully,
is male-male, not female-male.
The women are full of deceit, and witchcraft, and problems,
and read your Pandora's box discussion and you see it,
Oh, my goodness.
But in Egypt, the woman is what
keeps this safe.
The woman is the placeholder to allow this
patriarchy to continue.
That's the uncomfortable reality for me.
And I just wrote a piece in Time Magazine about this,
that the woman usually serves the patriarchy
without even thinking, without even knowing
what she's doing.
It doesn't matter if there's a woman in power, what is
the agenda of that woman?
So, this is very much my discussion for today.
If women do rule differently, what is their agenda?
How are we to understand their place in this society?
Now, many of you in the audience might be annoyed that I have
used the word female king twice.
You're like, "Why did she do that?
"That's stupid.
(audience members laugh)
"She could just use the word queen.
We do."
And I will say, in the ancient
Egyptian language, the word queen
connotes no power.
It is a sexual helpmate of the king.
It is something that is, it has nothing to do with
politics or decision-making.
When the Egyptians chose a woman to be king, in this case,
Hatshepsut from our obelisk.
Can you see the central column there?
Top word, Nesut is used.
They used the word king, so I'm gonna use the word king.
That's the way I've decided to do it.
So, just a little justification there
So I don't get that question in the Q&A,
which I always do, otherwise.
So, now I want to go through our six women.
How much time do I have until 2 40?
Who's running the show?
2 50?
Okay.
Alright.
So, we'll go through these, really five, 'cause I don't
have a whole lot of time for Tawosret here, and she's
more Game of Thrones than you can possibly imagine.
(audience members laugh)
So, we're gonna skip over her.
And I can stand here by the podium and say, 'You can buy
the book,' which is awesome.
But let's start with Merneith of Dynasty 1,
and gain an understanding that this female power in
ancient Egypt to protect an authoritarian patriarchal
regime, yeah, those words just rolled off my tongue.
The female power is the other side of the coin of
that patriarchal regime.
It comes with it.
You have to have the one without the other.
There is no way to avoid the female power.
You could argue, and the Egyptologists
in the room know what I'm talking about, that there
are Dynasty 0 examples of very, very strong female power.
Merneith is just the most well-documented
for us to start with, but it could have even
had an earlier beginning.
So, when Egyptologists found Merneith's tomb,
they found it in a place called Abydos,
Middle Egypt, along the Nile, out in the western desert sands.
And they looked at the layout of the tomb and they looked at
the horizontal stratigraphy, they're like, king's tomb
there, king's tomb there, now we're digging here,
must be another king's tomb.
They find the grave marker, the stela,
and they look at that and they're like, "Yup,
looks like the others.
"We're all good.
It's a king."
And then they start to look and compare.
And they're like, "Wait a minute,
something's missing.
"Something is a little bit off.
There are two things missing from Merneith's stela."
Merneith whose name means the beloved one
of the goddess Neith.
The name is not really gonna help us.
There's not at the end.
Egyptian names are useful.
It's Smurf or Smurfette, right?
(audience members laugh)
So, it's the same with Merneith.
Some would be like, 'No, there is a t,' some
would be like, 'No, there's not,' but it
depends on how it's written.
But the two things that are missing are the falcon at the
top, porous and carnic, kingship on earth, and the palace facade,
that mud brick walled fortress that goes around the inner
sanctum where the king and his court dwell.
Those two things are missing from her stela.
So, the Egyptologists are like, 'Huh, I wonder what's going on.'
And then they find a tiny little label, this big,
affixed to a commodity in her, well, I wouldn't
wanna give it away, in one of the later king's tombs.
And this tiny little label, they see, okay, we have Djer,
we have Djet, we have Den, and then what have we got here?
We have the king's mother, Merneith.
So, they're like, oh, it's not exactly the
correct lineup, but she's named as
the king's mother, they're like, 'Oh, I got it.
She's there as the regent.'
Djet must have died too early, leaving Den on the throne too
young, demanding somebody to be the decision maker,
somebody to act as regent.
Who better than the king's mother?
This starts off in Dynasty 1.
(fingers snap)
Soon as they can do it, they institute this as a
pattern, and as a system.
Now, how did she get there?
How does this work?
I say her father, Djer, and in the book I talk
about the king, Djer, as her father, given how
high Merneith's station is.
It is an assumption that I make, and I'm clear
about it in the book.
It's possible this guy is not her father, but we'll
leave it there for now.
But Merneith would have been a girl when this very powerful
and long-lived King Djer died.
And this would have been one of her earliest memories,
a memory seared into her brain.
Because at Djer's death, and at the death of any
First Dynasty king, the courtiers were separated,
and it was determined who among them would accompany
the king into death themselves.
So, they were sacrificed.
We don't know the method.
I'll show you some of the skeletons.
They could have been poisoned, they could have been strangled,
they could have been starved, we've got nothing.
There's very little evidence.
And the archaeologists who found most of these
skeletons only kept the heads.
Annoying, right?
(audience members laugh)
I have a graduate student, Rose Campbell, for those of
you that know her, who's working on isotope analysis,
and she's heading to London and Cambridge soon, where there
are hundreds of such heads.
And she's gonna be looking at these skulls and determining
where these people grew up, 'cause you can tell that from
the isotopes, what kind of health and nutrition they had.
And this work has not been done yet.
But the work that has been done suggests that the people who
were sacrificed to surround the king's tomb were buried at one
time and were wealthy people, well-nourished people, people
who were probably courtiers, people with whom you shared a
meal, people who were probably family members of yours.
And when Djer dies, hundreds of people
met their end.
Think of this.
We have this phrase, the king is dead, long live the king, right?
Well, think of it this way.
The king is dead, long live the king.
You say it fast like that 'cause you don't want any
vulnerability coming in between.
You know it's a time period of great potential problems.
You wanna make sure everybody's safe and everybody's taken care
of, that you go to the next kingship when you're moving
from one government to another.
And to make this more seamless, the Egyptians of the First
Dynasty hit upon a rather brilliant but macabre and
brutal plan, which is to show the king's power over
life and death itself.
And to also, I would argue, take out potential
threats from society.
So, if you're worried about, you know, you've got your king,
you place him on the throne, who are you most worried
about as you do that in that a most vulnerable situation?
Well, you're worried about the other guys who could
have taken that position.
Those are the ones who are most of a threat to the guy
who's sitting on the throne.
He's the one, in a sense, that needs this sacrifice.
