Notes
The pharaonic custom of having princesses marry their brothers and rule as sister-queens had a well-thought political rationale behind. These marriages were rarely consummated and any offspring produced normally were unfit for power, so most pharaohs were sons by their predecessor's non-related wives or concubines. However, brotherly marriages meant that Egypt’s royal princesses typically didn’t marry outside of the family. As it's very evident from the comparison between Egypt's relative stability and the chaos and carnage that was attached to any power transition among the Hittites, the strategy worked: royal princesses were off limits for elite Egyptians, and thus none of them had a special claim to the throne, superior to that of other members of the upper class, and even remotely comparable to that of the sons of the previous pharaoh. At the same time, the lack of royal dowries to be paid and the fact that fewer inheritances had to be divided meant the crown was always vastly wealthier than anybody else. A key reason why the strategy worked was that, even more that in Egypt, the reverence in Hatti for alleged royal founder bloodlines was strong. All Hittite kings in history, and some rulers of southern Anatolia after the final Hittite collapse, claimed descendance from the same clan/family that produced the first, and considered themselves as members of essentially the same dynasty. By allowing royal princesses to marry outside the royal family, the Hittites systematically expanded the pool of potential claimants to the throne with the appropriate royal blood. Looking at the great number of Hittite kings and aspiring kings who were descendants of other kings through the mother line and had to butcher rivals from either of the lines, one can then understand Egypt's penchant for giving royal princesses – who led lives of isolation and attention only from their own brothers – great prominence. At Deir el-Bahri, opposite of Luxor across the Nile, a great caché of mummies from princesses of the dynasty indicates that they were given full funerary honors when buried, in compensation for their sacrifices. On the other hand, not all royal princesses, wives and widows were strongly inclined to sacrifice themselves or their powerful status.
