Drawn by Faucher-Gudin,
from a photograph
by Plinders Pétrie.
As we proceed, however, information becomes more plentiful, and the list of reigns almost complete. The part which the princesses of older times played in the transmission of power had, from the XIIth dynasty downward, considerably increased in importance, and threatened to overshadow that of the princes. The question presents itself whether, during these centuries of perpetual warfare, there had not been a moment when, all the males of the family having perished, the women alone were left to perpetuate the solar race on the earth and to keep the succession unbroken. As soon as the veil over this period of history begins to be lifted, we distinguish among the personages emerging from the obscurity as many queens as kings presiding over the destinies of Egypt. The sons took precedence of the daughters when both were the offspring of a brother and sister born of the same parents, and when, consequently, they were of equal rank; but, on the other hand, the sons forfeited this equality when there was any inferiority in origin on the maternal side, and their prospect of succession to the throne diminished in proportion to their mother’s remoteness from the line of Râ. In the latter case all their sisters, born of marriages which to us appear incestuous, took precedence of them, and the eldest daughter became the legitimate Pharaoh, who sat in the seat of Horus on the death of her father, or even occasionally during his lifetime. The prince whom she married governed for her, and discharged those royal duties which could be legally performed by a man only,—such as offering worship to the supreme gods, commanding the army, and administering justice; but his wife never ceased to be sovereign, and however small the intelligence or firmness of which she might be possessed, her husband was obliged to leave to her, at all events on certain occasions, the direction of affairs.
At her death her children inherited the crown: their father had formally to invest the eldest of them with royal, authority in the room of the deceased, and with him he shared the externals, if not the reality, of power.* It is doubtful whether the third Saq-nûnrî Tiûâa known to us—he who added an epithet to his name, and was commonly known as Tiûâqni, “Tiûâa the brave” ** —united in his person all the requisites of a Pharaoh qualified to reign in his own right. However this may have been, at all events his wife, Queen Ahhotpû, possessed them.
* Thus we find Thûtmosis I. formally enthroning his daughter
Hât-shopsîtû, towards the close of his reign.
** It would seem that the epithet Qeni ( = the brave, the
robust) did not form an indispensable part of his name, any
more than Ahmosi did of the names of members of the family
of Ahmosis, the conqueror of the Shepherds. It is to him
that the Tiûâa cartouche refers, which is to be found on the
statue mentioned by Daninos-Pasha, published by Bouriant,
and on which we find Ahmosis, a princess of the same name,
together with Queen Ahhotpû I.
His eldest son Ahmosû died prematurely; the two younger brothers, Kamosû and a second Ahmosû, the Amosis of the Greeks, assumed the crown after him. It is possible, as frequently happened, that their young sister Ahmasi-Nofrîtari entered the harem of both brothers consecutively.
Drawn by Bouclier,
from a photograph
by Emil Brugsch-Bey.