You put them around the burial of the king before, but really
the dead do not bury themselves.
This is about the guy who's sitting on the
throne now and what he needs in the here and now.
And what the guy who comes next, Djet, after Djer's burial needs
now, is some sacrifice of older men, but not a whole lot.
Djer has more females buried in his tomb than he has males.
And this is based on archaeological reports
that are problematic, but we're gonna leave it there.
But he has a great number of dead that accompany him.
And I would argue that any threats to the throne are
eliminated in a very quick couple of weeks as they
put this man to death.
Each person gets their own little marker, their own name,
a little designation of their gender.
Even if you can't tell from a skeleton what the gender is,
you can use these markers to determine what the gender is.
Ellen Morris is the person whose work I follow the most on this.
Laurel Bestock as well, if you guys wanna follow up.
Now, Merneith is not slated for sacrifice,
but she may have seen her own mother die in
front of her eyes.
We have no way of knowing.
This is history from 5,000 years ago.
But the burial of the king would have been accompanied
by a keening and mourning that we have no concept of.
Imagine somebody very important dying and then imagine that
they take out 500 other very important people right
in front of your eyes, and you have to watch
that in a ritual.
Absolutely brutal.
Merneith watches all of that.
She marries the next king, the guy Djet.
She then watches as he dies, and then the selection
is made again.
Now, he dies a little too early.
He dies leaving Den, her son, to rule before his time.
However this happens, and this is one of the most
mysterious things about any authoritarian regime, how is the
successor to the throne chosen?
How is this choice made?
What is the realpolitik?
How is the regent chosen?
Do they choose the successor by which regent is best
or other way around?
We don't know.
But Merneith is chosen as regent, her son is the king.
And now who's gonna be in charge of the selection at
the death of her husband?
Well, we have to assume it's her.
So, you have to look at this again as the dead
do not bury themselves.
The living are the ones who are doing this.
The kid on the throne is too young.
Let's assume he's 12 years old.
Not ready to rule yet, but not incredibly young either.
And Merneith is the one saying, 'Him, him, him,
her, and him, him.'
And these people are all sacrificed in front
of everybody else.
Merneith doesn't have to die because she's
there as Queen Regent, but I imagine she sacrificed
or saw sacrifice many women her age, who accompanied
her husband maybe from the harem into his burial place.
She's the one that's calling the shots.
Each one gets a little burial marker of their own.
Each one gets a room of his or her own in a sense.
This is a very brilliant, if brutal,
plan of making sure that everyone understands who
has the power.
This is an interesting, if you look at comparative
anthropology and you look at incipient states,
you look at nascent states, this is a feature you see
in Africa and Europe and Asia, in the New World.
That in these states when a kingship is new,
sacrificial burial often goes along with it for the king.
It is a great and quick, efficient means of showing
who has the power and that you better move along with
this and not rock the boat.
Do what you need to do.
This is what the dead look like as they are buried,
they're accompanied with these markers, with grave
goods, sometimes with jewelry, buried on their side in a fetal
position as if they're sleeping, there are no marks
of murder, nothing.
So, even though we have symbols like little labels like this,
and in the top right corner you see somebody stabbing
somebody in the chest, that seems to be more
of an enemy combatant.
This doesn't seem to be what we're talking about here.
Matthew Adams, the archaeologist who
works at Abydos now, he thinks it's a
mass cyanide death.
Like a Jonestown kind of thing, right?
A Guyana Punch sort of deal.
And that that was a really easy way to dispatch hundreds of
people in public in one moment.
We don't know.
Until we have better access
to the bioarcheological remains, this is going to remain
a mystery for some time.
Now, Den rules, he has the best and
greatest rule of all of the Dynasty 1 kings.
He expands Egypt's borders the farthest that they've
ever been expanded.
Merneith is there alongside him for much of his rule.
And when she dies in his reign, she is buried like a king.
She does not ever receive the status of a king herself.
She's not a co-king.
She is just a regent.
Her status is completely informal.
And yet she's buried in the lineup of other kings.
She's put into the king list as king's mother.
She's afforded an incredible amount of status.
And yet, a pattern, oh, given a tomb like this as
reconstructed, and yet just two generations later, she's already
removed from the king list.
This is a pattern that we will see repeated.
The woman is there as a placeholder in the moment
to keep the patriarchal system going, to link
from one king to the next, from one patriarch to the next.
If you need a woman to keep the system safe,
everyone's gonna be okay with me.
They're gonna include her in the king list during the time,
but then as soon as they move on to somebody who's disconnected
from her, phew, she's gotta go.
She doesn't fit.
And so, then we see all of these kings moving in this direction.
You've got the Djer, Djet, Den, and then you move on to
a different king.
No mention of Merneith anywhere in the list.
So, now we're gonna skip a number of dynasties
and go up to Dynasty 12.
Those of you that want me to talk about Tawosret,
it's in the book.
There are no contemporary documents for her during
that time period, so we will not be able to speak about her
as an actual living person.
But Neferusobek, we can.
Some of you may know her as Sobekneferu.
Much disagreement about how her name should be
pronounced and spoken.
We'll leave it this way for now.
This woman was born into a very formidable dynasty,
an incredibly strong dynasty, a dynasty that begins with a
regicide, and then is very protective from that point on,
making sure that it keeps the money and the power and the
influence within the family.
Her grandfather was the formidable Senwosret III,
who also expanded Egypt's borders farther than we've ever
seen, who lived very, very long.
And his son is Amenemhet III.
This is Neferusobek's father, also a very, very strong king.
Both of them great builders, both of them making statuary
that was so successful aesthetically that it was
reused for millennia afterwards.
She may have married Amenemhet IV.
This is where the history starts to get really problematic.
And those of you who know your end of the 12th Dynasty history,
how many of you are there?
(audience members laugh)
That's right, no hands at all.
(audience members laugh)
I like that.
Good, because it's very problematic.
Some people think that this guy wasn't a king's
son at all and that he's marrying into the family.
Other people think this was a king's son.
We're never gonna know these things.
Remember, an authoritarian regime is not going to
give away its secrets.
It's going to give away only perfection, idealism.
Everything is the way it should be.
He's depicted as a king's son, he names himself as a king's
son, I'm gonna go along with it.
Not gonna hurt me.
Though I do believe as an Egyptologist it is my
responsibility to try to figure out what these guys are
telling us by not telling us.
I'm distrustful of all of the data.
I don't like to drink the Kool-Aid, as I think
most Egyptologists do.
