PENGUIN BOOKS

NEFERTITI

Joyce Ann Tyldesley was born in Bolton, Lancashire. She gained a

rst-class honours degree in archaeology from Liverpool University
in 1981 and a doctorate from Oxford University in 1986. She is now
Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics
and Oriental Studies at Liverpool University, and a freelance writer
and lecturer on Egyptian archaeology. Her previous books include
Daughters of Isis, Hatchepsut, Ramesses, The Private Lives of the
Pharaohs, Egypt’s Golden Empire, Judgement of the Pharaoh, The
Mummy, Pyramids and Tales from Ancient Egypt.
 NEFERTITI
EGYPT’S SUN QUEEN

JOYCE TYLDESLEY

Revised edition

PENGUIN BOOKS
 PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in Viking 1998

Published in Penguin Books 2003
This edition with revisions published in Penguin Books 2005
5

Copyright © Joyce Tyldesley, 1998, 2005

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it
shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
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imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-194979-6
 For Frank and Su,
who in the past eight years
have been joined by
Louisa and Phoebe.
 Contents

List of Plates
List of Figures
Map and Chronologies
Acknowledgements
Preface

Introduction
1 The Imperial Family
2 A Beautiful Woman Has Come
3 The Aten Dazzles
4 Images of Amarna
5 Horizon of the Aten
6 Queen, King or Goddess?
7 Sunset
Epilogue The Beautiful Woman Returns

Notes
Further Reading
Index
 Plates
1 Statue of Amenhotep III with the god Sobek (Luxor Museum,
Luxor)
2 The Colossi of Memnon at Thebes
3 Wooden head of Queen Tiy (Egyptian Museum, Berlin)
4 Stela depicting Amenhotep III in old age, with Tiy (© British
Museum, London)
5 Gold mummy mask of Yuya, father of Tiy (National Museum,
Cairo)
6 Head of the mummy of Yuya (National Museum, Cairo)
7 Gold mummy mask of Thuyu, mother of Tiy (National Museum,
Cairo)
8 Head of the mummy of Thuyu (National Museum, Cairo)
9 A colossal statue of Akhenaten (National Museum, Cairo)
10 An asexual colossus of Akhenaten/Nefertiti (National Museum,
Cairo)
11 Relief depicting Akhenaten (Egyptian Museum, Berlin)
12 Sandstone portrait of Nefertiti (1380–1375 BC. 26.7 × 28 cm ©
The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1998. Purchase from the J H
Wade Fund, 1959.118)
13 Relief depicting the family of Akhenaten o ering to the Aten
(National Museum, Cairo)
14 Quartzite head of Nefertiti (Egyptian Museum, Berlin)
15 Relief showing Ay and Tey receiving royal gold (National
Museum, Cairo)
16 Stela showing Akhenaten and Nefertiti with their family
(Egyptian Museum, Berlin)
17 Statuette of Nefertiti in old age (Egyptian Museum, Berlin)
18 Painted relief depicting Smenkhkare and Meritaten (Egyptian
Museum, Berlin)
19 The most widely recognized image of Nefertiti (from an exact
replica of the Berlin head reproduced on the cover, in Bolton
Museum & Art Gallery, Bolton)

Photographic Acknowledgements

AKG London: 9, 13
Author collection: 19
Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: 3, 14, 16, 17
British Museum, London: 4
Bulloz, Paris: 15
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio: 12
C M Dixon, Canterbury: 1, 11
E T Archive, London: 5, 7
Giraudon, Paris: 2
National Museum, Cairo: 6, 8, 10
Werner Forman Archive, London: 18
 Figures

Chapter 1
1.1 The royal names of Amenhotep III
1.2 The royal names of Amenhotep IV

Chapter 2
2.1 Mutnodjmet and her nieces (From Davies, N. de G. (1908), The
Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 6, London: Plate IV)
2.2 The Window of Appearance: Theban tomb of Ramose (From
Davies, N. de G. (1941), The Tomb of the Vizier Ramose, London:
Plate XXXIII)
2.3 The Window of Appearance: Amarna tomb of Ay (From Davies,
N. de G. (1908), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 6, London:
Plate XXIX)
2.4 Nefertiti and Meritaten in the Hwt-Benben (After Redford, D. B.
(1984), Akhenaten: the heretic king, Princeton: Fig. 6)
2.5 Nefertiti smiting a female enemy, scene on the royal boat
2.6 The cartouche of Nefertiti
2.7 The royal names of Akhenaten

Chapter 3
3.1 The god Amen
3.2 The god Re-Harakhty
3.3 Worshipping in the temple (From Davies, N. de G. (1903), The
Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 1, London: Plate XIII)
3.4 The old names of the Aten
3.5 The royal family worship the Aten (From Davies, N. de G.
(1906), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 4, London: Plate
XXXI)
3.6 The new names of the Aten

Chapter 4
4.1 Nefertiti’s trademark blue crown and imsy linen robe
4.2 Nefertiti, early Amarna style, in Nubian wig (After a Karnak
talatat block)
4.3 Nefertiti pours liquid for Akhenaten (From Davies, N. de G.
(1905), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 2, London: Plate
XXXII)

Chapter 5
5.1 Map of Amarna
5.2 Boundary stela S (From Davies, N. de G. (1908), The Rock Tombs
of el-Amarna, vol. 5, London: Plate XXVI)
5.3 A royal chariot ride (From Davies, N. de G. (1906), The Rock
Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 4, London: Plate XXII)
5.4 The royal harem (From Davies, N. de G. (1908), The Rock Tombs
of el-Amarna, vol. 6, London: Plate XXVIII)
5.5 Kiya (After Cooney, J. D. (1965), Amarna Reliefs from
Hermopolis, Brooklyn: Plate 18b)
5.6 The families of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten (From Davies, N.
de G. (1905), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 3, London: Plate
XVIII)
5.7 Nefertiti and Akhenaten entertain Tiy (From Davies, N. de G.
(1905), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 3, London: Plate VI)

Chapter 6
6.1 Nefertiti and Akhenaten wearing the atef crown (From Davies,
N. de G. (1905), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 2, London:
Plate VIII)

Chapter 7
7.1 Nefertiti, Akhenaten and family at the Year 12 celebrations
(From Davies, N. de G. (1905), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna,
vol. 2, London: Plate XXXVIII)
7.2 The death of Kiya (From Bouriant, U., Legrain, G. and Jéquier,
G. (1903), Monuments pour servir à l’étude du Culte d’Atonou en
Egypte I, Cairo: Plate 6)
7.3 The death of Meketaten (From Bouriant, U., Legrain G. and
Jéquier, G. (1903), Monuments pour servir à l’étude du Culte
d’Atonou en Egypte I, Cairo: Plate 7)
7.4 Meketaten in her bower (From Bouriant, U., Legrain, G. and
Jéquier, G. (1903), Monuments pour servir à l’étude du Culte
d’Atonou en Egypte I, Cairo: Plate 10)

Epilogue
8.1 The workshop of the sculptor Iuty (From Davies, N. de G.
(1905), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 3, London: Plate
XVIII)
 Map and Chronologies

Map of Egypt
Chronologies
The Amarna Royal Family
Historical Events
The Amarna Royal Family
 Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to all those involved in the

writing of this book. Thanks are due to Eleo Gordon and Sheila
Watson who gave practical advice whenever needed, to Professor
Elizabeth Slater for use of the facilities of the Department of
Archaeology, Liverpool University, and to the members of the
Liverpool University S.E.S. photography department. The wonderful
line drawings of Norman de Garis Davies are here reproduced by
kind permission of the Egypt Exploration Society. Joyce Filer
provided invaluable help with the identi cation of the bones from
KV 55. Finally I must thank my husband, Steven Snape, and my
children, Philippa and Jack.
 Preface

In 1997 I wrote a book telling the story of Nefertiti’s life. A year

later that book was published as Nefertiti: Egypt’s Sun Queen. Not
exactly a biography – we lack too many of the major details and all
of the minutiae and trivia of daily life to be able to write a full and
unbiased history of any character from ancient Egypt – the book
nevertheless included all the known archaeological and textual
evidence concerning the life and death of Egypt’s most famous
queen.
Egyptology books can quickly become dated. Since my original
book was published there has been a steady stream of scholarly
publications concerning Nefertiti and her husband, the unorthodox
pharaoh Akhenaten, plus a urry of more speculative books, each
claiming to reveal their own particular ‘truth’ about Nefertiti. In
addition, there have been important developments in the eld of
mummy studies. While our understanding of Nefertiti’s life remains
fundamentally unchanged, our understanding of her death, or rather
the treatment of her body beyond death, has been challenged by
recent re-discoveries in the Valley of the Kings. The Amarna period,
never simple, has grown alarmingly complex. We now have, in KV
55, a once-female mummy de nitely reclassi ed as a young royal
male, while in nearby KV 35 there rests a once-male mummy
reclassi ed as a female – and a queen of Egypt, too – who may
perhaps be male after all.
The intervening seven years – seven years of reading and of
discussions with colleagues, students and friends – have also
brought changes in my own understanding of the complexities of
the Amarna age, and in particular the complexities of Amarna art.
This therefore seems a good time to revise my original book. To
eliminate the few factual errors and emotive assumptions that crept
into the original text, to delete some of the endnotes which are not
strictly necessary to my argument and which seem to annoy some
readers, to revise the bibliography, and to expand chapters six and
seven to take account of recent eldwork. I have taken a fresh look
at all the evidence for the life and times of Nefertiti, and have built
on this to provide my own explanation of events at the end of the
Amarna age.
 Introduction

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 in uential
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 o cial 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
gure, 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 co ers 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
nest work; this was the age of lyric love poetry, sensual sculpture
and brightly painted tombs. At the same time monumental
architecture ourished 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 nest white linen
as they enjoy a leisurely sail on the river or dawdle in a eld 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, bene ting from the necessary expansion
of the state bureaucracy, ourished 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
sti ing con nement of Amarna, beyond her husband’s
overwhelming in uence.
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 rst idealist and the world’s rst
individual, but also the earliest monotheist, and the rst 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 rst 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 – typi ed by Princess Diana
and Princess Grace of Monaco – whose perceived goodness masks
the fact that they are real, thinking, esh 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 nal
years, why so many archaeologists are intent on nding 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 ine ectual
intellectual or a blinkered zealot, while his admirers have variously
recognized a paci st theologian, the world’s rst 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 outing 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 e ectively the power behind two thrones, not
only ruling on behalf of her lazy, e eminate husband, but exerting a
strong, almost unwholesome, in uence 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 a airs, 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 identi ed. 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 in uence 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 su ered 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 de nitive ‘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
nd 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 attened 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, su ered 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 di culties of translation, with many
of the letters being undated and therefore di cult 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 speci c
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 nal 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 di erent modern
spellings. The personal names used in this book have all been
chosen to re ect 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 di erentiate 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 at 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 justi ed on the grounds of clarity; I
can only apologize if they o end any egyptological purists.
 1
The Imperial Family

Words to be spoken by Amen, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands in front of her
majesty… ‘Amenhotep III, ruler of Thebes, is the name of this child whom I have planted in
your womb… His shall be an excellent kingship throughout the entire land. My soul is his,
my honour is his, my crown is his. It is he who shall rule the Two Lands like Re for ever.’1

Once upon a time, a long time ago in a far-away land, the king of
the gods, Amen-Re, fell in love with a fair maiden who dwelt in the
southern Egyptian city of Thebes. Thoth, his ibis-headed messenger,
was dispatched to Egypt where he discovered that the maiden,
Mutemwia, was indeed fair, easily the most beautiful woman in the
land, but that she was a married lady, a wife of King Tuthmosis IV.
Amen-Re found himself haunted by thoughts of Mutemwia’s charms.
He very much wanted to sleep with her, but knew that she would
always be faithful to her husband. So Amen-Re hatched a cunning
plan to seduce his beloved, and to make her the mother of his child.
When night fell, the great god disguised himself as Tuthmosis and
crept into the bedchamber where Mutemwia lay dreaming:
There he found her as she slept in the innermost part of her palace. His divine fragrance
awoke her. Amen went to her immediately, he lusted after her. When he had appeared
before her he allowed her to see him in the form of a god; the sight of his beauty made her
rejoice. Amen’s love entered her body, and the palace was lled with the fragrance of the
god, as sweet as the scents from Punt…2

Nine months later Mutemwia bore a son whom Amen-Re decreed

should be named Amenhotep after her husband’s father. That son
was destined to become Nebmaatre Amenhotep III, Ruler of Thebes,
the Good God, Lord of the Two Lands, Son of Re, Lord of
Appearances, and Beloved of Amen.
Amenhotep III acceded to the throne of the world’s only
acknowledged superpower in his early teens, his father, Tuthmosis
IV, having ruled for only nine years. During his brief reign
Tuthmosis had raised an obelisk at the Karnak Temple, campaigned
successfully in Nubia and established good diplomatic relations with
the Syrian kingdom of Mitanni by marrying the daughter of King
Artatama I. His main claim to fame was, however, that he had
instigated the world’s rst rescue archaeology by freeing the great
sphinx at Giza from the sand which threatened to overwhelm it
completely. A stela set between the paws of the sphinx tells us how,
as a young prince hunting in the Giza desert, Tuthmosis had fallen
asleep in the shadow of the monument. The sun god, Re-Harakhty,
had spoken to him in a dream and had asked that the sphinx be
saved from his sandy grave.3 As a reward, the grateful god granted
Tuthmosis the throne of Egypt, even though he was only a younger
son of Amenhotep II. The body of Tuthmosis IV, now housed in
Cairo Museum, shows that the king died an emaciated young man
whose long, narrow face was, in the opinion of the anatomist G.
Elliot Smith, ‘very e eminate [in] appearance’.4
Thanks to the military expertise and administrative skills of his
18th Dynasty forebears who had ruled Egypt for almost 200 years,
the young

