An 80-Year-Old Grainy Photo Could Solve the Mystery of an Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh

4 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Meretneith was a First Dynasty queen who may have briefly taken up the crook and flair to become the first female pharaoh in history.What’s especially confusing about Meretneith is that her name appears in several different spellings across First Dynasty artifacts, including one inside a serekh—the rectangular insignia used to frame a pharaoh’s name.After converting a grainy image of the serekh to a much sharper vector, researchers are now convinced that the inscribed name is Meretneith, and that she probably was pharaoh. Before Hatshepsut, before Sobekneferu, even before the pyramids, a forgotten queen might have ascended to the throne as the first female pharaoh of Egypt over 5,000 years ago: Meretneith. She was only a few generations removed from Narmer, the unifier of Egypt and founder of the First Dynasty. According to some records, Meretneith (also spelled Merit-neith or simply Merneith) is believed to have been the daughter of the pharaoh Djer and the queen of the pharaoh Djet, ruling alongside him until his death. But their son, Den, was too young to shoulder the weight of the crown, so the queen took it upon herself, marking a first in Egyptian history.The strange arc of Meretneith’s place in Egyptian history begins in 1900 C.E., when Egyptologist Flinders Petrie was excavating tomb Y at Abydos when he made a perplexing discovery. The royal stela he’d found bore no serekh. Meaning “that which makes known,” a serekh was an insignia similar to the later cartouches bearing the names of pharaohs, except in a rectangular arrangement. Petrie then discovered what he thought to be a king’s name elsewhere in the tomb, but curiously, it had a feminine ending. The confusion lasted 40 more years, until Egyptologist Walter B. Emery found seal impressions in Saqqara’s tomb S3503 showing a faint name stamped next to Djer’s serekh. He was sure it read Meretneith; his colleagues were sure it didn’t.“Undoubtedly, Meretneith was a prominent figure in the First Dynasty,” archaeologists Sue Kelly of Charles University in Prague and Crystal Miller of Macquarie University in Sydney said in a study recently published in Prague Egyptological Studies. “However, despite the considerable amount of surviving evidence, her political position remains ambiguous and open to conflicting interpretations.”Kelly and Miller noticed that there were discrepancies over Meretneith’s rank because of how her name was written on the royal serekh versus other inscriptions. Worse, the serekh is gone. It survives only in Emery’s black and white photos of a mud jar plug stamped twice with the disputed name and twice with the serekh of Djer. The researchers were able to look further into the grainy images when they employed a new digital process that clarified the symbols in each serekh. A serekh typically depicts the facade of a royal building, with the pharaoh’s name written inside it and a patron deity perched on top. The researchers were able to isolate each hieroglyph onscreen and convert each one into vectors. Because vector graphics use mathematical formulas converted into digital images, that produced much clearer visuals.The enhanced images revealed a pair of hoe signs sharing one compartment of the first serekh. The hoe stands for mr—the Mer in Meretneith. It also matches other inscriptions of her name in the royal tomb, documents that mention her along with her administrative titles, and impressions on necropolis seals. The catch was that the hoe sign sat at a slight tilt, which is different from the orientation scribes normally used. Then there’s the sign above the serekh. The name Meretneith means "beloved of Neith,” the goddess of war, wisdom, and creation, so her emblem—a shield crossed with arrows—should be perched there, in the spot deity symbols usually occupied. But the details don’t quite match. Some researchers have speculated it’s a falcon instead, the emblem of Horus reserved for reigning pharaohs.Whether this is really the serekh of Meretneith is still a debate among Egyptologists. Some argue that the deity symbol is too unclear to make out, while others insist that the hoe symbol is suspiciously different from its typical form. The name itself has been written several ways in different epigraphical sources. Some have a feminine ending “t” depicted by a semicircle of bread, and some do not, while others feature an additional phonetic component “r”, the oval mouth sign, beside the hoe. There are some instances in which the extra symbols appear together. While the Neith symbol was written differently at times, it was always present at the top of the serekh. In addition, those arguing that the serekh doesn’t symbolize Meretneith as pharaoh have yet to suggest who it belongs to instead.Other serekhs from the same era show inconsistencies in the spelling of kingly names, including Narmer and the predynastic ruler Ka. Meretneith’s own son Den would also have different ways of writing his name once the throne passed to him. How rulers’ names were written would continue to vary during Egypt’s first century as a nascent unified land. The differences could easily be chalked up to human error—accidental distortion stemming from an inexperienced inscriber or a seal unevenly rolling over objects to stamp them. After analyzing vectors, Miller and Kelly argue that the serekh can only be linked to Meretneith.“Undoubtedly, the rulers of ancient Egypt were predominantly male, but evidence suggests that a royal woman was the preferred interim ruler under prescribed circumstances or during a crisis in the state,” they said. “Meretneith appears to have adopted distinct positions as ruler of the country throughout her career dictated by the changing political environment.”Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.