Nitocris

The Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt in the 5th century BCE. He says that Egyptian priests read to him the names of 330 pharaohs from a papyrus, and that among them was one woman, Nitocris. She is said to have succeeded her brother, a pharaoh killed by the Egyptians, and she wanted to avenge him. She had a long hall built underground and invited the chief guilty men to a banquet. Then she let the water of the Nile into the hall through a hidden channel and drowned them. Afterwards she threw herself into a room full of ashes to escape revenge.

Manetho, an Egyptian priest who wrote in Greek in the 3rd century BCE, tells the story again. His work survives only in later summaries, which often disagree with each other. In them Nitocris is the last ruler of the Sixth Dynasty and reigns twelve years after a pharaoh called Menthesuphis. She is described as a woman of great beauty and courage. The sequence of Menthesuphis and Nitocris is the reason why many authors identify the murdered pharaoh of Herodotus with Merenre II, although Herodotus does not name him.

Manetho also says that Nitocris built the third pyramid of Giza. This cannot be right. The third and smallest of the great pyramids belongs to Menkaure of the Fourth Dynasty, who reigned almost three centuries before the time of Nitocris. Greek visitors to Giza told other tales of a woman and this pyramid, including one about a courtesan named Rhodopis, which Herodotus himself rejects. The stories show how freely the Greeks connected famous monuments with famous women, and how little they knew about the real order of the Egyptian pharaohs.

For a long time a name in the Turin Canon, written Nitiqreti, was read as Nitocris and taken as proof that she existed. The fragment of papyrus belongs to the 19th Dynasty and was placed in the Sixth Dynasty section by the scholars who put the papyrus together. Kim Ryholt's study of its fibres suggests that the name is a faulty writing of the throne name of Netjerkare Siptah. On this view Nitocris is a legend that grew out of a pharaoh's name. Other scholars still think that a woman, perhaps a regent, may have ruled for a short time.

The name Nitocris was borne by more than one woman, and they should not be confused. Herodotus also tells of a Babylonian queen Nitocris in the first book of his Histories, who is said to have built works along the Euphrates. Much later a historical Egyptian princess had the same name, Nitocris I, a daughter of the pharaoh Psamtik I of the 26th Dynasty. She became God's Wife of Amun at Thebes about 650 BCE. Neither woman has any connection with the queen of the Old Kingdom, except for the sound of the name.

The story of Nitocris has been retold in novels and popular books. In Rhodopis of Nubia, the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz makes her a royal wife of Merenre II. These works are fiction. Those who want a woman who certainly ruled Egypt as pharaoh will find her later, in the Twelfth Dynasty: Sobekneferu, whose reign is shown by contemporary monuments. For the end of the Old Kingdom the honest answer is that we do not know whether a woman ruled, and that the Greek tale is better evidence of what later generations wanted to remember than of what happened.

Nitocris belongs to the history of how the Greeks remembered Egypt more than to the history of Egypt itself. A queen who avenges her brother and builds a pyramid made a good story, and it was attached to a time of which very little was known. Behind the story there may be nothing, or a pharaoh whose name changed its sex in the telling. The same period, as far as it can be read from real documents, is described on the pages on Merenre II and on the Seventh and Eighth Dynasties.