The Hereditary Princess, Great in Favour, Lady of Grace, Endowed with Gladness. The Aten rises to shed favour on her and sets to multiply her love. The great and beloved wife of the King, Mistress of South and North, Lady of the Two Lands Nefertiti, may she live for ever.1
For just over a decade Queen Nefertiti was the most influential woman in the ancient world. Standing proud beside her husband Akhenaten, Nefertiti was the envy of all; a beautiful, fertile woman blessed by the sun-god, adored by her six daughters and worshipped by her people. Her image and her name were celebrated throughout Egypt and her future seemed golden. Suddenly Nefertiti disappeared from the heart of the royal family. No record survives to detail her death, no monument serves to mark her passing, and to this day her end remains an enigma. Nefertiti’s body has never been recovered.
Soon after Nefertiti’s disappearance her husband’s unorthodox reign was erased from Egypt’s official record. With history successfully rewritten, king and queen were conveniently forgotten. It was as if Nefertiti and Akhenaten had never been. The decoding of the hieroglyphic script at the beginning of the nineteenth century restored Nefertiti’s name to scholars, but she remained a shadowy figure, merely one amongst the many faceless queens of Egypt. It was left to archaeology to return her to her unique position in Egyptian history. A succession of egyptologists excavating at the Middle Egyptian site of Amarna did much to reconstruct her story, but it was not until 1924, when a painted limestone bust was put on display in Berlin Museum, that the general public became aware of Nefertiti’s existence (plate 19). This was perfect timing. Western Europe, already experiencing a bout of Egypto-mania following the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen, immediately hailed Nefertiti as one of the most beautiful and fascinating women of all time.Ever since, this image of Nefertiti has stood alongside the death mask of Tutankhamen, the pyramids of Giza and the sphinx as a universally recognized symbol of Egypt’s history. Nefertiti now gazes out from a wide variety of tourist-orientated bric-à-brac. Anything which could feasibly be embellished with her head has been, and the hapless holidaymaker looking for a suitable souvenir is presented with a tempting display ranging from Nefertiti earrings to key-rings, postcards, playing cards, tea-towels, tablecloths and of course ‘ancient’ papyri. Even the carrier bags from Cairo airport’s duty-free shop display Nefertiti’s image, and many of the tourists carefully selecting their Nefertiti-enhanced T-shirts seem completely unaware that the original bust is actually housed almost two thousand miles away in Berlin.
Nefertiti lived during the late 18th Dynasty, an idyllic period of unprecedented luxury tinged with more than a hint of decadence. Egypt had always been a wealthy country blessed with abundant natural resources and a plentiful supply of water but now, with an empire stretching unchallenged from Nubia to Syria, tribute and gifts poured in until the royal coffers were full as they had never been before. The Egyptian court was the sophisticated centre of the civilized world, and everyone bowed down before its king. Scribes, artists and craftsmen, stimulated by this new internationalism and, of course, by increased funding, started to produce some of their finest work; this was the age of lyric love poetry, sensual sculpture and brightly painted tombs. At the same time monumental architecture flourished and massive stone temples dedicated to a variety of gods started to dominate the skylines of towns and cities up and down the Nile.
The New Kingdom élite decorated their tombs with images of the idyllic life that they fully expected to enjoy beyond death. Theirs was an afterlife heavily based on their earlier Egyptian experiences. Here we can see the deceased dressed in robes of finest white linen as they enjoy a leisurely sail on the river or dawdle in a field of gleaming corn. Evenings are times of feasting and fun, when vast amounts of food can be washed down with endless cups of wine while listening to an all-female orchestra or watching an exciting troupe of semi-naked dancers. Even allowing for a certain amount of wishful thinking, the Egyptian upper classes had never had it so good. The middle classes, benefiting from the necessary expansion of the state bureaucracy, flourished in a more muted manner, while the labourers employed on the royal building projects were kept busy as they had never been before. Meanwhile the peasant farmers, the vast majority of the population, remained largely untouched by Egypt’s new prosperity and continued to live the life led by their parents and grandparents before them.
The women of the 18th Dynasty enjoyed a freedom that made them unique in the ancient world. They had the same legal rights as men, and were permitted to own property, to work outside the home, and to live alone and raise their children without the protection of a male guardian. Nevertheless, few women received a formal education and, in a country where maybe between two and ten per cent of the population was literate, few women could read or write. Women were not expected to train for careers. They were expected to marry and produce children, and mothers enjoyed a position of great respect within the home and the wider community. Nefertiti was no exception. Born a non-royal member of Egypt’s élite, she was married as a young girl to the most enigmatic individual in Egyptian history. By the age of thirty Nefertiti had borne at least six children and had transformed herself into a semi-divine human being. Meanwhile her husband, Akhenaten, had instigated a religious revolution and founded a capital city.
