THE FEMALE ‘KINGS’ OF ANCIENT EGYPT

According to the ancient Egyptians, the entire universe was made up of masculine and feminine elements, maintained in a state of perfect balance by the goddess Maat. Her numerous fellow deities included a male earth god and female sky goddess. While the green-hued Geb lay back, his star-spangled sister Nut stretched herself high above to form the expanse of sky, hold back the forces of chaos and give birth to the sun each dawn.

Nut was the mother of twin deities Isis and Osiris. Isis was the active partner to her passive brother Osiris, whom she raised from the dead to conceive their child, Horus. Isis was also regarded as ‘more powerful than a thousand soldiers’. This same blend of nurturer and destroyer was shared with Hathor, goddess of love and beauty, who was capable of transforming into Sekhmet – a deity so fierce that male pharaohs were said to ‘rage like a Sekhmet’ against enemies in battle.

Such mixing of the sexes was not confined to myth. Indeed, Egypt’s women were portrayed alongside men at every level of society. This no doubt explains why the Greek historian Herodotus, when visiting Egypt around 450 BC, came to the conclusion that the Egyptians “have reversed