Neithhotep

Neithhotep is the earliest Egyptian queen whose name survives, a figure from the very beginning of the First Dynasty, around 3050 BC, whose standing was so exceptional that early excavators mistook her for a king. Her name, "Neith is merciful" or "Neith is satisfied," invokes the goddess of Sais in the western Delta, and it appears on clay sealings, ivory labels, and stone vessels from Naqada, Abydos, and Helwan. Unusually for a woman, it was sometimes written inside a serekh, the palace-facade frame otherwise reserved for reigning kings; her recorded titles include "Foremost of the Women" and "Consort of the Two Ladies." Her tomb is generally identified as the great mastaba at Naqada excavated by Jacques de Morgan in 1897, reinvestigated by Ludwig Borchardt in 1898 and John Garstang in 1904. Its niched mudbrick walls and outstanding size have parallels only in the monument of the later queen Merneith. Sealings of Narmer and of Hor-Aha were found in it, and the number naming Hor-Aha suggests she was buried in his reign. On that evidence Egyptologists long concluded that she was Narmer's wife and Hor-Aha's mother, perhaps a princess of Naqada or of the Delta married to seal the unification of Egypt, and that remains the conventional account. The picture has grown more complicated. Rock inscriptions found at Wadi Ameyra in the Sinai in 2012 and published by Pierre Tallet place her name above a royal serekh in a way that suggests she ordered a mining expedition in her own right, and Tallet argues that she belonged to the next generation, acting as regent at the start of the reign of Djer rather than as Narmer's consort. An object bearing her name was found in Djer's tomb. Whether she was Narmer's queen, Hor-Aha's wife, or a regent for a young Djer remains an open question; what is not in doubt is that she wielded authority of a kind no other woman of her era is known to have held.