Part of a series of various “chronicles”, including (so far) Popes, Roman Emperors, Roman Republic, Old Testament Kings, Maya Kings and Queens, Pharaohs, Tsars, and Chinese Emperors. These are coffee-table books with a little extra: attractive pictures in a large format, but with some scholarly stuff interspersed. Chronicle of the Queens of Egypt is by Joyce Tyldesley, who, with previous biographies of Hatshepsut and Nefertiti, seems like a good choice.


It does seem like every psychic in the world was Nefertiti in a previous life (unless they were Hatshepsut or Kleopatra), but Tyldesley is stuck with the actual evidence instead of interviews. The evidence, like a lot of Egyptian history, is pretty sparse. For example, there’s a badly damaged limestone macehead that shows the first king of a unified Egypt contemplating something on a litter. From this, Egyptologists have spun out a story of the Delta ruled by a queen, Neithhotep, whose marriage to Narmer of Upper Egypt united the country. The lump on the litter is then the veiled Neithhotep and the macehead commemorates the wedding. Tyldesley is skeptical, but Neithhotep is also known from other sources and remains the first “queen” in Egyptian history.


Things do get somewhat better with time, allowing various nice color pictures, including the obligatory two page spreads of the Berlin bust of Nefertiti and the beautiful painted tomb of Nefertari. I didn’t realize the two ladies are probably distantly related, or that while there’s no trace of a body for Nefertiti (Tyldesley doesn’t buy the various theories that either the “Elder Lady’ or the “Younger Lady” from the cache in the tomb of Amenhotep II is Nefertiti), we have Nefertari’s mummified kneecaps.


On the subject of royal remains, Tyldesley makes a tantalizing suggestion. During the Late Period, when control was breaking down and tomb robbers ran rampant in the Valley of the Kings, priests collected all the remaining pharaohs and moved their mummies to various “caches” for safety (apparent simultaneously helping themselves to whatever valuables the thieves left behind). A few royal ladies were brought along, but most are missing. Tyldesley proposes the wishful hypothesis that there are similar but undiscovered caches in the Valley of the Queens.


While running through the list of various poorly- to moderately-documented Egyptian royal women, Tyldesley points out that just using the word “queen” creates a mental image that isn’t quite correct. The Egyptian word translated as “wife” is hmt; hmt nswt is translated as “royal wife” or “queen”, and hmt nswt wrt is “great royal wife” or “principal queen”. Thus an Egyptian “queen” is a king’s consort, whereas the word “queen” in English can mean that or also a female ruler. When Hatshepsut was ruler, she used the same titulary as a male Pharaoh – nswt bity, “King of Upper and Lower Egypt”, with no feminine suffix. Further, the word “wife” is problematic, because in English that implies somebody who’s been through a formal legal ceremony (well, it used to imply that). Egyptians had no marriage ceremony; a couple just set up housekeeping. The word translated “wife” and the one translated “female servant” have identical phonetic components; they differ only in the unpronounced determinative. Thus both have the implication “somebody who lives in a man’s household” with the understanding that sexual access might or might not be involved. This gets interesting when considering the long-held idea that many Egyptian pharaohs “married’ their sisters or daughters, and Tyldesley discusses this is some detail. In almost all cases of a pharaoh “marrying” near kin, it seems like the lady in question was made “female head of the household” without any sexual connotations, even though carrying the title “royal wife” or “great royal wife”, and acted to run the palace and fulfill the religious obligations of a “queen”, allowing her sister or mother to go into retirement. The issue is further complicated by the paucity of Egyptian words for relations. A relative older than you was a “father” or “mother”, a relative of the same generation was a “brother” or “sister”, and a younger relation was a “son” or “daughter”. Thus a “daughter” could actually be a third cousin twice removed. Finally, the words “sister” and “brother” were used as terms of endearment between lovers; thus erotic poetry about a woman clandestinely meeting her “brother” for hanky-panky by the Nile has nothing to do with incest.


(This was not true in Ptolemaic times, where brother-sister, mother-son, and stepmother-son marriages were common; in fact, the norm. Kleopatra VII, the famous one, was the product of a brother-sister union between Ptolemy XII and Kleopatra V. This sort of thing makes Ptolemaic genealogical charts look like a plate of linguine).


All things considered, a nicely blended combination of serious scholarship and attractive illustrations. Recommended. ( )

This book works both as a basic narrative history and as a reference work. The queens are discussed sequentially in paragraphs and chapters, depending on the amount of information available about them. Tyldesley is quite open about the paucity of information and different interpretations of the facts, so the reader is enlightened without being left with a false sense of certainty. I did find the explanation of the Saite dynasty a little too brief; I had supposed it to be some invading force, but it turned out to be a native dynasty.

In addition, the book becomes a valuable reference work with the names of the Queens in hieroglyphics, a time line;, lists of royal couple for each dynasty; an overall chronology of dynasties and royal couples; a standardized box of information on each queen; a bibliography and index. The one thing that I did not find helpful was the genealogical tables, where it was often difficult to separate out the generations. Sometime bent lines appeared to join siblings, and other times to refer to children of a king from a mother other than the listed queens.

In all, a good basic trip through Egyptian history with great value as a continuing reference work. ( )