In ancient Egyptian royal iconography, the pharaoh most often appears alone as he offers to the gods, drives his chariot triumphantly against his enemies, or enters the afterlife to join Ra’s unending journey. One king is a dramatic exception to this overarching principle of lonely pharaonic glory: Akhenaten, who began his rule as Amenhotep, the fourth king of that name during the Eighteenth Dynasty. This king not only dispensed with the rich pantheon of gods in his worship of the unique solar god Aten, but also elevated his chief wife, Nefertiti, and their daughters to be essential participants in all aspects of his innovative religious practices.
Who was Nefertiti?
A stela carved in the massive sandstone quarries of Kheny (modern Gebel el-Silsila) during the earliest years of the reign of Amenhotep IV provides the first evidence of the king’s intense focus on the sun god. He commands the construction of a great monument for the god ‘Ra-Horakhty, who rejoices in the horizon in his name of light which is in the sun disc’. This ‘name of light’ is first applied to a falcon-headed solar deity, and later to a divine form that has shed nearly all human features: a disc with multiple rays, each of which ends in a hand. A shortened name for the divine disc is Aten, and about the same time as the god’s transition in imagery, and enclosure of his name in two cartouches, a powerful queen bursts on to the scene: Nefertiti.
This woman, whose family origins remain uncertain, may not have been named Nefertiti at birth. Meaning ‘the beautiful one has returned’, the queen’s name alludes to the annual return of the far-wandering solar eye of the cosmic creator. Nefertiti’s royal name may have mirrored her husband’s transformation from Amenhotep (‘Amun is content’) to Akhenaten (‘He who is effective for Aten’). It is likely that Nefertiti was related to Akhenaten’s mother, Queen Tiye, and genetic evidence from royal mummies suggests that she may even have been her husband’s first cousin on both the maternal and paternal sides. From around Year 4 to the end of Akhenaten’s 17-year reign, Nefertiti appears alongside her husband in nearly every two- and three-dimensional work of art.
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