There is no evidence that the queen would have sexual relations with her brother-king. The sister and brother of the ruling pair could each have a consort or consorts for sexual relations, but these spouses were not included in the possession and transmission of property. The queen did have intercourse with her consort-king. and the resulting female progeny constituted the royal line, earning the title of "Royal Mother" by right of birth. As in any other matrifamily, the mother's brother or maternal uncle held a more important and permanent place than the husband. For example, Tutankhamon was king because he was married to one of Queen Nefertiti's daughters, Ankhesenamon. Since Ankhesenamon had no brother to rule as regent after Tutankhamon's death, and her plan to marry a Hittite prince was foiled, her uncle Ay succeeded as pharaoh because he was blood kin to her mother, Queen Nefertiti.

       A childless princess could not hold the throne unless married, although many queens ruled alone during the minority of their children. Continuity of the ancient female blood line had to be assured. Ruling power from predynastic times was transferred by Queen Niet-hotep (who bore the "ka" ruler name) to her consort King Mena to found the first historical dynasty under which Upper and Lower Egypt were united.

       Despite the anthropologically recognized importance of matrilineal descent in Egyptian culture, art historians continue to misinterpret Egyptian art and life by applying to it the familiar conventions of their own patriculture. For example, in the most recent edition of Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Hatshepsut was "a princess who became queen when there were no legitimate male heirs." Another current text, discussing the paired statues of Prince Rahotep and "his" consort Nofert, describes Rahotep as "a son of Sneferu . . . also high priest of Heliopolis and a general. His intelligent and energetic face suggests that he owed his high offices to something more than kinship with the king." A final example comes from a book entitled, ironically, Gods, Men and Pharaohs: The Glory of Egyptian Art, where we find the following commentary on the paired figures of King Mycerinus and his wife (i.e. the queen), Khamerernebty II:

The fact that the king is portrayed in close conjunction with his, consort does, however, indicate a weakening of the concept of the pharaoh as an unapproachable being possessed of divine power. In the portrait of Mycerinus the expression of imperturbability and calm strength associated with the god-king is no longer given prominence; instead we can detect a physical and spiritual tension, the slight hint of a connection with the transient human world, of a diminution of the king's claim to divinity.

       In fact, what we see in the queen's embrace is more likely to be the opposite of what we have been told: not "a diminution of the king's claim to divinity," but the affirmation of it. In light of what we know about the Egyptian matrifamily and the founding of the historic dynasties, a queen's embrace in Egyptian art should be more properly read as a gesture that confers legitimacy, a symbol of her transfer of power to the pharaoh.

       Like the Egyptian matrifamily, which was retained from the Egyptians' Neolithic ancestors, many of the symbols of power that surround Egyptian royalty also had their origin in North African Neolithic culture. Principal among these are the symbols of a cow deity, which became closely associated with major Egyptian goddesses and the queen in Egyptian art.

[...]

       The control of the life-giving sun and the ka's admission to rebirth in the underworld was given to goddesses who derived their insignia from the Great Cow: Hathor, Nut, and Isis. From the Cow-Goddess's prominent position on Narmer's palette of the first dynasty to Hathor's cow-eared visage at her late Ptolemaic ternple at Dendera, the cow is seen in Egyptian art as a chief deity, in charge of regeneration and sustenance.

       From earliest times, the rulers of Egypt were identified with cows and cow imagery. Just as the sun was born of Nut, the Sky-Cow Goddess, so too the pharaoh, in his divine status as incarnation of the sun, became known from the Fifth Dynasty onward (ca. 2580 B.C.) as child of the Sky-Goddess. "As the Bull of Heaven he was the dominant male, the embodiment of virile fertility, and in this capacity he impregnated the queen, called 'The Cow that bore the Bull.'" The queen therefore was equated with the great Sky-Cow Mother, alternately Nut or Hathor, who swallows the Sun (Re) to give birth to it anew. Like Neith, the Sky-Cow was self-generating, only needing the sun disk Re to impregnate her body "with the seed of the spirit that must be in her." At death, the pharaoh is received into the body of Hathor as a mountain; through her body, as through the queen's body, the pharaoh can hope to be born anew.

