It is very frustrating that we have virtually no information concerning either the private lives or the public duties of the queens of Egypt, and consequently no real understanding of the perceived role of the queen-consort. Although we can see that the queen’s titles, her official regalia and even her religious affiliations slowly evolved as the Dynastic period progressed, we can only draw the most tentative of conclusions from this combined evidence.11 We can see that the queens of the Old Kingdom, who did not adopt a standard diadem or crown, often served as priestesses for the cult of Hathor. This Hathoric tradition had died out by the end of the 11th Dynasty and the later Middle Kingdom queens, who are seldom mentioned in any official capacity, were rarely associated with any particular cult. Where they are depicted, these shadowy ladies wear a distinctive headdress of two tall feathers. The queens of the New Kingdom emerged from this relative obscurity as fully formed personalities wearing a complex range of royal insignia apparently intended to stress the links between the potentially divine queen and the gods. These New Kingdom queens did not as a rule serve as priestesses although the queenly title of ‘God’s Wife of Amen’ became very important at this time. By the Late Period, queens were again functioning as priestesses, but the suggestions of a connection between the queen and the gods had become somewhat muted.
Official illustrations almost invariably present the queen as a dutiful wife providing loyal but entirely passive support for her husband. In the approved Egyptian tradition the queen was literally expected to stand by the king, and indeed Queen Merytre, consort of the New Kingdom ruler Tuthmosis III, earned high praise as ‘one who is never absent from the side of the Lord of the Two Lands’. This essentially inactive role is constantly reinforced by the numerous scenes which show the queen observing her husband as he performs a royal duty, just as non-royal tomb scenes depict more humble wives watching their husbands at work. In the vast majority of these scenes the queen is totally static. She keeps her hands by her sides and, although she may carry an ankh sign symbolizing life or a sistrum to stress her link with Hathor, she has no formal role to play at the official function. It is not until the 18th Dynasty that we see a queen actually shake her sistrum, while only in very specialized and female-orientated scenes such as those depicting royal births, or those included on the walls of her tomb, do we see the queen acting independently of her husband.
The individual queens of the turbulent and unsettled Archaic Period are now very remote figures, better known for their funerary monuments than their deeds. However, four prominent women have emerged from the mists of historical obscurity to suggest that royal females played a far more prominent role in the unification of their country than the present dearth of evidence would suggest. Three of these women (Neith-Hotep, Her-Neith and Meryt-Neith) bear names compounded with that of the goddess Neith, the patron deity of the town of Sais in the Nile Delta, and this strongly implies that all three may have been born into prominent northern families; an important distinction at a time when Upper and Lower Egypt were still very much separate entities. One of these women, Queen Meryt-Neith, may have been a queen regnant rather than a queen-consort; the evidence for and against her reign is therefore considered in detail in Chapter 7.12
Queen Neith-Hotep may well have been the first queen-consort of the newly unified Egypt; the evidence recovered from her tomb certainly suggests that she was an important element in 1st Dynasty political life. We know that in spite of her northern name Neith-Hotep was buried at the southern site of Nagada, where her enormous tomb (measuring over 53 × 26 metres) contained objects inscribed with the names of both King Aha and his predecessor, King Narmer. Aha has been very tentatively identified as King Menes, the traditional unifier of the country, while we know that Narmer was a highly successful southern warrior king. It is perhaps not stretching the available evidence too far to suggest that Neith-Hotep, a princess from the north, was married to the southerner Narmer in order to add strength to his ambition to rule over both north and south. Aha, or Menes, would therefore be the son of both Neith-Hotep and Narmer, and a man with an impeccable right to claim the throne of a united Egypt. This suggestion of a dynastic marriage is supported by a decorated mace-head recovered from Hierakonpolis which shows Narmer participating in an unidentified ceremony while wearing the distinctive crown of Lower Egypt; this may well represent the celebration of his marriage with Neith-Hotep. History shows that such calculating alliances are certainly not unknown and, for example, some 4,500 years after Neith-Hotep’s marriage King Henry VII followed exactly the same line of reasoning when he married Elizabeth of York, the daughter of his defeated enemy, in order to emphasize his right to the throne of England and Wales.