The Ancients - Women and Power in Ancient Egypt

Episode Date: March 11, 2021

Kara Cooney has been studying 6 of the remarkable female pharaohs of Ancient Egypt. In this episode she explains why many of them have been forgotten, and others regularly misrepresented. Professor of Egytian Art and Archaeology at UCLA, Kara introduces us to the lives and rules of Merneith, Neferusobek, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret and Cleopatra, and explains how their reigns were used as tools of control in a patriarchal society.Kara is the author of: 'When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt'.

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in 30 BC. Now joining me to talk through this incredible history, I was delighted to get on the show, Professor Cara Cooney from UCLA. Cara has done a lot of work about women and power in ancient Egypt. She's written books such as Hatshepsut, She Who Would Be King. And she's also written a book entitled When Women Ruled the World, which focuses on six key women from ancient Egyptian history, five of which became kings. That's right, not queens, kings in their own right. So in this podcast, we're going to go through those six figures. Without further ado, here's Cara. Cara, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Now, Ancient Egypt, When Women Ruled the world, this book that you've written,

is Ancient Egypt one of the only places in the ancient world that consistently allowed female rule? It is. It's the only place in the ancient world I've found that allowed consistent formal rule in which women not only ruled behind the scenes, behind the throne, through other men, but formally as nothing less than king, which is why I use the phrase female king rather than queen, because for the ancient Egyptians, queen connoted no political power. King did. And when a woman rose to that position, which I would count as five times, that would be Nefru Sobek, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, potentially Tawasret, and then Cleopatra, depending on how one defines a king, though I don't think Nesut is there in relation to Cleopatra's name, but many other monikers of masculinized kingship are.

And so that's the unusual thing. You could compare ancient Egypt to a place like ancient China, where you also see very regular, systematic use of women to protect a family group, a family dynasty in an authoritarian, in their case, imperial context. But in China, the women are working through the males around them and working through a system of filial piety. around them and working through a system of filial piety. And you don't see the same formalized positioning of power, the naming of a woman into a position. And instead, she's dowager queen, for instance, or wife, queen, you know, empress, that kind of thing, which is a title to be sure. But it's not like Hatshepsut ruling as Nasut, as king. I guess that then begs the question, Kara, why does this happen so much then in ancient Egypt of all civilizations?

Well, this is the dirty underbelly of the whole story. And I wasn't able to arrive at this conclusion until I compared ancient Egypt to ancient Persia, ancient Rome, ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, Levant, India, China, and to some extent even the New World. And by comparing Egypt to all of these places, there are two things that stuck out at me that helped these women to find their way into these roles. And the first one is a protected space for most of Egypt's existence up until the Iron Age. It is this place that has boundaries on all four sides, deep deserts on the east and west, a Mediterranean Sea to the north, cataracts and desert to the south. It's a very hard place to invade. So it's protected from outside invasion.

It also is internally very wealthy. So you have easy farming, Herodotus talks about this in his histories. So you have a place that doesn't have a lot of competition as a whole, not a lot of external competition until the Iron Age when empires roll in, which is a different discussion. And not a lot of internal competition because you have a lot of wheat and barley and cheap carbs, for the most part. Yes, there are intermediate periods. Yes, there are droughts. But for the most part, you have a group of people that are able to be full, full bellies, right? So without that competition, you end up creating risk averse power structures that lead to divine kingship par excellence, unlike anywhere else in the ancient world. And that's the second thing that Egypt has. They're both obviously connected to one another. And that second thing is divine kingship. It's

an authoritarianism. It's an unequal social system, more unequal, arguably, than the Levant or Mesopotamia or Greece or Rome. And I just counted up like rain lengths. So if you look at the King of Mari, Zimri-Lim, and how long he rules before Hammurabi of Babylon comes in and takes his city, and he's got a 10-year reign. We have all these documents, but it's this short reign. And if you look at reign averages for these parts of the world, they show intense competition. I would encourage everyone to read Walter Scheidel's Escape from Rome and look at how short these Roman emperors ruled on the whole on average very few years and the amount of competition is extraordinary compared to that the Egyptian kingship in which you

actually see a reign of 67 years documented for Ramses II that's extraordinary and during a time period of intense Ramessid competition no less right before the fall into the Iron Age. So Egypt allowed this authoritarian chokehold on the country. And that means that when that family authoritarianism was threatened, when the king died early and there's a young boy on the throne, or somebody's unready or a little bit mad or who knows, instead of allowing it to descend into a melee of war lording, which would happen in most other places in the world, Egypt decided en masse, organically, even in some ways geographically conditioned, to allow a representative of the family who was considered risk averse, i.e. a woman, to step in as a placeholder to keep the

family together. So you see this dozens of times as a woman is there as an informal regent acting on behalf of a son, another male relative, something like that. But every now and then, these women were able to step up and become nothing less than kings. So the dirty underbelly of the whole thing to come full circle is that this miracle of female rule has nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with patriarchy. It has nothing to do with equality and everything to do with inequality. And in those places of the world where we have a broader distribution of goods and power, like Greece or Rome, you see very little formal female power. When one man falls, another man will fight to take his place, which then made me think of all of the

conditioning we have, our knee-jerk reactions of hostility towards female power even today, and how females often feel the need to represent the patriarchy even more than a man might. And you being now in Britain, I think you can understand that perhaps better than Americans in your parliamentary system, where your greatest female leaders have been the staunchest supporters of a strict patriarchy return to the past, the way things used to be, which is not supporting a forward thinking feminism in any way, shape or form. And that was the point of my book, which makes people mad. But there it is, I'm gonna put it down like I see it. You put it down as you see it exactly, Cara. But it is so interesting, isn't it how these women who we're going to dive into now,

as you say, they were placeholders for the Egyptian patriarchy at times, as you say. Yeah, they're there in the moment. They're there when they're needed. They're there to get from point A to point B. And then after their time of glory, of notoriety, ignominy, whatever the woman has, they are very often erased. If it's notoriety, they will be remembered as a cautionary tale against why we shouldn't have female power in the first place. But if they do everything right and perfectly,

and I would put Hatshepsut and even Nefertiti in these categories, they are so erased that we forget their names, we can't pronounce their names, or we can't even identify them as women who were queens, they melt into something else. And that is very interesting that these women had to fit into a mold that they could not shape themselves, that the office of kingship was bigger than they were. It is so interesting that, Cara, this idea of consistent formal power that they held in ancient Egypt compares to the likes of, and my mind instantly springs to figures like Boudicca, maybe Castamandu, Tamiris, Zenobia, these figures who we hear one-offs of, shall we say, at other places. But even though this consistent formal power, they're poorly remembered today,

