The forgotten Egyptian queen who demanded she live for eternity as a pharaoh
Long before Cleopatra and Hatshepsut, Ankhnespepy II amassed unprecedented political and religious power. Here's how.
In a quiet corner of New York’s Brooklyn Museum, a luminous alabaster sculpture of an Egyptian queen commands attention.
Just 16 inches high, the sculpture is modest in scale but arresting in presence: Old Kingdom (2700-2200 B.C.) queen Ankhnespepy II sits enthroned, with her son, Pharaoh Pepy II, perched on her knees. He wears the same distinctive royal headdress later seen on King Tutankhamen, an unmistakable emblem of kingship. But there’s something unusual about this small sculpture: Ankhnespepy looms twice as large as her son, an intentional subversion of Egypt’s artistic rules, where the pharaoh towered over all but the gods.
In this sculpture, the king of Egypt may wear the crown, but his mother rules the composition.
Carved more than 4,000 years ago, the statue seems to demand an answer to the question: How did a woman rise to such power in a world built for kings? For many decades, the question had no answer. The sculpture was a mystery, appearing on the 19th-century art market with no record of its discovery. Divorced from its original setting and purpose, it revealed little more than a tantalizing glimpse of this once powerful but long-vanished queen, a woman who ruled Egypt on behalf of her son during the twilight of the Old Kingdom.
Then, in 2000, the sands of Saqqara, the vast necropolis that’s home to Egypt’s first pyramid and those of many powerful pharaohs, finally answered the question. The French-Swiss Archaeological Mission at Saqqara (MAFS), led by archaeologists Audran Labrousse and Jean Leclant, uncovered a shattered pyramid complex bearing Ankhnespepy’s name. The discovery became even more remarkable when the archaeologists unearthed her subterranean funerary chambers, finding her burial vault inscribed with hundreds of spells from the Pyramid Texts, religious writings that were the pharaohs’ magical access keys to resurrection and power in the afterlife.
These texts were found in hundreds of fragments scattered throughout the sands and had to be painstakingly reconstructed. Over the course of more than 20 years, French Egyptologist and epigrapher Bernard Mathieu and the MAFS team carefully photographed, drew, numbered, scanned, and recorded each of the more than 1,600 written fragments unearthed while they reconstructed the shattered walls of the burial chamber. “As the queen’s funerary complex was cleared, and the inscribed fragments were collected over the course of eleven excavation campaigns … it became a matter of restoring the full program of inscribed texts on the funerary chamber’s walls,” Mathieu recalls.
This long and painstaking pursuit has recently yielded an impressive publication of Ankhnespepy’s Pyramid Texts, now readable again more than four millennia after they were inscribed. They offer an important ew window into the world of this extraordinary queen.
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Until the sacred words of the Pyramid Texts were found in Ankhnespepy’s burial chamber, they had previously been reserved only for the male pharaohs. These spells were the most sacred rite of ancient Egyptian religion, designed to bestow the powers and immortality of the gods upon the deceased king. These were honors to which even the most elite could not aspire: Only the king, as the son of the sun god, Re, and living incarnation of the god of kingship, Horus, was considered worthy of unlimited access to this powerful magic.
By taking the incantations of the pharaohs, Ankhnespepy crossed a religious boundary as radical as it was bold, claiming the divine afterlife of a pharaoh for herself. Labrousse, who discovered her pyramid, described her as “the first independent woman. Even if she was acting in the name of her son, she had the power. So why not eternity? She is the first woman to make herself immortal.”
Her titles elevated her to divine status, declaring her the “Daughter of Two Gods.” In the Brooklyn Museum sculpture, she further strengthened her divine ties by posing in emulation of Isis, drawing a deliberate parallel between her own story and that of the powerful goddess who also protected her young son after the death of his father and forged his path to the throne. Ankhnespepy’s influence did not end at the grave—inscriptions reveal that she was revered by an enduring funerary cult for centuries after her death.
This longevity underscores how deeply she had woven herself into Egypt’s religious and political fabric. She was remembered not just as the mother of a pharaoh but also as a woman who dared to claim for herself the same magical protections and divine afterlife as the kings. It was a revolutionary act for a woman, marking her as a political and religious innovator centuries before famed female rulers like Hatshepsut and Cleopatra.
Queen, mother, regent
Though Ankhnespepy was a young woman when she married Pharaoh Pepy I, who ruled from 2315 to 2275 B.C., she was no stranger to political power. Born to an influential family in Abydos, the holy southern province venerated as the eternal home of the first pharaohs, she grew up in the orbit of powerful parents. Stela from her hometown preserve the names and extensive titles of her family members. Her father served as a regional governor, an intermediary between the royal court and the local people, and, more provocatively, her mother was one of very few women known to hold the mighty position of vizier, the pharaoh’s chief adviser and top official of the vast state bureaucracy.
