SAPPHO

The Greek lyric poet Sappho (or Psappho, as her name is given in the Aeolic dialect spoken by the poet) has been greatly admired in all ages for the beauty of her writing style. She ranks with Archilochus and Alcaeus, among Greek poets, for her ability to impress readers with a lively sense of her personality. Her language contains elements from Aeolic vernacular speech and Aeolic poetic tradition, with traces of epic vocabulary familiar to readers of Homer. Her phrasing is concise, direct, and picturesque. She has the ability to stand aloof and judge critically her own ecstasies and grief, and her emotions lose nothing oftheir force by being recollected in tranquillity.

Legends about Sappho abound, many having been repeated for centuries. She is said, for example, to have been married to Cercylas, a wealthy man from the island of Andros. But many scholars challenge this claim, finding evidence in the Greek words of the bawdry of later comic poets. Most modern critics also consider it legend that Sappho leaped from the Leucadian rock to certain death in the sea because of her unrequited love of Phaon, a younger man and a sailor. She had at least two brothers, Larichus and Charaxus, and may have had a third. A fragment from Sappho that is dedicated to Charaxus has survived. One of her poems mentions a daughter named Cleis or Claïs. 

The tradition that she fled the island or was banished and went to Sicily may be true, but she lived most of her life in her hometown of Mytilene on Lesbos.Sappho’s work contains only a few apparent allusions to the political disturbances of the time, which are so frequently reflected in the verse of her contemporary Alcaeus. Her themes are invariably personal—primarily concerned with her thiasos, the usual term (not found in Sappho’s extant writings) for the female community, with a religious and educational background, that met under her leadership. Sappho herself attacks in her poems other thiasoi directed by other women.

The goal of the Sapphic thiasos is the education of young women, especially for marriage. Aphrodite is the group’s tutelary divinity and inspiration. Sappho is the intimate and servant of the goddess and her intermediary with the girls. In the ode to Aphrodite, the poet invokes the goddess to appear, as she has in the past, and to be her ally in persuading a girl she desires to love her. Frequent images in Sappho’s poetry include flowers, bright garlands, naturalistic outdoor scenes, altars smoking with incense, perfumed unguents to sprinkle on the body and bathe the hair—that is, all the elements of Aphrodite’s rituals. In the thiasos the girls were educated and initiated into grace and elegance for seduction and love. Singing, dancing, and poetry played a central role in this educational process and other cultural occasions. As was true for other female communities, including the Spartan, and for the corresponding masculine institutions, the practice of homoeroticism within the thiasos played a role in the context of initiation and education.

In Sappho’s poetry, love is passion, an inescapable power that moves at the will of the goddess. It is desire and sensual emotion, nostalgia and memory of affections that are now distant but shared by the community of the thiasos. There is a personal poetic dimension, which is also collective because all the girls of the group recognize themselves in it. An important part of Sappho’s poetic oeuvre is occupied by epithalamia, or nuptial songs.

It is not known how her poems were published and circulated in her own lifetime and for the following three or four centuries. In the era of Alexandrian scholarship (3rd and 2nd centuries BCE), what survived of her work was collected and published in a standard edition of nine books of lyrical verse, divided according to metre. This edition did not endure beyond the early Middle Ages. By the 8th or 9th century CE, Sappho was represented only by quotations in other authors. Only the ode to Aphrodite, which is 28 lines long, is complete. The next longest fragment is 16 lines long. Since 1898 these fragments have been greatly increased by papyrus finds, though, in the opinion of some scholars, nothing equal in quality to the two longer poems.

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NEFERTITI

Nefertiti, also called Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti. was the queen of Egypt and wife of King Akhenaton (formerly Amenhotep IV; reigned c. 1353–36 BCE), and she played a prominent role in the cult of the sun god (Aton, or Aten) that he established.Nefertiti’s parentage is unrecorded, but, as her name translates as “A Beautiful Woman Has Come,” early Egyptologists believed that she must have been a princess from Mitanni (Syria). There is strong circumstantial evidence, however, to suggest that she was the Egyptian-born daughter of the courtier Ay, brother of Akhenaton’s mother, Tiy. In any case, it is known that she had a younger sister, Mutnodjmet. Married to him before her husband’s accession, Nefertiti bore six daughters within 10 years of her marriage, the elder three being born at Thebes, the younger three at Tell el-Amarna. Two of her daughters became queens of Egypt.

