Nitocris

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Nitocris in hieroglyphs

For other uses, see Nitocris (disambiguation).

Nitocris (Greek Νίτωκρις) has been claimed to have been the last Pharaoh of the Sixth dynasty of Egypt and thereby perhaps the first female ruler of Egypt and first known Queen regnant in the world. Her name is found in the Histories of Herodotus and writings of Manetho.

According to Herodotus (Histories ii), she invited the murderers of her brother, the "king of Egypt", to a banquet, then killed them by flooding the sealed room with the Nile. Then, to avoid the other conspirators, she committed suicide (possibly by running into a burning room). Manetho claims she built the "third pyramid" at Giza, which is attributed by modern historians and archaeologists to Menkaure. Herodotus also has a Babylonian queen of the same name and talks of her constructions in Babylon, mainly connected with diverting the Euphrates. His story about her tomb and the inscription on it which fooled Darius into opening it, only to have another inscription on the inside that chastised the opener for being so greedy is an early example of a familiar cultural meme.

Nitocris is not mentioned, however, in any native Egyptian inscriptions and "she" probably did not exist. It was long claimed that Nitocris appears on a fragment of the Turin King List, dated to the Nineteenth dynasty, under the Egyptian name of Nitiqreti (nt-ỉqrtỉ). The fragment where this name appears was thought to belong to the Sixth Dynasty portion of the king list, thus appearing to confirm both Herodotus and Manetho. However, microscopic analysis of the Turin King List suggests the fragment was misplaced in reassembling the fragmentary text, and that the name Nitiqreti"is in fact a faulty transcription of the praenomen of a clearly male king Netjerkare Siptah I, who is named on the Abydos King List as the successor of the Sixth Dynasty king Nemtyemsaf II. On the Abydos King List, Netjerkare Siptah is placed in the equivalent spot that Neitiqreti Siptah holds on the Turin King List.

[edit] In fiction

Nitokris is mentioned in two stories by H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider and Imprisoned with the Pharaohs. She is mentioned only in passing and portrayed as an evil queen reigning over ghouls and other horrors.
Tennessee Williams' first published work is the 1928 short story The Vengeance of Nitocris, detailing the queen's careful plan for revenge.
The Queen's Enemies, a play by Lord Dunsany, is also based upon Herodotus' account of Nitocris' murderous activities.

[edit] References

Newberry, Percy Edward. 1943. "Queen Nitocris of the Sixth Dynasty." Journal of Egyptian Archæology 29:51–54.
Ryholt, Kim Steven Bardrum. 2000. "The Late Old Kingdom in the Turin King-list and the Identity of Nitocris." Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 127:87–100.
Zivie-Coche, Christiane M. 1972. "Nitocris, Rhodopis et la troisième pyramide de Giza." Bulletin de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale 72:115–138. PDF