these women who we're about to dive into now. They are, and particularly the successes are poorly remembered. So somebody like Cleopatra, if we went out on the street and we said, name the most famous Egyptian female ruler, Cleopatra would be immediately at hand. You would then ask, perhaps, did she leave Egypt better than she found it? And I think everyone would immediately say, no, she did not. So that's what's in our cultural memory. That's what Shakespeare wrote his play about. That's what Hollywood has their films revolving around, this cautionary tale, this aggrandizement of female failure, whether the system put her into this position to fail or not. power when there is crisis anywhere in the world. And you mentioned Zenobia and Boudicca. Those women were freedom fighters fighting against the Roman Empire that was swallowing up their lands and their people and their cultures. And their men folk are dead and having already fought this great machine and lost. And they are now the ones left to step in. So it is a very human thing to

associate the female rule with crisis and to say, when there is female rule, there will be crisis, rather than understanding that when there is much maligned in this regard, and that we have been taught this cultural way of distrusting the female and assuming that she's going to bring discord like Pandora when she opens her box or sack. Well, then let's dive into these figures from your book. Cara, is this a momentous task? So we're going to cover thousands of years of history from the dawn of the Egyptian state down to, as you mentioned, Cleopatra. So let's give it the best we can. So the first person we're going to start with, forgive me if I get the pronunciation wrong, Merneth? Merneth, I mean, you know, we just have the Egyptian writings of these things.

We don't know how they vocalize them. Only the vowels and signs are there. So your guess is as good as mine. I'm going to go with Merneth. Mere-eth-neth, maybe, beloved of the goddess Nath is what good as mine. I'm going to go with Merneth. Merit's Nath, maybe, beloved of the goddess Nath, is what her name means. And with this first figure, Merneth, we are going back to the start of the Egyptian nation state. Yeah, it's an extraordinary thing that what you just said in and of itself, because the word nation state is a very modern idea. And it's something that historians would generally avoid what you've just

said, that Egypt is a nation state. I don't think it's that crazy. I think that it was Barry Kemp that argued that Egypt was the first regional state of a homogenous elite culture from Delta to Aswan. And I think he's right. And I think that it is a different thing. It is a large territorial entity that the Nile allowed to be pulled together, unlike a place that has geographic boundaries or open yawning expanses without any protection like in West Asia or northern Mediterranean lands. So Merneth is super interesting because she's there immediately as a very strong element of female power right when kingship is being formed in ancient Egypt. So as soon as kingship is born, queenship, to support it,

follows. It's there. It's the other side of the coin. Merneth is the only one out of the six women in the book who does not herself become female king. But when the archaeologists found her grave in Abydos, they thought she was a king. She was there in the lineup of other kings. She had a stela like a king, a little bit of stuff missing, like the Horus bird at the top or the palace structure, ideogram. But her tomb had sacrificial burials. And it seemed that this was a king. But no, no, she's something different. She's a king's mother. Helen, hold the phone there. You mentioned sacrificial burials.

What is the story of sacrificial burials in this time period? It's super interesting. And it's something that when I'm teaching this, I usually have a little bit of a discursus and I go, okay, now this sacrificial burial thing is super interesting. And we go to the royal burials at Ur and we compare even Cahokia in Missouri, we look at places where kingship is new and around the globe where kingship is new. And that could be New World, Old World, Europe or Asia or Africa. You see this method of reifying that power by dispatching, causing to sacrifice or outright killing in front of other people, courtiers from the court, people who are well-bred, well-fed, in whom much has been invested.

And those people are sacrificed semi-publicly, but it's a means of creating, manufacturing an extraordinary amount of violent and political power for a king. And this happens in Egypt too. It happens in Egypt for about 100 years during the first dynasty. And you can see kind of a U-curve of how it starts out slowly at the beginning, and then it really finds its apex around King Den, that's Merneth's son. And then it starts to fall down a bit. And the next dynasty comes along and you don't have any real good evidence for human sacrifice. Now, the evidence for human sacrifice in and of itself is quite veiled and problematic. And we can talk

about that. But it's an interesting thing that the next dynasty comes in and like human sacrifice, us, we would never, it's those other guys that would do that. So the point has been made, the kingship has been reified, the power has been manufactured. When the king was put to death, the keening and mourning was not just there for the king. It was for all of his court and people. His death was their death. His mourning was their mourning. And to reify the new king, and in my opinion, it's a way for the next king to come to the throne and say, who's a threat? That brother of mine, that brother of mine, that brother of mine, that brother of mine, you're all threats, you're all going, you're my bodyguard. And that woman, that woman, that

woman connected to that man, that man, that man, you guys are going. Did they do this openly and say threat, threat, threat? Probably not, because this is all ideologically driven. And I love this book by Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power. And in it, he argues that ideology is the one social power that can get people to do something that is not in their own personal best interest. And here we understand the extraordinary power that ideology has over people, because it can allow you to watch a beloved family member go to their death and do nothing about it or even walk yourself to your death and do nothing to fight against it or to think that it's a good thing for you for your king for everybody involved but the cultural memory

of this for the first dynasty is created during the first dynasty renaith would have been there to see all of this human sacrifice, one must imagine. And it stops in dynasty two, they move on to something else, but we still have it in our cultural memory. We know that it was there. We look at the great pyramids and we go, oh yeah, the queen was sacrificed to be with the king.

I hear this from tourists when I'm there on site or the craftsman, he had to stay inside and then he was the last one to close it up and to put the last block in or something, right? And this isn't true for the fourth dynasty pyramids at Giza, but the cultural memory is strong. And if it lives on to us today, then I can imagine that it was there quite strong

just a couple of hundred years after and to dynasty four and onward. So, yeah. That's all astonishing. And I appreciate when we talk about Menuheth, we're going back so, so far. But what has the archaeology discovered at her tomb, for instance, and for instance, these sacrificial bodies? What does it tell us about Menaraith and the possible life that she had? Well, I and all the other Egyptian archaeologists and historians are trying to tell a 5000 year old story from grave goods and grave architecture, which sounds impossible and ridiculous, but one

can piece together something knowing the context of the time, the players, the power players, what the system was. Merneth would have grown up at court, would have been a very wealthy and well-placed woman, likely an educated woman, whatever that early writing system of her time was. Could she read those signs? Probably. But she found herself married to a king who died early. She was probably one of many wives, but it seems that she was the highest placed wife, or it seems that she became very highly placed when her son was chosen as the next king. And when he was chosen, youthful, we don't know his age, no idea how old she was either. But if she's marked as king's mother, then he was probably, I don't know, 12 years old,

