Women Who Ruled: Sovereigns From Hatshepsut to Catherine the Great

Women held sovereign authority in Egypt, China, Korea, South Asia, West and Central Africa, the Byzantine world and Europe, and the political problems they faced are strikingly consistent across all of those settings. Treating them as a collection of exceptions obscures the pattern. Treating them as a recurring political form — with a recurring legitimation problem and a recurring evidence problem — makes the whole subject legible.

Four different jobs, one word

Most confusion in this area is definitional. "Queen" covers at least four distinct positions, and they carry entirely different evidential footprints.

A consort is married to the monarch. She may be enormously influential; she does not hold the office. A regent governs for someone else — a minor, an absent or incapacitated ruler — and her authority is explicitly borrowed and explicitly temporary. A co-ruler shares the office formally, appearing alongside the other ruler in decrees and images. A sovereign in her own right holds the office itself.

The distinction is not pedantry, because the surviving evidence is generated by the office. Coins, decrees, treaties, seals, tax records and diplomatic correspondence carry the name of whoever holds authority. A regent who governs for twenty years may leave a smaller documentary trace than a sovereign who reigns for four. Eleanor of Aquitaine is the standard illustration: duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, queen consort of France and then of England, and regent for her son — three different capacities, three different kinds of record.

The legitimation problem

Wherever succession rules assumed a male officeholder, a woman taking the office had to explain herself in terms the system could accept. The solutions were remarkably varied.

Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt as king during the Eighteenth Dynasty — conventionally placed in the fifteenth century BC, with the usual margin that Egyptian absolute chronology carries — was represented in royal regalia and with the full titulary of a king, and her monuments advanced a divine-birth narrative that placed her accession beyond dispute. The archaeology and epigraphy behind this sit with institutions such as the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago, which describes itself as a centre for the study of the ancient civilizations of West Asia and North Africa and maintains Egyptian and Nubian galleries and field programmes, and the American Research Center in Egypt, which has funded hundreds of research fellowships and dozens of conservation projects in the country.

Wu Zetian, operating inside a Confucian bureaucratic order with no precedent for a female emperor, went further: having exercised power as consort and then as dowager, she took the imperial title in 690 under a new dynastic name and held it until her abdication in 705, using Buddhist prophetic literature as an alternative source of legitimacy to the classical tradition that excluded her. She ruled within the span of the Tang dynasty, which Columbia University's Asia for Educators places at 618 to 906.

Seondeok of Silla, who reigned from 632 to 647, faced the objection directly: hostile commentary at the time and afterwards treated her sex as a structural weakness of the state. Silla's material culture is held and interpreted by the National Museum of Korea, where the period's royal objects are among the best evidence for how that kingdom presented authority. Razia, sovereign of the Delhi Sultanate from 1236 to 1240, was designated by her father over her brothers and was deposed within four years by a nobility that would not accept the arrangement.

The record was attacked

The second recurring pattern is posthumous editing. Hatshepsut's images and cartouches were removed from monuments after her death, an operation now generally dated to late in the reign of her successor Thutmose III. Egyptologists continue to argue about why, and the argument is instructive: the older reading of personal vengeance fits poorly with the timing, and the current debate concerns whether the erasures were about dynastic tidiness, the ritual status of the images, or both.

Whatever the motive, the methodological consequence is the same everywhere it happened. In this subject, the absence of evidence is an unusually poor guide to the absence of a reign. Where a later regime had reason to remove a name, silence in the record is a datum about the later regime.