Nefertiti’s tomb may have been found behind that of her son, Tutankhamun. Or it may not. Yet the possibility has spawned excitable headlines across the globe.

The story here is not simply the hypothesis, advanced by a British Egyptologist from the University of Arizona, Dr Nicholas Reeves, whose digital study of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber has, perhaps, revealed two unopened side doors. It’s more that this bronze age queen has such pulling power. Nefertiti is an exception that proves a rather worrying rule – only a handful of women, living or dead, have the power to command such attention.

Nefertiti taught me this lesson in 2010. Giving a talk on Socrates to a genteel crowd in a church in Woodstock, I mentioned that I had to leave for Egypt where colleagues were investigating new evidence of her life and death. Our team had already scanned Nefertiti’s bust in an MRI scanner in Berlin to reveal a wonderful limestone portrait beneath. The results were striking, showing an older woman who might well have lived to rule alone after her husband Akhenaten’s death.

After a fortnight in Amarna, a news-free desert, a baggage handler at Cairo airport asked me what I had been up to. “Looking for Nefertiti,” I muttered; “Ah!” came the eager reply “But we have found her face – look!” And there was our research – on the front covers of the Egyptian press; my passing comment in middle England had been picked up by a local journalist and gone global in our absence.

But the female characters who guarantee such instant impact can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Name the 10 most influential men in history and the debate can rage for hours; when it comes to women, after number six or seven many start to grope around for inspiration. This gaping rent in history has been cut by a dangerously double-edged sword.

Primarily, we find what we are looking for. The historical and archaeological sources have not been interrogated with parity to flesh out the story of the female of the species. A new poem of Sappho, a gospel of Mary Magdalene, accounts of the convictive value of Sophia – woman wisdom – as a driving theological force, are only now emerging from fragments of papyrus that have lain undisturbed in Edwardian biscuit tins in Oxford or reused as cartonage in Egyptian funeral masks.

And where we have the evidence it is often sidelined. Think of Enheduanna, the first named female author in history, writing exquisite poetry in the Middle East 4,000 years ago; or Puduhepa, the bronze age queen of the Hittites who scolds Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II as if he is a recalcitrant schoolboy. How about the medieval empress Wu Zetien, who, pumped with so many aphrodisiacs she grew an extra pair of eyebrows, ruled China until she was 81, ensuring the future of Buddhism through her patronage and invading Korea and Tibet along the way? These should all be household names. And yet they are systematically relegated to the footnotes of history.

All this is very odd because the hard evidence tells us that women are there in the stem cell of civilisation. Of all the human figurines discovered so far from 30,000–3,000BC, 92% are of the female form. This is not to say there was any kind of matriarchy or worship of a mother goddess – far from it – but women are conspicuous by their presence.

Then in the late bronze age there appears to be a kind of cultural genetic mutation. Why? It seems that in broad terms we get greedy. Territorial expansion demands warriors and, once population levels are stable, demotes the female role. Once religious empires have not just an idea but a territory to call their own, the soldiers of god are of more value than his handmaidens. The keepers of records – scholars in the Jewish study halls, monks in their cloisters and guardians of Hadith and the Qur’an – are male. Whether by chance or design, we start to lose sight of female players.

There have been moments when the greatest thinkers in the world tried to address this issue; 25 centuries ago, Socrates and Buddha, with mind-shifting clarity, pushed against society’s misogynist grain. Buddha asserted that the possibility to be good did not depend on caste or gender, that women are capable of enlightenment and insisted they should be welcomed as followers. Via Plato and Xenophon, we hear of Socrates chewing over the role of women: “If we are to use women for the same things as men, we must also teach them the same things”; “A woman’s nature is not at all inferior to a man’s… except in that it lacks reasoning and strength.”

Not proto-feminists then, but this was a world where women were described as oozing, degenerate creatures. A popular ancient Greek poet Semonides advised the best way to deal with a talkative wife was to smash her teeth out with a stone. Even Buddha’s contemporary Confucius, equally radical, a proponent of doing as you would be done by, opines: “Of all people, girls and servants are the most difficult… If you are familiar with them, they lose their humility. If you maintain a reserve towards them they are discontented.”

When we do uncover the evidence it can make for unpleasant reading. Bronze age Hittite laws tell us that if a woman is raped in her own home she is guilty and should be executed. Herodotus writes in his Histories: “Women were raped successively by so many Persian soldiers that they died.” Many of the women we are familiar with – Eve, Helen of Troy, Jezebel, Cleopatra – have been memorialised as femmes fatales, promoting a stereotype that women are trouble, tempting men to their downfall.

But at least the Nefertiti case points to new possibilities. Using cutting-edge technologies, we can now scan ancient documents to read the palimpsest writings. Resistivity and magnetometer archaeological techniques are revealing palaces in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East where women are honoured as the keepers of stores of both grain and wisdom. The analysis of pots in bronze age graves indicates that women are the doctors of society, left in charge of the pharmaka, useful little drugs today stocked in pharmacies.

We hear from Plato that if women aren’t allowed to pull their weight, “the state will only ever be a half of itself”. Well, the same can be said of the story of humanity. Nefertiti is lovely, but we should use our wit and will to look beyond that beautiful face to discover and to enjoy a more satisfying narrative – the story of mankind, not just of man.

Bettany Hughes’s series Buddha, Socrates and Confucius: Genius of the Ancient World continues this Wednesday, 9pm, BBC4