We accept the authoritarian regime and
the information we're given.
And we don't question the data enough, trying to figure out
what the propaganda is and what the realpolitik could
be behind the propaganda.
But here we've got this dude, Amenemhet IV, who is married
to Neferusobek, may have been her half-brother, maybe not,
we don't know, but oof, he dies, and there is no heir to the
throne in any way, shape, or form that we can identify.
There's nobody, there's nobody left.
So, what do we have instead but maybe a problem with
incest in ancient Egypt?
(laughs)
I don't know.
But I do know that incest happened in ancient Egypt
pretty regularly.
Tutankhamun is an example of it, we have other kings,
Dynasty 19's Siptah had a club leg and it was probably
a product of incest.
The Ptolemies are well known for their incestuous pairings.
Hell, European monarchs are well known for their
own incestuous pairings.
I have a picture of Charles II here with his ginormous head
that needed a special pillow and his overly large jaw.
And we could think of Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia,
and his hemophilia also being the product of incest.
Incest is a very useful tool, especially in a dynasty that's
trying to keep power inside of its own system and
not give it all away.
This is the best I've got as a solution for why you can have
such strong kings and then all of a sudden have nothing and
end up with a female king.
How could that possibly happen?
How could the harem just come up empty?
Well, we've seen it before in ancient Egypt,
and we'll see it later.
This is the best solution that I have to this problem,
though it's not necessarily the only one.
But it results in Egypt's first female kingship.
Let me go back to the incest a little bit,
'cause who doesn't wanna talk about more?
Think about it, 'cause a lot of you in
the audience are probably like, "Those ancient Egyptians,
they're so stupid "and primitive,
and why would they even do something so ridiculous?
We would never do that."
Well, really?
'cause all this is, is a short-term
decision based on the opportunism of the moment.
So, let's put it this way, if you're an elite,
a very high-level elite, a courtier in the palace
and you're one of four other guys who is able to whisper
when the king is sick and the decision you guys make could
actually hold some weight, and you guys are talking with each
other and you're like, "Okay, we have a couple of choices.
What are you guys thinking?"
You're not gonna put this down in writing,
authoritarian regimes don't do that.
You're gonna talk about it.
And you're gonna be like, "Okay, well,
we've got a couple of choices.
"We've got this strong strapping lad whose in-laws
are from the "South, and they have their own private army,
and they all wanna "have jobs if we bring him in as king.
"or we could get the rather dim-witted, large-headed,
"incestuous product of the brother-sister kingly
marriage, and all our jobs would be awesome,
and we'd go on as before."
And everyone's like, "Yeah, let's do that.
(audience members laugh)
Let's go with that short-term solution."
And if you think we don't make short-term solutions,
just think of global warming and climate change.
And this being what, the fourth hottest
summer the world has ever, year the world has ever seen,
and we still all have plastic water bottles in our bags and
there's a plastic island between here and Hawaii.
And yet we never do anything to change the system because there
will be job loss or whatever.
And so, we all continue to make our short-term decision to keep
the can down the road a little bit more, instead of thinking
of the long-term repercussions.
Human beings are not good at long-term decision making at
all, which is another thing that I've noticed from ancient Egypt.
And it's a good thing to apply to the modern world,
(laughs)
If a depressing one.
Now, the first female kingship that Neferusobek creates is
an interesting one, because she shows herself as a woman.
She has breasts, she's wearing a dress,
but she layers the kingship onto her person.
She ties a masculine kingly kilt over her dress,
and she puts that Nemes headdress under her head,
the one you know from Tut's mask in your mind's eye,
that's what she puts on.
And so, she's not hiding the fact that she's woman,
she is layering these elements of kingship upon her person.
Her kingship lasts for just a few years,
about four at most, though there's disagreement about
this, and she leaves no legacy.
One of the most interesting things to me about Neferusobek
is that the Egyptians let her get away with it all.
Because there's no heir to the throne that we can see,
there's only this woman left.
They know that Dynasty 12 is gonna end, and it's gonna go
to the ne-, well, they don't call it Dynasty 12, right?
But they know it's gonna end, and they're gonna go to
Dynasty 13, why bother?
Well, because in this system of divine kingship, she is
the last holder of that royal ka, that spirit of kingship.
And everyone bows down to her.
She's the last recipient of it, so she gets to finish it out.
That's an extraordinary thing in and out of itself.
But Neferusobek should not be, her decision making should not
be overlooked, because she also justifies it in a way that works
for the people around her, so they don't see it as a threat.
And the way that she does that is she justifies her kingship
through her father's lineage, not by mentioning her
dead husband-brother.
She doesn't go about, you wouldn't even,
this is why we don't know who Amenemhet IV was, because
she gives him so little play.
She doesn't talk about him, she doesn't name him,
she doesn't make any monuments to him,
his name is nowhere connected to her stuff,
but her father's name is everywhere.
And that is useful for her, and it's something that we
actually understand as well.
We trust more those women who are coming in as leaders in
a strict linear progression.
We trust more the woman who's protecting her son in power.
We trust more the daughter who's acting for her father
in power, than we do the sister or the wife.
And I can give you an easy political example
from the last 20 years.
You guys are probably thinking of it right now, no?
You're thinking of Hillary Clinton in the 90s when she
tried to create health care as wife of the president, informal
power appear to her husband?
Who the hell does she think she is?
Everybody said it.
What is going on?
I don't understand how, and we feel threatened by this.
It threatens our patriarchal system.
But in today's White House, the base that supports the
current president has no problem with Ivanka having an office
in the White House, acting as an advisor for her father.
And this is very cleverly done, whereas Melania is like, 'No,
I'm not getting into that,' right?
She knows.
She's there as the wife.
She's learned from Hillary's mistakes.
I am not gonna try to take power, but Ivanka can do so,
and she can do so with impunity, because we respect that kind
of patriarchal lineage.
Very interesting way that female power must be packaged,
and Hatshepsut knows to do this as well.
And here we move on to her.
So, Hatshepsut of Dynasty 18 is the most powerful
of all of our women.
She's the one that is really able to leave Egypt better
than she found it, save her dynasty, leave a legacy.
She rules for about 22 years altogether.
And
yet most of you maybe, maybe, maybe you guys.
How many can pronounce her name well?
But everyone's like, 'I don't know.
Hatshepsut
(unintelligible)
' We'll get to that.
She starts out as Egypt's greatest high priestess.
For those of you in the know, this would be the God's
wife of Amun stationed at Thebes in the South.
