Female "King" Ruled in Canaan, Carving Suggests

clipped from news.nationalgeographic.com

The home of a mysterious female "king" in Canaan, the land that became ancient Israel, may finally have been identified.

Archaeologists digging in the ruins of the Canaanite city-state Beth-Shemesh last summer found a decorated plaque with what could be the first known depiction of a ruler known as the Mistress of the Lionesses.

The plaque—which is slightly smaller than a cigarette pack—shows a bare-chested figure wearing a kilt, with short-cropped hair and bent arms holding up two long-stemmed lotus flowers.

The figure is standing on a basket called a neb, which in ancient Egyptian iconography signifies a ruler or deity.

Although the tablet bears no writing, the figure's hairstyle and the fact that it is holding lotus flowers suggests it is a woman, said Tel Aviv University archaeologists Shlomo Bunimovitz and Zvi Lederman, who made the discovery.

Mistress in Distress

Before it became the Promised Land of the Hebrews, Canaan was a collection of city-states ruled by mostly male kings who paid tributes to their more powerful neighbors the Egyptians.

Around 1350 B.C., several Canaanite kings sent clay tablets to the Egyptian pharaoh requesting military help from nomadic marauders known as the Habiru.

Of the 382 tablets that have been found, two were signed with the feminine epithet "Mistress of the Lionesses."

"The Mistress complained to the Egyptian court that the Habiru were around and that her city was in danger," Lederman said.

Some archaeologists believe the Mistress was a female ruler of a Canaanite city, but which city has remained an open question.

The new plaque could link the Mistress to the city of Beth-Shemesh, Bunimovitz and Lederman suggest.

Not a Woman?

But not everyone is convinced the tablet portrays the mysterious Mistress.

"The figure is, in my opinion, a man," commented University of California, Los Angeles Egyptologist Kathlyn Cooney.

"I would expect a female to wear an ankle-length dress, not a knee-length kilt," Cooney said.

"This figure is also shown striding, with legs apart, a typical posture for a man."

Instead, the plaque may depict a male king who is wearing a wig and making an offering to a deity of lotuses—a flower symbolic of death and rebirth to the ancient Egyptians, Cooney added.

Robert Griffin, an Ancient Near Eastern history scholar at the University of Memphis in Tennessee, is also skeptical the figure is a woman, but said a female Canaanite ruler would not be that surprising.

"It would not have been the norm, but it certainly could have been possible," Griffin said.

As an example, Griffin points to Hatshepsut, the wife of an 18th-dynasty Egyptian pharaoh.

After her husband's death, Hatshepsut famously portrayed herself as a man in a bid to solidify her claim to the throne over that of her young stepson.

A similar thing may have happened in Canaan, which was heavily influenced by the Egyptians, Griffin said.