[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This fascinating collection of essays, arising out of a symposium hosted by the University of New York’s Gallatin School of Individualised Study, is a welcome and important contribution to the growing scholarship on ‘queenship’ (or ‘queenships’) in both ancient and modern contexts. This is not an orthodox collection of essays. While around half the chapters are framed as academic articles which develop specific arguments, a number are critical essays, opinion pieces interviews and dialogues. There are twenty chapters (authors and titles are listed at the end of the review); Chapter 1 is the introduction, and the rest are divided into two parts. The first part is entitled ‘Approaching the Methodologies and Historiographies of Ancient Queenship’ and comprises nine chapters on topics relating to historical queens of the Mediterranean and ancient Near East. Specific queenships covered in this part include Assyrian queens, Hellenistic queens, the 15th century BCE Egyptian Hatshepsut, the Nubian queens of Meroitic Sudan, and Ethiopian queens. The second part (‘Speculating Ancient Queenship in Contemporary Cultures’) has ten chapters which offer different kinds of modern perspectives on and critiques of queenship(s).
In the Introduction, the editors tell us that the central questions were ‘what is a queen’, ‘what was a queen’ and ‘what is a queen to you?’ (p. 3) As with any collection of essays of this kind, the different contributions vary in quality and in the effectiveness with which they answer these questions. Nevertheless, this volume should be read systematically from beginning to end if the reader is to understand the richness of its strong and insightful arguments about queenship(s) in the ancient world, modern receptions of ancient queenships, and twenty-first-century ideas about how ‘queenship’ can be interpreted. It is a shame that there is no short concluding chapter to help draw together the two parts of the volume and make the critical connections between them even more explicit. Still, this volume will surely influence future studies of queenship, both ancient and modern.
In Part One, most of the chapters consider specific examples of queenship in the ancient world. The first two chapters (Ellie Bennet on Arabian queens in Neo-Assyrian documents and Elizabeth Carney on the titles of Hellenistic queens) demonstrate just how much can be learned from detailed and close readings of our ancient sources. The šarrāt aribībi (‘queens of Arabia’) are shown to be fundamentally different from the royal women of the Assyrian court, who are never given the title šarratu, which is otherwise reserved only for goddesses like Ishtar. These Arabian queens were ‘“kings” who happened to be women’ (p. 30). Carney also shows just how much can be learned from a title and how it is used. The Macedonian/Hellenistic title basilissa (the female equivalent of basileus, ‘king’, taken by the Successor Kings of Alexander the Great in 306 BCE) is first used only after about 300. The importance of this was that, while Olympias and Cleopatra (mother and sister of Alexander) had other attributes such as divine descent to legitimate their royalty, the title basilissa in itself could equalize male and female members of the new dynasties whatever their backgrounds. Chapter 4 (Jacquelyn Williamson), by contrast, considers a female ruler who seeks to legitimate her position by presenting herself not as a queen but as a king: the 15th century BCE pharaoh, Hatshepsut. While she is often seen as an aberration, this chapter convincingly argues that, on the contrary, she was being conventional in her self-presentation as a ‘male’ ruler (despite the fact that she was a woman) because her rule needed to be seen as traditional, with a traditional agenda, in order to stabilise her kingdom. Likewise, chapter 6 (by Tara Sewell-Lasater) on Cleopatra III argues thather actions (often dismissed as ‘transgressive and unwomanly’) can be understood in terms of what was needed politically. As Sewell-Lasater argues (p. 98): ‘The real problem with Kleopatra III, it seems, is not that she was an evil queen, but rather she was an effective king, who also happened to be a woman.’
The chapters in Part Two, many by artists and cultural critics, are much more varied in the topics they address and the perspectives they bring to queenship, and so more difficult to summarise. Much of the critical meat of the volume is offered in Part Two, and earlier chapters need to be reconsidered in light of the thought-provoking and challenging questions raised here. In fact, it is this broader view which gives the volume clarity of perspective.
Chapter 10 (Anastasia Tchaplyghine), titled ‘Assyrian Mothers and Queens in Diaspora: A Conversation with Maryam Yousif’ is a good example of a different methodological approach which brings insight to the central questions posed by the volume. This chapter is written as a conversation between Tchaplyghine and the ceramicist Maryam Yousif, and gives a strong sense of of the importance of the search for cultural identity. Yousif, whose family became Iraqi expatriates in North America, shows how, by connecting with her mother’s art, she was able to explore through ceramics her own ideas about Assyrian queenship and the relationship of her family to an ‘Assyrian’ identity. She says (p. 167): ‘Queen to me is power and beauty and confidence, freedom, just the ultimate self-expression’.
In fact, one of the recurring themes of the volume is the power of queens. This power is nevertheless shown to be of different kinds and qualities according to context, and also different in the way it is received. Yousif finds Assyrian queenship personally empowering although, as we have already noted, actual Assyrian queens were not as powerful as the contemporaneous ‘queens of the Arabs’ who Bennet argues were ‘woman kings’. Other historical queens are described as taking the roles of kings even though they were women: Hatshepsut and Cleopatra III are two examples. Both these ‘woman kings’, however, have been the victims of scholarly misogyny, which tends to assume that they could only have acquired this male power through deviousness and scheming.
