Was ancient Egypt’s first female pharaoh the one you think?

With the publicity around Queen Hatshepsut as a result of the popular new book 'The Woman Who Would be King’ by US Egyptologist Kara Cooney, many may think that this resourceful queen was the first to rule as a pharaoh, but was she?

If few have heard of Hatshepsut, who has ever heard of Nitocris?

Quite a few, actually.

Playwright Tennesse Williams of “A Streetcar Named Desire’  fame wrote his first published short fiction about her, titled: ‘The Vengeance of Nitocris.’

A little florid, full of youthful exuberance and colour, it opens with the words ‘Hushed were the streets of many people Thebes…’

Williams was a beginner.

Nitocris also attracted the attention of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft who dubbed her the ‘subtle Queen Nitocris.’

Then Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz wrote a novel about her.

But was the queen a real person?

Ancient historians Herodotus, Eratosthenes, and the Greek-Egyptian Manetho all attest to the queen’s existence.

Some authors ascribed the building of the third pyramid of Giza to Nitocris, unlikely since Menkaura was known to be its builder, but there were signs of later additions to it, which may have involved the queen.

Greek historian Herodotus described her beauty and bravery. He also noted her cunning in these words:

To avenge her brother (he was king of Egypt and was slain by his subjects who then gave Nitocris the sovereignty) she put many Egyptians to death by guile. She built a spacious underground chamber; then, with the pretense of inaugurating it, but with far other intent in her mind, she gave a great feast, inviting those Egyptians whom she knew to have been most concerned in her brother's murder; and, while they feasted, she let the river in upon them by a great secret channel. This was all that the priests told of her, save that when she had done this, she cast herself into a chamber full of hot ashes, thereby to escape vengeance.

Modern day scholars range in their opinions. Some say that Nitocris was in fact a male king, others that she was possibly the eldest daughter of King Pepi II, and married King Merenre, while others dismiss her as an entirely mythical personage.

Founder of modern Egyptology, William Petrie, in his ‘History’ claimed that Nitocris was another version of a courtesan called Rhodopis who bizarrely, gave birth to the Cinderella story…

The poet Sapho wrote of her:

The Rhodope that built the pyramid was Nitocris, the beautiful Egyptian queen who was the heroine of so many legends; Mycerinus (Menkaura) began the third pyramid, and Nitocris finished it. One day, they say, when Rhodopis was bathing at Naucratis, an eagle snatched up one of her sandals from the hands of her female attendants, and carried it to Memphis; the eagle, soaring over the head of the king who was administering justice in an open-air court at the time, let the sandal fall into his lap. The king, struck with the beauty of the sandal and the singularity of the incident, sent over all Egypt to discover the woman to whom it belonged. The owner was found in the city of Naucratis and brought to the king; he made her his queen, and at her death erected, so the story goes, this third pyramid in her honour…

So was Nitocris, the first woman to be a king, fact – or fairy story? 

(NOTE: The enigmatic Nitocris is at the centre of a new modern day crime mystery  with an ancient Egyptian theme: 'The Egypt Trap'.) It appears in 'Death by Egyptology" - Amazon paperback and Kindle