       The insignia of those goddesses who embodied the power of the Cow-Mother were the lyriform cow's horns and the sun disk. These elements are prominently displayed in the headdresses of queens from the New Kingdom on (after 1600 B C.), suggesting a desire to reaffirm the queen's identity with the heavenly "Cow that bore the Bull." An example, on an inlaid throne from the tomb of Tutankhamon (1355-1342 B.C.), shows Queen Ankhesenamon wearing the lyriform cow's horns and sun disk of the cow-goddesses, as well as the uraeus of the cobra, Wadjet of Buto. The enraged female cobra, or uraeus, is another important female symbol of government that can be iinked to the functions of the Great Goddess. It is the personified eye of the sun-god Re and is always present on royal crowns.

       The cobra, Wadjet of Buto, was the tutelary goddess of North or Lower Egypt, and one of the earliest of royal insignia. It was in her sanctuary that the pharaoh sat at coronation to receive the Red Crown. The tutelary goddess of the South or Upper Egypt was the vulture Nekhbet, who similarly represented royal dominion. Her great house, the per wer, was likewise used in coronation and jubilee ceremonies to represent the White Crown. But Nekhbet had the special function of designating the person through whom the royal line was traced, and thus appears in the headdress of the Great Wife, the queen.

       Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom (2800-1700 B.C.) portrayals of princesses and queens often showed idealized women who are of equal size and importance to princes and pharaohs. But these same periods saw the ascendancy of the pharaoh's power, which was paralleled by an increase in the importance of the solar deity Re and the vegetation-god Osiris over the cow-goddesses who had been so prominent on earlier monuments. Pharaonic symbols of the hawk, scepter, flail, and pyramid were derived from the cults of these male deities. By the Eighteenth Dynasty, however, the arts reinstated the goddess symbols of horns, sun disk, uraeus snake, and vulture in depictions of female royalty. "From then onwards," as E. O. James has written, "royal heiresses became increasingly prominent in Egypt. Hereditary queens bore the titles 'Royal Daughter,' 'Royal Sister,' 'Great Royal Wife,' 'Hereditary Princess,' 'Lady of the Two Lands,' as well as 'God's Wife.'" The title of "Divine Wife," for example, was assumed by Queen Neferu of the Eleventh Dynasty (2100 B.C.); and Ahhotep, the mother of Ahmose I, who was founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, was described as the "God's Wife." Thus the designation of the queen both as the wife of the pharaoh in the incarnation of Re, and as chief priestess of Re, was continued.

       At least a half dozen female pharaohs have been recognized. Most famous of these is Queen Hatshepsut, who reigned for twentyone years, from 1504 to 1483 B.C. Her mortuary temple at Deir-el-Bahari, which commemorates her reign, is a monument to a skillful and determined monarch who asserted her right to exercise the full powers of her throne.

       Hatshepsut was the daughter of Queen Ahmose and King Thutmosis I. In Hatshepsut's temple, the god Amon-Re was shown taking the form of her father Thutmosis I in order to have intercourse with the queen. In the accompanying inscription, Amon declares: "Khenemet-Amon-Hatshepsut shall be the name of this my daughter, whom I have placed in thy body.... She shall exercise the excellent kingship in this whole land. My soul is hers, my [bounty] is hers, my crown [is hers,] that she may rule the Two Lands, that she may lead all the living...." Most scholars write as if these reliefs were an attempt to legitimize Hatshepsut's reign by showing her consecration by Thutmosis. In reality, the right to the throne was Hatshepsut's already. She ruled because, though married, she did not let her husbands govern. Her first husband, Thutmosis II, was a son of her father Thutmosis I by a minor wife who legitimized his claim to the throne by marrying her. After his death, she married again, but kept this husband, Thutmosis lII, as an unimportant minion. Her "favorite," Senmut, became her architect and built the mortuary temple for her. Senmut had some prestige, but not the throne; his reward for being Hatshepsut's intimate was the privilege of carving his image discreetly behind doors of the niches of some upper terrace chapels.

