Not Just the King's Wife: Was First Dynasty Egypt Ruled by a Woman Named Meretneith?

Imagine a pharaoh. You probably picture something like Tutankhamun's sarcophagus: a man with a long, stylised beard, charcoal eyeliner, a headdress and a staff. You probably don't picture a woman.

Female rulers weren't unheard of; Cleopatra is Egypt's most famous. But far earlier, in the First Dynasty, when Egypt was first united, one woman's role has been disputed for decades.

In 1900, Flinders Petrie excavated her tomb at Abydos and took her for a male king, Merneit. When scholars noticed the name's feminine ending, Meretneith was downgraded to a king's wife.

In 1946, Walter Emery found 13 jar stoppers, each stamped with a row of four serekhs, the frames surrounding royal names. Two, he believed, held Meretneith's name. But the seals and his glass-plate negative have since vanished, leaving only a grainy photo.

So Sue Kelly and Crystal Miller developed a way to enhance it, essentially a digital charcoal rubbing, making the name clearer than it has been in decades. But does it prove Meretneith was a king?

And why would it matter? Isn't it just a label? Not quite. She wasn't downgraded for lack of proof, but largely because people assumed women could not be kings. Her royal tomb, her privileges, her role: all explained away as the perks of a king's wife or mother.

Finding A Name

In 1900, Petrie was excavating the royal cemetery at Abydos, the burial ground for Egypt's first kings, when he came across a carefully built tomb with two royal stelae bearing the name Merneit. He believed Merneit to be a previous king immortalised on the stelae, even though the name was not framed by a serekh. Later, other inscriptions revealed the name's feminine ending, Meretneith, and "King Merneit" was downgraded to a king's wife.

Fast forward almost half a century, and Emery came across 13 clay jar stoppers in a tomb in Saqqara, each stamped with a row of four serekhs. Two belonged to King Djer; the other two didn't carry his name. Emery photographed one of the stoppers on a glass plate and published the image in 1954.

Meretneith's name was also inscribed on stone vessels beside the sarcophagus of the tomb, and so Emery believed the tomb belonged to Meretneith. Years later, he suggested the two mystery frames were hers, topped not with a Horus falcon, as with a king, but with the cross-arrow symbols of the goddess Neith, suggesting she might have been King Djer's successor.

But the 13 jar stoppers and the glass plate have since vanished, leaving only the grainy black-and-white image.

Making the Image Legible

In 2022, the Egypt Exploration Society scanned the original photograph at high resolution for the researchers. The scan suggested marks pressed into the clay above the name-frames, but they were too hard to decipher.

Hoping the image could be read more clearly, Kelly and Miller ran it through something called DStretch, a tool used by rock art researchers to reveal faded pigments (I have used it myself, revealing faded rock art I honestly never would have noticed with the naked eye, and turning what looked like a blob of paint into a detailed figure, with faded limbs).

The thing is, DStretch works by exaggerating tiny colour differences, but a black-and-white image has almost no colour to exaggerate, so the tool made barely any difference.

But the researchers did not give up just yet; they decided to build their own image enhancer. In essence, their method separated the raised impressions from the clay backdrop. Then it stripped away the background and traced what was left into a digital drawing, like a digital charcoal rubbing.

The result was much clearer than Emery's original drawing. According to the authors, the first mystery frame contained a hoe-shaped sign spelling "Mer," written twice, and just above the frame sat the symbol of the goddess Neith, just as Emery had traced decades earlier. The second mystery frame was somewhat less clear; it too seemed to have the double hoe sign, but whatever sat on top did not look like the symbol of Neith.

One scholar, Roth, back in 1997, argued she could see a falcon depicted, which would make Meretneith the first female ruler with a king's falcon of Horus, but the authors are more cautious, saying it is too worn to be certain.

With a clearer image, the authors could confront the first criticism: that the name inside the frames was not Meretneith's at all.

Mere-who?