10 years old, 15 years old, no idea what the Egyptians thought of as minority and majority in terms of maturity and the ability to act as a ruler and an adult. But she was needed as the decision maker. And it shows such cleverness within a patriarchal system by the ancient Egyptians that they didn't choose an uncle of the next king to act as his regent. Their patriarchy was not so slavishly non-nuanced that they're like, it must be a man. No, this patriarchy was very clever and nuanced. And it understood that within this system, women had very little foundation from which to create more power. And as such, they were the most risk averse selection to have as the

placeholder for the next king. So instead of choosing a brother of the dead king, you choose a mother of the next king who's going to be able to be a decision maker and act on his behalf and then slip back into the shadows when the time is right. And for Merneth, she must have been the one when Den took the throne. Let's say he's a 10-year-old kid. He gets enthroned, you know, everyone's watching all of these ceremonies. And it seems to be that the human sacrifice is as much about the coronation of the new king, if not more about the coronation of the new king, as it is about the burial of the old. It is feeding a system with blood. It is showing everyone that this is the price that we pay to have this next king, to avoid bloodshed, avoid warfare, all of this

stuff that we have to assume the Egyptians remember and went through in Dynasty Zero, whatever that was, to form this kingship. And Merneth is the one ordering who's going to die. And she would have known immediately for Jet's burial. That's her husband and King Den's father. Maybe she works with courtiers maybe she doesn't we have no idea how this decision was made 5 000 years ago but it's an interesting thing that ellen morris's work on these bodies has shown that more males were put to death including females with children for the burial of king jet which suggests a strategy to remove potential male competitors from the throne. When you saw the burial before of who we think was Merneth's father,

Jer's burial had more females in it than males. And these are gross simplifications, but you get kind of an idea of what they're worried about, how much they're trying to remove certain tensions or certain competitors. But this is a really important point that queenship or female role does not bring with it a Pacific avoidance of all bloodshed. Merneth steps into the role and she's like, this is what we do. I will do it too. And I will kill as many people as were killed before. I will dispatch them. We will make sure it is done. And she does. If she's regent, we have to assume she's the one that made these decisions. So that's the way this human sacrifice works. It is an

extraordinary, interesting topic. But this sacrificial burial is a practice that we only have evidence for in Egypt's first dynasty when kingship is new. You mentioned, Cara, of course, that you have these sacrificial victims buried nearby her in her tomb, but you also mentioned that you're trying to figure out the story through grave goods too. So are there treasures buried with Merneth too? There were treasures buried with all of these first dynasty kings, but there's not a whole lot left. In some cases, there's good stuff to be found by archaeologists. There's a massive amphora of wine jars that show that there's trade with the Levant and olive oil and other sorts of commodities brought in. There's hard stone vessels that show a skill that only was possible for the

first dynasty court, the king, to have at his disposal. There's timber from the Lebanon. There's cedar. There's gold ostensibly, but there's hardly anything left. You find little bits and pieces, right? So much of what is left are these commodity labels made of ivory or wood or bone. Ivory in and of itself is telling you something about an extraordinary commodity that comes from hunting, comes from far away. It's something that screams masculine power. So all of these treasures are funneled into the court, monopolized by these people at the top. And to sacrifice those things, in addition to those people, it's the same as conspicuous consumption today. I was just talking

to my son about how ridiculous it is to buy something like a Lamborghini. Like who's going to buy a car that costs a quarter of a million dollars? To me, it's ridiculous. But it is a conspicuous consumption to immediately in a moment communicate to everyone that you do not need this for transportation. You can buy a car that's more expensive than a house in many places. And you're there able to, yeah, show a wastefulness, an expenditure on something that you can't even really drive in a city is even more ridiculous, but people do it. So it's something I think we can understand quite well. Well, going back then to Merneth, her legacy, as you mentioned earlier, it doesn't

last very long is probably the wrong words, but things happen to her legacy not long after she dies. Things happen to her legacy about two generations, maybe one after she dies. So the way it works is she dies and she's buried during the reign of King Den, her son. And because there's no transfer of power, there's no moment of the king is dead, long live the king. The king is alive. She doesn't need a whole lot of sacrificial burials.

There are some sacrificial burials, but they're the fewest in number during this stretch of time. And many people have said, oh, it's because she's a woman. That's part of it, but it's because she's not holding the formal place. She's not there with any sort of link in the chain being broken and a new link being put onto the chain. That's not what's happening. When Den dies, and he rules for another 20 years, he's the first dynasty's longest-lived king and quite popular from what we can see at court, potentially, but he did kill a whole lot of people, and quite successful in what he was able to do. But in his tomb, there is a label that lists the succession. And you have Jer, then you have Jet,

then you have Den. So the kings are there in a line. And then next to Den's name, you see the king's mother, Mernath. So she's there in the lineup, in the succession, not exactly where she should be, but she's there. And then when you see the next king in succession, she's gone. There's another king list, and she's been removed. And it is a pattern that will be continued in Egyptian history, that these women are allowed to come in as placeholders. They're allowed to be decision makers. They're allowed to keep the dynastic line going. But as soon as that link has been put on the chain from one man to another and you move to the next successor, that woman is a distraction.

She's a problem. She actually creates an alternative lineage in many ways for succession. And she is usually erased. That's the case with Merneth. It's the case with Hatshepsut. But Tawastrut and Nefertiti are different because they're the end of dynasties. So it's a different kind of discussion. It's interesting, as you were saying there, Cara, when it's in the middle of a dynasty, it's not just Merneth's case. We have got a later case that we'll get onto in a bit of once again, we see a few years later, their names always being erased. Yeah, they're forgotten. And then we don't know

their names. So here we are resuscitating Merneth's name and people are like, wait, who is this? This extraordinarily powerful, badass woman. And her name is not a part of our cultural memory. The most successful ones, we don't remember their names. We don't speak them. Now let's move on to the figure number two. This is really interesting. So we've talked about Mernath as she didn't acquire the title of king. But this next figure, she did. And this is now, is it 12 dynasties later? Yeah, first dynasty to 12th dynasty.

So we're skipping over 11 dynasties. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. That's a huge amount of time in itself. I mean, that's incredible. Yeah, yeah. That's a huge amount of time in itself. I mean, that's incredible.

I would suggest that the stories of Natakris have kernels of truth to them in terms of female power. So if you look at the end of the sixth dynasty, and you can find Gay Calendar's discussion of female power at this time period in digital content, because that book is old and I think maybe out of copyright. So I encourage everyone to look for that book. But the end of the sixth dynasty, again, a story written from pyramids and funerary architecture, this time at Saqqara, shows extraordinary female power surrounding Pepi I and Pepi II.

