Ancient Egypt’s first female king revealed by long-lost royal seals

Scientific American · Taylor Mitchell Brown · 2026-10-22 10:30 UTC

Ancient Egypt’s first female ruler lived centuries before Nefertiti or Cleopatra

Around 5,000 years ago a mysterious ancient Egyptian woman was given a burial worthy of kings. Her tomb was decorated with splendid furniture and would have contained lavishly designed artifacts of stone, ivory, and copper. Her name was Meretneith.

Despite these signs of her royal power, researchers have long questioned whether Meretneith actually ruled Egypt in her own right. Now new evidence suggests she wasn’t merely revered: she was ancient Egypt’s first female king. (The term “pharaoh” was not used to describe rulers until some 1,000 years later.)

“Assumptions about titles and grave goods usually lead to conclusions that men had the highest titles and women did not,” says Suzanne Onstine, an Egyptologist at the University of Memphis, who was not involved with the research. The new work should help free scholars of the “mental gymnastics” they sometimes undergo to explain away powerful female figures like Meretneith, she says. The research was recently published in Prague Egyptological Studies.

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