There were maybe other high priestesses, but for all we
can see, this is the most important of them all.
And she is placed in this position probably under
her father, Thutmose I.
She continues in this position alongside her half-brother
husband, Thutmose II,
(gasps)
Incest!
(audience members laugh)
To to to.
She ends up, so, all together, she is the king's daughter,
she is the king's sister, she is the king's wife,
'cause she's married to her brother, but she never
becomes the king's mother because she only gives birth
to Neferure, her daughter.
She does not give birth to a son.
So, when Thutmose II, her half-brother husband
dies after only three years of reign, and trust me,
the Egyptological discussion about this is very intense, but
we'll leave it at three years.
Because if all he produced, if he had nine years of
reign and that's all he produced in Egypt's temples,
then what a sad king.
So, we'll give him three years, I think it's better.
So, if he dies after three years of reign,
he's gonna leave a bunch of two-year-olds in the nursery.
Hatshepsut's not gonna have a son amongst those
two-year-olds in the nursery.
And now we have a serious succession crisis.
A succession crisis where the choice of the next king is
probably going to be based on who the regent is,
rather than on who the kid is.
Because they're a bunch of toddlers.
Who's gonna choose the possibility that the toddler's
gonna grow up to have a good ruling acumen in the future?
You can't.
But you have to be very strategic.
This is a long regency with a two-year-old.
You're talking about 14, 15, 16 years of a woman ruling
on behalf of this kid.
It's a long time.
You have to make sure you choose wisely.
It seems that Egypt had already decided they wanted
Hatshepsut to be regent.
She's there as the greatest high priestess,
she's there bred for the position, the most elite,
the king's daughter, the king's wife,
the king's sister.
She's ready to go.
They have to choose a boy that won't be threatened
by her or vice versa.
So, they pick a boy with a nothing mother,
from all we can see, a mother that cannot
step in as regent.
His name will be Thutmose III to Egyptologists,
just Thutmose in the moment.
And she is there acting as his regent for a good seven years.
Now, people don't do anything alone.
This is what I'm always hammering
into my students' head.
This is not a history written by individual people.
This is a history of systems.
Hatshepsut can't barge into a system and say,
'I'm gonna do it this way.
I'm gonna be king,' or 'I'm gonna be regent.'
This is not the way things work.
Hatshepsut is going to be allowed into a system
by the elites around her.
The elites, it seems, want her to be in this
position of power.
They demand that she step forward and do this.
And over the next couple of years that she's acting
as regent for this toddler king, who I imagine was
really hard to crown.
"Keep the crown.
"No, stop.
No, stay there," kind of thing.
(audience members laugh)
She's there as the, and their texts say
this, she's the rock.
She's the one that's gonna be clever in her strategies,
she's gonna keep Egypt safe.
But she's already, or her advisors are already
thinking about the future.
Because in texts like this from down south in Egypt,
this one happens to be near Elephantine,
we see Hatshepsut depicted as a God's wife of Amun,
but in the text that only the top 1% can read,
it says that the sun god Ra has given her the kingship.
She's like a lawyer.
She doesn't go out and say, 'I am king.'
Not yet.
She's laying her foundation for that.
She goes out and she says, "You know, I'm doing the job.
"I'm doing the kingship.
I may not be king, but I'm on my way."
And when the elites don't push back against this,
then she and her advisors know that they've got room to run.
They've been given some reigns.
They can really start to move now.
And her first image of kingship we see we another cartouche name
added, and she shows herself as a female wearing a dress,
wearing masculine ram's horns and a masculine wig.
So, she is already, like Neferusobek,
changing her image to include the masculine in
addition to the feminine, kind of like the, I don't know,
the pantsuit of 1985
(audience members laugh)
With the shoulder pads, right?
Make you look all manly.
Give you a little fluffy bow tie to go along with that.
(audience members laugh)
She is crowding year 7, from what we can tell, and again,
the Egyptological debate about this is quite fierce.
The reasons for this are unclear.
This is the most frustrating part of Egyptology for me.
They don't let us into their secrets.
They're not going to tell us what's actually happening.
We don't get a view of the realpolitik.
She tells us, "My father Amun-Ra wanted me to be king.
My father Thutmose I bred me and wanted me to be king."
Very useful things to say.
She's fitting herself in that patrilineal lineage, no problem.
But we don't know why, in year 7,
she felt the need to formalize this,
because she had all the power.
Was there another entourage of Thutmose III who's
trying to push her out?
Was there another regent that was trying to push her
out with another entourage?
Was there a problem with Thutmose III himself?
Was he lying on his deathbed with some sort of disease?
Because in Egypt, it's not, if you get malaria,
it's when you get malaria.
Did he fall off his chariot?
Was something going on?
We have no idea.
But in year 7 probably when Thutmose III is
around nine years old, she is crowned alongside
him and now it is irrevocable.
There's no going back from this.
This system is completely locked down for her.
And yet, this is a pattern that we'll see again with
Cleopatra, she never goes alone.
She's always got this kid following her.
Now, there is a more crass part of my feminism that I
will share with you right now.
Because there's no woman that, if a woman rules alone
in this entire lineup, she rules for a very short
period of time, one, two, four years, something like that.
But if she rules for a long period of time,
like Cleopatra or Hatshepsut, or other women we could compare
her to around the globe, we see that there's always
a male accompaniment, some sort of presence alongside
the female on the throne that allows her to be there.
So, the crass feminist part of me is like, why didn't she
just have the kid assassinated and then we could at least talk
about one woman that did it, that ruled Egypt for a
long period of time, and wouldn't that be great?
Well, she knows, and I know, that if she had Thutmose
III assassinated, well, however she felt about
him and maybe she loved him very, very much, I don't know,
if she had him assassinated, her means to power is gone,
even as king probably.
She would have been a swept aside as well.
You need a male at the center of an authoritarian wheel of power.
You need that, because just in terms
of biological economy, the harem exists for
a reason, right?
I can have one baby a year.
Two is probably gonna kill me, though it didn't kill Cleopatra.
But I can have one baby a year.
A guy can have 365 babies a year.
(audience members laugh)
That biological economy is something,
and I cannot compete with.
He will always win in terms of the basics of
power and succession, keeping the status quo,
keeping things risk averse.
A woman can't compete with that.
She removes that boy, then they're gonna replace her
with another boy, another man.
So, she knows she's got to keep him with her,
and she never rules alone.
And by year 16, she starts to depict him with her,
almost like twinsies, as you see here.