Akhenaten dominates Nefertiti’s story making it impossible to entirely separate the two. I make no apology for including him as a major character throughout Nefertiti’s tale. It is through his eyes – his sculptures, his monuments, his city and the unique demands of his religion – that we are allowed to look at his queen. We see only what he sanctioned, only what he wanted us to see, and Akhenaten appears, directly or indirectly, in every chapter of Nefertiti’s life, subtly directing the way that we view his wife. Perhaps this is why so many writers have been keen to grant Nefertiti a life beyond the stifling confinement of Amarna, beyond her husband’s overwhelming influence.
Akhenaten, the so-called heretic king formerly known as Amenhotep IV, had either the courage or the folly to challenge a religious tradition that stretched back over one and a half thousand years to Egypt’s prehistoric past. Discarding many of the long-established gods, he replaced them with a single religious icon, the sun-disc or Aten. But who was Akhenaten? He has been famously described as: ‘not only the world’s first idealist and the world’s first individual, but also the earliest monotheist, and the first prophet of internationalism’.2 His religious convictions and distinctive, almost mystical, appearance have allowed him to evolve beyond death, carrying him far beyond the narrow world of Egyptian history into the realm of the occult. He now has his own mythology celebrated by a diverse band of modern-day disciples who range from the most scholarly of students of egyptology through those interested in wider issues of religion to those who have been described, with perhaps more accuracy than tact, as ‘cranks’. Akhenaten has inspired poets, artists, authors, composers, designers, theologians, Afrocentrists, psychotherapists and fascists. The history of his cultural life beyond death is now an academic subject in its own right.3
Nefertiti, too, has developed a cultural life beyond death. But unlike Akhenaten, who is respected/hated for his thoughts and beliefs, Nefertiti is celebrated worldwide first and foremost for her beauty. The Berlin bust shows us an aloof, remote being, seemingly attractive to every race, every generation and every gender of every age. It is a powerful, compelling, and curiously modern image which allows Nefertiti’s name and face to sell beauty products to women born three thousand years after her death. Nefertiti has joined that select band of beautiful, blessed women – typified by Princess Diana and Princess Grace of Monaco – whose perceived goodness masks the fact that they are real, thinking, flesh and blood women. It is hard to accept the sudden disappearance of these icons. This may explain why there are so many theories concerning Nefertiti’s final years, why so many archaeologists are intent on finding her body.
Akhenaten has generally been recognized as a more complex character. He, more than any other ancient Egyptian, has been interpreted via the cultural conditioning of his modern observers. Early egyptologists, many of whom came to their subject as committed Christians intent on expanding their knowledge of the Bible, generally respected Akhenaten as the inspired founder of a pre-Christian monotheistic religion. Today he is more widely regarded as an oddity whose ill-considered attempt to impose a comfortless religion on his people was always doomed to failure. His detractors have generally seen him as either an ineffectual intellectual or a blinkered zealot, while his admirers have variously recognized a pacifist theologian, the world’s first openly gay man (a charge also levied against him by his detractors), a brave king coping with a debilitating illness, or simply ‘one of the most attractive characters in Egyptian history’.4 Many have attempted to delve into Akhenaten’s psyche with perhaps the most devastating, and in my view inaccurate, analysis being suggested by Velikovsky, a great admirer of the work of Freud:
Were it possible for King Akhnaton (sic) to cross the time barrier and lie down on an analyst’s couch, the analysis would at an early stage reveal autistic or narcissistic traits, a homosexual tendency, with sadism suppressed and feminine traits coming to the fore, and a strong unsuppressed Oedipus complex.5
In a remarkable flouting of centuries of tradition Akhenaten allowed Nefertiti to play a major role in his new religion. The queen was now to be regarded as the female element of the new state god, and as such was permitted to perform rituals hitherto restricted to the king. The late 17th and earlier 18th Dynasties had already yielded a series of powerful queen regents and queen consorts, with Tiy, wife of Amenhotep III and mother of Akhenaten, one of the most prominent. Tiy, conspicuously featured in many inscriptions and statues, abandoned traditional queenly reticence and stood alongside rather than behind her husband, providing the female complement to his kingly role. Weigall was not the only historian to believe that Tiy was effectively the power behind two thrones, not only ruling on behalf of her lazy, effeminate husband, but exerting a strong, almost unwholesome, influence over her young son:
