Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin

              was based on numbers indicating small steps of development which he
himself sometimes called reigns, sometimes generations, and which in
the light of subsequent research might have been better termed sequence-
numbers. Reisner added up the total number of reigns and divided that
into the time taken. The resulting average length of reign, which he
considered as being normally a sequence of son to son, he thought of
as being of paramount importance in settling questions of chronology.
Perhaps some explanation of this is necessary. It is clearer to us
now than perhaps it was to Reisner that the royal line of the Sudanese
was matrilinear. That the mothers of their kings were all holders of the
title "Candace"8 is known from the classical writers of antiquity. These
royal ladies were of importance in determining the order of the succession of the kings, later they sometimes yet not always seem to have
assumed an authority which warrants their recognition as Queens Regnant. Yet there were also kings reigning with them, for it is evident
both from classical allusions and from the growth of the importance of
the Egyptian title "King's Mother" in the Napatan period, when public
inscriptions were still being written in a language intelligible to us, that
it was either the fact of being the mother of a kino or the right to have
O (DO
one's son succeed to the throne — which, it is not quite clear, — that
conferred the title of Candace. On the Egyptian-style bas-reliefs of the
earlier times the physique of these ladies is represented normally
enough, but in the later reliefs their girth increases until thev become
quite unlike the contemporary Egyptian queens, the Cleopatras and the
Berenices, who remain as slim as ever. Evidently their great girth" in
the sculptured reliefs must have been meant to express not merely their
royalty and political importance, but also their status as nursing mothers, the hope of the race. Thev may be Queens Regnant, thev are also
potentially queens pregnant. We may note that during the so-called
Napatan period, while the rulers' pyramids were in the northern part
of the kingdom, all the largest pyramids in the series have structural
characteristics belonging to the tombs of males, and the royal inscriptions, still couched in Egyptian, confirm this. Later, however, when it is
certain that there were queens in their own right, the language has
changed to Meroitic, and since Meroitic seems to have no grammatical
expression of sex, we sometimes doubt whether we are dealing with
a queen or a king.
s A word here in explanation of spellings. The literary English spelling of this
word is "Candace." Writers foreign to English literature tend to write Kandake
or Kandaki, since the C's are both hard, being written in fact with K both in
Greek and in Meroitic.
0 See for example BudgeES II, p. 142; LD V, 57.
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