The Collector has published a feature examining why so few of ancient Egypt's female rulers are remembered today, arguing that there were more women on the throne than most people imagine, yet that they remain difficult to trace in the historical record.
The article's central point is one of visibility rather than numbers. While women who held the office of pharaoh were always a small minority, the piece contends that the count is higher than popular memory suggests. The difficulty, The Collector explains, lies in how these rulers were presented in their own time and how later records treated them. Some legitimised their authority by adopting the visual and titular conventions of a male king, which has made them harder to identify at a glance. Others were remembered chiefly as queens, a title that could obscure the extent of the power they actually wielded.
Hatshepsut is offered as the clearest example of the first strategy. As The Collector notes, she presented herself in the guise of a male ruler, a choice that has shaped how she has been read ever since. The feature uses her case to illustrate a wider pattern in which a woman's exercise of royal power was folded into forms and images that the culture associated with kingship, leaving the fact of her gender less visible to those who came later.
The result, the article suggests, is a kind of unrecorded history: rulers who governed but whose place in the sequence of pharaohs was softened, reframed, or set aside by the conventions of their age and by the traditions of record-keeping that followed. The piece invites readers to reconsider how the surviving evidence has been assembled, and how the categories used to describe Egyptian rulers can themselves shape who is counted as a pharaoh and who is remembered only as a queen.
This is an explanatory feature rather than a report of new fieldwork or fresh discovery. It draws together well-known cases to make a broader point about the gaps in the record and the ways in which royal women could be written into, or out of, the story of Egyptian kingship.
Titles and names sit at the heart of this problem, because in ancient Egypt a ruler's identity was carried above all in the written and carved forms that surrounded them. Readers who would like to follow how such names and titles were framed can learn to read the script for themselves with the Hierolyte app. The full article is available on The Collector.