Same crown, same look, sometimes different crowns,
but almost the exact same face, almost the exact same body type.
So similar that the Egyptologists, we know,
you look at their statues and you're like, 'It's
Thutmosied,' we say.
We sound very clever when we say this.
'cause we're like, "It could be Hatshepsut,
it could be Thutmose III, who's to know?"
So, we say, 'Thutmosied.'
It's a cool Egyptological speak for we have no idea.
But how Hatshepsut did this to us, she's the one.
And Thutmose III he seems to follow along
with this portraiture, which is interesting
in and out of itself.
So, now she's got the kingship, she's got the nine-year-old
who's growing up, becoming a 16-year-old, and a strong
man right next to her.
He's probably training with the army off to the north,
maybe she's in the south, we actually don't know
a lot of these details.
But what we do see is that more jobs,
more professions are created under her than
at any other time.
The Egyptologists know that we have to commit all kinds
of crazy things to memory.
Statues, stela, tombs, coffins, what's in what museum,
where is this, where is that.
And we know that when Hatshepsut takes the throne,
this stuff explodes in quantity and quality.
That means that she has to give to get.
That means that when she takes this power position,
she and her entourage know that the elites are like,
"You know, this is great, this is a very aberrant situation."
And you're like, 'Yeah, okay, what would you like?' 'Well,
my son would love to be in the treasury.'
'Okay, got it.
What would you like?'
"Okay, well, my son would
love to be one of the overseers of the
scribes of the House of Amun."
'you got it.'
And so, the jobs are created like candy, in a sense.
There's another Egyptologist named David Warburton,
who argues that it's during Hatshepsut's reign when Egypt's
treasury, Egypt the crown, loses more power than in any
other time in the long term.
Because the treasury is giving out more funds than
it had ever given out before.
That's a little more debatable, because Hatshepsut kept such
good control of the money and created more income streams.
She knew that she needed to bring in more money,
so what do you do?
You start a little war, you invade a little Nubia,
and you bring a lot of gold into Egypt.
So, she knew to do that right off.
She also knew to place people in control of that money only had
her to depend on, and who had no other conflicting interests.
So, she picks a dude like this, Senenmut, who's not a patrician,
not one of the old families, and she elevates him to
a station that everyone is like, 'Whoa, really?'
She's like, 'Yeah, really.'
And he's like, 'What would you
like, my lady?'
(laughs)
Because he's not gonna try to work with other people.
They're all mad that she's doing this.
And she's picking a number of new men who
will answer only to her.
Very, very cleverly done.
She has control of the temple like no one else.
This woman grew up in the temple, it's in her bones.
She knew that when she had herself marked for kingship,
she had to do so in a way that was overtly
displayed to her people.
So, she tells us in the text, where she is marked for rule,
that the bark of Amun-Ra is brought out on a festival
day in public in front of all of her elites, and that it
moves decisively towards her.
And then she throws herself on the ground, raises up her arms
and says, 'Oh my father Amun, what would you have me do?'
No one can speak against that.
Once the god Amun-Ra has chosen her to be king,
then it is again irrevocable.
It is something that cannot be overturned.
She sends out expeditions to crazy faraway places that
Egyptologists don't even know where they are, maybe Eritrea,
maybe Yemen, the debate goes on.
She shows the details of those expeditions.
She doesn't go herself, she sends other men, but it's
still considered a miracle of kingship that she's doing this.
Incense trees brought back roots and all, the misshapen
chieftainess of Punt depicted in all of her glory next to
her husband, the chief.
And she builds structures that are avant-garde and at the same
time they're conservative in the most holy places on
the Egyptian landscape, not just in ancient Thebes,
but all over the country.
This was a woman who left Egypt better than she found it.
And yet, throughout all of this, she cannot make
Egypt fit to her.
She has to fit to Egypt and she has to fit the patriarchy.
So, she starts out depicting herself as a
female, a female king, putting the Neme's headdress on,
putting the kilt of kingship on.
Actually here she just has a dress.
And this is not enough.
So, we see her trying to figure this out, trying to crack it.
This is my favorite statue of hers,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York.
And she's androgynous.
She's male, and she's female, she has breasts, but she
doesn't have nipples, so is she wearing a shirt?
But I don't see any trace of it.
So, she's topless, but she's this gracile
heart-shaped beautiful thing.
How are we to understand this?
Male and female simultaneously.
Well, only one such statue was made, and then she quickly moves
on to statues like this.
This is what most of her statues look like.
Strong biceps, broad shoulders and
chest, square jaw, indistinguishable from a man.
She has to fit, the patriarchy
cannot fit her.
And as her nephew, Thutmose III, is getting older and haunting
her steps, she has to become more masculine, one could argue.
Did she dress like this in public, in the festivals?
Did she tie on the royal beard and strap down her
breasts and wear a shirt that's skin-colored?
Who are we to say?
Why not?
This is what she's depicting.
Quite possibly.
Did she dress like that in the palace?
From the existence of this statue, I think not.
But anything is possible.
Until we get our time machine invented,
we will continue to discuss these things for some time.
So, she depicts herself as the father, sorry,
as the daughter of Amun-Ra, building her kingship for him.
She rules for about 22 years altogether.
When she dies, from all we can see,
she's buried in state.
We have to use a lot of circumstantial evidence to
figure this out, but there is a detritus of her death.
Even though her tomb was pretty thoroughly robbed,
you find little, little things, a canopic char here,
a little shabti fragment there, a sarcophagus here.
There is enough there to suggest that Hatshepsut was
buried in state, as a king, in the Valley of the Kings,
by her nephew, Thutmose III.
And Thutmose III finished temples of
hers, finished chapels, made sure that everything
was good for her.
And so, everything's fine, right?
She's gonna be our successful female.
Well, no she's not.
Because about 20 to 25 years later, after her death,
he says, "Come here, you, chief of artisans.
"Go, send the guys out.
"I need Hatshepsut's names and images removed from
this temple, this temple, this temple,' which he
names all the temples.
They're like, 'What?
Really?'
"I want you to take plaster and I want you to replace those
names with the name of my father and the name of my grandfather."
'Yes, sir.'
"You, come here.
"Sledgehammers, send them out.
"I need you to smash these statues up to tiny bits.
"Throw them out in a hole.
"I don't want you to do anything with those.
"Oh, wait, but the big colossals,
"I don't want you to break those up.
"Those are too valuable?
Just switch out the names."