And that famous statue of Pepi II at Brooklyn Museum of Art shows Anknasmeri Pepi larger than the king. He's seated on her lap and she's the one that's bigger in stature. She's the one that's the foundation for the king and like Isis holding Horus. So there is female power. It's hard to find it reified as kingship and it's a difficult history. And well, everything that's written about Natakris is much later. These are difficult stories. So I mentioned her, but we skip on over and move to the first documented female king in our lineup. And that's Nefru Sobek, also known as Sobek Nefru. So take your pick. I'm not going to be difficult about this. Either one is fine. And I've actually used both in my scholarship, which is problematic. But Nefru Sobek is there following that typical

pattern. There's a crisis at the end of the 12th dynasty. There's no male to take the succession. Amenemhet IV dies. This is after incredibly strong kingship of Simhwastra III and Amenemhet III, expanding Egypt's boundaries, just banging shit up left and right, just able to keep Egypt super strong. And all of a sudden, then it moves to Amenemhet IV and then nothing. And Nefrusobik has to come in as king. What happened? They're not letting anything out. They're not telling us anything. It's like the court is saying, nothing to see here.

Look it, everything's continuing as it should. Of course, the dynasty ends with her, and it moves on to the 13th dynasty after Nefru Sobek. But there is this extraordinary agreement amongst all the courtiers and priests and decision makers in Egypt, that top 1%, that whoever is there children. We only have evidence of that dynasty dying out, and then the kingship moving to dynasty 13. So it is a time of crisis, but the nature of the crisis is very much unknown. I do suggest in my book, and people can argue with this, and that's completely fine, that there are known attestations of brother-sister marriage in the 12th dynasty, and there are known issues from those brother-sister marriages. And if the Egyptians were risk-averse in allowing female power to step in a time of crisis,

incest worked in that same way. It avoided pesky fathers-in-laws, brothers-in-laws, difficult people who could come in and try to take power that weren't from inside the court. It allowed courtiers to keep their positions, to not have a big transfer of power from one family to another. So the product of incest very often made it to the throne, and maybe too often in the 12th dynasty. But this is the main problem with ancient Egypt. And it's a problem that I hammer home again and again in the book, and that I will say here. And that is authoritarian regimes don't give us their realpolitik. They're not going to tell us in diaries or speeches or letters what went wrong at the court today or what people were whispering. This was not that world where those

kinds of political machinations could be spoken aloud or where it could get you something. It seems that those kinds of political machinations, if committed to papyrus, would only get you dead, and people didn't do it. And so everything is idealized. Everything is perfected. And we have a perfected kingship moving from Samwastrut III to Amenemhet III to Amenemhet IV to Neferus Sobek, and then boom, it's done. Why? So we have no idea. But it's up to the Egyptologist, in my opinion, to remember that they're studying an authoritarian regime, and to try to pull aside some veils and to see the things that the Egyptians will not tell us themselves. But yeah, Nefer Sobek, she's that first king documented with a Nemi's headdress, a Shendi kilt, all of the things associated with kingship,

with a Nemi's headdress, a Shendi kilt, all of the things associated with kingship, cartouche names. And she's probably the least known, I would argue, even less known than Merneth, because we don't have her burial. A few statues here and there, potential burial site or fragments from it. But hers is a very, very difficult story to tell. Absolutely, Cara. I mean, can arts, can depictions of her, can that help unveil her as it were? Or is it the art similarly what they want us to see rather than giving us a true picture maybe? All of it, all of the evidence pretty much is what they want us to see. The only instance where we get more complicated discussions about a female ruler is Cleopatra, because you have the idealized kingship on the one hand with Cleopatra, and then the Roman competitive scrum on the other trying to

take her down. So that's why I threw out the Roman evidence. I'm like, no, we're going to treat Cleopatra like any other female in our perfected Egyptian lineup and try to understand her in an experiment, the way we would understand Nefru Sobek or Nefertiti or any of the others, through this perfected idealized evidence that is burial evidence, that is tombs, that is temples, that is statuary, that is art, idealized imagery. And it's amazing how much one can mess with that data to try to understand

what's potentially behind it. And many people have accused me of hypothesizing too much, going too far out on a limb, making conclusions that I have no right to make, because the data doesn't speak to that. And my response is, it's up to us if we're studying this kind of regime that's purposefully hiding the reality from our eyes to try to look at the system as a whole and to see how things might have worked. And it's what I imagine intelligence does with North Korea, trying to figure out from what Kim Jong-un deigns to show in his parades and perfected imagery, and what you know of the system and what little things can leak out here or there or the way normal people would behave in that kind of a situation

of authoritarian power and I think that's the way I go about it so I think it's our responsibility in actuality to try to hypothesize which is going against much of my own training, where you're taught this is the evidence. Take the story as written. Who are you to go beyond it? And I think it's an interesting thing. 2020 has opened the eyes of many people who study ancient authoritarianism as a beautiful creation of art. And they're looking at it now as a more ugly kind of authoritarian power that needs to be more critically examined and less apologistically examined. Absolutely. Something which came to my mind straight away was I did a podcast recently on the urban history of Rome. First of all, talking about, oh, look at the architecture,

the amazing sewers, the games, the Colosseum, etc. But then actually, the sanitation was actually really bad. A lot of the city was slaves. This was not a nice city to live in, despite our images sometimes of ancient Rome today. So it is absolutely crucial, as you say, to lift the lid and not get the wrong perception of what these ancient societies were like. Yeah, we have been drinking the Kool-Aid or believing the propaganda for many years now. And I think that turn is coming within the field. I can see it. And let's see where it goes. Absolutely. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles.

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Well, woman number three, king number two, and this is a big one, Cara. This is one you've done a lot of work on, Hatshepsut. Yeah. My first trade book, The Woman Who Would Be King, was about Hatshepsut. And it was the craziest, maddest experiment anyone could ever engage upon, craziest, maddest experiment anyone could ever engage upon, which was to try to write a fictionally feeling nonfiction book from cradle to grave or before cradle to grave, because these women of power always have a pedigree and a long past. Otherwise, they wouldn't have made it into that position and beyond the grave when they are erased. And to try to look into her decision making, her agendas. And by doing it that way, you realize how much Hatshepsut was a product of her system

and how much her life was a choiceless series of situations that occurred to her one after the other, which is probably the same for many people that find themselves in a royal position. It is choiceless. They are born into it. But Hatshepsut, she's that woman who took something that wasn't hers, according to some historians, or she's a woman that is held up as this scion of female power and success that we should look to as a corrective of the male power. And for me, I'm taking perhaps a more jaundiced and cynical look. But her main pattern is that she's ruling as a regent for a child who is not her own. It's her nephew because of the incest in the 18th Dynasty royal family.

But that child is not her own. She is ruling from a foundation of power as Egypt's highest priestess, the god's wife of Amun at Thebes. highest priestess, the god's wife of Amun at Thebes. And from that position, she is able then by year seven of that young king Thutmose III's reign to vault herself or to be vaulted by courtiers, we don't know, into the position of king itself. And she rules all together between regency and kingship 22 years, more or less. And yet it's important to point out that this woman never rules alone, that there's always a male accompaniment next to her.

