The Matrilineal Succession of the Kingship in the 25^th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt

A New Proposal Based on Kinship Terminology

Abstract

The royal succession in the 25^th, i.e. the Kushite, dynasty has been interpreted as hereditary through patrilineal succession, because of the father-son relationship of the kings. One of the textual grounds for accepting the father-son relationship of the kings is the indirect one that some royal women held both the titles "the king's sister" and "the king's daughter", and this ground is regarded as decisive. However, this ignores the possibility that the Kushite kingdom was a matrilineal society using the same term for both brothers/sisters and parallel cousins, as does Iroquois/Crow kinship terminology.
　This possibility is suggested by the fact that not all women called "the king's sister" were also called "the king's daughter". In a patrilineal society, all of the king's sisters must have been also king's daughters, and the title "the king's daughter" was so important that it would hardly ever be omitted. If the Kushite kingdom was a matrilineal society using Iroquois/Crow kinship terminology, a current king should have been the son of a previous king's sister, and "the king's sister" should have denoted both a king's sister and a king's maternal parallel cousin. In that case, a daughter of the king's mother or her sister, whose father was not a king, was called just "the king's sister" and a daughter born of a marriage between the previous king and his sister was called "the king's daughter" and "the king's sister".
　The genealogy of the 25^th dynasty reconstructed according to Iroquois/Crow kinship terminology shows the pattern of the succession of political power from a maternal uncle to his nephew typical of a matrilineal society. Although there still remain several points which need to be discussed, the idea of interpreting the royal succession in the Kushite dynasty as a matrilineal succession seems quite promising.