After Djet’s reign, the sovereignty of Egypt seem to have been assumed by a woman. Merneith compounded her name with the great goddess of the north. Her northern affiliations may have contributed to the Thinite family’s policy of conciliating Lower Egypt, as their dynastic succession became more and more established as each royal generation passed.
Women were important in Early Dynastic Egypt. The queens were called ‘She who unites the Two Lands’, recalling by this title perhaps the event early in the dynasty when a southern prince possibly married the heiress of the north and so brought the two kingdoms into association. The queen was also ‘She who sees Horus and Seth’ as though to her was reserved the privilege of the actual manifestation of the two perpetually counter-balanced gods, joined only in the divine person of the king.
To find a queen ruling apparently with all the power accorded to a king of Egypt is, at this early time, mildly surprising, though the generally high status of women in early Egypt should be recalled and the probability is that she was acting as regent for her son, the future King Den. The Egyptian traditions stated that it was only decided that a woman could occupy the throne when the Second Dynasty was well advanced, but there is no doubt that Merneith was buried with the solemnity accorded to a king: her tomb at Abydos and that associated with her reign at Saqqara (S3503) are of considerable grandeur. The Saqqara monument was memorable for the subsidiary burials of menials and artisans who were, willy-nilly, obliged to accompany the inhabitants of the tomb to oblivion or the promise of eternal life. The burials included a maker of pots, a painter supplied with his pigments and the reeds whose crushed ends constituted his brushes, a shipmaster, indeed an entire household of upper servants.45
World History