Some scholars still aren't convinced the name is hers; one researcher never even considered that it could belong to a female ruler. He dismissed Neith's symbol as no match for the Horus falcon and doubted the signs inside spelt her name at all.

Roth, the same scholar who argued she may be able to see a falcon on top of one of Meretneith's frames, argues that the name is spelt inconsistently in other inscriptions, so the name is probably not hers.

To address these arguments, Kelly and Miller point out that early Egyptian writing often spelt different rulers' names differently, including kings, so why couldn't that hold true for a queen?

Then they lined up every known version of Meretneith's name. Sometimes it had an extra sound sign, sometimes a feminine ending, once both; sometimes it was read left to right or right to left, and sometimes it was written vertically, other times horizontally. What never changed was the hoe sign, the same sign doubled in Emery's photo of her name.

They argue the differences could be due to different scribes, seals rolled over damp clay or plain old bad handwriting.

So was she a king who ruled in her own right, a queen or simply a regent?

One puzzle is why her name appears beside that of her probable father, King Djer. The authors theorise it may be because she ruled alongside him or perhaps she was his heir. Also, other kings' names, even if rarely, sometimes appear together, such as Narmer and Aha, or Semerkhet and Qaa, possibly indicating a shared reign.

The next clue, they say, comes from the tomb of Meretneith's son, King Den. Seals from his tomb list the dynasty's earlier rulers, every king before him. But each king had the symbol for Khentiamentiu, a god of the dead, before their own name, except Meretneith; she is simply titled the king's mother. Some argue this showed she was no king; others argue that she was still alive and thus had no symbol for the god of the dead before her name. A seal from the reign of Semerkhet, two rulers after Den, still lists her, but his successor, Qaa, left her out entirely.

Whatever she was, she was clearly influential. In fact, broken stone bowls from her tomb link Meretneith's name to the royal treasury and to officials who served under her. One inscription might even be read as a title, "foremost of women" or perhaps "head of the treasury".

Even if she was no king, and perhaps only a regent while her son came of age, she seems to have been active in ruling the state, at least to some degree.

Her royal stela lacks a ruler's name-frame, which may show she was no king; yet by the time she died, two male kings had reigned since Djer, and she may have stepped up occasionally to fill the role of ruler when the male heir was not yet ready.

The main point is that her name appears next to her father Djer's, which the authors argue shows she co-ruled with him, before later ruling on behalf of her young son, Den.

And yet, even with the enhanced images, some are still not convinced, pointing out that even the clearer images do not show the name Meretneith; they read the seal as naming only King Djer. That said, whatever Meretneith was, and whether or not she appears on those seals, she seems to have been powerful. Powerful enough that her tomb was built amongst those of earlier and later kings.

So was Meretneith a king? Perhaps. The authors argue she probably was, while others disagree. No matter what label she was given back then or even now, she was powerful and clearly influential in her own right. To have dismissed her simply because she was female says more about those writing and interpreting her story than about Meretneith herself. That said, so many of these claims rest on a single digitally enhanced photograph, something that could just as easily further distort whatever the image was of in the first place.

What we do know is that Meretneith was a woman worthy of a king-like tomb, one who was remembered in royal seals generations after she passed, who oversaw the treasury and whose name appears beside the officials who served her. She was far more than just "the king's wife."

History can easily be framed by what we expect more than what is actually there. Petrie expected a king and decided that's what he had found; later generations saw a female name and saw a queen. Meretneith herself did not change; her story was over. The way we interpreted it did.

Do you think Meretneith was a ruler in her own right, a regent, or simply a king's wife? And why do you think some royal lists include her while others leave her out?

Let me know what you think, and if you'd like to support this blog and the person writing it, you can chip in once, monthly, or yearly. Only if you'd like to.

Reference

Susan Kelly et al, New technology illuminating ancient evidence: Re‑evaluating Meretneith's serekhs and political position, Prague Egyptological Studies (2026). (Page 28 in full issue) https://pes.ff.cuni.cz/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2026/09/PES_XXXVI_2026_web.pdf