She's not there on her own telling everyone what to do and how to do it. She's only there because of a crisis of a king dying so unexpectedly, that would be her half-brother husband, Titmuss II, of a whole bunch of kids who are way too young to rule anytime soon. And this is like for a decade or more. And she's

thrust into that position. She's erased afterwards, but she has to fit the patriarchal scheme like anybody else. And she's got to make decisions throughout this time period that match this king who's already on the throne. Sometimes he's downplayed at the very beginning of her kingship. You can see that he's not around. And you can look at the work of Gabald in this regard. And she had temples built where she's the only one there. But at a certain point, particularly when she celebrates her jubilee in year 16, there he is. He's a grown up. He's a man. And she now has to depict herself as a man. So I think many women in power today understand in their bones that Hatshepsut having to masculinize to fit this man who's already in power is like us having to masculinize and put on our pantsuit with our shoulder pads and put our hair back so that we

can go into the boardroom and interrupt as much as the men and lean in as Sheryl Sandberg says and things like that. But Hatshepsut is whispering to us that women can do the job. They have the skill set. The Egyptians allowed her to prove that she had the skill set, but that they won't be remembered for having done the job. And she reminds us that success is extraordinarily fungible, transferable. It's something that anyone wants to take credit for, as opposed to failure, which is very idiosyncratic. Suicide with an asp, that's a great story that belongs to Cleopatra and only to Cleopatra. But Hatshepsut building all these temples and putting up statues and doing what the gods want is exactly what the king before her did and what the king

after her should do. And it's an easy thing to lightly erase some of those things from a temple and put the name of another king in because she's doing it all right. So Hatshepsut is like our Maggie Thatcher in the story, potentially, but perhaps less bombastic. She's very traditional. She understands, like Nefru Sobek before her,

that she has to take power through her father. She has to justify it in that way. I'm only doing this because daddy wants me to, not for any other reason. And she says, I'm only doing this because the god Amun-Re needs me to do it. And she manufactures oracles and ideological shows. She and her priest, does she do it in concert with them? How cynical do we want to get? The most workable ideology on the human mind is the one in which we believe the most. Look at Christian fundamentalism in the United States politics today, right? And there you get an idea of all these discussions of end times, and it shields a white supremacy of American politics because the ideology is so powerful. I have to imagine the same kind of thing was happening in

Hatshepsut's Egypt. But she grew up with that temple ideology in her bones. She knew how to work it and her priests knew how to work it. And thus she had their support and they had hers. So she's a pretty formidable woman. Well, Cara, I must admit, I think that's the first time I've ever heard Hatshepsut, the ancient Egyptian iron lady. So here we go. But Karen, let's shine a light then on some of these amazing achievements of Hatshepsut, because you mentioned them in passing there. So there are architectural accomplishments, economic accomplishments, and perhaps military accomplishments too.

Yeah, her military accomplishments are only in Nubia, as far as we can tell. And she seems to avoid the Levant outright and it's an interesting thing that before her body is even cold Thutmose III is off on his campaign to go off to Megiddo and to get done what he needs to get done but Hatshepsut made sure that she had control of the Levant and the cash that the Levant could offer. So that was very much a part of her agenda. How much this was pushed by the organic nature of Egyptian hegemony in these places is arguable. Hatshepsut doesn't need to make these decisions on her own. These things were already put in place by her father, Thutmose I, and then ostensibly continued even with the short reign of her husband,

Tutma's the first and then ostensibly continued even with the short reign of her husband, brother, Tutma's the second. So she's following up with that. But her father was most cruel to the kingdom of Kerma. And Hatshepsut, it seems, followed up on that. Did she go on the campaign? Probably not. But who are we to know? Maybe she took a boat to Aswan and then hung out at the cataracts there. It's a beautiful place. And then learned what happened as the campaign went further down south. Don't know. It's interesting that her courtiers and she decided we're going to avoid the Levant for now. Pull back on that and let that wait for another day.

They had enough internal politics ostensibly to deal with at home, just with her unusual reign. And what must have been at the end of her reign a pushback by the tutma's the third family as the mother isis of tutma's the third is known we know she wasn't regent we can guess that tutma's the third was picked purposefully because he was a disconnected maybe son of a peasant woman who was only there because she was a beautiful young thing. And yet those family members got educated, got involved in the politics. And as time went on, they were players. And one can easily argue that it's that lineage of the family that led to Amenhotep II. And it's that that ends up being the cause of Hatshepsut's erasure. Hatshepsut is that old line, that

Ahmizid line. Her daughter, Nefer-Rei, probably had children. It seems she was married to Thutmose III, a half-brother, half-sister marriage. And yet those sons were not chosen. Those sons were passed over, and instead a much younger son from a different lineage was chosen. And Amenhotep II even has a co-regency with his dad, Thutmose III. That's highly unusual to be documented like that. And then the erasure comes. So she's there, as I said, they're there as placeholders until they're not useful anymore. And then once you've picked your lineage and you've gone all in with that, her existence is a problem for that next lineage. And they make that clear. And they keep her temple of millions

of years, Dhirubhakri, which is visited by every tourist who gets to Luxor for certain. It is a beautiful and wondrous place to behold. And it was saved and transferred in its identification to different kings. But think of her statuary that was smashed up into tiny little pieces. And her statuary is hard stone. It's made of hard red granite and granodiorite and quartzite. And this is an expensive destruction. And they go after these pieces with the ferocity. And I would assume a public statement was being made by Amenhotep II to destroy her as king and to show his lineage taking shape.

It is interesting. It's the legacy of Hatshepsut that's, and I know you've done a program on history here about it recently, which is fantastic. We've also had a podcast on it. Also, you mentioned Diyer al-Bahri there, amazing monument to go and see. But let's keep moving on. You mentioned Amenhotep II. So let's talk about another Amenhotep now who comes a bit later, but mainly the person next to him, woman number four, king number three, the elusive beauty Nefertiti. Yeah. And my chapter for her is more than just a pretty face because we think of her and we just have that image of her bust from the Berlin Egyptitious Museum in our mind. And that's where we go. And really, if you want to start a bar fight amongst Egyptologists, what you do is you

sneak up to the conference, you go to the bar and you say, was Nefertiti Smenka re? And then back away slowly and see what proceeds. Because these discussions that swirl around Nefertiti about what kind of power she took. Was she co-king alongside her husband as Ankheprure Nefernefruaten? Was she sole king after his death as Ankheprure Smenkare? These things are being written and rewritten as we speak. And as new evidence comes out, really in the last five years or even year, Nefertiti's story is being rewritten. And I would say that a majority of Egyptologists are now like, okay, fine. She was co-king. We're there. We get it. Nick Reeves was right. We're fine. She's co-king. But this idea of Nefertiti being sole king with a wife, as we see in some of the tomb depictions, who would have been her own

daughter, is more problematic for people. And they're like, yeah, but it's a man depicted. I'm like, so what? So was Hatshepsut. She's depicted as a man. Hatshepsut's depicted as a man. And her daughter, Neferi, is often standing in a wife-like position. So why couldn't Smenka Re potentially potentially been a woman who's masquerading, not to fake people out, but to fill a position that is so overtly masculinized that she needs to take on that role. I think it's possible. And I think that it's also a pattern that we see that at the end of dynasties, during moments of crisis, the women are expected to come in and fill positions. The strangest thing, however, about Nefertiti is not that she's taking the position of king at the end of a reign when a young boy is on the throne or when there's a problem. She's taking the role almost when the king has gone mad, one could argue. That's certainly debatable, but it seems she's the only one he trusts in his shrinking world at Akhenaten.