Fig. 1.1 The royal names of Amenhotep III

Amenhotep III inherited an empire whose borders stretched from
the fourth Nile cataract in Nubia to northern Syria, and whose
sphere of in uence extended much further a eld. Following
Egyptian tradition the widowed Mutemwia ruled as regent during
the rst few years of her young son’s reign, and under her guidance
Amenhotep grew into the archetypal New Kingdom monarch,
healthy, vigorous and brave. His courage in the hunting eld was
unprecedented; by his own account he shot 102 savage lions in the
rst ten years of his reign, while in a single day’s hunting in the
Faiyum he killed no fewer than fty-six wild bulls. His bravery on
the eld of battle was less easy to prove. The well-trained Egyptian
army was second to none in the ancient world, and a severe
shortage of enemies willing to face inevitable defeat made it
virtually impossible for Amenhotep to enjoy the sort of victorious
campaign which had enhanced the reputations of earlier 18th
Dynasty kings. This di culty was eventually overcome by elevating
a minor Nubian scu e in Year 5 into the status of a full-blown war.
Amenhotep’s victory against the vile Ibhat, which yielded a meagre
740 living captives and 312 hands cut from the bodies of the dead,
was commemorated by a series of stelae erected at strategic points
in Nubia, while monumental carvings along Egypt’s southern border
at Aswan showed Amenhotep in the traditional role of pharaoh as
defender of Egypt, smiting his enemies in the presence of the gods.
The predictable behaviour of the River Nile made Amenhotep’s
own country the most prosperous and fertile in the ancient world.
The annual inundation, or ooding, ensured that the Egyptian
farmers could, with relatively little e ort, grow crops which were
the envy of their neighbours and, while the agricultural land was
under water, provided a vast labour force available for work on
state projects. If the Nile failed to ood, or if the waters rose too
high, there could be grave problems, but Amenhotep was truly
blessed by Amen, and the Nile behaved impeccably throughout his
lengthy reign. Grain was grown in vast quantities; it was used to pay
the wages and to make the bread and beer which were staples of the
Egyptian diet, while any surplus was stored in vast warehouses to
provide against future lean times. Amenhotep’s highly e cient civil
service, which included a band of tax collectors who visited the
primary producers on a regular basis to extract payment in kind,
ensured that the warehouses were constantly topped-up.
Life was good for those who dwelt along the Nile. A wide range of
vegetables, fruit, sh, fowl, small game and meat was available to
supplement the basic diet of bread and beer. The thick Nile mud,
sun-dried into bricks, made an excellent and very cheap building
material, while both limestone and sandstone were available for the
more permanent construction of temples and tombs. Flax was grown
to spin into linen cloth, papyrus was grown for paper, and the
deserts which bounded the Nile Valley were exploited for their
precious metals and minerals which included gold, turquoise,
amethyst and jasper. Only good quality timber was missing; this had
to be imported from Lebanon. This superabundance of natural
bounty had been boosted during the earlier part of the 18th Dynasty
by the booty brought back from successful foreign campaigns. As
the Egyptian empire grew, the royal co ers were further
supplemented by the taxes and tribute extracted from Asian and
African vassals eager to remain on good terms with their overlord.
Egypt now held control over Nubia’s mineral riches, and a steady
stream of gold owed into the treasury. At the same time there was
an expansion in merchant shipping and an increase in foreign trade
which was accompanied by an in ux of exotic visitors who
introduced new ideas and new skills so that Aegean, Asian and
African in uences started to creep into the hitherto rather insular
Egyptian arts and crafts. Egypt was now truly cosmopolitan in a way
that she had never been before.
Exaggerated rumours of Amenhotep’s fabulous wealth spread
throughout the Near East. His brother kings were envious and not
too proud to try to divert some of that wealth towards themselves. A
surprisingly large part of the surviving 18th Dynasty diplomatic
correspondence is concerned with lists of valuable goods exchanged
between kings, and there was a great deal of childish bickering over
the relative values of presents expected, requested, received and
sent. Tushratta of Mitanni, newly ascended to his throne, was
certainly not too embarrassed to ask point-blank for a generous
allocation of gold:
May my brother treat me ten times better than he did my father… May my brother send
me in very great quantities gold that has not been worked, and may my brother send me
much more gold than he sent to my father. For in my brother’s country gold is as plentiful
as dirt.5

Tushratta’s letter was accompanied by a greeting gift which,

although lacking the ‘very great quantities of gold’ which were so
desirable, nevertheless included one inlaid golden goblet, twenty
pieces of lapis lazuli, ten teams of horses, ten chariots and thirty
men and women.
Egypt’s New Kingdom population of approximately 4 million
bene ted from the strong economy. As the king grew ever richer he
was able to pass his wealth downwards by creating employment for
vast numbers of labourers and craftsmen. The civil service and the
army had developed into e cient professional units; bureaucrats
and soldiers were now rewarded for acts of outstanding loyalty or
bravery by a gift of gold presented at a special ceremony by the
grateful king. The priesthood of Amen-Re, already in receipt of a
good income from its numerous assets supplemented by generous
o erings from the royal palace, was now entitled to a large share of
all foreign tribute, and the enormous temple storehouses were
slowly lling. The new-found a uence of the Egyptian élite was
re ected in the fashions of the day, which rejected the pure lines of
the classic linen sheath dresses, kilts and tunics popular during the
Old and Middle Kingdoms in favour of more frivolous garments;
voluminous pleated, folded and fringed clothes were worn with full
make-up, an array of semi-precious jewellery, earrings – a new
fashion for men and women – and long, heavy wigs. The brightly
painted tombs of the nobles on the west bank at Thebes suggest a
relaxed hunting, shing and banqueting lifestyle which makes the
more muted Old and Middle Kingdom scenes appear positively
austere.
 Amenhotep, o cially head of the army, the priesthood and the
civil service, relied heavily upon the small core of bureaucrats who
ran the country on his behalf. Included in his cabinet were men of
high birth, born to inherit their fathers’ positions, who had been
raised alongside the king in the royal school, and men of more
humble origin who had, by their exceptional intelligence and
ability, earned promotion to the most in uential positions in the
land. Amenhotep gathered around him some of the nest
administrators in his country’s history, and Egypt’s prosperity
throughout his reign bears witness to their success. Most famous of
all his bureaucrats was Amenhotep son of Hapu, a relatively humble
man from the Delta town of Athribis who rose to become ‘Scribe of
Recruits’ and ‘Overseer of All Works of the King’, and who was the
mastermind behind the tasteful elegance of many of Amenhotep’s
Theban monuments. Amenhotep son of Hapu was richly rewarded
for his services; he was allowed to place his own statues in the
temples of Amen and Mut at Karnak and was eventually given the
unprecedented honour of a splendid mortuary temple close to that
of his master on the west bank at Thebes. For many years after his
death Amenhotep son of Hapu was revered as a wise man and
worshipped as a demi-god at the Theban site of Deir el-Bahri. His
cult continued until the Graeco-Roman period.
Freedom from expensive and time-consuming foreign campaigns
allowed Amenhotep and his ministers to turn their attention
inwards, towards the improvement of their own land. Making full
use of the vast wealth and surplus labour at his disposal, and
deploying some of the best architects and craftsmen which Egypt
was ever to produce, Amenhotep instigated a building programme
for the glori cation of Egypt’s gods and, of course, the
commemoration of his own name. Construction started on an
unprecedented scale up and down the Nile as insigni cant mud-
brick chapels were demolished to be replaced by impressive stone
temples dedicated to an array of local gods. Heliopolis (temple of
Horus), Sakkara (the Serapeum), Hermopolis (temple of Thoth) and
Elephantine (temple of Khnum) were among those regional centres
which bene ted from the king’s generosity. Nubia received more
than her fair share of new monuments, while at the northern capital
of Memphis the ‘Castle of Nebmaatre’, a temple dedicated jointly to
the god Ptah and to Amenhotep himself, dazzled all who saw it.
At Thebes the Karnak complex, home of the state god Amen-Re
and his family, saw building works at the temples of Mut and
Montu. The beautiful White Chapel of Senwosret I, now demolished,
was used as lling inside a magni cent decorated pylon or gateway
which Amenhotep built to face the river, while a smaller
undecorated pylon anked by two colossal statues of the king was
constructed on the south side of the temple of Amen. Gazing from
an elegant plinth over the sacred lake, an outsized stone scarab-
beetle observed the aquatic processions of the god and his
entourage. All these monuments, erected with surprising speed
given that Amenhotep’s architects and builders were working
without the modern bene ts of steam power and the combustion
engine, were well designed and well built, each lavishly decorated
by master-craftsmen using the nest materials that the treasury
could supply. Amenhotep himself tells us that his temple of Montu
combined every type of noble and precious metal; the principal
materials used included vast amounts of electrum (a mixture of
silver and gold), gold, bronze and copper, augmented with lapis
lazuli and turquoise.
Three kilometres to the south of Karnak stood the hitherto rather
shabby Luxor Temple, a shrine dedicated jointly to Amen, to the
ithyphallic god Min and to the celebration of the divine royal soul
or Ka. Amenhotep rebuilt Luxor as a sandstone palace t for the
gods, so that it formed a suitable theatre for the annual Opet
Festival, a lengthy celebration during which the king’s own identity
would e ectively merge with that of Amen. This connection with
the divine soul made Luxor an eminently suitable place for
Amenhotep to tell the story of his divine conception as the son of
Mutemwia and Amen-Re, a story-line which he had copied
wholesale from the walls of King Hatchepsut’s mortuary temple at
nearby Deir el-Bahri.
 The new Luxor Temple was linked to the Karnak Temple by an
avenue of sphinxes, which allowed the gods to travel in public
splendour between their various homes. Amenhotep was
particularly fond of public processions, and he covered Thebes with
a network of sacred routes connecting all the major east and west
bank temple sites. On festival days the whole city celebrated as the
gods emerged from the darkness of their shrines to sail along the
processional avenues in their sacred boats carried high on the
shoulders of their priests, accompanied by an entourage of soldiers,
musicians, acrobats and dancers. The proper enjoyment of festivals
was taken very seriously. At the west bank village of Deir el-Medina
the workmen were given o cial leave from their labours in the
Valley of the Kings in order to brew festival beer, while those
a icted with severe post-festival hangovers were allowed further
time o work to recover.
On the west bank at Thebes Amenhotep built himself an immense
mortuary temple of unprecedented luxury, recording its splendours
on a stela housed within the temple itself:
A fortress made out of ne white sandstone, wrought entirely with gold, its oors
decorated with silver and all of its doors decorated with electrum… Its lake was lled by
the high Nile, possessor of sh and ducks, and brightened with baskets of owers. Its
workshops were lled with male and female servants…6

The temple functioned during the king’s lifetime as a temple of

Amen. After his death it would become more specialized, dedicated
to servicing the cult of the dead king for all eternity.
Unfortunately, the mortuary temple intended to last for ever did
not survive the vandalism of later pharaohs, most notably the 19th
Dynasty King Merenptah, who demolished it in order to re-use its
stone in their own buildings. However, the two seated quartzite
statues of the king, each measuring 21.3m from pedestal to crown,
which had originally anked the temple entrance, remained
untouched. There they still stand, isolated and battered but
unbowed, beside the modern tourist road which leads to the west
bank ferries. During the Graeco-Roman period these gures became
known as the Colossi of Memnon, a corruption of Amenhotep’s
throne name, Nebmaatre, into the name of the legendary Ethiopian
hero who had been killed by the Greek Achilles at Troy. Visitors to
Thebes were taught that Memnon himself was buried at the feet of
the northern monument, and when every morning an eerie moaning
sound was heard to emanate from this gure, the noise was
understood to be Memnon greeting his mother Eos (Aurora),
goddess of the dawn. In fact the noise was the result of structural
damage caused by an earthquake; its exact cause is not known and
various theories have been suggested including the evaporation of
night-time moisture from within the statue, wind whistling through
the ssures in the gure, or the expansion of the stone warmed by
the morning sun. When the Roman emperor Septimus Severus
restored the monument, Memnon was heard to cry no more.
Every Egyptian king needed a queen to complete his role and
supply the next heir to the throne. The divine triad of Osiris, Isis and
Horus set the pattern for the ideal royal family and, just as Egypt
could not function without a king, the king who took the role of
Osiris could never be complete without his wife (Isis) and the son
who would eventually replace him (Horus). Amenhotep III had
inherited his father’s harem and was not short of female
companions, but he needed an o cial consort. He was therefore
married within two years of his assumption to a young lady named
Tiy, and Tiy, at twelve or thirteen years of age, became queen of the
most powerful country in the world.7
… King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Nebmaatre, son of Re, Amenhotep ruler of Thebes,
given life, and the king’s principal wife Tiy, may she live. The name of her father is Yuya
and the name of her mother is Thuyu; she is the wife of a mighty king…8

During the rst eleven years of his reign Amenhotep ‘published’ a

series of large scarabs inscribed with several lines of text
commemorating important events. These scarabs, issued in the same
way that a contemporary monarch might issue a commemorative
medal or coin, were distributed throughout Egypt and sent abroad
to impress his fellow kings. The undated scarab issued to publicize
the royal marriage makes it clear that Tiy was the daughter of a
non-royal couple named Yuya and Thuyu who hailed from the
prosperous town of Akhmim on the east bank of the Nile, opposite
the modern town of Sohag. That an 18th Dynasty king should select
a queen who was not already a high-ranking member of the royal
family was curious but certainly not unprecedented. Marriage with a
close relative may have had many advantages but it was not
compulsory and, although many kings chose to marry a full or half-
sister, Tuthmosis III and Amenhotep II had both selected non-royal
women as their principal wives. Amenhotep’s own mother,
Mutemwia, although she used the non-speci c title of ‘Heiress’,
never claimed to be the daughter of a king.
Amenhotep seems to have intended his marriage scarab to make
an unusual situation clear to his people; to con rm that Tiy,
although of relatively humble extraction, was not to be classed as a
minor wife or a concubine. She was his consort, the queen of a great
empire, and it was her son who would one day inherit the throne of
Egypt. In fact Tiy was of humble birth only when compared to her
exalted in-laws. Yuya and Thuyu were certainly not the ‘Egyptians
of mediocre, if not of low, extraction’ identi ed by Gaston Maspero
and others;9 they were members of the wealthy and educated élite
who e ectively formed non-royal dynasties parallel to the royal
dynasty, handing positions of trust and power from father to son.
Such families were often linked by marriage both to each other and
to the royal family, and it is possible that Yuya was already related
to the young king, perhaps as the brother of Mutemwia. Yuya, a
former army o cer, held several important posts including
‘Overseer of the King’s Horses’ and ‘God’s Father’ and served as a
high-ranking priest of Min. Thuyu, like many upper-class women,
was included among the musicians of the state god Amen, and she
was also active in the more local cults of Min and Hathor. Like her
husband, she held a series of positions at court but, not surprisingly,
the title which gave her most pleasure and which was repeated over
and over again in her tomb was that of ‘Royal Mother of the Chief
Wife of the King’.
The queen’s brother, Anen, was a man of some standing who
served as an o cial of Re at Karnak and, more importantly, as the
Second Prophet of Amen at Thebes at a time when the cult of Amen
was one of the most powerful and wealthy presences in Egypt. Anen
was eventually interred alongside the great and the good in the
prestigious Sheik Abd el-Gurna burial site on the west bank at
Thebes, where curiously his damaged tomb makes no mention of the
fact that he was brother-in-law to the king. His sister’s marriage may
well have helped his career, but royal patronage via a sister was not
something which Anen cared to acknowledge. Indeed, Anen’s
parentage is con rmed only because Thuyu includes his name on
her sarcophagus, suggesting that he may have predeceased both his
mother and his sister.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that Tiy had a second brother, a
man called Ay. We know that a courtier of this name rose to
prominence under Amenhotep IV, but unfortunately Ay does not
include details of his parentage in his elaborately decorated tomb.
We can tell that Ay was close to the royal family as he refers to
himself as the ‘One trusted by the good god’ and ‘Foremost of the
companions of the king’. He includes among his many accolades
some of Yuya’s titles, including ‘Overseer of the King’s Horses’ and
‘God’s Father’. As it was common practice for the rst-born son to
inherit his father’s titles, and as Ay is known to have dedicated a
chapel to Min at Akhmim, home town of Yuya and Thuyu, a link to
the family of Tiy seems indicated. Even the names of Yuya and Ay
hint that the two may have been related; we are not altogether
certain how Yuya was pronounced but it is likely to have been
something close to ‘Aya’, and both names may in fact have been
nicknames or shortened forms of a more traditional Egyptian name.
Cyril Aldred has even suggested that there was a close physical
similarity between Yuya and Ay, with both displaying a large nose,
receding forehead, protruding cheek-bones, prominent lips and a
deep jaw. However, as we do not have Ay’s body, this resemblance
is based on Ay’s portraits and statuary and is therefore not as clear-
cut as we might wish.10
‘Yuya’ – perhaps because it was a nickname – was certainly an
unusual name in ancient Egypt; the semi-literate artisans who were
charged with labelling their patron’s monuments and funerary goods
had trouble with the spelling and each eventually produced his own
Yuya variant. Mis-spellings were by no means uncommon in
Egyptian tombs, but Yuya’s name seems to have caused more
problems than most, and this has led to suggestions that Yuya may
have been an Asiatic with an unfamiliar foreign name.11 The idea
that Tiy may have been of foreign blood, possibly a Syrian princess,
seemed an attractive one to those who rst studied her. Flinders
Petrie was quite rm in his belief that Tiy, who he felt bore a
striking resemblance to depictions of Asiatic prisoners at Karnak,
was of northern Syrian extraction and Wallis Budge concurred,
agreeing that the queen, with her fair complexion and blue eyes,
‘has all the characteristics of the women belonging to certain
families who may be seen in North-eastern Syria to this day’. Others
proclaimed Tiy to be of Lebanese extraction.12 In stark contrast, Tiy
has also been claimed as a woman of Nubia-Kush with ‘full dark
Africoid looks’.13
The suggestion that Tiy and Yuya were blue-eyed blondes can be
dismissed at once; the blue eyes were the unfortunate result of a
modern misinterpretation of an ancient portrait. The idea that Tiy
may have been of Nubian or Central African origin is worthy of
more serious consideration as Tiy does appear, on some of her
sculptures, to have typical Nubian features, with a broad nose and
full lips. The famous wooden head recovered from Gurob actually
shows Tiy as black (Plate 3); this is, however, carved from a dark
wood and is counterbalanced by other representations which depict
Tiy as white. Added to this evidence is a sudden vogue for short
curly Nubian-style wigs among the ladies of the court, and the rising
importance of the queen, which some have linked to the more
matriarchal nature of the Nubian royal family. Against this theory is
the undisputed fact that Egyptian sculptures were never intended to
be exact likenesses; they conveyed the essence of the person rather
than his or her appearance, and a lady with a light-brown skin could
be painted as white (living), or black or green (deceased).
 In fact, the remarkably well-preserved mummi ed bodies of Yuya
and Thuyu (Plates 6, 8) do not show the Central African appearance
which has been assigned to Tiy and, while Yuya has been
interpreted as having an unusual, almost European, physiognomy,
Thuyu is generally regarded as a typical Egyptian woman. There is
no reason to view Tiy as anything other than an Egyptian although
it remains possible that her father may have been of (unspeci ed)
foreign descent. Egypt, a corridor linking Africa to the Near East,
had always been racially well-mixed and most families would have
contained their quota of lighter- and darker-skinned members. The
preoccupation with ‘colour’ and the idea of ‘race’ cutting across
national boundaries is a very modern one. The Egyptians themselves
drew a simple distinction between the people of Kmt who spoke
Egyptian and followed Egyptian customs, and the foreigners who
did not.14
Yuya and Thuyu lived to a good old age, eventually receiving the
ultimate accolade of a double burial in the Valley of the Kings, the
graveyard normally reserved for the tombs of the pharaohs.
Although their tomb, now numbered as KV 46, was robbed soon
after it was sealed and their mummy wrappings were disturbed by
the thieves, the two white-haired bodies remained encased in their
nests of wooden co ns until 1905, when their tomb was
rediscovered by an American expedition led by Theodore M. Davis.
Davis has described the opening of the tomb, apparently a highly
dramatic and almost fatal occasion, in an account which perhaps
owes more to dramatic licence than to historical accuracy. Davis
was accompanied on this momentous occasion by Arthur Weigall,
acting Chief Inspector for the region, and Gaston Maspero, Director
General of Cairo Museum. When opened, the tomb proved
confusing, very dark and very hot, lit only by the candles carried by
the archaeologists. The eager explorers were forced to descend a
steep passageway and then scramble through the small hole made
by the robbers in the doorway which blocked the burial chamber.
Maspero, the stoutest member of the party, could only enter the
chamber after much pushing and shoving from his colleagues. Once
inside, however, it was Maspero who, bending over the gilded
co n, rst read the name of the deceased as ‘Yuya’. This gave Davis
a great thrill:
Naturally excited by the announcement, and blinded by the glare of the candles, I
involuntarily advanced them very near the co n, whereupon Monsieur Maspero cried out,
‘Be careful!’ and pulled my hand back. In a moment we realized that, had my candles
touched the bitumen, which I came dangerously near doing, the co n would have been in
a blaze. As the entire contents of the tomb were in ammable, and directly opposite the
co n was a corridor leading to the open air and making a draught, we undoubtedly should
have lost our lives…15

