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Writer's pictureAlexandra Tiffany

Breaking Barriers: The Few Women Who Rose to Power in the Ancient World.




These women first accessed their power through men- fathers, husbands, brothers and sons. Through a mix of ambition, intelligence, political savvy, generosity, guile and, in some cases, a ruthless and bloody drive for power, women were only then able to stay in power, sometimes for decades.


“In every single case, it’s crisis that brings them to the throne. It’s a lack of men, they are there as placeholders or stopgaps, and they usually have a bad end,”


says Egyptologist and archaeologist Kara Cooney, who teaches about female rulers in antiquity at the University of California, Los Angeles.  


When their reigns ended, they sometimes died violently. Their lives and achievements were often scrubbed from collective memory by subsequent male rulers eager to take credit and reinforce prevailing patriarchal norms.  


“In each case, the woman is swept aside. In each, case the woman has no genetic legacy. And in each case, her ambition is judged as self-serving and dangerous,”


says Cooney, author of The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt and for millennia thereafter, their stories were chronicled largely by male historians. Those narratives, sometimes framed around the women’s violent or promiscuous ways (think Egypt’s Cleopatra or Phoenician royal Jezebel), became “cautionary tales” that “have invaded our cultural psyche,” says Cooney, preventing many from seeing a more complete picture of their real lives and accomplishments. 


Alexandra Welch.

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