I'm talking about her husband, the 18th dynasty king, Amenhotep IV, as was. And so he puts her into this position of power, and we have no idea what she thought about it. Did he come to her and say, hey, baby, I want you to serve as co-king now? Did this happen gradually? Was it a big sudden decision? Was it like a weird Charles Manson renaming of her? I mean, we have no idea. But I think most people looking at Akhenaten, this situation that's created in Middle Egypt, see all of the signs of a cult-like leader's attempts to pull all power to himself, to monopolize the whole game. And it makes sense that he would then look

to his highest place wife as the most trustworthy, the one who has only him to trust, because the only reason she has any power at all is because she's married to him. So it makes her rather slavishly connected to his power. And I mean that word in that sense. So I wonder what Nefertiti had to say about the whole thing. There is evidence of a text that talks about Nefer-Nefru-Aten going to Thebes and going to Thebes and connecting with the people of Waset through their original and old ways, through the old gods. So it seems that this Nefer-Nefru-Aten, if it is Nefertiti, and the name suggests certainly that it was, that she was immediately interested in overturning some of her husband's more difficult decisions, ideologically and in

terms of temple politics. And that's interesting, too. So then you see this pattern of if women come in because of crisis, you also see women coming in to clean up a mess made by a man who's given way too much leeway, way too much power to see through some of his more crazy and mad schemes. She's the one that's got to clean it up. And to go a little bit further into their dynasty, one of the most interesting things is that Ankhes Pa'aten, her daughter with Akhenaten, who we think is married to Tutankhamen and renamed to Ankhesen Am there's much disagreement there. But it shows that the dynasty has been broken by military powers. And that would be I and Horemheb. That's the break, in my mind. It's not between the 18th and the 19th dynasty. It's when the family lineage cannot sustain itself. It's when the people of Egypt are like, no more. You know, you want another daughter to have power. We see this woman is powerful. You know what? We're going to just marry her. We're

not going to let her become king. She's going to be my chief royal wife. And that to me is the break between the dynasties. Manetho obviously has it different, but that's the shift in power for me. So Nefertiti, it's a bitter story for her. And one can only imagine what her life must have been like, married to this guy with all of this extraordinary change happening about her. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not,

just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. I mean, forgive my ignorance, but just before we move on to the next person, I mean, what is this extraordinary change that was happening at that time? Amenhotep IV, before he changes his name, decides that he's going to go all in with this god that's already been much revered by his father, Amenhotep III, the Aten sun disk. And it's a non-anthropomorphized god. It's the image of the sun in the sky. Whether a disk or a globe is debatable, it's the sun in the sky. And that's all he's allowed to show.

And he then and his family, his wife and daughters, no sons, only daughters, then become the physical stand-ins for what divinity is. He moves the capital to Middle Egypt out in the middle of nowhere to a place he says is not dedicated to any god or goddess before. He changes his name to Akhenaten, the one who is beneficial for the Aten. He gives the capital city a name that is almost him, as if he and city are synonymous. The city is Akhetaten, the horizon of the Aten.

And he pulls to this place, courtiers, people who are willing to go with him, and he gives extraordinary power to the military arm of Egyptian society. And in so doing over the long haul, he ends up creating, in my opinion, and this is more what my next book is about, The Good Kings, he ends up creating a military genie that he cannot put back into the bottle, so to speak, empowering something that will end up being greater than the kingship itself. And the 19th dynasty will find, or Horemheb himself, will find its origins within a military institution rather than in a family dynasty. And it is no surprise that then female rule is pretty much gone. There's a little blip with Tawasret, but it's pretty much gone when the military takes over.

That's the same thing you see in Egypt today. And I mentioned this pattern. It's a very interesting thing that when you had Hosni Mubarak, you had Suzanne Mubarak by his side doing political things, saying political things, being an arm of his political power and ideological power. When you move to Sisi in the military wing of power, you see the female power very much pushed to the side. Yes, there are cabinet ministers who are female, and I think it's a 20% number right now who are female ministers, but this is very much a male-run, not a family-run military regime. And in ancient Egypt, it's the same. The move from the 18th dynasty family system

where women really could step into real positions of the power. In 18th dynasty, case in point, you see these powerful women one after another, two becoming king, no less. And then you move to the 19th dynasty and you just have Tawasret, who's kind of a blip and doesn't even really figure into our story and maybe more of a pawn than anything else of someone trying to make Egypt great again

and use female power to their own ends. Well, let's then focus on, as I said, room number five, king number four. You mentioned Tawasret right now. I mean, the whole tale is really interesting. It's a time of great turmoil, it seems. Good luck. How does she become king? What do we know of Talwassret? This story is probably the most complicated. And when I'm doing public lectures, I tell the audience, I'm like, there's gonna be one woman here that I'm not going to talk about, because I don't have time to get into all of this Civil War dynastic craziness. And I'm going to say Game

of Thrones and we're just going to move on. And everyone laughs, ha ha ha. And that's the way we deal with Talwastrat. But it's a super interesting story that she ends up becoming king by being married to Seti II. And what position as wife she is is is complicated. It seems he had a wife before Tawasret. How this actually came to be is quite problematic. And there's a civil war in between. So we'll skip the civil war that seems to be a very much north-south, Pair Ramses, the capital of the north versus Thebes in the south. Quite simplistically put, but it may very well have been that. And then once Sedi II wins out and then quickly expires, he leaves behind this son named Sipta who needs a regent. And the regent is going to be Tawasret.

