The present article is a rejoinder to Douglas Kammen recent study "Queens of Timor" (Archipel 84, 2012). Studying the numerous small polities ("kingdoms") of Portuguese Timor, Kammen found a remarkable upsurge of female rulers in the nineteenth century, explained through the interplay between house, kingdom and colonial administration. However, the occurrence of female rule before 1800 is not as rare as suggested by Kammen. On the contrary, the available contemporary (Dutch and Portuguese) archival sources reveal a cyclical pattern of reigning queens. While almost no women in power are attested for the eighteenth century, there are at least eleven such cases on Timor and the adjacent islands in the period 1640-1700, that is, from the time when detailed documentation on Timor starts. Some of these queens owed their position to inheritance while others were widow-rulers. On average they appear personally active to a higher degree than the nineteenth century counterparts. The article discusses Timorese queenship in relation to the upsurge of female rule found in Aceh, Patani, and so on, in the same period. Like in these areas, the discontinuation of female rule on Timor after 1700 might be connected to external forces, in this case the new networks forged by European authorities.