For a girl raised in this world, the idea that women might step into the highest levels of statecraft wasn’t unimaginable. In Ankhnespepy’s family, it was precedent.
It’s no surprise that her family arranged a political marriage, deepening their ties to the pharaoh. Both Ankhnespepy and her older sister became wives of Pepy I. Well into the second half of his reign by the time he married the sisters, he was a seasoned king who had bolstered his power through military action and diplomacy. Two daughters married to a pharaoh at the height of his power—this no doubt made Ankhnespepy and her family influential. Still, as one of seven wives, her path to becoming the de facto ruler of Egypt was unlikely.
But it’s clear that she was ambitious: To celebrate her marriage and her closeness to the king, Ankhnespepy II took the name we know her by today, which translates to “she who lives for Pepy.” She kept that name for the rest of her life, even as political circumstances shifted,and she married again—it was a declaration of her vaunted position in the royal hierarchy, as well as a tribute to her powerful first husband.
Her son Pepy II was crowned pharaoh when he was only about six years old (circa 2260 B.C.). Palace intrigue haunted the 6th dynasty 2325-2175 B.C.), an era shaped by courtly conspiracies and political factionalism. The glories of the great pyramid age were two centuries past, and increasingly powerful regional officials had whittled away at the heart of pharaonic power. But as queen regent, tasked with running the kingdom until her son came of age, Ankhnespepy navigated these turbulent conditions with skill.
Inside the palace, Pepy Is network of widows, sons, and in-laws formed a charged political landscape, the kind in which a child-king’s reign could easily be toppled. And danger lurked outside of the court too: The Nubians, denizens of the kingdom to Egypt’s south, chafed against pharaonic control, and rebellions sparked in Egypt’s territories to the north.
Though the details of her regency are sparse, the outcome is clear. Her son went on to rule for more than 65 years, the longest reigning monarch in Egyptian history. His survival and stability in those early years point to a regent who managed Egypt’s political knife-edge with acuity.
Testaments to Ankhnespepy’s political authority have survived in the archaeological record across Egypt. An inscription at the turquoise mines of Wadi Maghara, in the Sinai Peninsula, proclaims her as the ruler who commanded this royal mission in her own name as well as that of her son. The accompanying image depicts her wearing the king’s cap crown instead of the queen’s headdress and names her as “beloved of all the gods,” a description used exclusively by kings.
Even here, she appropriated the sacred words and regalia of pharaohs for herself, altering the depiction of female royal power.
(Nubian kings ruled Egypt for less than 100 years. Their influence lasted centuries.)
A discovery that changed our understanding of Egypt’s queens
In 2000, archaeologists made a discovery that altered the history of Egyptian queenship.
For centuries, the Saqqara sands had concealed a low, nondescript rise near the pyramid of Pepy I. When the excavators began clearing the area, they had few expectations. The site was a ruin. Centuries of stone robbers, beginning as early as the Roman period, had dismantled the limestone walls block by block, carting off the finely cut masonry for their own construction projects. What remained was a ragged depression in the desert.
A hint came in 1997 with the discovery of a massive lintel, 17 tons of carved stone, emerging from the sands. Across it ran the unmistakable hieroglyphs of a royal name: Ankhnespepy. Its monumental script was designed, as Egyptologist Vivienne Gae Callender observed, so that “an initial glance would encourage the viewer to see the queen as a ruler.”
The complex is so large that it took three more years for the team to locate the queen’s pyramid. As they dug deeper, the outline of a pyramid took shape. The base measured roughly 100 feet on each side, making it the largest pyramid known to have been constructed for any Egyptian queen except for one, the mysterious 5th dynasty queen Setibhor.
This size alone was astonishing. But Ankhnespepy’s pyramid also contained features associated solely with Egypt’s pharaohs: a broad-pillared entry, a grand square antechamber, and a Hall of Offerings paved with luminous white alabaster. Fragments of the obelisks that once flanked the entrance suggest that their gold-capped peaks rose more than 15 feet into the air.
Further evidence of her tomb’s grandeur came to light as the archaeologists unearthed a spectacular scene in which the queen floats by on her royal boat, legs spread in a masculine stance borrowed from the pharaohs, as she and her daughter perform a ritual. Lead excavator Philippe Collombert also uncovered an intriguing inscription in the queen’s funerary temple. Reading “His Majesty acted for her while she was in the [royal] residence,” it was later interpreted as an unprecedented acknowledgement of her regency (as well as an amusing reminder that even kings of Egypt must answer to their mothers).
As they cleared the subterranean rooms, excavators found the burial chamber, unfortunately plundered long ago. The queen’s spectacular black basalt sarcophagus remained, its immense cover cracked into four massive pieces. Scraps of linen wrappings and bone fragments were all that remained inside, but the exterior inscriptions survived. They proclaimed her the “Bodily daughter of [the sky goddess] Nut” and the “Daughter of [the earth god] Geb”—titles that enshrined her as divine, part of the mighty lineage of the gods themselves.