The expedition beat a hasty retreat and returned some time later,
having rigged up an electric light. They found that Yuya and Thuyu
had been buried with a magni cent collection of goods for use in
the Field of Reeds, including two Osiris beds of growing corn16 and a
full-sized chariot suitable for a former ‘Overseer of the King’s
Horses’. Although Maspero o ered him a share of the treasure Davis
rightly felt that such an important collection should not be split up
and, although some items eventually made their way to the
Metropolitan Museum, New York, most of the contents of the tomb
are now housed in Cairo Museum.
Amenhotep III may have made an unconventional choice of bride,
but his selection was a wise one. Tiy was to prove not only a fertile
queen, but an astute woman of great political ability, well able to
play an active part in her husband’s reign. Almost immediately she
became a force to be reckoned with; a powerful and in uential
gure with a high public pro le and a string of impressive titles:
‘King’s Great Wife… The Heiress, greatly praised, Mistress of All
Lands who cleaves unto the King… Mistress of Upper and Lower
Egypt, Lady of the Two Lands’. Mutemwia was quickly relegated to
the background as Tiy became Egypt’s rst lady.
Although strong queens had been a feature of the earlier 18th
Dynasty, Tiy’s immediate predecessors had been remote gures of
little political importance. Tradition dictated that the queen, or
rather the ‘King’s Great Wife’, for there was no word for queen in
Egyptian, should remain in the background, supporting her husband
as and when required. The absence of the speci c title ‘Queen’ both
re ects the general shortage of kinship terms within Egypt and
reinforces the overwhelming importance of the king. Only at times
of dynastic crisis, usually following the premature death of a king,
did the queen step forward. Tiy, however, soon abandoned the
customary queenly reticence. She became the rst consort to be
regularly depicted beside her husband and the rst queen whose
name was consistently linked with that of the king on both o cial
inscriptions and more private objects. A colossal statue designed for
inclusion in Amenhotep’s mortuary temple even shows Tiy at the
same scale as her husband, an important development in a culture
where size really did matter because size was directly equated with
status.
Her religious pro le rose equally high, and Tiy was allowed an
increasingly prominent role in the rituals of her husband’s reign.
The queens of Egypt had traditionally been associated with the
ancient goddess Hathor, who herself could appear as a royal wife
and mother, and the features and actions of the two had often been
blurred together so that the queen could appear as the living
representative of Hathor on earth. Hathor, the cow-headed goddess
of love, motherhood and drunkenness, was allied to the solar cults
through her roles as the daughter of Re and the mother of the solar
child, and was the alter ego of the erce lion-headed goddess of war
Sekhmet. Tiy became the rst queen to adopt Hathor’s cow horns
and sun disc in her formal head-dress, and the rst queen to be
consistently associated with the use of the sistrum, a religious rattle
whose handle usually featured Hathor’s head. The sistrum was used
to provide the music which would soothe the gods during worship.
Its inclusion as part of the iconography of queenship emphasizes
Tiy’s new dual role of queen-priestess.17
At the same time Tiy became closely identi ed with Maat,
daughter of Re and personi cation of truth, who, in an ideal world,
would be the constant companion of the king. In the Theban tomb
of the Queen’s steward Kheruef (TT 192), Tiy and Hathor
accompany the seated Amenhotep III. Tiy is here taking the role of
Maat, and indeed is speci cally described as ‘The Principal Wife of
the King, beloved of him, Tiy, may she live. It is like Maat following
Re that she is in the following of Your Majesty [Amenhotep III].’18 In
the contemporary tomb of Ramose (TT 55), where we see
Amenhotep IV sitting on a throne with Maat beside him, Maat has
been given Tiy’s features.
Towards the end of his reign Amenhotep established a cult to a
dei ed form of himself, ‘Amenhotep, Lord of Nubia’. Tiy, as consort
of the semi-divine king, developed her own divinity until a temple
was dedicated to her at Sedeinga in Nubia, the complement of her
husband’s forti ed temple at nearby Soleb. Here Tiy appears in the
guise of Hathor-Tefnut, ‘Great of Fearsomeness’, and she is seen in
the form of a striding sphinx stalking across the tops of the temple
pillars. This is not our only representation of Tiy as a sphinx. A
carnelian bracelet plaque now held in the Metropolitan Museum,
New York, shows Tiy as a winged sphinx holding her husband’s
cartouche in her human arms, while in the tomb of Kheruef she
assumes the role of defender of Egypt as a sphinx trampling
underfoot two bound female prisoners. Although the queen-sphinx
was by no means an unusual symbol in 18th Dynasty art, such
sphinxes had hitherto been essentially passive. Now we see Tiy, as
she dominates the enemies of Egypt, appropriating a role formerly
reserved for the king. The origins of the queen-sphinx motif are
obscure, although it is generally agreed that she is connected with
the solar deities as a daughter of the sun god. Some experts identify
the queen-sphinx with Hathor in the form Sekhmet, while others
have suggested that she may be linked to Tefnut, daughter of the
creator god.
Convention dictated that husbands should love their wives, and
Egyptian kings always took care to be seen to be behaving in a
conventional manner. Nevertheless, the pride which Amenhotep
obviously took in his bride, the unprecedented prominence which
he allowed her and his habit of linking her name to his on all
possible occasions, must be taken as a sign that Amenhotep felt a
deep a ection for Tiy. Seldom are we able to detect such a genuine
emotion amid the conventions and calculated formulae of Egyptian
monuments.
Tiy was not – to modern eyes at least – a great beauty. Her image,
preserved in sculpture and painting, shows a determined-looking
lady with a triangular-shaped face and the heavy-lidded almond-
shaped eyes typical of the art of her time. Her face is often
dominated by the long, heavy wig which dwarfs her features. Tiy
rarely smiles, and her mouth frequently has a decided downward
cast which gives her a dissatis ed expression. Beauty is, however, in
the eye of the beholder, and at least one observer has seen in Tiy’s
portraits ‘a face of pure Egyptian type, youthful and sweet, with a
slightly projecting chin’.19 Others have sensed the power behind the
mask, noticing ‘a realistic interpretation of imperious royal
dignity’,20 and interpreting Tiy as a ruthless and determined woman,
initially pretty but growing increasingly ‘pinched and shrewish’.21
Although Tiy was the beloved of Amenhotep III, she was by no
means his only beloved. The kings of the New Kingdom were
polygamous, maintaining large harems which included their
numerous wives, sisters and aunts plus a multitude of children and
the servants and administrators who looked after them. The royal
harem was housed in one or more permanent harem-palaces, which
the king visited as he travelled between the royal residences which
were dotted up and down the Nile. The harem of Amenhotep III, as
be tted the ruler of a vast empire, was enormous, and throughout
his reign the king took a keen interest in increasing its numbers so
that by his death it housed well over 1,000 women. There was no
disgrace in being a secondary or minor wife – indeed it was an
honour to be selected for the king – but with one husband among so
many it could never be a full-time occupation. In the secluded
seraglios of the Ottoman Empire the women idled away their days
in preparing themselves for a royal visit that might never come. In
more down-to-earth Egypt the ladies of the harem were semi-
independent, receiving an income from the palace and from their
own estates, but also running a highly pro table textile business
supervising the women who wove the linen cloth which Egypt
consumed in such great quantities in her funerary rites.
The majority of the royal women were Egyptian ladies who
provided the king with pleasure, status, and doubtless many
children, but who had no political or ritual importance. Their names
go unrecorded, and their children are ignored in the royal histories.
Occasionally a harem lady would have the great good fortune to
give birth to a future king. She would then be elevated to the status
of ‘King’s Mother’ and enjoy national prominence during her son’s
reign. This was, however, exceptional, as it depended upon the
failure of the queen consort to produce a surviving male heir, and
the ability of the mother to promote the cause of her own son.
Included among the women of the harem were a number of
foreigners. Some were girls of lowly birth, sent as tribute or booty to
the Egyptian court, while others were the daughters and sisters of
minor rulers bound by oath of allegiance to Amenhotep. These
vassals could not resist the demands of the ‘father’ who controlled
them, and sent their daughters as brides – and perhaps hostages – as
and when required. A few privileged royal brides were the
daughters or sisters of rulers of importance who could con dently
address the mighty king of Egypt as ‘brother’. We know that
Amenhotep contracted several of these diplomatic unions and was
married to at least two princesses from Mitanni, two princesses from
Syria, two princesses from Babylon and a princess from the
Anatolian state of Arzawa. This trade in royal brides was strictly
one-way tra c: Amenhotep demanded and received his foreign
wives, but when Kadashman-Enlil of Babylon requested an Egyptian
princess, Amenhotep turned him down with a at refusal, even
though Kadashman-Enlil’s own sister was already a bride in the
Egyptian harem. Amenhotep’s original letter on this subject is
unfortunately lost, but the Babylonian’s indignant reply, quoting
Amenhotep’s words, was preserved in the royal archives:
… When I wrote to you about marrying your daughter you wrote to me saying ‘From time
immemorial no daughter of the king of Egypt has been given in marriage to anyone.’ Why
do you say this? You are the king and you may do as you please. If you were to give a
daughter, who would say anything about it?22

Amenhotep stood rm. As ruler of the dominant world power he

had no reason to change his mind. Kadashman-Enlil, constantly
threatened by the volatile political situation outside the stability of
the Egyptian empire, could not a ord to be o ended. He needed a
powerful big brother. He therefore took steps to assure himself that
his Egyptian sister was still alive and well. ‘You are now asking for
my daughter’s hand in marriage, but my sister whom my father gave
to you is already there with you, although no one has seen her or
knows whether she is alive or dead’,23 and then sent his daughter to
join her aunt.
The diplomatic marriages were celebrated as a means of linking
two mighty rulers rather than two mighty states. The bond was
always a highly personal one between the bridegroom and his
father-in-law, and should either party die a new union would be
necessary. Thus, although Amenhotep was already married to a
Babylonian princess, the daughter of King Kurigalzu, the accession
of Kurigalzu’s son Kadashman-Enlil had to be marked by marriage
with one of the new king’s daughters.
Negotiations with Mitanni followed a similar pattern. Tuthmosis
IV had married the daughter of Artatama I but this link was severed
by the death of the two kings. Therefore, in the tenth year of his
reign Amenhotep III married Gilukhepa, the daughter of Shuttarna,
king of Mitanni, and a scarab was issued to commemorate the
arrival of the bride and her retinue:
Year 10… The King of Upper and Lower Egypt, the Lord of Ritual, Nebmaatre chosen of
Re, Son of Re, Amenhotep ruler of Thebes, and the king’s principal wife Tiy, may she live…
The wonders that were brought to his majesty were the daughter of Shuttarna, King of
Mitanni, Gilukhepa, and the chief women of her entourage, totalling three hundred and
seventeen women.24

