Transcript of What’sHerName Episode 46: THE PHARAOH Tawosret 00:00:00 - 00:05:07 This episode is sponsored by Girls Can! Crate. Girls Can! Crate is a unique subscription box, inspiring girls to believe that they can be and do anything. How do they do it? Like us, Girls Can! Crate believes that real women make the best heroes, and every month they deliver them to your doorstep. [Opening music plays] Olivia Meikle: Hi Katie! Katie Nelson: Hi Olivia! OM: So today, we are going to my very favorite place, (KN: Ooh!) and my very favorite time, in the history of the world! KN: [Laughing] That’s exciting! OM: Can you guess where we’re going? KN: Okay. So are we talking about your very favorite place since childhood? Since, like… OM: Yes! Ever! KN: ...posters on your wall and books on your shelf when you were twelve years old? OM: …in the history of ever! HN: Okay! [Laughing] Ancient... Egypt! OM: [Cheering] Yay! Yes. And we are going to talk about one of the only women to rule ancient Egypt as a pharaoh. KN: Ooh! Nefertiti? Wait, no. She's too famous. OM: Yeah no, not Nefertiti. KN: Okay… Hatshepsut. OM: No, good guess. KN: Okay... I got nothin'. [Laughing] OM: We are gonna talk about Tawosret! KN: Uh, say that again? [Laughing] OM: The wildly famous… KN: [laughs] yes OM: …female pharaoh Tawosret! KN: Wait, no, actually say it again; I can’t hear those phonemes. OM: Ta-wo-sret. KN: Tawosret? OM: Or, people who know this, may have seen it as Tausret, Twosret... Because in hieroglyphs, of course, they do not write the vowels. KN: Right, yeah! OM: So, we actually have no idea what any Egyptian words sounded like or what vowels they used. And we kind of change our minds every few decades about how we’re going to pronounce things. KN: That’s awesome! OM: But I like “Tawosret.” So, that’s what we’re doing. KN: Tawosret? OM: T. A. W. O. S. R. E. T. KN: Okay, Tawosret. Never heard of her. OM: You are not alone. [Laughter] Most people have never heard of her. Those people who have heard of her? It's very likely because of a woman named Kara Cooney. She's a wildly popular Egyptologist with a huge social media following (KN: Really?) who wrote a book called When Women Ruled The World, and Tawosret is in that book. So, I gave her a call. KN: [Laughs] As you do. OM: As you do. This is me being extremely cool, and not at all fangirling over my favorite Egyptologist. I just want everyone to be clear. What’sHerName Podcast – www.whatshernamepodcast.com - pg 2 Kara Cooney: My name is Kara Cooney, I'm an Egyptologist at UCLA. ON: Kara Cooney is also the author of a fantastic book on Hatshepsut called The Woman Who Would Be King. KN: Cool! OM: Tawosret is one of the most neglected stories from ancient Egypt and, to me, she's one of the most fascinating ones. Her story might be a story of ambition and regicide and deeply flawed strategic thinking. Or it might be one of an obscure woman used as a puppet by a powerful man. Or it might be both! (KN: Ha!) So, in this episode we're gonna dig into the possibilities. KN: Cool. [theme music plays] OM: I'm Olivia Meikle. KN: And I'm Katie Nelson OM: And this is What'sHerName. KN: Fascinating women you've never heard of. [music] OM: So, we're going back to 1100 BCE. KN: Okay, so that's New Kingdom Egypt? OM: Yep, this is the Ramesside Period. So, Ramses. What a lot of people think of as a sort of Golden Age of Egypt. Ramses the Great, all of this. So, first we need to explain that stories of anyone from ancient Egypt are very hard to tell. Egypt kept its secrets very close to the vest and they did not make any public references to anything that might tarnish the shine of the court of the Pharaoh, of the king. Kara Cooney: If you let out the kind of realpolitik that's happening behind the scenes, it would get you nothing but dead, or threaten your entire family, and so you don't write it down. It's not going to help you. You may verbalize it, you may talk about it, and that's why we end up having to tell this history through circumstantial argument of who was erased from this temple, and who was put in their place, whose name was added over the cartouche, whose tomb was changed, and it all becomes an exercise of trying to remove the veils of the perfected story that the Egyptians