The most important discovery scrolled in long columns of hieroglyphs down the walls of the burial chamber, still glowing with traces of green paint more than 4,000 years later. It was immediately clear to archaeologists that these writings were the words of the Pyramid Texts. The texts’ incantations first appeared in the tomb of King Unas roughly six decades before Ankhnespepy was born. These spells were intended to transform the pharaoh into a divine being, ensure his safe journey through the world of the afterlife, and grant his eternal reunion with the gods. They were the most sacred rites of the pharaohs of the Old Kingdom.
The texts in Ankhnespepy’s tomb, however, were in terrible condition. Time and looters had taken their toll: They were reduced to hundreds of splintered stones scattered and buried in the sands; to read the texts in their entirety, researchers had to first reconstruct them.
Reconstructing Ankhnespepy’s Pyramid Texts
Over the course of two decades, epigrapher Mathieu and MAFS undertook the painstaking work of reassembling the inscriptions in Ankhnespepy’s tomb. After the discovery of the first fragment of the texts in 2000, Mathieu recalls that “1,035 inscribed blocks had been found and inventoried” by 2003, with Collombert discovering more in later seasons, until they unearthed a total of 1,617 fragments. Each of the 1,617 stone shards had to be photographed, drawn, studied, recorded, and scanned. Putting these blocks back together was like solving a gigantic three-dimensional puzzle, where the pieces are radically different shapes and sizes, and several are missing. And yet, members of the archaeological team succeeded in reconstructing the walls, fitting small fragments into larger blocks and aligning crumbled edges to reveal the sequence of the writings. This was a monumental task, essentially requiring the team to rebuild the interior of Ankhnespepy’s burial chamber.
In the end, Mathieu and the team’s tireless work culminated in a marvel: a nearly complete corpus of the Pyramid Texts, including 10 spells never seen in any pharaonic tomb.
These new spells center on nourishment, protection, and the queen’s ascension among the gods. Each of the 11 rulers who had the Pyramid Texts inscribed in their tombs chose a slightly different version, perhaps reflecting their personalities and religious beliefs. Many of Ankhnespepy’s unique spells offer her royal and magical objects, possibly indicating her interest in affirming her status as a resurrected pharaoh: “Take this, your papyrus scepter,” exhorts one, while another promises: “The canals are open to you, so that you can immerse yourself in waves of red crowns.”
Other passages in the texts describe her reunion with the gods, declaring her divinity: Yyou will find the gods ... you shall sit with them, eat with them, and travel in the sacred sun-boat with them,” reads one such spell. “The sky shakes for you, the earth trembles for you, the imperishable stars bow before you, for you are the one that [god of the afterlife] Osiris has placed on his throne,” proclaims another. These texts armed Ankhnespepy with all the same tools that a king received to thrive in the afterlife.
Her choice to engrave these incantations was more than mere religious ambition. It was an assertion of power, a claim that the gods supported her reign. In life, she ceded the rule of Egypt to her son, but in death, she could regain the powers and privileges of a pharaoh, this time in her own right and for eternity.
(This Egyptian queen's tomb lay untouched for more than 4,000 years.)
Setting the standard
Ankhnespepy’s story does not end with her death or even with the collapse of the Old Kingdom. Her rule became the blueprint for the powerful—and better known—Egyptian queens who followed in her footsteps.
When Hatshepsut, the second woman to rule Egypt in her own right, occupied the throne nearly a thousand years later, she adopted the kings’ regalia and presented herself as the divine daughter of a god, echoing Ankhnespepy’s earlier claims to these prerogatives of kingship. Nefertiti, too, borrowed from Ankhnespepy’s precedents as she amassed power, depicting herself in iconic pharaonic stances and religious roles, steps she may have taken to consolidate her rise to the throne if, as some scholars believe, she did indeed rule as pharaoh after her husband’s death. When Cleopatra positioned herself as the living incarnation of Isis, she was explicitly proclaiming what Ankhnespepy implied more than 2,000 years earlier with her evocation of Isis in the Brooklyn Museum statue, referencing an Egyptian queenly tradition with roots so old that they would have been ancient history by the time Cleopatra seized her own power. These women drew from a lineage of female power that Ankhnespepy was among the first to define.
Her pyramid, her texts, and her titles reveal a queen who refused to remain in the background. She reshaped the boundaries of what Egyptian queens could be: guardians, regents, divine daughters, and sovereigns. In the dim light of her burial chamber, where painted hieroglyphs still shine after four millennia, her ambition remains unmistakable: a woman who claimed the rites of kings to secure her place among the gods, demonstrating that the power to rule need not belong to men alone.