We have to wonder how happy the 317 women of Gilukhepa’s

entourage would have been to accompany their mistress into
e ective exile in a distant land.
 Several years later Shuttarna died and, after a struggle during
which his elder son was assassinated, his younger son, Tushratta,
brother of Gilukhepa, took the throne. The now elderly Amenhotep
III immediately opened negotiations for the hand of Tadukhepa,
daughter of Tushratta. The two kings exchanged magni cent gifts,
Amenhotep supplying a bride-price ‘beyond measure, covering all
the earth and reaching to the heavens’25 and Tushratta providing an
extensive dowry which included a chariot, four swift horses, and a
variety of expensive household and personal items including linen
garments, shoes, a golden bread shovel and even an inlaid lapis-
lazuli y-whisk.26 Eventually, all negotiations complete, Tadukhepa
and her retinue followed her aunt to Egypt.
Once the foreign princesses arrived in Egypt, they and their
retinues were absorbed into the harem and to all intents and
purposes disappeared. Although their families never forgot their
Egyptian womenfolk – Tushratta was punctilious in remembering
his sister and his daughter in his correspondence, on one occasion
sending Gilukhepa a greeting gift of golden trinkets including toggle
pins, earrings, a nger ring and a phial of perfumed oil27 – they
played a peripheral role in the everyday life of the royal family. The
queen consort led a very di erent, and far more public, life.
Although Tiy had her own quarters in the harem, she also had a
place at court. She owned property in her own right, and derived a
good income from her estates which were administered by her
stewards and worked by her servants. Most importantly, Tiy, as
queen, was at the centre of royal family life. It was the queen, the
king and their young children, together with the king’s mother, who
formed the true royal family.
Tiy bore her husband at least six children: two sons, Tuthmosis
and Amenhotep, named after their grandfather and father
respectively, and four daughters, Sitamen (Daughter of Amen),
Henut-Taneb (Mistress of All Lands), Isis (the name of a goddess
which literally means ‘throne’) and Nebetah (Lady of the Palace).
Princess Sitamen, almost certainly the eldest daughter, was her
father’s favourite and as such was accorded an unusually prominent
position within the royal family until, at around Year 31, Sitamen
received the ultimate promotion becoming a royal wife alongside
her mother. Sitamen’s a airs were controlled by the great
Amenhotep son of Hapu who held the post of ‘High-Steward of the
Princess Sitamen’. She had her own palace, her own estates, and her
own furniture, some of which was included among the grave goods
within her maternal grandparents’ tomb. A scene on the back of an
ornate chair recovered from this tomb shows Sitamen, ‘the Eldest
Daughter of the King, whom he loves’, sitting to receive an o ering
of a golden necklace pro ered by a servant.28 Sitamen is dressed in a
long skirt and an elaborate collar. On her head she wears a short
wig and an intricate crown of lotus blossom but the double uraeus
(or cobra) at her brow has been replaced by a pair of gazelle heads
whose signi cance is not now apparent but which may be intended
to designate a subordinate or minor queen. In her hands she holds
the sistrum and menit beads which associate her with the cult of
Hathor. Eventually Sitamen received the high accolade of ‘Great
King’s Wife’, although we can see from contemporary illustrations
that she never took precedence over her mother.
Isis and Henut-Taneb may also have become royal wives. Their
names were written in royal cartouches but they were never
important enough to be named in their grandparents’ tomb.
Nebetah, however, does not appear to have become a queen, and it
seems that she may have been the family afterthought, too young to
follow in her sisters’ footsteps.
Amenhotep III enjoyed a lengthy reign, celebrating three sed
festivals, or jubilees, during his regnal years 30, 34 and 37. The heb-
sed, a tradition which stretched back to the dawn of Egyptian
history, was originally a public ceremony of rebirth intended to
rea rm the king’s powers after each successive thirty years on the
throne. However, kings who had achieved their rst three decades
felt free to bend the rules in subsequent years. As life expectancy at
birth throughout the New Kingdom was less than twenty years,
thirty years on the throne was by anyone’s reckoning a remarkable
achievement, and the celebration of an o cial jubilee gave the king
and his people the excuse for a magni cent and lengthy party.
Amenhotep, who was evidently something of an antiquarian,
claimed to have discovered, hidden in the palace archives, an
ancient order of service for the celebration of the heb-sed, and to
have revised his own ceremony accordingly.
Although the heb-sed was traditionally celebrated at Memphis,
Amenhotep chose to duplicate his festivities at a site now known as
Malkata, literally in modern Arabic ‘the place where things are
picked up’, on the west bank opposite Thebes, where he already had
a royal residence. Here, in good time for his rst extravaganza, he
built a gaily painted mud-brick festival hall and a T-shaped
ceremonial lake for use in the water procession. A vast array of
tempting food was prepared, some of which was ‘donated’ by local
o cials, numerous jars of wine were made ready, and a host of
dignitaries, both mortals and gods, was invited to witness the
celebrations and enjoy the feast. Among the court o cials present
was Tiy’s steward Kheruef, who recorded the highlights on his tomb
wall:
The glorious appearance of the King at the great double doors in his palace, ‘The House of
Rejoicing’; ushering in the o cials, the king’s friends, the chamberlain, the men of the
gateway, the king’s acquaintances… Rewards were given out in the form of ‘Gold of Praise’
and golden ducks and sh, and they received ribbons of green linen, each person being
made to stand in order of rank.29

After the jubilee the festival palace was demolished in order to

expand the sacred lake in time for the second celebration. The
excavation of this lake, still visible in modern times and now known
as the Birket Habu, was one of the largest civil-engineering projects
ever undertaken in dynastic Egypt. It measured two kilometres by
one kilometre, and tens of thousands of labourers must have been
involved in the excavation of many tons of earth. For a long time it
was thought that the Birket Habu was the pleasure lake ordered by
Amenhotep for his beloved queen and recorded on yet another
scarab:
His majesty commanded the making of a lake for the great Queen Tiy in her home lands of
Djarukha, its length being 3700 cubits and its breadth being 600 [or 700] cubits. His
majesty made a festival of the opening of the lake in the third month of the inundation
season, day six, when his majesty sailed in the royal barge ‘The Sun Disc Dazzles’.30

Unfortunately the measurements do not tally. Queen Tiy’s pleasure

lake took only sixteen days to construct and, given that a dynastic
cubit equalled 52.5 cm, must have been far narrower than the Birket
Habu.
A new mud-brick festival palace was built beside the Malkata lake
where it was serviced by the extensive royal village. Here, the
contrast between the formal and well-planned architecture of
Amenhotep’s stone-built temple precincts and the rather rambling
and disjointed layout of his own home is striking. The king’s palace
fronted on to a large open courtyard and included private quarters,
a bedroom, bathroom and robing room, plus the necessary harem
accommodation and an audience chamber, and was served by an
untidy cluster of kitchens, o ces and storerooms. Although the
walls and ceilings of the palace are largely destroyed, painted
plaster fragments show that the walls of the king’s bedroom were
decorated with an elaborate and entertaining frieze of naked Bes
gures above a pattern of false door panels and alternating ankh
(life) and sa (protection) signs, while the ceiling was painted with
stylized vultures with outstretched wings. Next door was a smaller
residence intended for the queen (now known as the South Palace).
The crown prince had use of a large porticoed palace (the Middle
Palace), while a fourth palace built without harem accommodation
(the North Palace) was probably the home of Queen Sitamen. Also
included within the complex were several great houses for high
o cials, smaller cottages for lesser courtiers, servants’
accommodation, storehouses, workshops, a temple of Amen, sundry
small chapels, a workmen’s village and formal pleasure gardens. The
complex was linked to the Nile by a canal, and to the king’s
mortuary temple by a causeway.31
We have a mere handful of scenes showing Amenhotep towards
the end of his lengthy reign.32 His earlier portraits had depicted a
prime physical specimen displaying all the manly vigour expected of
a New Kingdom monarch. His later images are less stereotyped. The
king appears languid to the point of lethargy, his clothing is
unconventional, and there has been a general consensus of opinion
that we are looking at a fat and tired old man su ering from some
unspeci ed but debilitating sickness. On one battered limestone
stela, recovered from the Amarna house of Panehesy and now
housed in the British Museum (Plate 4), we nd the king propped
limply in a chair ‘with drooping head and with his corpulent body
collapsed to a certain abby lethargy, with his hand hanging
listlessly to his knee’.33 Beside him sits Queen Tiy who, although her
image has been badly damaged, is always interpreted as bursting
with rude health. In other representations we see the bloated king
dressed in a long pleated linen garment which some have
considered more suited to a woman than a man. Despite his
idiosyncratic style, James Baikie speaks for many when he describes
what he takes to be the king’s obvious decline into obesity and
mental decay:
The great king was still well short of his ftieth year; but he had doubtless ‘warmed both
hands before the re of life’, with the consequences which usually follow on such
indulgence of the relishing and enjoying faculties; and now he had to put conclusion to the
verse – ‘It sinks and I am ready to depart’.34

Obesity may be associated with various diseases including

arteriosclerosis, in ammation of the gall bladder and gall-stone
formation, all of which were to be found in ancient Egypt. However,
the portraits of Amenhotep do not show a clinically obese old man.
Indeed, they do not even show a particularly old man. Amenhotep
appears singularly free of wrinkles and he does not display excessive
folds of fat as shown on the Deir el-Bahri portrait of the Queen of
Punt. It therefore seems likely that the king’s extra pounds are
nothing more sinister than the inevitable results of a lifetime of
overindulgence which were not seen as a matter for shame. Indeed,
rolls of fat and pendulous breasts were the well-respected signs of
male old age in dynastic Egypt.
Amenhotep had certainly had every opportunity to overeat and
drink to excess, and his only physical exercise seems to have
occurred during his regular visits to the harem. Although he was
still actively seeking new brides, the days of hunting wild lions and
shooting erce bulls were long gone, if indeed they had ever
occurred; quite often the daring hunts commemorated in royal
inscriptions involved the slaughter of ‘wild’ animals which had
already been captured and penned. Similarly Amenhotep had
avoided, through accident or design, all military action. He had not
led the ght against the vile Ibhat in person, delegating the
command of the army to the viceroy Merimose, and he had never
felt the need to embark on a military campaign or to make a tour of
his foreign possessions. While it may be going too far to suggest on
such limited evidence that Amenhotep was basically a lazy man who
enjoyed his creature comforts, there is certainly no evidence to
suggest that he was ever tempted to exchange the luxury of the
palace for the rigours of an army tent.
The king’s new limpid pose and his unconventional garb probably
owe little to his actual physical condition. Amenhotep’s last
portraits, which may have been produced some time after his death,
were composed during a period when Egyptian artistic conventions
were undergoing a profound change. It is therefore not surprising
that we nd Amenhotep being depicted in the exaggerated manner
soon to be favoured by his son. His ‘dress’, which is again very
similar to the garments worn by his son, may well have been a
contemporary garment; long gowns were by no means con ned to
women.35 Some observers, however, have chosen to read these
portraits as indications of something far more sinister. They have
seen a king in moral and physical decline, prematurely aged by his
sexual decadence. The marriage with his own daughter is the
ultimate indication of aberrant sexual taste, while the public
donning of a woman’s robe is an indication that Amenhotep had
abandoned heterosexuality in favour of public cross-dressing and
‘Greek love’.36 As the king had now totally given himself to the
pleasures of his decaying esh, Queen Tiy, still very much compos
mentis, must have taken e ective control of Egypt. Again Baikie has
summed up the thoughts of many:
There can be little doubt that during the later part of his reign, at all events, while it was
Amenhotep who wore the Double Crown, it was Tiy who ruled; and probably the easy-
going, good-natured king was quite content with the arrangement. Tiy’s supremacy over
her husband’s mind leaves little question as to where we are to look for the chief in uence
in the upbringing of her young son. His vivid, capable mother must have been almost
everything to the young prince, and increasingly so as the years went on, and his father
gradually sank into the lethargy of premature decay.37

While we have absolutely no proof that the king had become

senile, and indeed madness through sexual excess is more common
in ction than real life, there is some evidence to suggest that he
was su ering very badly from toothache. Painful teeth were an
unfortunate fact of Egyptian old age, as the desert sand and particles
of grinding stone which invariably became incorporated in the food
wore away the surface of the teeth until the sensitive pulp was
exposed and became infected. Not only was this persistent toothache
very painful, it undermined the general health of the su erer. The
skill of the Egyptian doctors was famed throughout the Near East,
but even they could suggest no cure for the ailing king. Even a
dedication of 600 statues to Sekhmet brought no relief. In despair,
Amenhotep wrote to his brother-in-law Tushratta, asking if he could
help. Tushratta responded by sending the cult statue of the goddess
Ishtar of Nineveh, another female warrior with the power to heal:
May Ishtar, Mistress of Heaven, protect my brother and myself for a hundred thousand
years, and may our mistress grant us both great joy. And let us act as friends.38

As Egypt’s king su ered, the political situation in the Near East

was shifting. Egypt remained the dominant world power but the
Hittites, a non-Semitic people based on the Central Anatolian
plateau, were pursuing expansionist policies which posed a threat to
Mitanni’s north Syrian possessions. At the same time in central
Syria, Amurru or ‘the West’, a region populated by disparate bands
of semi-nomadic peoples and bandits, was now united under the
Canaanite-speaking Prince Abdi-Ashirta and making a determined
e ort to assert itself as an independent state. Both Tushratta and
Amenhotep took steps to restrict the growth of Amurru but neither
was entirely successful, and Abdi-Ashirta and his son Aziru – both
nominally Egyptian vassals – were able to continue their
expansionist policies unchecked. Amenhotep, perhaps because he
had grown used to international inactivity, continued his friendship
with Tushratta but took no e ective action to intervene. He seems
not to have realized, or not to have cared, that Mitanni was under
increasing pressure, and he showed very little concern over the fate
of his lesser vassals. Indeed the peoples of Tunip – a small
independent state eventually overrun by Amurru – were later to
complain that they had begged for help from Egypt for twenty
years, in vain.39
The goddess Ishtar travelled to Egypt, but it was a wasted
journey. Soon after her arrival Amenhotep died at Thebes during the
seventh month of his regnal year 38. Tuthmosis, the crown prince,
had predeceased his father, and so it was his younger son, now
Amenhotep IV, who performed the funerary rites and buried
Amenhotep III in a suitably regal tomb in the Western Valley, close
to the Valley of the Kings (WV 22). Amenhotep was not, however,
destined to lie in peace. His tomb – which almost certainly housed
the richest royal burial Egypt had ever seen – was robbed during the
21st Dynasty, and his battered mummy, rescued by the necropolis
o cials, rewrapped and labelled, was eventually stored with other
displaced royal mummies in the cache held in the tomb of
Amenhotep II. Here, in 1898, a mummy bearing the label of
Amenhotep III was discovered by Victor Loret and transferred to
Cairo Museum. The unfortunate king was by this time in a sorry
condition. He had su ered a severe mauling at the hands of the
tomb robbers: his head, right leg and left foot had been snapped o
and his back had been broken. G. Elliot Smith, who unwrapped the
body in 1909, found that the mummy had been packed with resin,
which had set hard under its covering of skin. ‘It was a great
disappointment to nd only these broken and blackened bones to
represent the body of
 Fig. 1.2 The royal names of Amenhotep IV

Amenothes “the Magni cent” ’.40 More recent scienti c analysis has
cast grave doubts on our acceptance of this body as the remains of
Amenhotep III. It seems that the necropolis o cials who ‘rescued’
the king may well have muddled up their charges and lost the
magni cent Amenhotep III.41
 2
A Beautiful Woman Has Come

She pure of hands, Great King’s Wife whom he loves, Lady of the Two Lands Nefertiti, may
she live. Beloved of the great living Sun Disc who is in jubilee…1

