Narrative thread of 'dangerous females' twists like a serpent down the length of Egypt's long history.

The wife of Potiphar. Tababua. Cleopatra. Hathor-Sekhmet, goddess of love and destroyer of humankind... The narrative thread of dangerous females twists like a serpent down the length of Egypt's long history. An early queen Nitocris, who was possibly the first female pharaoh, set a trap for her enemies by inviting them to a feast in a subterranean banquet hall secretly linked to the Nile, which, at the height of celebrations, she flooded, drowning them all. The snaky schemer Cleopatra continued the tradition of seduction and perfidy. Then there is the mysterious Egyptian feminine in modern fiction. I first discovered the fatal female of ancient Egypt in literature in Sinuhe, The Egyptian by Mika Waltari. The mysterious female of Egypt was the most deadly and ruthless of the species and they have a long history to prove it.

The tradition of dangerous ancient Egyptian womanhood in literature has its folk roots in ancient Egyptian tales such as the Tale of Setne-Khaemwas. In the story, the young prince breaks into the tomb of a magician and steals the forbidden Book of Thoth. Then he meets the seductress Tabubu, a great beauty who demands that he forsake his family before being allowed to enjoy her charms.. I have created my own dangerous ancient Egyptian female in Hunting Hathor, a terrifying and sexually voracious entity by the name of Sesheshet. Se-she-shet is the soothing onomatopoeic sound made by the sistrum, an instrument rattled by Egyptian priestesses of the goddess Hathor in her temples. Hunting Hathor is a tale about a young hunter given the greatest task since creation, to hunt down the lioness goddess who has become the destroyer of humankind. Hathor-Sekhmet was the goddess with two faces, one, Hathor, the Sweet One, goddess of sexual love, joy, music and intoxication, the other, Hathor-Sekhmet, the terrible lioness of annihilation, sent by the god Ra to destroy humankind after their rebelliousness. In her marauding stage they called her The Confused One in the Night. Were there times when Hathor slipped from one state to another? One phase goddess of love, shining in her beauty, and the next a wild and dreadful lioness of destruction? What would it have been like to come across Hathor, the young woman, and not know that she hid another side?

Note: The Se-she-shet story appears as a tale within my archaeological thriller "The Smiting Texts"

Roy Lester Pond's Egypt collection is available at Amazon