Sobekneferu
1777 BCE–1773 BCE · Middle-Kingdom · Itj-tawy / Lisht
Sobekneferu is, by current consensus, the first woman securely attested to have ruled Egypt as king in her own right; the case of the much earlier Merneith remains contested, which is why she is given this careful framing rather than a flat 'first'. She closed Dynasty 12, reigning around 1777-1773 BCE (Shaw's conventional dates), after the failure of the male royal line at the death of Amenemhat IV. She took a full royal titulary, presenting herself with the formal apparatus of kingship, and, unlike Hatshepsut centuries later, she was retained in the official king-lists rather than struck from them. Her short reign brings to an end the golden age of the Middle Kingdom, after which central authority began to fragment into the Second Intermediate Period.
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Itj-tawy / Lisht
What they did here
The Dynasty 12 royal capital of her reign. (coord approx)
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Sobekneferu’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.