Mariam F. Ayad was born in Cairo and studied Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and the University of Toronto, before earning her doctorate in Egyptology at Brown University in 2003. She is currently an associate professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. In 2020-2021 she was a visiting associate professor of Women's Studies and Near Eastern Religions and a research associate of Harvard Divinity School's Women's Studies in Religion Program. She is the author of God's Wife, God's Servant: The God's Wife of Amun (c. 740-525 BC), and the editor of three volumes on Coptic Culture, including Studies in Coptic Culture: Transmission and Interaction. She is also editor of Women in Ancient Egypt: Revisiting Power, Agency, and Autonomy - AUC Press 2022.
In her book God's Wife, God's Servant: The God's Wife of Amun (c. 740-525 BC), Mariam F. Ayad explores how five women were elevated to a position of supreme religious authority. Drawing on a variety of textual, iconographic, and archaeological evidence, and containing fifty-one black and white and colour illustrations, the volume discusses this often neglected subject, placing the women within the broader context of the politically volatile, turbulent seventh and eighth centuries BCE.
