Эртний Египетийн хатан хаан Меретнейтийн эрх мэдлийг батлах шинэ судалгаа

Thirteen mud jar stoppers lay on a shelf and around the mouth of a tomb shaft at Saqqara when the English archaeologist Walter B. Emery found them in 1946. Each bore the same seal impression: a line of four royal emblems, three in a row and a fourth set apart by a gap.

None of the 13 stoppers can be located today. Neither can the original glass plate of the photograph Emery published of one of them. What remains is a single black-and-white photograph in the excavation archive and a line drawing from his 1954 report.

Those emblems are serekhs, signs that held a ruler’s name and served in this early period as the main written marker of who ruled Egypt. Two of the four may name a woman: Meretneith (also spelled Merneith or Meret-Neith), who lived during the First Dynasty, about 5,000 years ago. If they do, she held a mark reserved for rulers, and one scholar has called her the first woman pharaoh in history.

A study in Prague Egyptological Studies now argues that the serekhs are hers. Sue Kelly, an Egyptologist at the Czech Institute of Egyptology at Charles University in Prague, and Crystal Miller of the University of Bucharest digitally reprocessed a scan of the photograph. They report that the second and third serekhs each contain a hoe sign written twice in the space reserved for the ruler’s name. The hoe, they write, is the only element that appears in every known writing of Meretneith’s name.

Emery Waited Seven Years to Name Her

Emery recognized the first and fourth serekhs as belonging to Djer, a First Dynasty king. The middle two did not contain Djer’s name and lacked the Horus falcon that sits on top of a king’s serekh. His 1954 report offered no interpretation of them. Seven years later he described them as Meretneith’s, topped by the crossed arrows of the deity Neith, and suggested she might have succeeded Djer as the dynasty’s third sovereign.

Critics raised two objections. The published image was too unclear to confirm what the signs showed, and the doubled hoe did not match the way Meretneith’s name was written elsewhere.

Meretneith herself was never obscure. At Abydos, which became Egypt’s royal cemetery around 3000 BCE, Flinders Petrie excavated her tomb and believed he had found a new king, although the stela bearing the name had no serekh. Later finds showed the name with a feminine ending, and she was reclassified as a queen consort.

Her tomb measured 16.5 by 14 meters (about 54 by 46 feet) and was surrounded by 49 subsidiary graves and chambers. Seal impressions from the tomb of her son, King Den, list the dynasty’s early rulers and end with Meretneith under the title “king’s mother.” That title underlies the view that she governed as regent while Den was a child.

From a Flatbed Scan to a Digital Rubbing

The reconstructive imaging methods archaeologists now use require the artifact itself. In September 2022, staff at the Egypt Exploration Society instead scanned Emery’s original photograph at high resolution on a flatbed scanner.

Working in Adobe Photoshop, Kelly and Miller pushed the contrast until the surface of the seal impression turned white and the clay beneath it black. They removed the background, inverted the colors and converted the result to a vector image that can be examined at any resolution.

Kelly, writing in The Conversation, described the output as “much like a high-tech pencil rubbing over a coin.”

The Third Serekh May Carry a Falcon

In the enhanced image, the second serekh shows the doubled hoe beneath a symbol consistent with the remnants of Neith’s crossed arrows that Emery traced. The third serekh also appears to double the hoe, though the first of its two signs is misshapen.

The figure on top of the third serekh does not look like the Neith symbol. Silke Roth, a critic of Emery’s reading, reported in 1997 that the legs and abdomen of a royal falcon could be made out there. Kelly and Miller say the new image appears to confirm her observation, which would make it the first known falcon-topped serekh of a woman. They call that possibility tempting and decline to conclude it.

On spelling, the authors answer that kings’ names varied too. One earlier analysis counted 15 different ways of writing the name of the king Narmer.

No other known seal impression places two rulers’ serekhs side by side. Kelly and Miller, following earlier scholars, read the pairing as a co-regency: Meretneith sharing rule with Djer, who may have been her father, before later governing for Den and possibly alone for a period after his death.

Citing a 2013 radiocarbon chronology, the authors write that she likely ruled for at least 30 years across those roles. Unlike a king, who held the throne until he died, Meretneith may have had the advantage of “stepping on and off the rulership platform” as politics required, they write.

A Berlin Historian Reads Only Djer’s Name

The authors conclude that little argument remains against assigning the middle serekhs to Meretneith. Eva-Maria Engel, a historian at the Humboldt University of Berlin who was not involved in the study, examined the published enhancements and came away with the opposite reading. She told Live Science that the seal appears to name only King Djer and that “Meretneith is not mentioned at all.”

An anonymous reviewer of the paper had raised the possibility that the middle serekhs are distorted versions of Djer’s. The authors reply that this would give Djer a Neith-topped serekh, which is otherwise unattested in the archaeological record.

Engel does not dispute that Meretneith held power. She noted that Meretneith was buried alongside the kings who came before and after her, and that inscriptions from other sites show her acting for Den when he was too young to rule.

“First Woman Pharaoh” is One Scholar’s Phrase

The label comes from Jean-Pierre Patznick of Sorbonne University, whose paper for a 2015 Egyptology conference is titled “Meret-Neith: in the Footsteps of the First Woman Pharaoh in History.” Kelly and Miller cite him for the co-regency idea. They do not call Meretneith the first.

Their paper notes that a serekh has also been proposed for another early royal woman, Neithhotep. Its bibliography lists a 2025 article by Kelly titled “Neithhotep: Ancient Egypt’s First Female Ruler.”

The claim they make for Meretneith is about rank. Kelly writes in The Conversation that the serekh makes her a female king, the equivalent of a male ruler.

The authors acknowledge a gap in that case. Meretneith’s surviving stela at Abydos has no serekh, and her other inscriptions name her with titles or alongside the treasury without one. They suggest her political status had changed by the time she was buried.

Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to our free newsletter for engaging stories, exclusive content, and the latest news.