'Huh?' 'Take out her name, put in my father's name.'
'Got it.'
And they go out and they do this.
Now, they don't do a great job so that we Egyptologists can
come in after the fact and say, 'Oh, look, there's a t there.'
Remember the Smurfette?
And then you see the daughter of Ra is still there even though
it's talking about Thutmose III.
You're like, 'Hmm, something's going on.'
Or you can see that there's an erasure,
and you can see the traces of what the
old name could be.
In some cases, they relied so
much on plaster that the old carving
is as clear as day.
So, we can put this back together.
But the end result is that Hatshepsut is not a part
of our cultural memory.
We can't pronounce her name.
She was too successful.
Success is a problematic thing.
Think about it this way.
You have a really good successful idea.
It's gonna bring your company a lot of business and you
tell your boss this idea.
And then you hear that the boss went to a CEO meeting,
and then all of a sudden, your idea is bandied about
it as his or her idea.
You're like, 'Damn it!
'that's
My idea.'
Well, it was successful.
You're doing what people would expect to work.
What has worked before, what will work after.
Success is very transferable.
It is very abstract.
It's failure that everyone remembers and
assigns your name to.
That's why you guys can pronounce Cleopatra like that.
(audience members laugh)
And Hatshepsut you're like, 'Hatshe-, Hat-'
(audience members laugh)
Okay, Nefertiti, Dynasty 18.
Her story is being written right now.
And Egyptologists in the room know that if we all went to a
bar full of Egyptologists and we just threw out and said,
'Is Nefertiti Smenkhkare?'
Then people, like people
would come to blows, right?
(audience members laugh)
People get really upset over this stuff.
And indeed, the evidence is
coming out of the ground right now,
like as we speak.
They're finding new stuff.
And so, it's, just take all
of that with a grain of salt,
but that doesn't mean we can't discuss
Nefertiti as a female king, because I think we can.
I think most Egyptologists would accept her as such.
What's cool and interesting to me is that when you hear
the name Nefertiti and you see her bust from Berlin,
you think of beauty.
She's a pretty face, right?
You don't think of her as a ruler, as anything
formidable or something associated with authority in
any way, but indeed, she was, so let's see how this works out.
She is married to this guy named Amenhotep IV,
who is born into Egypt's greatest success, its
wealthiest time period, when you don't even
have to go to war.
The tribute just comes to you, when what can be produced by the
craftsman is of a quality that you cannot possibly believe.
Everyone's eating well, everyone is getting good
money, everyone is happy.
This guy comes into power, he starts out his reign
depicting himself much like his father did before him,
and then all of a sudden, boom, he starts depicting
himself like this.
And he changes his name to Akhenaten.
And he changes the religion.
And he starts funneling money away from the other relig-,
like the Amun-Ra Temple, and the Ptah Temple,
and all these other places.
He funnels that money to a new god, a god named Aten.
And he starts to depict himself as male and female.
Do you see the breasts?
You can't see the hips in this one but there are hips too.
He starts to depict himself as animal and human.
If you saw it from the side, you would see a prognathism
of the lower face.
He starts to depict himself strangely elongated.
And I would argue that he's depicting himself
as a being of light.
He is changing the way kingship is depicted,
he is changing the way the chief priest, that would be the king,
is connecting with all of the divinities, and Nefertiti
comes along for the ride.
He changes her depiction in very much the same way.
Same prognathism, the same elongated features,
exaggerated eyes and chin, a very strange visage to behold.
And here he is with all his servants now
bent down around him, worshipping the sun
god over his head, giving offerings to
that sun god, the Aten, and its rays are bathing
him in its golden light.
He is the only one that should have direct
connection with that sun god.
Around year 5, he decides to
pick up and move away from Memphis,
Heliopolis, Thebes, and go to this out in
the middle of nowhere place where he says it
is sacred to no god or goddess, and build this
new city from scratch.
He calls it Akhetaten.
His name is Akhenaten.
It's like king and city are almost one.
And in about ten years or less, he builds from the ground up
new temples, new palaces, new administrative structures.
He makes all of his elites come and they're gonna build
all of their estates as well.
This is an incredibly energetic and dedicated
king to his new coat.
And Nefertiti comes along for the ride.
She is his great royal wife.
And when she comes to Akhetaten, she is given a new name.
And her name is Neferneferuaten Nefertiti.
There will be an exam after,
(audience members laugh)
It's gonna get way worse.
Way worse.
This is one reason why it's so hard to find Nefertiti in the
evidence, because Akhenaten seems to have renamed her
each step of the way.
And she gets to keep a small part of herself as
she goes to the next step.
You'll see what I mean in a bit.
They show these images of family togetherness.
Nefertiti is depicted about the same scale as
her husband Akhenaten.
They're cuddling their daughters,
they're showing new and different
kinds of scenes.
And Egyptologists for the longest time have looked at this
as puppies and rainbows and this beautiful togetherness and maybe
even the first monotheism in all of human history, though that is
still very much up for debate.
But there is a much darker underbelly to all of this.
Well, he married two of those daughters and
had children with them, and elevated each of them
to a great royal wife.
So, that creeps you out right there,
though that's not culturally aberrant for them.
He also co-ops his elite.
And here you see the elite reaching up and the king
and his queen, Nefertiti, just throwing down
solid gold necklaces.
How do you get a bunch of people to leave their
families and their lives in the traditional capitals and
move away the middle of nowhere?
Well, you bribe them.
And then they coerce other people to do the same.
And so, here we see just this co-option happening
before our eyes, but in a more idealistic sort of sense.
But what's really interesting in the work that's coming
out right now by a number of bioarcheologists,
one of them a former student of mine from
UCLA, Anne Austin, they're finding graveyards
filled with the laborers who constructed the city
from the ground up.
And the graveyards for the skilled laborers are fine.
They get great goods, they're just doing okay.
But the graveyards for those who are not so skilled, who are just
hauling stones and doing what they're told, are horrific.
They're working wounded, they're working malnourished, they're
working with acute fractures.
And even worse than that, they have found a graveyard filled
with hundreds of children, separated from any sort of
adult figures of any kind, also working with all kinds
of injuries, malnourished, and with acute injuries as well.
And the people who work in this graveyard are emotionally
affected themselves with each burial that they find.
This has been so disruptive to our understanding of what
Akhenaten's regime was that it's actually made most Egyptians
that I know very uncomfortable.
And when this work was first presented at a conference,
at a bioarcheology conference, Egyptians left, some, not all,
left the room and said you can't present the kingship this way.