Amenhotep IV emerged from an obscure corner of the royal court to

become pharaoh of Egypt under the throne-name Neferkheperure
Waenre (literally ‘The transformations of Re are perfect, the Unique
one of Re’). Little is known of him before his assumption and, while
his sisters and his brother are known to us from their statues and
inscribed possessions, the young Amenhotep is to all intents and
purposes invisible. Although we do have a few formal scenes
showing him alongside his father, it is probable that these images
were not carved during the old king’s lifetime. Our only certain
mention of the young prince comes from the Malkata Palace which
has yielded a wine-jar seal labelled ‘the estate of the King’s True Son
Amenhotep’. We may deduce from this seal that, by the nal decade
of his father’s reign, Amenhotep was old enough to have his own
establishment, and therefore that he was probably born before Year
29 when the court moved from Memphis to Thebes.
It is highly unlikely that the young Amenhotep had been sent
abroad to be raised and educated outside Egypt. This idea, put
forward by those who would like to interpret Amenhotep’s religious
beliefs as Near Eastern rather than Egyptian in origin, shows a lack
of understanding of the political situation throughout the later part
of the 18th Dynasty. At this time Egypt was universally regarded as
the centre of the civilized world, and the Egyptian royal court was
acknowledged as the epitome of sophisticated luxury. All foreigners
wished to emulate the Egyptians, and the Egyptians themselves
were rmly convinced of their own cultural superiority. No
Egyptian was likely to see a foreign education as in any way
bene cial to an Egyptian prince, and the Egyptian royal sons did not
enjoy the ancient equivalent of the Grand Tour. Instead, Egypt was
in the habit of demanding that the sons of vassals and allies be sent
to Egypt for their education. These young men, educated alongside
the Egyptian princes in the school attached to the royal harem,
served as hostages who would ensure the good behaviour of their
fathers. They became so steeped in Egyptian customs and beliefs
that, when they returned to rule their own countries, their loyalties
in theory lay not with their own people but with the Egyptian king
who had become their friend.
If Amenhotep was not raised away from Egypt, could there have
been something about the young prince – perhaps something about
his appearance or even his mental condition – which caused his
family to shield him from public gaze?2 With the bene t of
hindsight this seems possible, although it begs the question why, if
the young Amenhotep was so badly dis gured, should he ever have
been allowed to become king? Amenhotep III was free to choose his
successor and, although custom and divine precedent made his
eldest surviving son the natural choice, the Egyptians had no
objection to a reigning king adopting a less obvious heir before his
death. The royal harem, with its hundreds of wives, could surely
have yielded a replacement prince, and the fact that Tiy was not
herself of royal blood would have made it relatively easy for
Amenhotep III to reject her son in favour of one more suited to be
king.
In fact we should not be too surprised by Amenhotep’s hidden
childhood as almost all New Kingdom royal children led sheltered
lives away from the bustle of the court. Prominent royal o spring
were very much the exception, and sons were particularly well
hidden as, while daughters were almost always included in the
traditional ‘family groups’ which adorned their fathers’ monuments,
sons rarely were. Indeed, a casual examination of 18th Dynasty
royal scenes could give the impression that, at a time when the
royal harem contained many hundreds of women, Egyptian kings
were incapable of fathering male children. Such scenes can be very
misleading. They were never intended to be accurate portraits
detailing every family member, but were formal representations of
the monarch supported by his close female dependants – those
included in the nuclear royal family – who were present in the scene
as symbolic appendages enhancing the status of the king.
Our lack of knowledge concerning Amenhotep’s adolescence is
more unusual, but probably re ects the fact that he was a second
son born late in his parents’ marriage. As rst-born son, or crown
prince, Amenhotep’s older brother, Tuthmosis, would have inherited
a well-de ned role within the royal family. He was the Horus who
would eventually inherit the throne of his dead father, Osiris. His
future was assured, and there was an established training
programme to ensure that he would grow into a conventional New
Kingdom monarch. Since the reign of Tuthmosis I the crown prince
had been educated in the school attached to the harem, where he
learned his lessons alongside the sons of Egypt’s élite who would
one day become his ministers. His theoretical education complete,
the prince was transferred to Memphis, the administrative centre of
Egypt. Here he was able to experience the workings of the court
bureaucracy at rst hand, and his leisure time was spent perfecting
his hunting skills so that he could become the brave and fearless
warrior which Egypt expected.
Our only surviving image of Tuthmosis, an unusual statuette now
housed in the collections of the Louvre Museum, Paris, shows the
prince dressed in the kilt, side-lock and panther skin of a priest. He
is lying prostrate to grind corn before the god Ptah, and the
inscription identi es him as ‘… the King’s Son, the Sem-Priest
Tuthmosis’.3 Other inscriptions tell us that Tuthmosis, who seems to
have been something of an animal-lover, was accorded special
responsibility for the burial of the Apis bulls of Memphis. The
sarcophagus of his own pet cat, named Ta-Miu or ‘The Cat’, gives his
full and nal titulary as ‘Crown Prince, Overseer of the Priests of
Upper and Lower Egypt, High Priest of Ptah in Memphis and Sem-
Priest of Ptah’. The tomb of Tuthmosis has never been found but,
given his links with Memphis, it seems likely that he would have
been buried at Sakkara.
There was no well-de ned role for younger brothers who, unless
some tragedy befell the crown prince, were unlikely ever to inherit
the throne. In consequence younger sons played a relatively minor
part in the o cial royal family while they waited to see whether
they would be required to step into their older brother’s sandals.
Egypt’s high infant and child mortality rates and low life expectancy
meant that this happened more often than we might expect; within
the Tuthmoside royal family both Tuthmosis II and Tuthmosis IV
had inherited the throne after the death of their older brother(s).
The gods themselves, immune to the scourge of child mortality,
avoided the problem of surplus sons by restricting their own
families to one child, and triads of local gods (father, mother and
child, usually a son) were venerated as one family unit. At Memphis
the god Ptah, his wife Sekhmet and their son Nefertum were
worshipped together, while the Theban triad was made up of the
great god Amen, his consort Mut and their son Khonsu. Where a
divine family did include two sons there could be trouble. Seth, the
younger brother of Osiris, eventually murdered his brother so that
he could inherit the throne of Egypt.
Younger sons spent their earlier years as understudies to the
crown prince, and those who did not eventually become king sank
into obscurity once the succession was assured. This restricted the
immediate royal family to the king, his principal wife, his sisters,
aunts, mother, grandmother and children; brothers and uncles, and
of course their children, were no longer regarded as fully royal
although they enjoyed a well-respected place in Egyptian court life.
Grown men were certainly wary of claiming a family relationship
with the king at a time when others less well-connected were happy
to boast of their monarch’s patronage and, although we have
examples of 18th Dynasty individuals classifying themselves as a
‘King’s Son’, it seems remarkable that we have no one claiming to be
a ‘King’s Brother’ or ‘King’s Nephew’.
 The new Amenhotep IV needed a consort to complete his role as
king. Following the precedent set by his father he rejected his sisters
and half-sisters and looked outside the immediate royal family to
choose as his bride a previously obscure young woman named
Nefertiti. Amenhotep is silent about his wife’s origins and, although
Nefertiti’s name is constantly associated with that of her husband,
her parents are not mentioned in any inscription or document. This
in itself is not totally unexpected. Queens drew their status purely
from their links with the king. The more links, the more status, so
that the highest-ranking woman in the land was invariably a king’s
daughter who had become a king’s wife and then a king’s mother. It
did not matter that such a lady would almost certainly be linked to
three di erent kings (her father, her brother/husband and her son),
as the role of king remained constant no matter how many
individuals played it. A princess married to a king would always be
given her correct titles which would include ‘King’s Daughter’. Non-
royal women, however, were rarely given their liation on their
husband’s monuments as their existence before their marriage was
an irrelevance. Amenhotep III had been highly unusual in stressing
his own non-royal bride’s parentage.
With one exception, we know of no one claiming to be related to
Nefertiti. This is somewhat unexpected as Egyptians routinely
included within their tombs details of their more important and
glamorous relatives, thereby impressing visitors and adding to their
own status. There was a marked reluctance for men to make a direct
acknowledgement of any link with the royal family forged via
marriage, to the extent that neither Yuya nor Anen made any
reference to their kinship with Tiy. This taboo, however, did not
seem to apply to women, and Thuyu had certainly felt no need to
suppress her pride in her daughter’s achievements. As the
discoverers of her tomb noted, her title of ‘Royal Mother of the
Chief Wife of the King’ was everywhere:
… repeated jealously on the co ns, on the furniture, on the ouashbaatiou [shabti gures],
in such a manner that the day an intruder should penetrate into the tomb, he would know
from what to refrain on account of the quality of one of the persons resting there, and
would not be able to plead the excuse of ignorance if he persisted in his intention of
despoiling the mummy.4

It seems curious to modern eyes that Thuyu sought to impress

visitors to her tomb by emphasizing her relationship with the queen,
while the husband who lay by her side made no mention of his
identical relationship. Indeed, if it were not for the commemorative
scarabs which make Tiy’s parentage clear, we would be justi ed in
assuming that Tiy was not Yuya’s daughter. The evidence provided
by Yuya and Thuyu’s tomb suggests that, while we might expect to
nd that Nefertiti’s father and brother would stress their association
with the king rather than their kinship with the queen, Nefertiti’s
mother would have felt free to boast of her daughter. As we have no
woman claiming to be Nefertiti’s mother, should we assume either
that the tomb of Nefertiti’s mother has yet to be discovered, or that
Nefertiti’s mother died before her daughter married the king? Could
Nefertiti even have been born abroad?
As Nefertiti appears to have sprung from nowhere, speculation
regarding her origins has been rife. Her name, an unusual one,
translates as ‘A Beautiful Woman Has Come’. This has naturally led
to the suggestion that the new queen may have been a foreigner
who, quite literally, arrived at the Egyptian court in order to marry
the king. The idea of a foreign queen has a certain attraction, in the
way that the theories of Amenhotep’s Syrian education or Tiy’s Near
Eastern parentage had earlier appealed to egyptologists, because it
allows Nefertiti to introduce strange, un-Egyptian religious ideas
into the hitherto highly conservative royal family and thus provides
a neat explanation for Amenhotep’s defection from the traditional
Egyptian gods. It also allows Nefertiti a certain romantic glamour to
match her regal status. Although there is no evidence for the arrival
of any foreign bride at the start of Amenhotep’s reign, the harem
which Amenhotep had inherited from his father already contained
several suitable princesses. Could one of these have been
transformed into Nefertiti?
We have no rm date for the royal marriage, although
monumental evidence suggests that it occurred either just before or
shortly after Amenhotep’s accession to the throne. We can, however,
deduce that Nefertiti was relatively young when she married
Amenhotep, as she went on to bear at least six children. The most
obvious candidate for the role of queen consort must therefore be
the youngest of the foreign royal brides, Princess Tadukhepa,
daughter of Tushratta of Mitanni. Tadukhepa had been sent to Egypt
to marry the ailing Amenhotep III but the marriage was almost
certainly unconsummated as her arrival coincided with the death of
her elderly bridegroom. We know that Tadukhepa remained in
Egypt, becoming the wife of Amenhotep IV, but from this point on
she disappears from public view. Could she have become his
consort, changing her outlandish foreign name to a more suitable
Egyptian one? Tushratta had certainly hoped that his daughter
would one day become queen of Egypt; during the original marriage
negotiations he had stipulated that Tadukhepa should take the title
of ‘Mistress of Egypt’ although, with Queen Tiy rmly in place, this
must have seemed a remote possibility. A change of ruler, however,
would have meant a change of circumstances, and a new name
would certainly account for Tadukhepa’s disappearance at precisely
the time that Nefertiti emerges. Although there was no precedent for
a foreign princess becoming queen of Egypt, this was in no way
forbidden. Indeed, during the 19th Dynasty a Hittite princess,
presented by her father as a peace o ering to Ramesses II, was
renamed Maathorneferure and made ‘Great King’s Wife’.
Flinders Petrie, a strong supporter of the Nefertiti as Tadukhepa
theory, took matters one step further by suggesting that Tadukhepa
was herself of mixed Egyptian-Mitannian parentage and an ‘heiress’
capable of transmitting the right to rule Egypt to her husband. He
believed that she had never been intended as a bride for the old
king, but had always been meant for his son.5 Assuming, incorrectly,
that Nefertiti/ Tadukhepa’s daughters start to appear on their
father’s monuments only during his Year 6, and hazarding a guess
that the rst princess would probably have been conceived soon
after her parents’ marriage, Petrie decided that the royal wedding
must have occurred during Year 4. However, Tushratta’s
correspondence with Amenhotep III makes it clear that the marriage
was celebrated – but not necessarily consummated – before the
death of the old king. For Petrie’s theory to be correct, Amenhotep
IV’s Year 4 must have occurred during his father’s lifetime, and the
two would thus have spent at least four years as joint consorts.
Co-regencies had been an accepted feature of 12th Dynasty Egypt
when many kings ended their reigns by ruling alongside their
chosen successor. The Theban kings who founded the 18th Dynasty
regarded the 12th Dynasty as the height of Egyptian civilization
and, seeking to emulate their forebears in establishing an
unquestionable line of descent, reintroduced the custom. These joint
reigns must have posed many practical problems. How was such a
reign to be dated, and who was to be the senior monarch? How
could a co-regency be reconciled with the legend of the dying king
Osiris passing his crown to his living son Horus, the myth which
underpinned the whole dynastic system? However, the fact that the
tradition persisted shows that, whatever the drawbacks of co-
regencies, the bene ts outweighed the obvious disadvantages. Co-
regencies certainly had the advantage of making the succession
crystal clear, an important message at a time when kings were
fathering many tens of sons. Petrie’s theory of a four-year co-
regency, based as it was on awed evidence, was quickly discarded
but the suggestion of a joint rule between Amenhotep III and his son
was revived in the 1930s with several experts proposing joint reigns
of varying lengths ranging from three to twelve years.6
Co-regencies can prove almost impossible to detect. Does the
presence of a king’s name at an archaeological site con rm that he
actually lived there? Is the image of a king standing alongside his
successor intended to show two living monarchs or a dead father
and his living son? Only when a monument is double-dated, that is
it shows the dates of both the ‘senior’ and the ‘junior’ kings, can we
be certain that there are two rulers on the throne. Unfortunately,
New Kingdom co-regencies did not employ this double-dating
system, and in all known joint reigns the ‘junior’ king started to
count his own years only from the death of his co-monarch. All the
‘evidence’ put forward in favour of the proposed co-regency of
Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV is highly ambiguous and capable
of a variety of interpretations; there are, for example, a handful of
instances where the names or images of the two kings are linked on
monuments, but lial piety may well have caused the new king to
associate his name with that of his dead father. Similarly, wine
dockets recovered from Amarna bearing the regnal years 28 and 30,
and so assumed to belong to the reign of Amenhotep III, need not
have been taken to Amarna during the old king’s reign.
As yet there is absolutely no direct evidence to prove that
Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV ever ruled together. Indeed, King
Tushratta’s letter of condolence, written to Queen Tiy soon after
news of her husband’s demise had reached Mitanni, strongly
suggests that the old king had been succeeded by the new without
any period of joint rule. Tushratta manages to combine his
expressions of sorrow at the passing of the old king with a lengthy
grumble about the quality of gold statues sent to Mitanni by the new
king. Apparently Amenhotep III (called Nimmuaria by Tushratta)
had promised to send statues of solid gold ornamented with lapis
lazuli, but Amenhotep IV (a.k.a. Napkhururiya) had substituted
cheap wooden statues plated in gold:
Say to Tiy, the mistress of Egypt from Tushratta, King of Mitanni:
With me all goes well. With you may all go well. With your household and your son,
may all go well. With Tadukhepa my daughter and your daughter-in-law, may all go well…
You are the one who knows that I always showed love to Nimmuaria, your husband, and
that Nimmuaria, your husband, always showed love to me… You are the one that knows
much better than all others the things that we said to one another. No other person knows
them as well as you… I will not forget my love for Nimmuaria, your husband. More than
ever, I now show this love tenfold for your son, Napkhururiya… I had asked your husband
for statues of solid gold… But now Napkhururiya, your son, has sent plated statues of
wood. With gold being as dirt in your son’s land, why has your son not given what I asked
for?… 7

This letter makes it clear that Tiy, now queen mother, was still
widely regarded as one of the most important gures at the
Egyptian court. Her in uence over her son seems to have been as
strong as her in uence over her late husband had ever been, so that
when Tushratta sought help in the matter of his missing golden
statues it was to Tiy rather than to the new king that he turned.
Amenhotep IV probably seemed something of an unknown quantity,
and Tushratta may have calculated (wrongly) that his best chance of
receiving the precious statues was to beg Tiy to plead his cause with
her son. However, Tushratta may have already been aware that the
new king was by no means as friendly towards Mitanni as his father
had been. The two rulers went on to enjoy a less than brotherly
relationship and none of Tushratta’s letters to Amenhotep received
the courtesy of a reply. After three abortive epistles Tushratta
abandoned the correspondence. It is di cult to escape the
conclusion that Amenhotep was indi erent to the fate of both
Tushratta and his country.