How she gets into this position, if she's really regent or not, I mean, it seems she is. She takes on this title, mistress of the two lands. She's not married to Sipta, but she's there in the records. It seems that she's there acting as regent. Regency is not formalized. So it's something that we have to kind of make up and figure out. It's like a little indication of realpolitik that they have to formalize a tiny bit by showing her image and such. But there's this other dude that comes along named Bai, who's a chancellor, who's a money guy, who is associated with the palaces. And he could very well be the one that's pulling a lot of these strings. He's got a Semitic or Levantine name. That's not super shocking. You know, the name Seti in some ways shows a Levantine storm god

past or connections to at least Northeast Delta. But this guy Bai may have been the one that puts Tawasrat into this position this is the scheme of his and Tawasrat then becomes after the death of Sipta however that kid dies is unclear Tawasrat becomes king and then we see that in between and this is complicated as it happened during the reign of Sipta or as it happened during the reign of Tawasrat it is unclear but it's probably Sipta Bai is is killed. So it seems that Tawastrat, if she's placed into this position as regent ruling over a young boy king who's got congenital birth defects that might be a product of incest, who knows? But it seems she finds a way to fight back against some of these people who are trying to tell her what to do, but she doesn't last long. And this is a typical thing. No female on the throne of Egypt alone, without

male accompaniment, without an ideological reason to be there. I'm here to make sure that Thutmose III grows up. I'm here to make sure that Akhenaten, the mad king, doesn't screw you over anymore. Whatever, right? Neferusobik is the other one to be on the throne for a very short period of time, and also to rule alone, like four years, something like that. And here we see the same thing with Tawasret, less than five years ruling alone. And in all probability, she's taken out by force by Setnacht, a warlord from the northeastern delta. And he then institutes the 20th dynasty and his son, who probably accompanied him on this battle and maybe saw Tawasret herself being killed before their eyes, who knows? He's the one who becomes Ramses III. So it's an extraordinarily violent story where you see that

female power almost does not belong anymore. This isn't a family situation in which we're going to let the dynasties rule to the bitter end no matter what, because they're god kings and we would never. This has now become a more warlording reality of increased competition and increasingly broadly distributed economic and political power. And that's the way that Egypt ends with the 20th dynasty, a dynasty started by warlord kings. And it's an extraordinary thing that it's a kind of symmetry. And I mentioned this in the book that Ramses III is killed in a harem conspiracy. And here you see the woman returning to that typical expected Western trope of the woman scheming behind the scenes to get what she wants and to do things that are bad.

Slutty, horrible harem woman takes out the king, right? So that's the story that we end with in the 20th dynasty. And it's perfect. We see Egypt returning or going to a situation that is no longer family dynasties, but is now a more competitive system of military strongmen. And it fits the patterns of female power that we expect, which then I'm not trying to, but I am leading to the next woman because we have many years to go and many empires to get through before we get to Cleopatra. But it is an extraordinary thing

that we see so much female power in the Ptolemaic dynasty systematically throughout as male-female pairs. But then Cleopatra ends up almost taking all of the cues from the women who had come before her, putting them all together into a fabulous whole and taking on the Roman Empire itself, sleeping with the Roman Empire itself and almost winning the whole show. So I kind of skip to the as a comparison. I like to think in bigger systems, as you see. And I don't like to think in great man or great woman theory that these people, you or I, how much power do we have over our own lives? This is why we check our emails like we do, because we're waiting for that next big thing, that application or that hope, that system to give us that thing that we want. We have very little power as individuals, and even presidents, even Kim Jong-un, we have to work with the system in which we are embedded.

And these women were no different. And that's the way I write these long sweeping histories, as patterns and systems. It is super interesting. I mean, I'll go one step further and say that I sometimes always look out for the next WhatsApp message, especially when I'm in lockdown and working from home. But anyway, that's enough about myself because we're going to be moving on to number six, king number five. So Cleopatra, you mentioned the Ptolemaic dynasty. Now I'm glad we're getting down there. The Hellenistic period is the period I love the most. And as you say, before we go into Cleopatra proper, in the Ptolemaic dynasty, I'm thinking of figures such as Arsinoe II. You do see these powerful women before her. The women in power during the Ptolemaic dynasty are extraordinary badasses, all of whom must have

grown up in a context of post-traumatic stress disorder because the amount of internal competition. The way I explain it to my students is you think of how competitive Greece is as a system. All these islands, all this decentralization. Athens invents the first democracy, not because they're forward thinking, but because of the broadly distributed power and intense competition. It's the only way to do it.

They won't suffer a king. You take that amount of internal competition and you take that through the Macedonian family and put it into the palace. And what you end up getting is an extraordinary combination of a long durée of divinized power, the longest dynasty that Egypt has yet seen, 300 years. That's extraordinary. It does not give up. It's there to stay. And yet inside of that long-lived institution

is competition that we ourselves cannot even imagine. And it's a Game of Thrones reality of stabs in the dark, poisons, conspiracies, using entourages against each other, intelligence operations, and brutal, tragic terrorism committed by one family member against another. And I think it's Ptolemy VI who's married to Cleopatra II, who then takes up with his niece Cleopatra III instead. Cleopatra II is exiled and Cleopatra III and Ptolemy VI rule side by side. And then to show his power over her, he sends her the murdered and dismembered body of their

son together in a box for a present. But that kind of story, whether these things are true or not, where these stories come from, they are representative of extraordinarily brutal internal competitions amongst the Ptolemies that the women are engaging with on par with the men. These women are not afraid to be violent. They're not afraid to take on their fathers and brothers and husbands and cousins. They will do so. And it's one of the reasons that Cleopatra, the younger daughter, ended up ruling because she had two sisters in succession who are trying to take on their father Ptolemy XII's rule. And one of them, she will later have murdered with Mark Antony's

help on the steps of Artemis Temple at Ephesus. But the other one, Ptolemy XII, takes care of himself. So then he creates a pair, a father-daughter pair of power, Ptolemy XII and Cleopatra. And that's how she finds her way into power, because those older sisters had to be dispatched and exiled. And so it's crazy. You know, Cleopatra knew that her placement was there because she won in an arena of extreme competition. And I can only imagine what that must have been like for her to live that way, to have that kind of trauma. Cleopatra then, I think because of that trauma, knows she has to get protectors. She can't depend on her family. Her family's already screwed her over six ways to Sunday.

She's had to fight against two brothers in succession, one in open war, one she has assassinated. Can't trust either of them. Different entourages, different militaries, all of these things. So she looks to, perched at the edge of the Mediterranean as she is in Alexandria, she looks to the Roman protectors of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and ends up painting targets on their backs, but also ends up, in my opinion, and this is a big throwdown statement, creating a kingship in Rome, ends up transferring an authoritarianism that Egypt knew and loved and that worked well.