This is serious stuff because it's turning on its head what
the foundation of Akhenaten's kingship actually was.
This was a demanding king, a king who was quite
brutal to his people.
And Nefertiti came along for the ride.
And indeed, I think most
Egyptologists now see this new king,
co-king alongside Akhenaten with the
name, the row's off the top, Ankhkheperure
Neferneferuaten, as Nefertiti.
She's not identifiable as Nefertiti any longer, but that
Neferneferure is still there.
And so, people are like, 'Oh, okay, Ankheperure,
that's her as co-king.'
This is a weird and crazy thing.
And this is a breaker of all of our patterns.
She's not stepping in as a regent for a boy king.
She's stepping in alongside her husband.
I just told you you're not supposed to have
those parallel power structures, right?
It's supposed to be a linear.
Well, he must feel very vulnerable.
This is potentially the only person that he can trust.
He pulls in somebody to help him to continue this rule,
happens to be his great royal wife, now no longer,
and now a co-king.
And one Egyptologist, Nicholas Reeves, even
believes that the mask and all of the burial
equipment of Tutankhamen, including the three nesting
coffins, was not made for Tutankhamen, but was made
for a certain Ankheperure.
And indeed, he's shown, and I stood next to the case
when they opened the glass
And I got to see the mask and the shoulder from that far
away, so I'm a believer too.
And he's shown this to Dieter Arnold, Mark Gabolde,
and Ray Johnson, they also buy it that this is re-curved,
and that the traces of the old name are Ankheperure.
Which is the coolest thing ever.
Makes all the Egyptologists go, 'Ah!'
Because this could have been made for Nefertiti.
This that it's burned into your mind's eye, right?
That you can see without even, without me even
showing you this.
That could have been made for Nefertiti as co-king
for her husband, Akhenaten.
And I'm not gonna go into this, but I have interesting ideas
about the double cobra uraeus, which is also unusual and
not something that you see on other burial equipment.
What's going on here?
A graduate student of mine, Nicholas Brown, we argue
about this all the time.
We'll continue to argue about it.
I encourage my graduate students to argue with me.
It makes life more fun.
Did Nefertiti then become sole king after
the death of Akhenaten?
And this was where the Egyptologists really start to
throw the blows at each other.
Because I would say, you know, 40% believe that, yeah,
Nefertiti is there stepping in as sole king after the
death of Akhenaten in a time period of crisis.
And other people are like, 'Look,
there's just no evidence for it.'
I'm not gonna talk about the tomb.
If you guys wanna talk about that in the Q&A, we can, but
I'm gonna leave that for now.
And I told you I'm skipping Tawosret because I ain't
got no time, and she's all Game of Thronesey,
so you can read the book.
This woman was pretty badass so check her out.
(audience members laugh)
Came in as a regent for a son who was not her own, and
a kid with a club foot to boot.
But let's quickly talk about Cleopatra so we
can have some questions, and hopefully answers.
So, Cleopatra of the Ptolemaic dynasty also
does not rule alone.
She also rules her almost 22 years,
like Hatshepsut before her.
She rules alongside Ptolemy XII, who needs a co-ruler and
brings Cleopatra VII into the situation.
She rules alongside, though in many ways
quite unwillingly, her brother Ptolemy XIII,
and he dies in battle fighting against her.
Then she moves on to Ptolemy XIV, whom she has assassinated.
So, now that she's killed all of her Ptolemaic companions
and has no one else to bed with and to rule with,
Cleopatra is so canny, she still knows she
cannot rule alone.
Egypt is no longer happily ensconced in its own little
bubble of geographic protection, however.
It is now perched on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea from
its capital city of Alexandria.
It is part of a globalized Mediterranean world.
So, she's gotta look to a globalized partner,
and she launches upon, or he launches upon
her, Julius Caesar.
We all know the story.
She snuck into his chambers as he's in the Palace of
Alexandria in a bedroll, her brother is sieging
the city, it's perfect.
She gets in and they hang out for a couple of months
And she's going to give birth to Caesarion, known as Ptolemy XV,
the Egyptologist, sometime after that.
This works out quite well for her.
She's got a Roman warlord to rule and partner with.
He's a sperm donor to boot.
She doesn't even have to marry the guy.
He doesn't want to marry her, she doesn't want to marry him,
that wouldn't quite work.
But as a partnership of rule, this is quite useful.
But we all know what happens.
(laughs)
She's in Rome when he is murdered on the
steps of the Senate.
She has to hightail it back to Alexandria and
figure out what to do, and she needs another partner.
She knows she cannot rule alone.
And so, she launches upon Mark Antony.
She shows up, he apparently writes
her multiple times, 'Meet me in Anatolia,
meet me at Tarsus,' and, 'Come and visit.
'come and,' and she's like, she's playing hard to
get, 'No, no, no.'
And finally, she shows up
dressed to the nines,
dressed as a goddess in this
barge that is covered with gold, just showing
her wealth and her riches.
The Romans go crazy writing about them, saying, "Look at
this woman who wastes money, look at all of the success,
this is what kingship gives you, this is horrible."
Well, Cleopatra knew exactly what she was doing,
depicting herself as a goddess.
Nothing less than a goddess, as a beholder of great wealth.
She wants these Roman warlords to work with
her and do what she says, she needs to make sure
that they see that she's holding many cards herself.
They need the money.
They're constantly fighting each other in a civil
war that never ends.
They need cash, she's got some cash,
perfect partnership.
Better in terms of age as well, and she launches
up with Mark Antony.
Now, Cleopatra, I say she's a failure.
She does not leave Egypt better than she finds it.
It becomes a province of Rome after her death.
However, Cleopatra comes the closest out of any of
the women that we're talking about, in having it all,
in being the man in a sense, at the center
of the wheel of power.
Because she has such a strong womb and constitution, whoops,
she is able to, oh, I hate this like my, hold on, National
Geographic made me do this.
And they wanted it to be animated,
and I'm like, "Oh, okay.
Let's try again."
And every time, I mess up the animation.
Here we go.
'do I do another?'
'yes, one more.'
Boom.
Okay.
So, she comes the closest out of any of our women to
creating a legacy of her own genetic lineage that is going to
pass on to future generations.
She even creates this big show where she names each of her
children as leaders of different parts of her Eastern empire.
One kid in charge of Cyrenaica, Libya, one kid in charge of the
Levant, one kid in charge of Cyprus, and so on and so forth.
