The Queen
Queens were called hemet nesut (wife of the king).
Although the king usually had several wives, in the New Kingdom, one of them was
identified as the main queen by the title "great wife of the king." A queen's
status was highest when her son became king. There are a number of cases where a queen
mother ruled for a son who was still a child. Several queens also ruled in their own
right.
As consorts queens shared the divine nature of the king and were occasionally
identified with goddesses such as Hathor, Isis, or Tefnut (the female part of the first
gendered pair of gods). The crown worn most frequently by queens was that worn by
goddesses, which consisted of the head, wings, and tail of a vulture. Queens from the New
Kingdom onward also wore the horns and sun disk of Hathor.
Statue of Hatshepsut
The most famous female pharaoh, Queen Hatshepsut, was coruler with her young nephew
Thutmosis III, then took over kingship on her own. Since rulers of Egypt were almost
always male, when Hatshepsut assumed the titles and functions of king she was portrayed in
traditional royal male costumes. Such representations were political statements, not
reflections of the way she actually looked. |
Discovery of fragments of Hatshepsut's sculpture, Thebes
Some twenty years after Hatshepsut's death Thutmosis ordered her name erased wherever it
appeared and her statues smashed, for reasons that may have been politically motivated and
not a belated act of personal hatred. Here museum archaeologists are sorting fragments of
Hatsheput's statues before attempting to reconstruct them. |
These are a head and a fragment of a head of royal women of Akhenaten's
reign--a time when the king's wives, his mother, and her daughters played important roles
in rituals honoring Aten.
Fragment of the head of a queen
Canopic jar with a lid in the shape of a royal woman's head (detail)
