Category Archives: Arcaheology

Hatshepsut

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A Murder of Furies, the third in the Bronze Age Crete series, will be released January 31.

In this outing, Ancient Egypt plays a large role.

A minor prince seeks the hand of Hele, the High Priestess’s daughter. She has turned him down multiple times but he won’t take no for an answer. He arrives in Knossos to press his suit in person. While he is there, Martis discovers that the prince is allying himself with Khoranos, the High Priestess’s son, who is planning to take the throne.

And then the High Priestess is murdered! Martis suspects the Egyptians.

I don’t know if this could have happened but I thought it might be possible. Crete and Egypt were trading partners and some time after the time frame in which this story takes place, Ramses appealed to Crete for help in stopping the Sea Peoples, the pirates who attacked Egypt regularly. We know, therefore, that there was regular contact between the two.

When this mystery takes place, Hatshepsut, a woman, was the pharaoh of Egypt. Although women enjoyed a comparatively high status, there are very few women pharaohs. Hatshepsut was the daughter, the sister, and the wife of a king so her bloodline was impeccable.

The daughter of Thutmose I, she ruled jointly with her brother/husband, Thutmose III. She reigned for over 20 years and is generally regarded as a successful pharaoh.She reestablished trade networks that had been disrupted during a previous war and although was engaged in warfare in the early part of her reign, oversaw a long and prosperous era. She also embarked on many building projects.

She was almost lost to history since her cartouche was removed from her monuments. Her brother, Thutmose III, did not remove her cartouche until the end of his reign. Since by the little we know, the relationship between Thutmose and Hatshepsut was a good one, it is suggested that his son, Amenhotep II was the defacer.

Not much is known about her. She had one daughter and seems to have been a good ruler. A mummy believed to be hers has been discovered. An examination shows she had diabetes, cancer and bad teeth.

As even many layman know, the Egyptians married siblings, nieces, and daughters. The accepted explanation is that only another royal had the proper bloodline. Another theory is that this was an effort to keep the power concentrated in one family’s hands.. One suggestion I find particularly interesting is that, because of a woman’s connection to a Supreme Goddess, a holdover from the Goddess worship of earlier times, only a female member of the royal family could give legitimacy to the throne and to her relative’s rule.

Archaeological advances

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One of the things I find so interesting about the research into the distant past is how many more things are discovered, seemingly every year. One would think that after decades of excavation, everything would have been discovered already. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Recently a labyrinth was discovered on Crete on the top of a hill. Crete has undergone many excavations but clearly there is still plenty more to find.

And, as science moves on, we have better tools. archeogenetics is a new and burgeoning field. The discoveries made through testing DNA have upset many long held beliefs. The Etruscans, for example, believed to have emigrated from Anatolia to Italy are now found to be from the Caucasus.

Tests of the Blackfeet Indian Tribe have been similarly surprising.

Previously, they were thought to have migrated to the High Plains from the Great Lakes. Some anthropologists have argued that the Tribe’s language if part of the Algonquin family. Nothing in the Blackfoot oral tradition supports this.

DNA supports their belief that they have lived on their ancestral lands since time immortal. Current linguistic research indicates that the Blackfoot language has features belonging to an ancient language that predates Algonquin. 

Even coffee has proven to have a surprising journey. The coffee bushes evolved in Eastern Africa in a few different strains that eventually interbred. The plants that grew on the eastern side of the Great Rift Valley remained wild but the ones on the eastern side were brought to the Yemen city of Mocha. Folklore says that the red berries were eaten. (Yuck.) Oral histories say that an Indian monk brought the berries to India from which it spread around the world. Dutch explorers cultivated c. arabica on Java – Typical. Another variant was cultivated by French colonists – Bourbon – and that combination of those two varieties largely gave rise to the coffee most of us drink today. Who knew?