The Impact of Political and Climate Change on Women’s Agency: A Social Power Analysis for the Late 3rd Millennium BCE Egypt

A detailed social history of the women from Egypt’s First Intermediate Period (FIP) needs to be added to the growing corpus of women’s historical narratives.

This pivotal period of Egyptian history, the late third millennium BCE, witnessed profound transformations to their social and political structures.

These dramatic changes arose from political disintegration and the effects of environmental stresses from climate change at the end of the preceding Old Kingdom period (OK). While the FIP has received broad study, dedicated research into the women from this period has yet to be conducted.

Historically, FIP women’s data, derived primarily from biographical inscriptions that sometimes detail their involvement in economic, political, or religious roles (titles), have been subsumed into female title studies of the OK period or discussed in conjunction with the women of the following Middle Kingdom (MK) period.

Existing scholarship centres on biographies of exceptional women or significant inscriptions, and women’s details appear more generally in wide-ranging compilations of this historical period.

Yet, owing to the unique archaeological and epigraphical evidence of the FIP, it offers the opportunity to examine a broader cross-section of the female population, including levels of society previously absent in other periods.

For the first time, the women of the FIP and their agencies will be analysed via a theoretical framework that analyses social power based on the women’s roles and their access to/control over economic, symbolic, and/or political resources.

Thus, the objective of this project, The Impact of Political and Climate Change on Women’s Agency: A Social Power Analysis (IPOCCWWA), is to produce a quantitative and qualitative account of the women of the FIP independent from other chronological periods that examines their agency within their distinct historical context and deliver their overdue social history.