… there is every reason to suppose that queen Tiy possessed the ability to impress the claims of new thought upon her husband’s mind, and gradually to turn his eyes, and those of the court, away from the sombre worship of Amon (sic) into the direction of the brilliant cult of the sun… By the time that Amenophis III had reigned for thirty years or so, he had ceased to give much attention to state affairs, and the power had almost entirely passed into the capable hands of Tiy.6
Mother was therefore to be blamed, or praised, for Akhenaten’s all-consuming absorption in the sun-cult. Freud, neatly classifying Akhenaten as one of the earliest examples of the Oedipus complex, very much enjoyed Weigall’s writings. Weigall was, however, drawing his conclusions at a time when the archaeological record was profoundly biased. Many of Tiy’s monuments were known but few of Nefertiti’s had yet been recovered or identified. This selective recovery naturally led to the distortion of each woman’s relative importance so that Tiy was for a long time assumed to be the dominant queen – indeed almost the dominant royal – of the Amarna epoch. Tiy therefore overshadows Nefertiti in almost all early accounts of Akhenaten’s reign, and Janet Buttles when writing the history of the Queens of Egypt in 1908 was only able to accord Nefertiti a meagre six pages.7 More recent restoration work at Karnak and Amarna has done much to redress this imbalance of evidence, and today the relative importance of the two can be more accurately assessed, as can the long-overlooked influence of Amenhotep III in his son’s life. Although the assumption that Tiy was pharaoh in all but name must now be discarded and there is no evidence at all to indicate that she was the mastermind behind Akhenaten’s religious reforms, it cannot be denied that Tiy set a useful precedent. By the time Nefertiti became queen the active consort was an accepted phenomenon and it was natural for Akhenaten and Nefertiti to develop this role one step further.
The distortion of the archaeological record in respect of the relative importance of Tiy and Nefertiti is a sobering reminder of the problems that can beset an author attempting to reconstruct the life of a person who lived over three thousand years ago. Our knowledge of all dynastic Egyptians has to be gleaned from a random assortment of archaeological remains supplemented by a small collection of historical documents plus a great deal of religious and mortuary art and architecture. The Amarna period in particular has suffered from ancient and modern vandalism, and from a deliberate attempt to erase all memory of Akhenaten and Nefertiti from Egypt’s history. The evidence that remains is in many respects infuriatingly vague. We simply do not have the information to write the definitive ‘warts and all’ biography which we have come to expect of more modern subjects. Anyone who claims to be able to reveal the true story of the Amarna age is wrong. Every aspect of Nefertiti’s life has to be pieced together from meagre shreds of evidence which are often capable of a variety of interpretations, while there is at all times the possibility that a single archaeological find may overturn decades of scholarly reasoning. Egyptologists have argued long and hard, and indeed are still arguing, over many aspects of Nefertiti’s queenship. As a result, Nefertiti’s story has evolved into a fascinating tale of archaeological detection, and her life has become inextricably entangled with the thoughts and deeds of those who have sought to re-discover her.
The New Kingdom Egyptians, always highly practical, built their temples and tombs of stone or cut them into living rock so that they might last for ever. Meanwhile palaces, towns and villages were built of mud-brick, a plentiful and inexpensive material eminently suited to the climate. The ease with which pharaohs were able to raise and occupy new palaces and, indeed, entire cities (Akhenaten at Amarna, Ramesses II at Pi-Ramesses to give just two examples) never ceases to amaze observers accustomed to modern building procedures. But the elaborately decorated palaces, plastered, painted and tiled so that they sparkled in the ever-present sunlight, were temporary structures, doomed in some cases to last for less than one reign. Almost all the domestic sites of Egypt have now crumbled away and many have been flattened and built over so that they lie under many centuries of domestic architecture. Others have been ruthlessly pillaged by local peasants seeking sebakh, a highly fertile soil formed by the decomposed mud-brick.
We are therefore extremely lucky to have two relatively well-preserved sites surviving from the reign of Akhenaten and his father Amenhotep III. The Malkata Palace, an extensive and rambling complex of buildings situated on the west bank of the River Nile at Thebes, was occupied by both father and son and, although now reduced to the level of a ground-plan, has proved a mine of information for archaeologists. Of even greater importance is Akhenaten’s new city of Akhetaten – now known as Amarna – which was built, occupied and abandoned all within the space of thirty years and which in consequence is able to provide us with a snapshot of late 18th Dynasty daily life. Amarna can never be regarded as a typical Egyptian city, but is of crucial importance to those studying events during Akhenaten’s reign.