And because the guy who won the show gets all of Egypt's wealth, which is so much in terms of grain, so much in terms of gold, it's so overwhelming that it ends up creating a monopolization of economic and political power so great that the Romans are like, fine, we'll do a kingship. We won't call it that because that's bad. So we'll call it after the guy that we martyred, you know, Julius Caesar. We'll call him a Caesar Augustus, whatever the hell that is. It's just an ideological workaround for what they're actually doing, which is an authoritarian regime. And they don't go to the authoritarian regime until Egypt makes them go to the authoritarian regime. And they don't go to the authoritarian regime until Egypt makes them go to the authoritarian regime. And so in my opinion, Egypt changes Rome inexorably. And it's no surprise that they hate Cleopatra because they can see themselves the fall of the Republic and the

beginning of this principate, princeps, whatever the hell that is, really. It's just a king, but it's cool. That's why in my next book, The Good Kings, I kind of start out with, so you think you don't have a king? Really? Now? Today? You think we're all, because we call it democracy, we vote and all of, and so then I go off into what authoritarianism is and how we have a love affair with it. But that's a different discussion. That's for another day. But it's so interesting there, Cara. I've got to give credit to Cleopatra. I mean, she chooses well with Julius Caesar, the most famous Roman in history, and with the Ides of March just around the corner too. Yeah, but she brings that on for him. The Ides of March is because of her.

He's got his garrison in Egypt. Those vultures have been circling Egypt for forever. They see him having a baby with her. They see him doing almost what Mark Antony will do. her. They see him doing almost what Mark Antony will do. And that power in that senatorial context of internal competition is too much. He is grabbing for too much. And you always need the older sibling to rebel against your parents first, so then it's easier for you, right? So Julius Caesar is the older sibling who sacrifices his life. Octavian knows this. That's why he names his future kingship after it. It's all based on that. If Julius Caesar hadn't died to pave the path, people wouldn't have gone there. And Julius Caesar also was a part of this intense competition of very costly and brutal civil wars, triumvirate after triumvirate, civil war after

civil war, of just bloody infighting in the streets of Rome itself. I mean, this is awful. Cicero's head gets cut off, for God's sake. And all of these things and people are dragged through the streets. And we've all seen BBC Rome. You know, it's so cool, these stories. But everyone's tired and they're exhausted.

And Octavian's like, look, you guys, let's just be chill. I got Egypt now. It's the breadbasket. I'm going to give you some bread and circus and all this awesome stuff. But even he is so clever, and his wife too, to cloak it in this ideology of making Rome great again, a conservative ideological goodness, this excellent past and so his new kingship is really unassailable from an ideological perspective and Cleopatra is the perfect bad guy to say that you are fighting against she is Hillary she is that evil witch that needs to be dispatched and destroyed and he's the good guy coming in to save the day you could argue that Cleopatra helps him become king as much as her riches do it is so interesting what you were saying there, how it almost seems like these Roman lovers,

they help Cleopatra first of all, Caesar, then Mark Antony. All looks like it's going great. Then it all goes horribly wrong, ultimately with Actium and Antony's death. And then, as you say, we now remember Cleopatra, and we're going right back to the beginning now. We remember Cleopatra for her failures because of how she dies, Shakespeare, and perhaps maybe work from Octavian too yeah we remember Cleopatra mostly from the stories that Rome has written

about her and that is so problematic I can't even which is why I engage in this experiment to say okay you guys here we go we're throwing it all out not that Rome isn't important not that Rome isn't a player not that we can't understand and look at them. But if we're going to believe that all of this stuff is led by Cleopatra's seeking of fame and glory and her own greed and insatiable desire to rule the world, then we are missing the point. This is a freedom fighter in many ways, like Zenobia or Boudicca, trying her best to use what is at her disposal to keep her Egypt safe. But remember, she's a colonist too. So this is like, I can say I'm an American, but am I an American? I am obviously of European heritage. She calls herself

an Egyptian. Is she an Egyptian? She's a colonizer. We've had this amazing chat over the last hour or so about these incredible women in ancient Egypt's history. What lessons can we learn from ancient Egypt in regards to this today? There's so many lessons and it's hard for me to encapsulate. And it's why I had to write the next book, The Good Kings, because the feminism or the lack of feminism in these women's rule ended up leading me to patriarchy and a discussion of the water in which we all swim that we don't even recognize as such. Because we keep asking, why can't women rule? Why can't we allow them? Why are we so distrustful and hostile? And it's nothing necessarily biological, though those are interesting questions to ask, such as, is racism as biological as sexism or misogyny? You know, these are

interesting things to ask about the human species. But it's made me question whether we stuff a female into a certain position or not doesn't matter, because it's just cutting smaller pieces of the same pie. We need a new pie. We need a different system entirely as we move forward. If women, non-binary, children, minorities, immigrants, formerly enslaved people, indigenous people have been overrun, if these people are going to be part of our conversation of power in the days to come, then the patriarchy, with its methods of rule, we need to recognize that it is a system like any other, and it is a system that may be more short

lived than we imagine. The patriarchy is only 10,000 years old, at the most. And I would say where I sit in California, it's only a couple of hundred years old, where first contact and the real breakdown of Indigenous peoples here happen. So patriarchy, though it is the water in which we swim, though it is so hard for us to recognize, it is the very thing that that rampant capitalism, which is a patriarchal system par excellence, where a forest only has value when it's been cut down, for instance, that capitalism that's made all of us, you, me, hustle and work so hard, so many hours in a day. What's our side gig? What are we going to do? How are we going to make it? How are we going to find our way ahead in the academic world, in media world i don't care where you are you're hustling

you're working three jobs if you're at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum here in the united states you are that capitalism has demanded that men and women work equally and that we are all out there in this the pandemic has proven how much care and attention to the elderly and children women pay and how they are the ones who have lost most of the jobs in the United States during this pandemic. It's this patriarchy, it's this capitalism that is ironically pushing women to be breadwinners of their family, to out-earn men in terms of university degrees, to be at the bottom of society, being leaders who are deciding that they want to get married or not, they want to have kids or not, they can have kids out of

wedlock, we can shack up and live with people, which wasn't possible when I was growing up in my generation. All of the social things are changing. I just read that one in six of American Gen Zers identifies as non-binary. So as soon as the ideological patriarchal structures fall away, we quickly as humans move to our messy, real sexualities of non-binary identity. One in six. And I guarantee you, if you did that study, are you in New York City or are you in conservative Idaho? It would be one in 50 in conservative Idaho and like one in three in New York City, right? So those numbers are going to get even more extraordinary. So these women have

taught me that you can only do so much unless the system changes. But the more women and non-expected people are put into systems of power, the more the system will change from the inside out. So the question to end this for you, Tristan, is can we as a human society make it to a post-patriarchal system, to an anti-patriarchy, without destroying the planet first? And that's the big question that I find myself thinking about daily.

Cara, that was a great chat. Nice way to finish it off. Your book on the whole topic is called When Women Ruled the World Six Queens of Ancient Egypt five of whom were kings but I'm just adding that little bit at the end Cara thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show

thanks so much Tristan this was super fun Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, Thank you. to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.