Nefertiti

Nefertiti lived during the 14th century BC, but soon after her death she was written out of Egyptian history. Although a faint remembrance of her can be found in the work of the 3rd-century BC Egyptian chronicler Manetho, she was completely forgotten until the middle of the 19th century AD, when early Egyptologists re-identified her name and figure. She nevertheless remained a marginal figure in histories of her time until 1923, when a remarkable painted bust, originally found in 1912, was finally put on display and catapulted Nefertiti to international stardom. The bust has been reproduced in two and three dimensions innumerable times, and in many different modes. Media hyperbole has on the basis of the bust proclaimed her a famous beauty whose looks had never been forgotten – readily ignoring Nefertiti’s millennia of utter oblivion. But what is really known – or can at least be reasonably hypothesised – of the woman whose face has become so ubiquitous?

It seems clear that Nefertiti became the King’s Great Wife a short time after Amenhotep IV’s accession to the throne during the second half of 14th century BC. Within a year of the marriage, their eldest daughter, Meryetaten, had been born. In her role as queen, Nefertiti appeared in the decoration of the temple-complex that the king erected to the god Aten at Karnak, on the east bank of the Nile at modern Luxor. The Aten, a new divine manifestation of the sun, had emerged as a god during the time of the king’s father, Amenhotep III, but would soon become the sole god acknowledged by Amenhotep IV. The king accordingly renamed himself Akhenaten, while the queen added the name Neferneferuaten to her birth name, Nefertiti, in her cartouche (the oval enclosure that surrounded the names of kings and many queens).

As well as simply accompanying the king in scenes of worship, Nefertiti also appeared in colossal statue form, and as a sphinx, at Karnak and, accompanied only by her daughter, as the sole officiant in the reliefs adorning the colonnade that surrounded the obelisk that seems to have acted as the focus of the solar cult. A queen acting in this way without the presence of the king is quite exceptional, but, for Nefertiti, this merely marked the beginning of a career of exceptions. Within a few years she had become the only Egyptian royal wife known to have been shown in the iconic pharaonic pose of smiting an enemy, and also – while still alive – the protectress of the dead. Under Akhenaten’s religious revolution, the traditional goddesses of the dead – Isis, Nephthys, Neith, and Selqet – had been abolished, and on the king’s sarcophagus their places are taken by images of Nefertiti in raised relief, embracing each of its four corners.