The presentation of Nefertiti as an exotic foreign princess may have

an appealing neatness and a certain romantic attraction. However, it
is a theory completely unsupported by historical or archaeological
facts. Nefertiti’s name, although uncommon, was certainly not
extraordinary. All but the shortest of Egyptian personal names had a
meaning, usually re ecting either devotion to a certain deity or the
particular attributes of the child; Tuthmosis, for example, is a Greek
form of an Egyptian name which should more properly be written
Djehuty-Mes and which translates as ‘Born of Thoth’, while
Amenhotep means ‘Amen is Satis ed’. A child’s name was chosen by
the mother at the birth, and it does not take too wide a leap of the
imagination to envisage a proud mother choosing a name intended
to re ect the beauty of her new-born baby girl. We know that other
18th Dynasty parents devised similar names for their daughters; the
Theban tomb of Nakht, an o cial in the temple of Amen, which has
been dated to the reign of Amenhotep III, includes the female names
Nefert-Waty (‘The Beautiful One is Unique’) and Neferteni (‘The
Beautiful One is for Me’), while one mother named her daughter
Aneksi (‘She Belongs to Me’).
There is now enough evidence to con rm that Nefertiti, far from
being a foreigner, must have been born a member of Egypt’s
wealthy élite.8 In their un nished Amarna tomb the lady Tey is
shown alongside her husband Ay as they both receive a reward of
golden necklaces from the arms of the king and queen. The receipt
of gold was a great public honour which had originally been
reserved for victorious soldiers, but which at the start of the 18th
Dynasty had been expanded to encompass statesmen and high-
ranking male court o cials. For a wife to receive gold alongside her
husband was, however, unprecedented and must be read as a clear
message that the woman in question was of particular importance.
The fact that Tey was permitted to share the most elaborate of the
private Amarna tombs on an almost equal basis with Ay is further
con rmation, if any were needed, that she was a lady of the highest
rank. Tey was, indeed, no simple wife, and her titles include
‘Favourite of the Good God, Nurse of the King’s Great Wife Nefertiti,
Nurse of the Goddess, Ornament of the King’. Nurse, in this context,
is usually translated as wet-nurse.
A fragment of a relief recovered from Amarna and now housed in
the Louvre Museum, Paris, has been hailed as con rmation of Tey’s
intimate relationship with the queen. The fragment appears to show
a seated older woman wearing a distinctive golden necklace and
holding a younger woman on her knee. Both women wear pleated
linen dresses, and the older lady has one breast exposed. As Tey is
the only woman known to have received gold as an o cial reward
from the king, it has been assumed that the scene originally showed
Tey holding her royal charge, or even o ering her the breast. Such
scenes were not considered in any way distasteful, and the wet-
nurse, far from being a humble servant performing a rather basic
task, was to be equated with the great mother goddesses. Earlier
pharaohs had been depicted suckling from Hathor in her various
guises, which included a woman, a cow and even a snake goddess,
while references to nursing the king were made in several royal
texts; we know, for example, that the Great Enchantress suckled the
king in order to prepare him for his coronation. Unfortunately the
Louvre relief is so badly damaged that the identi cation of the two
gures as Tey and Nefertiti is by no means certain. It seems equally
possible that the scene could represent Nefertiti’s eldest daughter
Meritaten sitting on her mother’s knee, or even Nefertiti sitting on
her husband’s knee.9
The role of wet-nurse to the royal family was one of the most
important and in uential positions that a non-royal woman could
achieve, conferring great honour on her husband and great
privileges upon her own baby, who became a ‘Child of the Kep
[nursery]’, raised alongside the royal children. Consequently, the
royal wet-nurses were invariably the wives of the highest-ranking
court o cials. As we know that Tey was married to a man of high
status, and as her tomb shows her to have been a woman worthy of
great respect, could Nefertiti have been a royal baby? We know that
she was not a daughter of Queen Tiy, but could she have been a
half-sister of Amenhotep IV, born to a secondary wife? Perhaps even
the daughter of Queen Sitamen, or of Gilukhepa? Theoretically,
given the size of the royal harem, the list of potential mothers is
extensive, although, as Sitamen only married Amenhotep III towards
the end of his reign, it seems unlikely that she could have borne a
daughter old enough to marry Amenhotep IV at the start of his rule.
However, the fact that Nefertiti never refers to herself as a ‘King’s
Daughter’ makes such speculation fruitless. Nefertiti could not have
been a royal princess.
We have already met Tey’s husband Ay, the prominent court
o cial who included among his many accolades the positions of
‘Overseer of the King’s Horses’ and ‘God’s Father’, the latter being
his favourite title, used on all occasions until it eventually became a
part of his name and he was universally known as ‘God’s Father Ay’.
Circumstantial evidence makes it seem highly likely that Ay was the
son of Yuya and Thuyu, and the brother of Anen and Tiy, while the
shared title of ‘God’s Father’ suggests an even stronger link between
the royal family and the parallel dynasty from Akhmim. If ‘God’s
Father’ is not simply a priestly title but is to be taken literally, Ay,
like his father before him, must have been the father-in-law of the
king and the father of the queen consort Nefertiti.10 Ay himself
makes no mention of his relationship with Nefertiti but, as we have
seen, that is only to be expected. Tey does claim a link with
Nefertiti, although from her own words it would appear that she
was merely Nefertiti’s nurse and not her natural mother. Tey never
lays claim to the respected title of ‘Royal Mother of the King’s Great
Wife’ which had earlier given Thuyu so much pleasure. We may
deduce that Tey was a second wife who had been called upon to
raise the infant child of Ay’s deceased rst wife; such domestic
tragedies were common enough in ancient Egypt. However, their
joint tomb makes no mention of a rst wife and the suggestion that
Tey breast-fed the child poses certain problems. Did the widowed
Ay marry his daughter’s nurse? Could we be taking the title of wet-
nurse too literally – does it really mean stepmother or adoptive
mother? Whatever the answer, it is clear that the marriage of
Nefertiti and Amenhotep IV raised the lady Tey and her husband to
a position of great honour at court.
Although we know nothing of Nefertiti’s parentage we do know
that she had a younger sister who spent some time at the Amarna
court.11 As the term sister was used somewhat loosely throughout
the dynastic period, it is equally likely that this lady could have
been a half-sister, a stepsister or even a foster sister. Seven of the
earlier tombs of the Amarna nobles include among their depictions
of palace life a young lady referred to as Mutnodjmet, a Theban
name meaning ‘The goddess Mut (or mother) is the Sweet One’. The
vast majority of the women of the queen’s retinue remain
anonymous background gures, and the very fact that Mutnodjmet
is named is an indication of her importance,
 Fig. 2.1 Mutnodjmet and her nieces

although strict Amarna etiquette ensures that she always stands

behind the royal family. Mutnodjmet is consistently labelled
‘Queen’s Sister’. Like Nefertiti she never claims to be a king’s
daughter, and her parentage goes unrecorded. She is, however,
often shown as a companion to the three older daughters of
Nefertiti. Mutnodjmet is taller than her nieces and therefore older,
although the fact that she still wears the side-lock of youth indicates
that she was probably too young to act as their nurse or governess.12
Mutnodjmet disappears from the scenes before Nefertiti’s fourth
daughter is born and we may assume that she left the immediate
royal family at this time, possibly to be married.
In the tomb of Tey and Ay – most probably her parents –
Mutnodjmet watches with the ladies of the court as Nefertiti and
Akhenaten present the fortunate couple with a shower of golden
gifts. She refrains, however, from participating directly in any of the
Amarna celebrations, and does not seem to be a devotee of the sun
disc. This aloofness, her apparent reluctance to join her sister and
brother-in-law at worship, and the fact that Mutnodjmet is usually
accompanied by two comical dwarfs who are encumbered with
funny names, caused Norman de Garis Davies to speculate again on
the fate of one of the lost members of Akhenaten’s harem:
These servants, for whom ridiculous titles and names are invented, and their mistress, who
stands apart without participating in the worship of the Aten, invite comment. Were it not
for the evident youth of the princess and her Egyptian aspect, I would have ventured to
suggest that it was Tadukheper [sic] herself under an Egyptian name, to whom the
monogamous King would grant no higher title or relation than this… Her speedy
disappearance would be easily explained by the king’s repugnance to the alliance. The
dwarfs’ curious titles might then have some playful reference to their Syrian names.13

We have no contemporary written description of Nefertiti.

However, as she was almost certainly of Egyptian descent, we can
safely assume that she was relatively petite with brown eyes, a light-
brown skin and wavy brown or black hair. Throughout the New
Kingdom it was common practice for upper-class men and women to
crop their hair and shave their bodies as a practical response to the
heat, dust and bugs of the Egyptian climate; as Nefertiti frequently
appears completely hairless, we may assume that she too believed in
total depilation. We do know that Nefertiti used the make-up and
unguents of her day, and excavations at Amarna have yielded
several intimate cosmetic items including a blue glazed perfume
bottle and kohl tubes inlaid with the names of the queen and her
daughters.14 It is di cult to decide how much reliance to place on
contemporary depictions of the queen, as the Amarna artists did not
put a high premium on ‘realistic’ representations. However, her
portraits suggest that Nefertiti was slightly shorter than her husband
and of slender build at the time of her marriage, although she later
became more pear-shaped, with a trim waist but heavy thighs and a
sagging stomach. Whatever her shape, Nefertiti appears consistently
graceful in her movements. Her epithets are to a large extent
stereotyped expressions of queenly virtues: ‘Fair of Face, Mistress of
Joy, Endowed with Charm, Great of Love’, but they do suggest that
Amenhotep wished his wife to be recognized rst and foremost as a
beautiful woman.
Our rst glimpse of the new queen comes from the private tombs
of Thebes. In the badly damaged tomb of the royal butler Parennefer
(TT 188), an unnamed lady, almost certainly Nefertiti, accompanies
the king as he worships the Aten and, in a scene reminiscent of
earlier tombs, sits beside Amenhotep as he receives the grovelling
Parennefer.15 In the tomb of the Vizier Ramose (TT 55) we get a
much better view of the queen as she stands behind her husband at
the Window of Appearance, the palace balcony which allowed the
royal couple to present themselves to their subjects. Unfortunately
the scene is only partially carved, and Nefertiti is hidden from the
waist downwards by the palace wall. She is a slender young woman
with a heavy jaw, dressed in a long, elaborately pleated linen robe
with sleeves. This is Nefertiti’s standard attire, and occasional
depictions of an ankle-length sheath may simply represent the same
dress pulled tight in order to emphasize the body. On Nefertiti’s
brow there is the uraeus which signi es royalty and in her hand she
carries an object which has been identi ed as a ‘drooping queenly
lily’ but which is more probably a y-whisk.
Nefertiti’s Nubian-style wig, a bushy layered bob cut at an angle
so as to leave the nape of the neck exposed while the longer side
hair falls to the clavicles, is something of an innovation.16 This style,
which is believed to have been inspired by the naturally curly hair
of the Nubian soldiers who fought in the pharaoh’s army, had
hitherto been worn only
 Fig. 2.2 The Window of Appearance: Theban tomb of Ramose

by men connected with the military or the police force. Its

appearance on a high-ranking woman must have had the same
startling e ect on her contemporaries as the simple Eton crops of
the 1920s had on a world accustomed to seeing women with
elaborate long hair. Judging by modern standards of beauty the
Nubian style was very becoming to Nefertiti’s gamine good looks; it
is entirely possible that she adopted it simply because it made her
look good. However, the fact that this hairstyle is henceforth
reserved for women closely linked with the king, suggests that it
may have had a deeper signi cance for its wearer. In fact,
throughout her stay at Thebes Nefertiti varied her hairstyles,
choosing between the Nubian style, and the longer, more old-
fashioned tripartite wig favoured by her mother-in-law, which
Nefertiti wore either straight or curled. Generally the longer, heavy
wig was worn with a tall feathered crown, possibly in order to
counterbalance its weight.
 Standing in front of his bride, Amenhotep appears in a long and
voluminous pleated robe which very much resembles his wife’s
dress. Amenhotep is the active one; he leans forward with slightly
outstretched arms to greet his people and in doing so reveals his
trim waist, heavy hips and one breast. Nefertiti, entirely feminine in
spite of her masculine wig, is passive, and seems quite happy with
her traditional role as onlooker. High in the sky above, the sun disc
of the Aten shines down on the queen and her husband.
Nefertiti bore six daughters within ten years of her marriage, the
elder three being born at Thebes, the younger three at Amarna:
Meritaten (‘Beloved of the Aten’; born no later than Year 1),
Meketaten (‘Protected by the Aten’; probably born Year 4),
Ankhesenpaaten (‘Living through the Aten’; born before the end of
Year 7, most probably before Year 6), Neferneferuaten-the-younger
(‘Exquisite Beauty of the Sun Disc’; probably born by Year 8),
Neferneferure (‘Exquisite Beauty of Re’; born before Year 10) and
Setepenre (‘Chosen of Re’; born before Year 10). All six daughters
were depicted with their parents in a remarkable fresco painted on
the mud-brick wall of the King’s House at Amarna, dated on stylistic
grounds to Year 9. Here the family was shown relaxing in a
columned hall. Nefertiti reclined on a pile of cushions and cuddled
the tiny baby Setepenre who may have only just been born.
Amenhotep, dressed in a long robe and sandals, sat opposite his wife
on a low stool, and the three eldest princesses, naked but adorned
with jewellery, stood between their parents, secure in the shelter of
their mother’s extended left arm. Neferneferuaten-the-younger and
Neferneferure, still babies themselves, sat on colourful cushions at
their mother’s feet and played together. Unfortunately by the time
this mural was discovered by Flinders Pétrie in 1891, it had su ered
extensive damage caused by white ants and was in a highly fragile
condition. The upper part of the scene was beyond reconstruction
with Nefertiti and Amenhotep truncated at the waist, and baby
Setepenre had vanished except for one tiny painted hand. The
practical Petrie was forced to take drastic action to preserve what
little he could:
 Fig. 2.3 The Window of Appearance: Amarna tomb of Ay
On a still day, with a carpenter’s chisel, I cut to pieces, without any vibration, little by
little, the mud-bricks of the wall, until I had the facing of mud 30 × 16 inches, standing on
edge, free in the air. Having previously cut through where it should part, I brought up a
box lid against the face with newspaper padding on it, grasped the sheet of mud against
the lid, and turned it down. On getting it to my hut I brushed the dust o the back, made a
grid of wooden bars an inch square, and as much apart, put a layer of mud on each bar and
then pressed it down on the back of the mud, and put more mud as keying between all the
bars. On reversal, there was the fresco unhurt resting on the grid.17