The earliest images of Nefertiti come from the Theban tombs of the royal butler Parennefer and the vizier Ramose, where she is shown accompanying her husband. In the Theban temple known as Hwt-Benben (“Mansion of the Benben Stone”; the ben-ben was a cult object associated with solar ritual), Nefertiti played a more prominent role, usurping kingly privileges in order to serve as a priest and offer to the Aton, represented by the sun’s disk. A group of blocks recovered from Karnak (Luxor) and Hermopolis Magna (Al-Ashmunayn) shows Nefertiti participating in the ritual smiting of the female enemies of Egypt. She wears her own unique headdress— a tall, straight-edged, flat-topped blue crown.

By the end of Akhenaton’s fifth regnal year, the Aton had become Egypt’s dominant national god. The old state temples were closed and the court transferred to a purpose-built capital city, Akhetaton (Amarna). Here Nefertiti continued to play an important religious role, worshipping alongside her husband and serving as the female element in the divine triad formed by the god Aton, the king Akhenaton, and his queen. Her sexuality, emphasized by her exaggeratedly feminine body shape and her fine linen garments, and her fertility, emphasized by the constant appearance of the six princesses, indicate that she was considered a living fertility goddess. Nefertiti and the royal family appeared on private devotional stelae and on the walls of nonroyal tombs, and images of Nefertiti stood at the four corners of her husband’s sarcophagus.

Some historians, having considered her reliefs and statuary, believe that Nefertiti may have acted as queen regnant—her husband’s coruler rather than his consort. However, the evidence is by no means conclusive, and there is no written evidence to confirm her political status.

Soon after Akhenaton’s 12th regnal year, one of the princesses died, three disappeared (and are also pre-sumed to have died), and Nefertiti vanished. The simplest inference is that Nefertiti also died, but there is no record of her death and no evidence that she was ever buried in the Amarna royal tomb. Early Egyptologists, misunderstanding the textual evidence recovered from the Maru-Aten sun temple at Amarna, deduced that Nefertiti had separated from Akhenaton and had retired to live either in the north palace at Amarna or in Thebes. This theory is now discredited. Others have suggested that she outlived her husband, took the name Smenkhkare, and ruled alone as female king before handing the throne to Tutankhamen. There is good evidence for a King Smenkhkare, but the identification in the 20th century of a male body buried in the Valley of the Kings as Tutankhamen’s brother makes it unlikely that Nefertiti and Smenkhkare were the same person.

Nefertiti’s body has never been discovered. Had she died at Amarna, it seems inconceivable that she would not have been buried in the Amarna royal tomb. But the burial in the Valley of the Kings confirms that at least one of the Amarna burials was reinterred at Thebes during Tutankhamen’s reign. Egyptologists have therefore speculated that Nefertiti may be one of the unidentified bodies recovered from the caches of royal mummies in the Valley of the Kings. In the early 21st century attention focused on the “Younger Lady” found in the tomb of Amenhotep II, although it is now accepted that this body is almost certainly too young to be Nefertiti.Amarna was abandoned soon after Akhenaton’s death, and Nefertiti was forgotten until, in 1912, a German archaeological mission led by Ludwig Borchardt discov-ered a portrait bust of Nefertiti lying in the ruins of the Amarna workshop of the sculptor Thutmose. The bust went on display at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin in the 1920s and immediately attracted worldwide attention, causing Nefertiti to become one of the most recognizable and, despite a missing left eye, most beautiful female figures from the ancient world.

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HATSHEPSUT

The most famous female king of Egypt was Hatshepsut (Hatchepsut), who reigned in her own right c. 1473–58 BCE. She attained unprecedented power for a woman,adopting the full titles and regalia of a pharaoh. Hatshepsut was the elder daughter of the 18th-dynastyking Thutmose I and his consort Ahmose, and she was married to her half brother Thutmose II, son of the lady Mutnofret. Since three of Mutnofret’s older sons had died prematurely, Thutmose II inherited his father’s throne about 1492 BCE, with Hatshepsut as his consort. Hatshepsut bore one daughter, Neferure, but no son. When her husband died about 1479 BCE, the throne passed to his son Thutmose III, born to Isis, a lesser harem queen. As Thutmose III was an infant, Hatshepsut acted as regent for the young king.