Amarna was deserted a short time after the death of Akhenaten when the court returned to Thebes. Soon after, the persecution of Akhenaten’s memory began. In a determined attempt to remove all trace of the heretic and his religion from the historical record monuments were dismantled, Akhenaten’s image was defaced and his name was removed from the list of kings of Egypt. Nefertiti, as both queen and co-worshipper, suffered a similar fate. It is therefore ironic that, in spite of this deliberate vandalism, the atypical Akhenaten is now one of the most famous kings of Egypt while Nefertiti’s name is recognized by millions. The excavation of the Amarna studio of the sculptor Tuthmosis has yielded some breathtaking pieces abandoned in the move to Thebes, including the famous Berlin bust of Nefertiti, and the women of Amarna are now far better known to us than the women of any other dynastic court. We may have no contemporary unbiased description of the queen and her actions, but we have more engravings and sculptures of Nefertiti than of any other Egyptian queen.
One Amarna treasure, however, was never properly excavated. In 1887 a peasant woman digging for sebakh at Amarna stumbled across hundreds of sun-dried clay tablets inscribed with odd signs. Her attempts to sell the tablets were frustrated by the ‘experts’ who declared them to be forgeries. By the time they were recognized as genuine antiquities, fewer than four hundred tablets and fragments remained. We now know that the tablets, inscribed in cuneiform and written in the language of ancient Babylon, are the remains of the correspondence between Egypt and her neighbours and vassals in the Near East. Most of the letters are addressed to the king of Egypt, but a few represent copies of his responses. The collection is both incomplete and presents difficulties of translation, with many of the letters being undated and therefore difficult to sort into chronological order. Nevertheless, the so-called Amarna Letters have provided scholars with tantalizing glimpses of New Kingdom diplomacy, and of the characters who ruled the great Bronze Age states of the Near East.
Throughout this book I have avoided the use of calendar dates, preferring to use dynasties and regnal years to pinpoint specific events. The Egyptians themselves dated events by reference to the reign of the current king, and this dating of necessity started afresh with every new monarch. Thus we have a hieratic docket from Amarna which, originally dated to Year 17 – the final year of Akhenaten’s rule – was, on the death of the king, re-labelled to Year 1 of his successor’s reign. By modern convention the various reigns are grouped into families or dynasties, and further sub-divided into successive ‘Kingdoms’ and ‘Intermediate Periods’. Akhenaten’s rule therefore belongs to the latter part of the 18th Dynasty, which is itself a part of the New Kingdom. In order to keep track of their country’s history the ancient scribes were forced to maintain lengthy lists of successive kings and their reign lengths. The accuracy of these lists was distorted by inadvertent errors, by co-regencies and by the deliberate omission of kings such as Akhenaten who were excluded because of their unacceptable behaviour. Although several king lists have survived it has not proved possible to tie them in exactly with our modern dating system so that precise calendar dates for Akhenaten’s rule are a matter of some debate, although he is most likely to have reigned for seventeen years from approximately 1353 to 1336 BC (BC being the direct equivalent of the more modern ΒCE).
Hieroglyphs preserve only the consonants within Egyptian words. As we are lacking all vowels, it is often impossible to decide the original pronunciation of a particular word and, because of this, Egyptian names may be found with many different modern spellings. The personal names used in this book have all been chosen to reflect the names most familiar to modern readers, although any errors of translation have been corrected. Thus Nefertiti remains Nefertiti throughout, even though for many years she was more formally known as Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti. Her husband started his reign as Amenhotep IV and then changed his name to Akhenaten; to avoid confusion I refer to him as Amenhotep in Chapters 1 and 2, Akhenaten thereafter. Queen Tiy, and the Lady Tey wife of Ay, shared a name. However I have used variant spellings to differentiate between the two women. Akhenaten’s capital city, Akhetaten, is consistently referred to as Amarna even though this is an entirely modern, made-up name, a contraction of Tell-Amarna which is itself derived from the nearby villages of el-Till and Beni Amran. Amarna is not in fact an archaeological tell (a high mound formed by the compacted remains of mud-brick buildings). It is a flat site with relatively little stratigraphy. Akhenaten would never have referred to himself as a pharaoh as this is a modern metonymy derived from the Egyptian term per a’a (literally ‘great house’). However I use the words king and pharaoh interchangeably in order to avoid stylistic monotony. These inconsistencies seem to me to be justified on the grounds of clarity; I can only apologize if they offend any egyptological purists.