Nefertiti and Cleopatra: Queen-Monarchs of Ancient Egypt Book

This book, written by a woman intimately involved with the Amarna discoveries over decades since the thirties, consists of two biographies of two of the female pharaohs of Egypt. There were others probably and one of the points of the book is to argue that they were indeed seen as the actual heads of state.

Be that as it may, I found this book interesting primarily because it was written with more attention paid to domestic matters than most others I've read which have concentrated on religion, politics, the sciences or the arts. There is considerable attention paid to such topics as dress, cosmetology, child-rearing and household arrangements (albeit only of the very wealthy).

Both Nefertiti and Cleopatra are treated very sympathetically, which is to say imaginatively, because the author does often make inferences which are no more than plausible given existing written and archaeological records. This is, in other words, a kind of feminist appropriation of these figures, a rather quaintly old-fashioned kind of feminism in keeping with the author's age at the time of composition and her British background.