Misogyny, racism and white supremacist narratives have affected other stories of queenship. One striking example is that of the ‘Egyptian’ Barbie dolls produced by the toy manufacturer Mattel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, discussed by Aimee Hinds Scott (Chapter 17). Playing on the relationship to the Elizabeth Taylor block-buster, Cleopatra, she argues (p. 258): ‘… Mattel turns Egyptian queenship into a costume, one which is widely promoted to Whiteness but which is increasingly inaccessible to people who have a real stake in the inheritances of Egyptian queenship’. In a similar vein, Tasha Vordstrasse (chapter 7) argues that the Meroitic queens of Nubia have been ‘fat-shamed’ in the scholarly tradition because they do not conform to modern western conceptions of female beauty. Yet, these same female rulers, the kandaka, have proved inspirational to modern Sudanese women (Chapter 16: Yasmin Elnour).
The ‘beauty’ of queens is another important theme of the volume (as indicated by the number of index citations it receives). This is one topic that might have been explored further in a conclusion; more could be said, in particular, about how ‘queenly beauty’ might be defined. Nevertheless, the final chapter (Chapter 20), ‘Looking Critically: Goddesses, Queens and their Reflections’, does raise important questions about what ‘ideal’ female beauty might mean. Rather than being the subject of the ‘male gaze’, Hallie Franks suggests that ‘an ideal Venus is a one who is surprised, who happens to be caught in her nudity, and who therefore reflects no knowledge of her beauty … beauty—whatever that in fact is—is supposedly enhanced by ignorance of it, or by a refusal (out of embarrassment or decorum) to indulge it’.
This repositioning of queenship is at the heart of what is probably the most striking and important contribution in the collection. It is observed in the ‘Introduction’ (Chapter 1), that modern studies of queenship have grown out of research on medieval European queenship. Chapter 15, ‘What is a Queen to You?’, is based on the third-year undergraduate project of Lydia Pamudji at New York University, inspired by her realisation that her generation’s understanding of queenship was ‘shaped and limited by Western ideologies’. The project involved surveying 54 of her peers to gather data about their views on ‘feminism, queenship, and gender identity’. The chapter presents a summary of the results, and concludes with an interview between Pamudji and one of her respondents, the Nigerian-born Oluwademilade (‘Demi’) Ayeye. This conversation provides an important critique not only of queenship, power and beauty, but also of the roots of feminist theory, which Demi understands as predominantly Western. Nevertheless, there is a connection between Demi’s idea of queenship and Franks’ of the ideal Venus. Demi says, ‘I think the idea that queenhood or queenship is something you strive for is one I have a problem with. If who you are in this very moment is the best possible version of yourself that you can be, when you consider context and circumstance, I think that’s a queen in itself.’
The volume is generally well produced. The images are in colour (which is helpful), but there might have been more thought put into which images were included. There is a duplicate of the image of the bearded Osiride Hatshepsut in chapters 15 and 17, although there is only passing reference to it in chapter 17. Chapter 17 might also have been less confusing if there had been illustrations included of the Barbie dolls discussed, just as the discussion of the ‘Rokeby Venus’ in Chapter 20 would have been helped by an image. On the other hand, there are a number of images appended to Chapter 18 which are not explained or discussed, interesting though they are.
However, taken all together, this collection of essays provides important insights into how we should be thinking about queens and queenship in both conceptual and historical terms. It will be a significant contribution for any further studies on queens, queenship, and the power and accoutrements of female royalty.
Authors and Titles
Chapter 1: Introduction
Part One: Approaching the Methodologies and Historiographies of Ancient Queenship
Chapter 2: Arabian ‘Queens’ or ‘Woman Kings’? Defining Šarratu during the Neo-Assyrian Period (Ellie Bennett)
Chapter 3: What Difference Did a Title Make? ‘Queenship’ before and After (Elizabeth Carney)
Chapter 4: Hatshepsut: Frames of Power and the Speos Artemidos (Jacquelyn Williamson)
Chapter 5: What do we Know about the Queen of Sheba? Epistemological Limits and New Paths Forward (Jillian Stinchcomb)
Chapter 6: Kleopatra III: Not the Evil Queen (Tara Sewell-Lasater)
Chapter 7: Centering Nubian Queens in the Ancient World: Histories, Historiographies, and (Mis)Interpretations (Tasha Vorderstrasse)
Chapter 8: Queens and Consorts in the story of Sardanapalus (Michael Seymour)
Chapter 9: Wisdom, Virginity, and Motherhood: Archetypes in Ethiopian Queenship (David Benjamin Spielman)
Part Two: Speculating Ancient Queenship in Contemporary Cultures
Chapter 10: Assyrian Mothers and Queens in Diaspora: A Conversation with Maryam Yousif (Anastasia Tchaplyghine)
Chapter 11: The Impossible Dream of a Female King: Queer Gender and the Reception of Cleopatra and Wu Zetian in the 2009 Korean Historical TV Drama Seondeok Yeowang (‘The Great Queen Seondeok’) (Jackie Murray)
Chapter 12: Vanguard of the Viragoes: On the Forefront Looking back (ChealseaDee Harrison)
Chapter 13: Becoming I am Queen Mary: A Conversation between the Artists La Vaughn Belle and Jeanette Ehlers (La Vaughn Belle and Jeanette Ehlers)
Chapter 14: Queens in the Classroom: Connecting Histories of Royal Women (Patricia Eunji Kim)
Chapter 15: What is a Queen to you? (Lydia Pamudji)
Chapter 16: Kandaka (Yasmin Elnour)
Chapter 17: Barbie®, Perpetual Queen of the Egyptians (Aimee Hinds Scott)
Chapter 18: ANI-ICON Apokalypsis Mythos (Martine Gutierre)
Chapter 19: The Contour of a Queen (The Makeup Museum)
Chapter 20: Looking Critically: Goddesses, Queens, and their Reflections (Hallie Franks)