The fragment of mud showing Neferneferuaten-the-younger and

Neferneferure at play was sent to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,
where, as Petrie reports with some resignation, ‘… after some years
a coat of varnish was mistakenly put on the face to preserve the
paint, sadly darkening and yellowing it, besides destroying the most
interesting dusting with powdered orpiment which indicated the
high lights re ected’.
Tradition dictated that a royal son would not be included in a
formal family portrait, when the king would be surrounded by his
close female dependants, the women who supported him and
emphasized his power. Given the highly unconventional nature of
the scene described above, however, it seems unlikely that a boy
child would have been excluded from the family group purely on
the grounds of gender. It seems safe to conclude that Nefertiti never
bore a son, and indeed there is no inscriptional or archaeological
evidence to suggest that she ever did. The royal couple must have
been disappointed. Although the Egyptians, unlike almost all other
ancient civilizations, seem to have loved their children irrespective
of their sex, there was greater status to be gained from producing
sons rather than daughters.
For Amenhotep, the lack of a male heir was not a total disaster.
Although the myth of Horus and Osiris made it clear that it was the
king’s son born to his consort who should follow him on to the
throne, there was a good precedent for adopting a successor from
the harem. Earlier in the 18th Dynasty Tuthmosis II and III had both
been the sons of minor royal wives who succeeded to the throne
when the queen failed to produce a son, while Tuthmosis I had been
a general in the army until he was adopted by his predecessor. For
Nefertiti the lack of a son was more serious, condemning her to a
temporary role in Egypt’s limelight. As Nefertiti was not of royal
birth she was denied the title of ‘King’s Daughter’, and her entire
status was derived from her role as ‘King’s Wife’ and mother of the
royal children. Without a son this role would end with her
husband’s death and she could never become ‘Mother of the King’,
the title which had ensured her mother-in-law’s continuing
importance at court.
The royal couple hid their disappointment well. From the
moment they were born the little princesses were allowed an
unprecedented prominence by both their parents, with the three
eldest, and Meritaten in particular, being the favourites. All six are
included in both formal and informal royal scenes, where they are
portrayed as miniature adults rather than babies and toddlers, and
all six are consistently associated with their mother who, as the
Amarna boundary stelae make clear, took responsibility for their
upbringing:
… My heart is pleased with the queen and her children. May old age be granted to the
Great Queen Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti… for she is in the charge of the pharaoh, and may
old age be granted to her children, the Princess Meritaten and the Princess Meketaten, for
they are under the authority of the queen their mother, for ever and ever.18

So ubiquitous are the royal daughters that they have frequently

been used as a means of dating their father’s monuments, the
assumption being that if a daughter is not depicted, she has not yet
been born. While this is useful as a general rule of thumb, it can be
dangerous to date a monument purely on the grounds of the number
of daughters shown; we do not know, for example, whether a
daughter would be included in a formal scene as soon as she was
born, or whether the artist would wait until she was old enough to
play a proper part in the ritual. Anachronisms did occur, the most
obvious being an Amarna tomb scene showing the reception of
foreign tribute during Year 12, where only three of the six
princesses appear.
Throughout the rst year of his reign Amenhotep IV acted as a
conventional monarch, carrying on very much where his late father
had left o . The royal court remained at Thebes, probably based at
the Malkata Palace, and building work continued in and around the
Karnak Temple where Amenhotep undertook the decoration of his
father’s un nished pylons with what at rst sight appear to be
irreproachably conventional images, although Re-Harakhty, the
falcon-headed sun god who wears the sun disc on his head, was
allowed unprecedented prominence. Pylon III was embellished with
a scene showing the triumphant Amenhotep IV in the guise of a
victorious pharaoh smiting the heads of a group of grovelling
foreigners, while the southern pylon (now demolished) was
garnished with a series of traditional o ering scenes including the
new king presenting to Re-Harakhty who is now designated ‘… he
who rejoices in the horizon in his name “Sunlight that is in the Disc”
’. At Soleb Amenhotep completed his father’s un nished temple, and
here we see scenes of the son worshipping his dei ed father.
During Year 2 came the unexpected announcement that a sed
festival was to be celebrated on the third anniversary of
Amenhotep’s accession. No o cial explanation for this celebration
has been preserved, but we might hazard a guess that it marked
some important event in the king’s private life, perhaps his birthday
or even his decision to dedicate himself and his people to a new
god.19 An unexpected festival would certainly have set the seal on
the new king’s popularity, as the heb-sed was a time of holidaying
and feasting for all.
First, however, the festival buildings had to be prepared. There
was a urry of construction work and the opening of a new
sandstone quarry at Gebel el-Silsila, where a tall stela cut high on
the cli shows the new king wearing the crown of Upper Egypt and
o ering to Amen beneath the winged sun disc, and an inscription
records the cutting of stone for the ‘Great Benben of Harakhty’ at
Thebes. Heliopolis, Memphis and Nubia received new sun temples,
but Amenhotep’s attention was focused on Thebes, the religious
capital of Egypt, where Amen’s supremacy was threatened by a
disjointed series of temples and cult buildings, all dedicated in
various ways to the worship of the sun disc or Aten who was to play
a prominent role in the sed celebrations. These included a
magni cent open temple named Gempaaten (‘The Sun Disc is found’)
and its subsidiary, Hwt-Benben (‘Mansion of the Benben-Stone’),
which were situated to the east of the existing Karnak complex.
Unfortunately the archaeological evidence for this period is
severely limited and none of these buildings still stands. This is due
not to the ravages of time, which have not been particularly severe
at Thebes, but to the deliberate actions of Amenhotep’s successors
who made a determined e ort to wipe out all trace of their
unconventional forebear. Amenhotep’s name and image were
ruthlessly erased and defaced wherever they were found. His
monuments were torn down and his buildings were dismantled, the
valuable stone being re-used in other constructions. A similar fate
was to befall Amarna, Egypt’s short-lived capital city. Here the stone
blocks from Amenhotep’s temples were salvaged and taken across
the river to be incorporated in the building work of Ramesses II at
Hermopolis (modern Ashmunein). In 1939 a German expedition to
Hermopolis recovered over 1,000 limestone blocks which, originally
from Amarna, had been re-used in the foundations of the temple
pylon. Unfortunately the advent of war interrupted their work. The
Germans hastily reburied their precious nds, only to have them re-
excavated by enterprising locals who sawed the decorated blocks
into slabs, ‘improved’ them with modern plaster and paint, and then
sold them to eager collectors.
Not one of Amenhotep’s Theban monuments has survived the
harsh treatment meted out by his successors, and instead of a series
of impressive temples we have been left with a vast number of
inscribed and painted sandstone blocks of standard dimensions (52
× 26 × 24cm) which are today known as talatat blocks.20 These
relatively small blocks, Amenhotep’s building bricks, were easy for
his workmen to quarry and transport and very light for his builders
to handle, allowing the king to embark on a rapid building
programme which transformed the Karnak complex within three or
four years. Ultimately, it was their size which saved the talatat
blocks. They were preserved because they could be usefully
employed as the lling inside later monuments; the cores of the
second and ninth pylons at Karnak, for example, have been found to
include thousands of blocks. Over 35,000 disjointed inscribed blocks
have so far been collected from within the walls and gateways of the
Karnak Temple, making a 3D jigsaw puzzle of such size, weight and
complexity that many scholars believed the lost scenes would never
be restored. Fortunately archaeologists cannot resist a challenge,
and since the mid 1960s the Akhenaten Temple Project has been
dedicated to the recovery of the lost images. By employing a
combination of photography and ‘space-age’ computer graphics, it
has so far been possible to reconstruct over 2,000 individual scenes
of Amenhotep’s early reign, although the buildings themselves
remain a series of disjointed blocks.21
The indexing of the talatat blocks has made one thing very clear:
Nefertiti enjoyed a far greater prominence in Theban state ritual
than had ever been imagined. A brief analysis of the images of the
recovered blocks makes fascinating reading.22 By 1976 there had
been 329 con rmed occurrences of the name or gure of
Amenhotep IV and 564 occurrences of Nefertiti’s name or image.
When broken down these gures seem even more startling: for
example, Nefertiti’s name appeared sixty-seven times on o ering
tables, Nefertiti and Amenhotep appeared together thirteen times,
and only three tables bore Amenhotep’s name alone. This imbalance
is likely to be at least in part a re ection of the fact that the
recovered blocks – by no means a complete or randomly selected
sample – include a disproportionate number of images from Hwt-
Benben, a building which was particularly associated with Nefertiti.
Nevertheless, Nefertiti’s prominence in what until now had been a
king-dominated sphere, is beyond dispute.
The benben-stone was an ancient pyramid or cone-shaped cult
object which had been linked with the solar cult of Re at Heliopolis
from the very beginning of the dynastic age. Amenhotep adopted
and adapted this ancient symbolism, and his Hwt-Benben was a
colonnaded temple associated with the vast Aten temple Gempaaten
and focused not upon a true benben-stone, but upon the single
Karnak obelisk set up by his grandfather Tuthmosis IV. Women had
always been permitted to serve in temples as priestesses, musicians
and dancers, and many queens had held honorary positions in the
cult of Hathor. Some queens had enjoyed a more intimate
relationship with the gods. It was recognized that the queen could
stimulate or arouse susceptible male deities, and the king’s
grandmother Mutemwia had even conceived a child with Amen.
Centuries of tradition, however, decreed that the king, and only the
king, as chief priest of all cults, should o er to the gods. Within the
precincts of Hwt-Benben it was Nefertiti and not Amenhotep who
took the king’s role of priest.
Each reconstructed square pillar of the Hwt-Benben colonnade has
four sides, three of which show near identical full-length images of
Nefertiti and Meritaten shaking their sistra beneath the sun disc
while the fourth, the so-called ‘special’ side which is presumed to
have faced the temple courtyard, is divided into four scenes showing
Nefertiti o ering to the Aten. On all the ‘long’ sides Nefertiti wears a
long, heavy blue wig and a diaphanous pleated robe open to the
waist and tied under the bust. She has a uraeus on her head and
sandals on her feet, and holds out two large sistra. Behind her
Meritaten – invariably described as the ‘King’s bodily Daughter
whom he loves, Meritaten, born of the Great King’s Wife whom he
loves, Mistress of the Two Lands, Nefertiti, may she live’ – appears
as a perfect miniature adult, dressed in a similar imsy robe and
shaking a single small-scale sistrum. Directly above mother and
daughter the sun’s disc appears in the sky and the sun’s rays reach
down to extend their blessing. The scenes on the special sides vary
slightly, but each register shows two Nefertitis in mirror-image,
their open arms raised in worship, standing before an o ering table
under the Aten’s loving rays. Her stance is that of a king o ering to
a god. Again Nefertiti wears her imsy robe, and again Meritaten
accompanies her mother, shaking a miniature sistrum. Inside the
temple the story is repeated. The queen, accompanied by one or
occasionally two daughters, o ers to the god, while the king is
nowhere to be seen. Indeed, no males, neither human nor animal,
are depicted on any of the Hwt-Benben blocks.

Fig. 2.4 Nefertiti and Meritaten in the Hwt-Benben

Hwt-Benben was dismantled during the reign of King Horemheb,

when many of the blocks from the Nefertiti pillars were
incorporated in the Second Pylon at Karnak. The blocks were not,
however, used in a random or thoughtless manner. Henri Chevrier,
the French archaeologist who worked on the Second Pylon during
the late 1940s, discovered that within it the Nefertiti blocks had
been carefully reassembled so as to make up partial scenes, but that
curiously at least two of the scenes had been deliberately
reconstructed upside-down. Many of the images of Nefertiti had
been defaced within the pylon, and many of the hands on the end of
the Aten’s rays had been slashed across the ngertips. We do not
know why Horemheb’s workmen should have taken the trouble to
match up scenes which were to be hidden from view behind the
pylon facing, nor why some of the scenes should have been
reassembled in reverse order; the assumption that this may have
been a symbolic act of revenge against a heretic regime by the
orthodox Horemheb is probably correct. As Ray Win eld Smith has
noted:
It is certain that the queen was held in contempt by those responsible for this undigni ed
treatment. To turn a beautiful female upside-down, to slash her viciously, and to place her
where she would be symbolically crushed by the enormous weight of massive, soaring
walls, can hardly be explained otherwise.23

The mutilation of the Aten’s ngertips may have been intended to

suggest that the god would no longer be able to extend his love and
protection to the disgraced queen. It is not clear, however, whether
Nefertiti was singled out for this attack for political reasons, either
because she was usurping the role of a king or because she was
worshipping a proscribed god, or whether Horemheb held a more
personal grudge against Nefertiti.
Nefertiti’s prominence in the Mansion of the Benben-Stone could
perhaps be explained as an unprecedented aberration, ‘the Mansion
being merely a minor temple dedicated to exclusively female
worship of the Aten as a subsidiary of the more powerful male
temple Gempaaten. However, other Karnak talatat con rm that at
some point during the rst ve years of her husband’s reign,
probably soon after the birth of her rst child, Nefertiti was able to
abandon the traditional queen’s role of passive observer which we
saw in the tomb of Ramose. In the presence of her husband Nefertiti
remains a supportive wife, appearing at a smaller scale to shake a
queenly sistrum, but she is now a woman of action who may be
shown riding in a chariot, travelling in a palanquin, or even
enjoying a feast. In an echo of the scene in the tomb of Kheruef
where Queen Tiy takes the form of a sphinx to trample two female
enemies, alternating southern and northern female hostages now
pay homage before Nefertiti’s throne.
The most compelling evidence for Nefertiti’s changed role comes
from a disparate group of blocks which indicate her involvement in

