PRINCESS · Politics and Royal Foreign Women in the Court of Egypt: A New Analysis of Diplomatic Marriages during Late Bronze Age.

Politics and Royal Foreign Women in the Court of Egypt: A New Analysis of Diplomatic Marriages during Late Bronze Age.

The PRINCESS project adresses the issue of foreign women living at the Egyptian Court durung the 2nd Millenium BC. Objective 1: Define the role and status of the foreign wives at the Egyptian Court The general nature of the alliances and the matrimonial practices have been apprehended. The analysis of the documentation allowed to show that foreign practices were adopted to seal the alliance. Then, an updated list of the known foreign wives and their female retinue has been gathered in the PRINCESS database. I have been able to discover new princesses, never recorded as foreign royal wives. It must be noted that in the textual sources at our disposal, we have no letter directly sent from a foreign princess to her family ot to her future husband.The study has also shown thatthese wives are played a decisive role at the Egyptian Court. Objective 2: Understand the phenomenon of acculturation The acculturation phenomenon of the foreign court ladies has been approached through two main aspects. 1) study of their anthroponyms - Through the textual data, we were able to find clear non-Egyptian names, some from the Levant area, some from Mittani, or more generally attributed to Ancient Near East. The case of the Hittite princess, for which we know only the Egyptian name (Maathornerure) and not her foreign name is so far the only sure case of an Egyptian name given to a foreign wife. A less known Queen, Sutaliya, mother of the future king Siptah (1194-1188 BC) was probably of Syrian origins, highlighting her status at the Egyptian court. - In the correspondence between the kings, the bride is often designated as “my daughter” or “my sister”: in these cases, the study of the anthroponym was not possible, but the princesses were listed according to their country of origin. 2) study of the burials belonging to these foreign royal women discovered in Egypt. Two main tombs have been analyzed for this purpose: the tomb of the three foreign wives of Thutmose III and the plundered tomb discovered by Pr. Susanne Bickel in the Valley of the kings. Both showed that most of the funerary equipment they carried in the afterlife was from Egyptian origin and that they were buried in places devoted to the royal family. Hence the status of secondary wives of the Egyptian king as minor wives has been reassessed in the light of gender studies and gender archaeology.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union