       At Deir-el-Bahari, the queen is shown suckling from Hathor's udder, assuming, in this ritual image, the role of the pharaoh. The goddess, whether in the form of the cow, Isis, or the sycamore, had traditionally been shown nurturing the pharaoh, her offspring, from her udder or breast. As one scholar explains: "The suckling of the king by a goddess was a symbol of the entry of the king into the divine world. The king by this rite obtained a new and divine life which gave him the power to fulfill his royal mission on earth." Images which show Queen Hatshepsut as a boy or with a beard are also part of the tradition of the pharaoh as the male procreative force of the land, since early times ritualized in the pharaoh's displays of physical prowess in the Heb-Sed jubilee, and in his association with the heavenly bull and the ichthyphallic Min. After her death, Hatshepsut's suppressed second husband, Thutmosis III, had every mention of her name and every image of her destroyed.

       Another example of spite against an active queen occurred a little over a century later, when the upstart military pharaoh Horemheb singled out Queen Nefertiti for special indignities. Early in her reign, Nefertiti had built a great open sun court in the Aten Temple at Karnak. It was a unique architectural monument to the female succession because every surface was carved with exclusively female figures, including, of course, the queen. Consecration by the queen must have been important enough in the Eighteenth Dynasty to require this special court in the Aten Temple, which showed Nefertiti's endorsement of Atenism. Later, when Horemheb succeeded Ay, he ordered the destruction of Nefertiti's sun court. The tops of the twenty-eight great pillars showing Nefertiti and her daughters worshipping Aten were laboriously turned upside down; the faces, limbs, and fingers of each figure were defaced, and the blocks were buried inside the great second pylon at Karnak. In each of these examples, the spiteful successor attempted eradication of the queen who represented a blood line to which he did not belong.

       Continuance of matrilineal descent into the late period is clearly stated in royal titles, such as in this inscription on the statue of Amenertas:

The kindest and most amiable queen of upper and lower Egypts, the sister of the king, the ever living daughter of the deceased king, the wife of the divine one - Amenertas - may she live.

       This seventh-century queen did live for many years ruling Thebes, and her daughter transferred the sovereign rights of the throne to the following Saitic Dynasty (663-525 B.C.). A succession of five "God's Wives" followed, who ruled exclusively as governors. Their titles described them as "High Priestess" and "Mistress of Egypt."

       Female succession. brother-sister marriages, and dual kingship prevailed in Egypt until the reign of the last Ptolemy. The Cleopatra we know from Shakespeare was the seventh Macedonian princess of that name. She spoke the Egyptian language and adhered to Egyptian matrilineal custom. Cleopatra, however, married and reportedly murdered her two regent-brothers in turn for the sake of her consort Marc Antony, thus committing what Evelyn Reed has described as the "crime of crimes, shedding the blood of the blood kin." After Octavius conquered Egypt, Cleopatra refused to accept him as her pharaoh. At the same time, the Roman patriculture which Octavius represented would not allow him to accept her daughter and two sons as heirs to the throne. Male supremacy won out in the end, but Cleopatra's suicide deprived the Roman Empire of the ancient tradition of the Cow-Queen.

       Matrilineal descent made it possible for men of talent to rise to the throne of Egypt, but even the most ambitious male ruler had to reckon with the Cow-Queen's power. Egyptian princesses and queens could assert their power visibly, like Hatshepsut or Nefertiti, or elect to function as the "power behind the pharaoh." In either case, Egyptians knew as many art historians will not, that the Great Wife made whomever she married into a living king, whether brother or commoner, just as the goddess Isis as Throne Woman gave birth to the living king. Thus, if we are to interpret Egyptian art accurately, we must reexamine our definitions of dynasty and succession in Egypt, and from now on, remember to couch our thinking about Egyptian art in matrilineal terms.