A Woman Ruled Ancient Egypt as King 5,000 Years Ago, Research Claims

More than 5,000 years ago, a royal woman called Meretneith (also written as Merneith) lived in ancient Egypt. She was possibly the daughter of Djer, the third king of the First Dynasty , a period when the first kings ruled over a unified Egypt.

Details over Meretneith’s exact royal status have remained murky. We know she ruled the country because her tomb complex was filled with riches fit for a male ruler of Egypt. At the very least, she was an interim ruler or co-regent. But did she ever rule Egypt in her own right?

Egyptologists have long disputed whether Meretneith was an independent ruler of Egypt. Resolving that dispute would require finding a text that identifies her as a ruler. Our new research, published in the journal Prague Egyptological Studies , might do just that. Using a new digital technique, we examined hieroglyphs in the photo of a long-lost artifact, and the signs clearly point to Meretneith being one of the early rulers of Egypt.

Currently, the only possible text that could resolve the dispute over Meretneith’s status is a hieroglyphic inscription in a black-and-white photograph of a mud stopper (a plug used for pottery jars and other vessels).

The text in question was originally found on 13 mud stoppers excavated from an unknown tomb in Saqqara in the 1940s. Only one photo of an inscription remains. That photo is found in the records of Egyptologist Walter B. Emery from the Egypt Exploration Society in London. The location of the original artifact or glass plate of the photo is unknown. The text consists of a row of four royal signs, known as serekhs. This hieroglyphic sign is written, combining an image of a royal building, a patron deity, and the ruler’s name.

Emery said that only the first and fourth signs belonged to the ruler Djer. However, many scholars at the time rejected Emery’s claim that the other two serekhs were named Meretneith. Among the many arguments against Emery’s theory was that the poor quality of the original published photo made it impossible to confirm what the signs on the mud stopper depicted.

In collaboration with digital technician Crystal Miller at Macquarie University in Sydney, we came up with a new technique to digitally clear up the signs. The goal was to determine if the inscription provides definitive evidence that Meretneith held the same marker as male rulers—as Emery claimed.

We applied a multi-step process to a digital image of the scanned archive photograph. By isolating the hieroglyphs, inverting the colors, and converting the image to a scalable vector (a computer graphic based on mathematical formulas), we produced a crisp digital replica—much like a high-tech pencil rubbing over a coin.

The enhanced image quality significantly improved the clarity of the text and is much more accurate than the original hand illustration Emery drew of the symbols in the photo.

Our technique has revealed that in the second and third serekhs, the signs in the name portion of the emblem are consistent with the main sign used to write Meretneith’s name.