not hold it in his own right. So in the eighteenth dynasty of the Egyptian monarchy the Pharaoh Thutmose I had to yield the throne on the death of his wife to his teenage daughter Hatshepsut, even though he had two sons. The custom of royal blood and the right to rule descending in the female line occurs in many cultures: among the Natchez Indians of the Gulf of Mexico, the high chief of Great Sun only held rank as the son of the tribe’s leading elder, the White Woman. When she died, her daughter became the White Woman and it was her son who next inherited the throne, thus retaining the kingly title and descent always in the female line. This tradition was still evident in Japan at the time of the Wei dynasty (A.D. 220–264) when the death of the priestess-queen Himeko led to a serious outbreak of civil war that ended only with the coronation of her eldest daughter.
The power of the queen was at its most extraordinary in Egypt, where for thousands of years she was ruler, goddess, wife of the god, the high priestess and a totem object of veneration all in one. Hatshepsut who like Sammuramat fought at the head of her troops, also laid claim to masculine power and prerogative, and was honoured accordingly in a form of worship that lasted for 800 years after her death: ‘Queen of the north and south, Son of the Sun, golden Horus, giver of years, Goddess of dawns, mistress of the world, lady of both realms, stimulator of all hearts, the powerful woman’.23 But the frequent appearance of the queen as ruler, not simply consort, was by no means confined to the Egyptian dynasties. Queenhood was so common among the Celtic Britons that the captured warriors brought in triumph before Claudius in A.D. 50 totally ignored the Roman emperor and offered their obeisance instead to his empress, Agrippina. Perhaps the most interesting of all, however, is Deborah, leader of the Israelites around 1200 B.C.; in Judges 4 and 5, she holds evident and total command over the male leaders of the tribe, whose dependency on her is so total that their general, Barak, will not even take to the field of battle without her. Early Jewish history is rich in such powerful and distinguished women:
A Jewish princess? Judith, who saved the Jewish people; she flirted with the attacking general, drank him under the table; then she and her maid (whose name is not in the story) whacked off his head, stuck it in a picnic basket and escaped back to the Jewish camp. They staked his head high over the gate, so that when his soldiers charged the camp they were met by their general’s bloody head, looming; and ran away as fast as their goyishe little feet could run. Then Judith set her maid free and all the women danced in her honor. That’s a Jewish princess.24
Nor was female power and privilege at this time confined to princesses and queens. From all sides there is abundant evidence that ‘when agriculture replaced hunting . . . and society wore the robes of matriarchy’, all women ‘achieved a social and economic importance’,25 and enjoyed certain basic rights:
Women owned and controlled money and properly.
In Sparta, the women owned two-thirds of all the land. Arab women owned flocks which their husbands merely pastured for them, and among the Monomini Indians, individual women are recorded as owning 1200 or 1500 birch bark vessels in their own right. Under the astonishingly egalitarian Code of Hammurabi which became law in Babylon about 1700 B.C., a woman’s dowry was given not to her husband but to her, and together with any land or property she had it remained her own and passed on her death to her children. In Egypt, a woman’s financial independence of her husband was such that if he borrowed money from her, she could even charge him interest!26
Marriage contracts respected women’s rights as individuals, and honoured them as partners.
A number of Codes akin to that of Hammurabi explicitly contradict the ‘chattel’ status that marriage later meant for women. In Babylon, if a man ‘degraded’ his wife, she could bring an action for legal separation from him on the grounds of cruelty. If divorce occurred, women retained care and control of their children, and the father was obliged to pay for their upbringing. The Greek historian Diodorus records an Egyptian marriage contract in which the husband pledged his bride-to-be:
I bow before your rights as wife. From this day on, I shall never oppose your claims with a single word. I recognize you before all others as my wife, though I do not have the right to say you must be mine, and only I am your husband and mate. You alone have the right of departure . . . I cannot oppose your wish wherever you desire to go. I give you . . . [here follows an index of the bridegroom’s possessions]27
Another, stronger indication of the warm intimacy and forbearance that an Egyptian wife could expect from her husband is to be found in the ‘Maxims of Ptah Hotep’, at more than 5000 years old possibly the oldest book in the world:
If you’re wise, stay home, love your wife, and don’t argue with her.
Feed her, adorn her, massage her. Fulfil all her desires and pay attention to what occupies her mind. For this is the only way to persuade her to stay with you. If you oppose her, it will be your downfall.28
Women enjoyed physical freedoms.
The respect accorded to women within marriage mirrors the autonomy they frequently enjoyed before it. In the early classical period Greek girls led a free, open-air life, and were given athletic and gymnastic training to promote both fitness and beauty. In Crete, chosen young women trained as toreras to take part in the ritual bull-leaping, while Ionian women joined in boar-hunts, nets and spears at the ready. Across thousands of Attic vases (‘Grecian urns’ to Keats), girl jockeys race naked, or dance and swim unclothed through millennia of silence and slow time. The freedom of the young unmarried women was so marked in Sparta that it even caused comment in the other city-states of Greece. Euripides was not the only Athenian to be scandalized:
The daughters of Sparta are never at home!
They mingle with the young men in wrestling matches, Their clothes cast off, their hips all naked, It’s shameful!
The strength and athletic ability of these young women was not simply fostered for fun, as the story of the Roman heroine Cloelia shows. Taken hostage by the Etruscan king Lars Porsenna during an attack on Rome in the sixth century B.C., she escaped, stole a horse and swam the Tiber to get back safely to Rome. Even though the Romans promptly handed her back, Cloelia’s courage won the day; for Lars Porsenna was so impressed by this feat that he freed her and all her fellow hostages as a mark of honour.29
Regiments of women fought as men.
The hardening of young women’s bodies by sport and the regular practice of nudity had wider implications than these sporadic acts of personal daring. Throughout the ancient world there is scattered but abundant evidence of women under arms, fighting as soldiers in the front-line engagements that conventional wisdom decrees have always been reserved for men. Ruling queens led their troops in the field, not as ceremonial figureheads but as acknowledged and effective war-leaders: Tamyris, the Scythian warrior queen and ruler of the Massagetae tribe of what is now Iran, commanded her army to victory over the invading hordes of Cyrus the Great, and had the great king put to death in revenge for the death of her son in battle. Ruling women also commanded military action at sea, as the Egyptian queen Cleopatra did at the battle of Actium, where her uncharacteristic failure of nerve cost her the war, the empire, her lover Antony and her life. Warrior queens were particularly celebrated in Celtic Britain, where the great goddess herself always bore a warlike aspect. The pre-Christian chronicles contain numerous accounts of female war-leaders like Queen Maedb (Maeve) who commanded her own forces, and who, making war on Queen Findmor, captured fifty of the enemy queen’s women warriors single-handed at the storming of Dun Sobhairche in County Antrim.30