are telling us. 00:05:07 - 00:10:03 What’sHerName Podcast – www.whatshernamepodcast.com - pg 3 OM: You are not going to allow any hint that there is drama behind the scenes KN: No, yeah. OM: So most of what we have to go off of is just this very strict propaganda public narrative that is posted on monuments, that is posted on temples... Kara Cooney: I'm not sure how to tell you how shocked I was when I had finished my PhD, when I realized that I was studying an authoritarian, almost totalitarian-type regime and that I had to look at them with that jaundiced of an eye. Before that period I had really drunk the Egyptological kool-aid, celebrating my people and these beautiful things and all that they had created. Now, I look with much more of a side eye [laughter] as I try to figure out what's going on. And it's opened up the history for me in a new way, and it's astounding to me to read the Egyptologists who just believe the State Narrative. OM: So, Egyptologists have two choices, they can accept that public narrative and just go with what is written. Or we can speculate with the info that we do have. That's more fun! So we're going to speculate. KN: Yay! [Laughter] OM: The public record of Tawosret’s story is so limited that we don't even know where she came from or when she enters. Her husband was the Pharaoh Seti II. He became the Pharaoh when he was very old. His father just refused to die, and carried on until Seti was quite elderly when he finally became the Pharaoh. Kara Cooney: Tawosret’s story is really tough to tell because you don't even know when she first shows up, except that she's queen of Seti II, but Seti II has another queen. And by Queen, I mean Great Royal Wife, which is a very particular Egyptian title which connotes the first queen in the harem if you like. Like being, I dunno, first cello in the orchestra. She's the one that gets to rule everything, and to have two great royal wives is abhorrent. It's strange, so that already speaks to something going on. OM: He's supposed to make more kids after he becomes the Pharaoh because those kids are more likely to carry on. So, presumably Seti's wife is also quite old, so Seti takes a second Great Royal Wife and this is where Tawosret enters. She is this new young wife who is brought into the court. She seems to be a nobody. She's not a daughter or a sister of the king. She's not a daughter or a sister of the previous king. KN: Right, yeah. The Pharaohs are today renowned for sometimes marrying their sisters and daughters, right? OM: Yes. Mostly marrying their sisters and daughters. (KN: Ugh) Yes, for a long period of time. It's actually a really clever way to consolidate power within the family. That you're not marrying What’sHerName Podcast – www.whatshernamepodcast.com - pg 4 out. You're not allying yourself to other families, and increasing their power and prestige. (KN: Right.) But, of course there are problems with that. KN: Uh-huh! Kara Cooney: It's a tricky balance because in Dynasty Eighteen when you have so much female power you also have incest. Which weakens the dynasty because the more power you give to a king's daughter or a king's sister the more they're marrying the king and the more they're having children with the king then the more those offspring are chosen to be the next king. And then you have Tutankhamun who’s the product of incest. You have Hatshepsut herself who's probably the product of incest, but her daughter Neferure was certainly the product of incest, and while this keeps power within the family very securely it creates a long term problem for that family in terms of genetic health, right? And the Ancient Egyptians knew this. Everybody knew this! Everyone helped animals procreate. People knew what it meant to breed with one's own relative and what the problems would be. The Ramesside Period, you don't have that kind of inbreeding in the family, but then you lose the king's greatest protector. The king's greatest protector is in many ways a strong and powerful female. All of her agenda is wrapped up with his agenda, and she can't take power as king very easily, so it's less of a threat to him. So, in some ways when the Ramessides push that female power away they're pushing their greatest protector away.