For the first few years of her stepson’s reign, Hatshepsut was an entirely conventional regent. But by the end of his seventh regnal year, she had assumed the kingship and adopted a full royal titulary (the royal protocol adopted by Egyptian sovereigns). Hatshepsut and Thutmose III were now corulers of Egypt, with Hatshepsut very much the dominant king. Hitherto Hatshepsut had been depicted as a typical queen, with a female body and appropriately feminine garments. But now, after a brief period of experimentation that involved combining a female body with kingly (male) regalia, her formal portraits began to show Hatshepsut with a male body, wearing the traditional regalia of kilt, crown or head-cloth, and false beard. To dismiss this as a serious attempt to pass herself off as a man is to misunderstand Egyptian artistic convention, which showed things not as they were but as they should be. In causing herself to be depicted as a traditional king, Hatshepsut ensured that this is what she would become.

In styling herself as a king, Hatshepsut avoided the epithet “mighty bull,” regularly employed by other kings. Although in her reliefs she was depicted as a male, pronominal references in the texts usually reflect her womanhood. Similarly, much of her statuary shows her in male form, but there are rarer examples that render her as a woman. In less formal documents she was referred to as “King’s Great Wife”—that is, “Queen”—while Thutmose III was “King.” There is thus a certain ambiguity in the treatment of Hatshepsut as king.Hatshepsut never explained why she took the throne or how she persuaded Egypt’s elite to accept her new position. However, an essential element of her success was a group of loyal officials, many handpicked, who controlled all the key positions in her government. Most prominent amongst these was Senenmut, overseer of all royal works and tutor to Neferure.

Traditionally, Egyptian kings defended their land against the enemies who lurked at Egypt’s borders. Hatshepsut’s reign was essentially a peaceful one, and her foreign policy was based on trade rather than war. But scenes on the walls of her Dayr al-Ba rī temple, in western Thebes, suggest that she began with a short, successful military campaign in Nubia. More complete scenes show Hatshepsut’s seaborne trading expedition to Punt, a trading centre (since vanished) on the East African coast beyond the southernmost end of the Red Sea. Gold, ebony, animal skins, baboons, processed myrrh, and living myrrh trees were brought back to Egypt, and the trees were planted in the gardens of Dayr al-Ba rī.

Restoration and building were important royal duties. Hatshepsut claimed, falsely, to have restored the damage wrought by the Hyksos (Asian) kings during their rule in Egypt. She undertook an extensive building program. In Thebes this focused on the temples of her divine father, the national god Amon-Re. At the Karnak temple complex, she remodeled her earthly father’s hypostyle hall, added a barque shrine (the Red Chapel), and introduced two pairs of obelisks. At Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt, she built a rock-cut temple known in Greek as Speos Artemidos. Her supreme achievement was her Dayr al-Ba rī temple; designed as a funerary monument for Hatshepsut, it was dedicated to Amon-Re and included a series of chapels dedicated to the gods Osiris, Re, Hathor, and Anubis and to the royal ancestors. Hatshepsut was to be interred in the Valley of the Kings, where she extended her father’s tomb so that she could be buried with him.

Toward the end of her reign, Hatshepsut allowed Thutmose to play an increasingly prominent role in state affairs; following her death, Thutmose III ruled Egypt alone for 33 years. At the end of his reign, an attempt was made to remove all traces of Hatshepsut’s rule. Her statues were torn down, her monuments were defaced, and her name was removed from the official king list. Early scholars interpreted this as an act of vengeance, but it seems that Thutmose was ensuring that the succession would run from Thutmose I through Thutmose II to Thutmose III without female interruption. Hatshepsut sank into obscurity until 1822, when the decoding of hieroglyphic script allowed archaeologists to read the Dayr al-Ba rī inscriptions. Initially the discrepancy between the female name and the male image caused confusion, but today the Thutmoside succession is well understood.

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