And they don't seem to be fighting with each other.
She seems to have created a family that's not trying to
kill each other constantly, which for the Ptolemies
is a serious win.
And it looks like she has it all working out in her favor.
She doesn't have to marry Mark Antony,
but he seems to be staying in Egypt.
They have a real chance of creating an Eastern
dynasty that can work in opposition to that
Western dynasty that is Rome.
And yet, it all goes
horribly wrong.
Mark Antony, before this happens,
invades Parthia.
What do they say about a land invasion of Asia?
A land war in Asia?
Anyone see 'The Princess Bride?' Never have a land war in Asia!
(audience members laugh)
He tries that.
It goes horribly wrong, and he never recovers
from it financially, emotionally, physically.
And then they're on the back foot when they try
to fight Octavian, soon to become Caesar Augustus.
They're on the back foot, they don't have maybe all
of the allies that they could or all of the strong
allies that they could, didn't prepare for it properly,
and certainly didn't strategize well in terms of how the
battle should happen.
Should we be surprised that Cleopatra as the woman hightails
it out of there as soon as she sees what's going on?
The Romans write about this and say, 'Look at that coward.
Look at her run.'
And Mark Antony only stays for a little bit longer before he
also flees with his life intact.
But I guess he let a little more of his soldiers die
before and that makes him strong and powerful, I don't,
more manly, more noble.
But anyway, this goes
horribly wrong.
If it didn't go horribly wrong, I think we would talk
about Cleopatra very differently, but we can't.
I can't write a revisionist history, I can't make her
make a different choice.
As it is now, she is meant to
wait out the year in Alexandria trying
to save her children, trying to figure out
how to get herself out of this deep dark hole.
And given that she's had all of her children with two
Roman warlords who have now died in a civil war or some
other political aggression, she has a target on her back
and on her children's backs that she cannot remove.
There's nothing that she can really do to get
herself out of this situation.
And the story is that she then commits suicide.
It's a wonderful story for the Romans to give us.
While this is happening, her children, all but one,
are hunted down and murdered.
Caesarian, known as Ptolemy XV to us, is heading down south to
flee and he receives a letter, 'You're gonna be made
king by Octavion.'
It's gonna be okay.
He comes back.
You may think it's naive, but the Romans had allowed
the Ptolemies to rule this place for some time.
So, I think maybe he thought he could get away with it.
Well, he's murdered on the way back.
Other sons and daughters are murdered as well.
Cleopatra herself is said to commit suicide.
This works very well for Octavion's propaganda.
It's the reason that I am so suspicious of anything the
Romans tell us about Cleopatra and her manner of dying,
because there's no way to know.
We don't even know what the manner of suicide is.
I once listened to a whole academic discussion,
a panel discussion, about whether it was an asp,
or whether it was this, or whether it was that,
and there really is no way to know how Cleopatra
committed suicide, or I would argue
if she even did.
It makes the most sense for Octavion to say, 'Oh,
she took a hero's way out, committed suicide.'
Much the way they say Boudica left us, or Zenobia left us.
It works for the hero's way out.
But for the Egyptian, it's brutal, because it's
the mother abandoning her children to their fates.
It's the mother not wanting to have to be walked in chains in
a triumph, deciding to just, 'Screw it, I'm done with this,'
and just leave everybody behind.
From the Egyptian perspective, to say that she committed
suicide is one of the most brutally affected pieces of
propaganda that Octavion could ever produce.
And it is the reason that I am so suspicious of it.
Again, until I get my time machine,
I'll never be able to prove it true or false,
but this is where I fall.
So, it's 2 50, yah!
Where else did women try to rule the world?
Well, nowhere like Egypt, but there are other women.
Jezebel, Athalia, her daughter, who tried to rule on behalf of
her son, both killed for trying.
Boudica and Zenobia both fought Rome and died.
Empress Lu, Empress Wu Zhetian fought for extend, sorry,
ruled for extended periods of time in Imperial China,
also never ruled alone, ruled alongside others.
And of course, we know the many
female rulers of a fragmented Europe,
including Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great,
et cetera, et cetera.
Different situation in a fragmented Europe where you
don't want a Spanish cousin to come in just because he's male
and you would rather have the female because she's British.
So, this is more a situation where the fragmentation of
Europe works for the females, in the females' favor.
In all of these cases, in Egypt and elsewhere, almost all,
success is ignored and the failure is aggrandized.
We have a cultural memory of the failures, like Cleopatra.
Shakespeare writes plays about Cleopatra.
We have epic poems about Semiramis,
who also was a ruler of the ancient Near East,
who apparently epically failed.
But those women who did it all right, women like Neferusobek,
women like Hatshepsut, who left Egypt better than they found it,
or the ones that are not part of our cultural memory,
whose names were effectively replaced, and to whom credit,
from whom credit was taken away and given to the men
who who either preceded them or came after them.
And so, in the end, I usually end this
discussion with this.
(audience members laugh)
And I am trying, so just a quick point,
and then I'll let you guys ask me a couple questions.
I am trying to make this as topical as I possibly can.
I'm trying to bring this back to why do we still
distrust females in power?
What is it about the female that sets us so on edge?
What was it about, what is it about the
possible lies of a female candidate that are so much
more powerful than the absolute untruths of the male candidate?
What's going on here?
And why are we still in this conundrum?
And this, I think, is the reason.
That we assign women a mercurial nature.
We assign women ups and downs of emotionality
that cannot be controlled.
Now, I'm not gonna stand up here and tell you this
is true, because I actually don't believe it is.
I, first of all, don't believe that we
only have male and female.
We are the ones that have culturally constructed a binary.
When you talk about a transgender and you talk about
the complications of sexuality, you talk to a biologist and
talk about all of the sexual expressions that are allowed for
us humans, it's extraordinary.
This is an oversimplified agricultural system.
But this is what we live with, this is what we have, and so,
then I'll look at this and I would like to turn this
on its head and say, if we assume that females are so much
more emotional than men, and if cognitive scientists do tell us
that on the whole you and I can read each other's faces better,
that we actually are more in touch with our emotions,
less likely to, I don't know, stalk an ex-spouse or pick up
a gun and kill up the whole family and then kill ourselves
'cause we're not in touch with our emotions, right?
If that is the case, then I would encourage
all of us to look at this emotionality more positively
and think of that emotionality, whether wielded by men or
by women, as the ability to feel something before
you decisively act upon it.
That this emotionality could be the very thing that got,