Fig. 2.5 Nefertiti smiting a female enemy, scene on the royal boat

what are now known as ‘smiting scenes’. Talatat blocks recovered

from both Karnak and Hermopolis show Amenhotep’s boat
decorated with traditional images of the king slaying the foes of
Egypt. Amenhotep stands beneath the rays of the sun disc, his right
arm raised to deliver a fatal blow to an enemy who grovels at his
feet, while Nefertiti, emulating the goddess Maat, stands impassively
behind him and watches. These images are paralleled by
unprecedented tableaux showing Nefertiti herself as a triumphal
queen wielding either a mace or a sword in order to execute an
enemy. The clearest of these scenes, recovered from Hermopolis,
shows a eet of at least three royal boats, although Nefertiti’s is the
only one which is substantially intact. Royal boats may be
distinguished by the carved heads on the end of the steering poles,
and here Nefertiti’s poles show her wearing her trademark blue
head-dress topped with a disc and two tall plumes, whose streamers
utter merrily in the breeze. On the deck, behind the central cabin,
stands a small kiosk or canopy which possibly served as an audience
chamber. The relief which decorates the back wall of this structure
shows Nefertiti, again wearing her blue crown and dressed in a long
skirt, raising her right arm to dispatch a female enemy who kneels
in submission with her face turned towards the queen.24
These smiting scenes may well be representations of a disturbing
ritual – we should not assume that they are merely symbolic. The
image of the pharaoh as a victorious warrior subduing a
representative of the enemies of Egypt was an ancient one, rst seen
on the ceremonial Narmer palette dating to the very dawn of the
dynastic age. By the 18th Dynasty it had evolved into a visual
metaphor used to depict the concept of the pharaoh triumphant
rather than a speci c event. Neither Amenhotep III nor Amenhotep
IV was ever called upon to lead troops into battle, but both chose to
be shown in this aggressive pose and both may well have been
called upon to execute a token enemy. The message behind the
scene is one of generalized victory – the enemy is always subdued
and does not struggle to escape – and of sacri ce, and the action of
the right arm raised to kill or sacri ce by a person of authority may
be found in a scaled-down version in the tombs of the nobles, where
the tomb owner, attended by his wife and children, holds decoy
birds in his left hand and raises his right arm to throw a stick in the
air.25 However, the role of smiter had until now been exclusively a
king’s role, and by implication a man’s role. The fact that Nefertiti
was allowed to play the part of the king in this ritual must be read
as an indication of her increased ritual and/or political importance.
It should not, however, be read as a sign that Nefertiti was now of
equal importance to the king. The Egyptian love of symmetry
dictated that Nefertiti’s boat should as far as possible match
Amenhotep’s boat. In Amenhotep’s scene, however, he is supported
by the presence of the queen, his immediate inferior, while Nefertiti
is supported by her eldest daughter, who we must assume to be her
immediate inferior. The message seems clear. Just as Tiy had been
separated by her marriage from the rest of humanity, so the gulf
between Nefertiti and the common people has widened. The gap
between Amenhotep and Nefertiti may have closed slightly, but it is
still there. Nefertiti is indeed a powerful woman, and she has been
allotted some of the privileges and duties of the crown. Amenhotep
is happy for everyone to understand this. However, the basic chain
of authority remains unaltered. Amenhotep is responsible to the
Aten. Nefertiti falls under the authority of the king, and the little
princesses remain under the control of their mother. Later, at
Amarna, we occasionally see Nefertiti o ering alongside her
husband apparently as an equal. It is in these scenes that we may
realize the true extent of her religious power.
The elaborate crowns worn by the queens of Egypt were, during
the New Kingdom, intended to convey a symbolic message to the
observer. The ancient Egyptians consistently made use of symbols as
a means of communicating abstract concepts; it is this that makes
their art so di cult for modern observers to understand at any but
the most basic of levels. It should come as no surprise to nd that
Nefertiti’s increased status is re ected in her choice of head-dress.
For the rst few years of her husband’s reign she is invariably
shown wearing the single or double uraeus which, as a symbol
representing the eyes of Re, is often identi ed as the goddesses
Hathor and Maat. The uraeus, which itself often wears a solar disc
with cow horns thereby emphasizing the solar link, is frequently
supplemented with a traditional queen’s head-dress, and, like her
mother-in-law before her, Nefertiti favours either the double
feathers or the double feathers plus disc and horns which associate
her with the solar cults of Re and his daughter Hathor. She
consistently avoids donning the vulture head-dress which, as the
vulture was primarily associated with Mut, the consort of Amen,
may not have been acceptable in the new religious climate.
Now Nefertiti starts to wear her own unique head-dress, the tall,
straight-edged, at-topped blue crown familiar from the Berlin
bust.26 The origins of this crown are obscure, although it seems
likely that it was developed as a female version of the tall blue
leather war crown, covered with protective discs, which was worn
by the kings of Egypt. Akhenaten himself favoured a rather high,
narrow or bonnet-like version of the blue crown, which he often
augmented with stylized ringlets or multiple uraei. Nefertiti’s crown
too was occasionally covered with decorative discs, which may
themselves have had a symbolic meaning connecting their wearer
with the cult of the Aten. The shape of Nefertiti’s crown probably
owes much to the head-dress worn by Tefnut, daughter of the sun
god. Tiy, when depicted in the form of a sphinx associated with
Hathor-Tefnut, had worn a tall crown of similar silhouette whose
top was formed by sprouting plants, which some scholars have
interpreted as a symbol of rejuvenation and fertility, perhaps even
linked with the dishevelled hairstyles traditionally worn by women
in labour.27 Now we nd Nefertiti herself associated with the form
of the sphinx at Karnak.
It was during these early years, while the Hwt-Benben was under
construction, that Nefertiti received a new name, Neferneferuaten or
‘Beautiful are the Beauties of the Aten’.28 From now on she was
known to her contemporaries by the somewhat long-winded
appellation Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti (‘Beautiful are the Beauties of
the Aten. A Beautiful Woman Has Come’), although the Karnak
talatat blocks suggest that her shorter name was still used in scenes
where space was limited. To avoid confusion she will remain
Nefertiti, the name by which she is known today, throughout this
book. Nefertiti’s name, as queen, had always been written inside a
cartouche, the hieroglyphic device representing a
 Fig. 2.6 The cartouche of Nefertiti

loop of rope which always encircled the throne-name and birth-

name of the king. Her new name was similarly enclosed, although
its length occasionally posed problems for imprudent masons who
unwisely carved the cartouche rst only to nd themselves faced
with the problem of trying to cram an unusual number of
hieroglyphic signs into too small a space. Within the cartouche the
writing of ‘Aten’ – an element of the name Neferneferuaten – was
consistently reversed so that it faced the determinative sign which
indicated Nefertiti’s queenly status; the transposition of the Aten
was a great honour, likened to the inclusion of a capital letter
within a modern name, which allowed the queen’s image to face the
name of her god. Occasionally Nefertiti was allotted two cartouches,
so that her name resembled that of a king. At Thebes the juxtaposed
cartouches contained her shorter name and her longer name, while
at Amarna each of the cartouches contained the longer name.

Amenhotep’s jubilee was celebrated during Year 3 with major

festivities at Gempaaten. Recent excavation has shown that this was
a vast temple built in the form of a rectangular open court
surrounded by a roofed colonnade whose square pillars bore
colossal painted statues of the king himself. Here, under the
impassive gaze of his own image, Amenhotep reinterpreted the
traditional heb-sed rituals celebrated by his father before him. Scenes
recovered from the Gempaaten talatat blocks con rm that
 Fig. 2.7 The royal names of Akhenaten

the royal family and numerous anonymous dignitaries were present

to observe the ceremonies and enjoy the feasting but, very
signi cantly, many of the great state gods, including the hitherto
all-powerful ‘father of the gods’ Amen, were excluded and the
shrines which would normally have housed these deities all
contained depictions of the king beneath the Aten’s disc. Nefertiti
played an obvious but not intrusive role in the celebrations – she
supported her husband but never sought to usurp him. Dressed in a
long-sleeved robe with two plumes on her head, she rode in a
palanquin whose throne, the exact parallel of the king’s, was carved
with sphinxes in Nefertiti’s own image. Even the rearing cobras
fringing the palanquin had Nefertiti’s face and feathered crown.
The deliberate exclusion of the major state gods from the heb-sed
should have served as a warning to the priests of Amen. By the end
of Year 5 the Aten had risen from obscurity to become the dominant
state god. O erings which had traditionally been presented to the
temple of Amen were now diverted to the Aten temples so that the
cult of the Aten grew rich as the cult of Amen grew poor. Eventually
the old temples were closed, and all building work ceased as the
decision was taken to relocate the court to a new purpose-built
capital city, Akhetaten (‘Horizon of the Aten’), now known as
Amarna. Amen was now declared anathema and the king, rejecting
the given name which linked him with the despised Amen, followed
his wife in adopting a new name. Henceforth he was to be known as
Akhenaten, or ‘Living Spirit of the Aten’.
 3
The Aten Dazzles

Glorious, you rise on the horizon of heaven, O living Aten, creator of life. When you have
arisen on the eastern horizon you ll every land with your beauty. You are gorgeous, great
and radiant, high over every land. Your rays embrace all the lands that you have made.1

The kings of the 18th Dynasty openly acknowledged a great debt to

the god Amen, for they well understood that it was Amen who had
enabled the mighty Theban warrior Ahmose to unite Egypt after the
civil unrest and foreign rule of the Second Intermediate Period.
Amen’s protection of Ahmose soon proved to be a shrewd political
move, and the devotion of successive 18th Dynasty kings allowed
him to evolve from a relatively insigni cant local god worshipped in
and around Thebes into the patron god of the Egyptian empire.
Amen, appearing as a man dressed in a kilt and wearing a
distinctive head-dress of two tall plumes, was recognized both as
king of the gods and father of the king. He became associated with
the most important Old Kingdom deity in the compound sun god
Amen-Re and linked with the ithyphallic fertility god Min. Amen’s
mighty Karnak temple dominated the Theban skyline, and he was
the presiding deity in each of the royal mortuary temples on the
west bank of the River Nile. Within his temples, however, Amen was
an aloof and secretive god; his name, which translates as ‘the
hidden’, gives a clue to his character. Amen’s home was a dark and
lonely shrine hidden deep within the sacred precincts, inaccessible
to the ordinary people and visited only by the priests who attended
to the daily rituals of washing and dressing the god and making
o erings of food, drink and incense. Even when on festival days
Amen sailed out into the sunlight his sacred boat became a
miniature temple and he remained concealed behind the doors of
his shrine. This hidden aspect of the god allowed his priests – those
privy to his divine wishes – great power.

Fig. 3.1 The god Amen

As the 18th Dynasty developed into an era of unprecedented

prosperity successive pharaohs were faced with an embarrassment
of riches. Much of their new-found wealth was used to enhance the
Karnak temple complex, home of Amen, Mut and Khonsu, and the
stonemasons were kept busy as succeeding kings vied with each
other to express their devotion in stone. Amen’s temple grew
physically vast and, as royal endowments increased, developed into
a signi cant semi-independent economic entity administered by an
increasingly complex hierarchy of priests. Amen was now a major
landowner in his own right with control over a variety of income-
generating assets such as elds, herds, ships, vineyards and even
beehives, some situated many miles away from Thebes. The revenue
provided by these assets, plus taxes extracted in perpetuity from
individual estates, were used to pay the priests and the temple
servants; surpluses were hoarded, together with vast amounts of
grain and the gold, precious stones and foreign loot donated by the
king, in huge warehouses safe within the temple walls. Thus the
king was able to convince all of his extreme piety and indi erence
to worldly goods, while the temple provided a convenient and
secure bank for his treasures. If the annual inundation failed, or if
the Nile rose too high and ooded the towns and villages, the
temple stores could be requisitioned and their grain used to feed the
people.
For many years the king and the priesthood of Amen existed side
by side in symbiotic harmony. The priesthood, which owned
substantial tracts of land in the south, assisted the vizier in the
administration of Upper Egypt, thus freeing the royal court to reside
at Memphis. The king in his turn supported the god nancially,
while making judicious use of their relationship to reinforce his own
position as divine ruler. By the later 18th Dynasty, however, there
are signs that the monarchy may have started to feel itself
challenged by the ever-increasing power of Amen. Amenhotep II,
Tuthmosis IV and Amenhotep III all attempted to maintain control
over the cult by appointing their own loyal followers, natives of
northern towns rather than southerners, as High Priest of Amen.
Amenhotep III, ruling over a peaceful empire, must have seen little
need for the protection of a mighty warrior god although he was
certainly not averse to exploiting other aspects of Amen’s divinity.
Amen was chosen to be his heavenly father, and the extensive
programme of refurbishment at Karnak and Luxor which continued
throughout his reign is a testament to the king’s loyalty.
Egypt’s unprecedented wealth meant that the king’s generosity
need not be con ned to a single cult. Amenhotep had always been
interested in Egypt’s past, as evidenced by his revision of the heb-sed
ceremony. Now he started to pay more attention to the other gods
of the pantheon, partially reverting back to Old Kingdom solar
theology. He developed a particular interest in one relatively
obscure god, the Aten, whose name simply means ‘the disc’, and
who since the Middle Kingdom had been recognized both as a
physical manifestation of the sun god Re and as a symbol of divinity
closely a liated with the king. The Aten was represented either by
a winged sun disc or by a hawk-headed god, and at this time had no
cult centre or major temple. We now nd the name of the Aten
appearing with increasing regularity, so that even the royal barge
which sailed on Queen Tiy’s pleasure lake was named ‘The Sun Disc
[Aten] Dazzles’.
Egypt is a land of hot sunlit days and dark cool nights. The
contrast between the two is both sudden and obvious, and it is
therefore not surprising that both the sun and its light played an
important part in Egyptian life and religion, the daily cycle of sunset
followed by sunrise being interpreted as a certain guarantee of life
after death. The sun god Re, represented either as a falcon-headed
god or as a winged sun disc, is known from the time of the earliest
pyramids when to spend the Afterlife with Re was one of the most
important aspirations of the king. Indeed, the shape of the pyramid
may well have been intended to represent the sun’s rays in solid
form, a straight-sided ramp which would allow the king to climb up
to heaven. Re, the sun god, was occasionally combined with Horus,
god of the horizon, to produce the hybrid deity Re-Harakhty, a man
with Horus’s falcon head.
 Fig. 3.2 The god Re-Harakhty

The cult of the sun god was centred on the northern city of
Heliopolis (ancient Iunu), one of the most magni cent cities of the
dynastic age, which may well have provided vital archaeological
clues to the development of the Aten cult. Here the original benben-
stone, a pyramid or cone-shaped boulder, possibly a meteorite, took
the place of a cult statue of Re as a focus for worship. Sadly, due to
a fatal combination of ancient destruction and modern development,
there is now almost nothing left of the ancient glories of Heliopolis.
However, the 5th Dynasty sun temples of Abu Ghurab, only one of
which now survives, may well have been built to the same plan.
Here the temple consisted of an open courtyard with a central
alabaster altar and, to the west, a large obelisk which acted as a sun
totem or benben.
Amenhotep III used the cult of the Aten as a means of developing
a cult of the king, stressing his own personal divinity through the
newly established Aten priesthood. Although tradition dictated that
the king should become fully divine only at his death, the mortal
Amenhotep was already recognized as the living embodiment of
Ptah and worshipped at the ‘Temple of Nebmaatre-United-with-
Ptah’, Memphis. In Egypt’s outlying regions Amenhotep was more
obviously a god, and the Soleb temple included a relief showing the
king making an o ering to his own image, which bears the title
‘Nebmaatre Lord of Nubia’, a god who, judging from his head-dress,
had lunar rather than solar connections. Later, after the king’s
death, Amenhotep IV is shown worshipping his father at Soleb,
while in the Theban tomb of Kheruef, where we are shown
Amenhotep III and Tiy associated with a variety of solar deities, a
small scene shows the king and queen being pulled along in the
evening boat of Re, an image which seems intended to symbolize
the union of the dead king with the living sun god.2 The Nubian cult
of the dei ed Amenhotep survived the upheavals of the Amarna
period and continued into the reign of Tutankhamen, while at
Thebes it went on beyond the Ramesside period.
A major alteration in Amenhotep’s status seems to follow the
celebration of his rst heb-sed;3 it is after this date that we nd an
increasing emphasis on solar iconography and this goes hand in
hand with the development of statues intended to commemorate the
dei ed king. The Colossi of Memnon, placed immediately outside
the king’s mortuary temple, may well have served as an object of
worship in their own right because, just as a cult statue was
recognized as divine, a colossal statue of the king – particularly one
which had been named – made an appropriate object of worship. By
the time of Ramesses II, some sixty years later, colossal statues of
the monarch were regularly named and worshipped and various cult
temples included within their sanctuaries depictions of the divine
Ramesses sitting alongside his fellow gods.
The king had always lled the role of an intermediary between
the gods and mankind, a mortal born to a human mother who
became semi-divine on the death of his predecessor. In his o cial
persona the pharaoh was an ex o cio god on earth, the only
Egyptian who could speak directly to the gods and in consequence
the chief priest of all religious cults, although he was forced to
delegate his responsibilities to deputy priests, only stepping in to
o ciate at the major cult ceremonies. The king’s most important
duty, a function of his semi-divine status, was the maintenance of
maat throughout his land. Maat, a word which cannot be translated
literally but can mean ‘justice’ or ‘truth’ though it is better
understood as status quo, was an abstract concept representing the
ideal state of the universe and everyone in it. This ideal state had
been established at the time of creation and had to be maintained to
placate the gods. However, maat was always under threat from
malevolent outside in uences seeking to bring chaos to Egypt.
Throughout the dynastic age the concept of maat combined with the
divine nature of the kingship to reinforce the power of the royal
family. By ensuring that the pharaoh’s position could not be openly
questioned without compromising Egypt’s security by threatening
maat, the ruling élite remained securely at the top of the social
pyramid.
During the Old Kingdom his semi-divine status made the king
very di erent from his subjects, and only he could look forward to
an afterlife in the presence of his fellow gods. Mere mortals could
continue to exist beyond death, but they were con ned to the
precincts of the tomb. By the Middle Kingdom, however, the
afterlife beyond the grave had been opened to all. In consequence
the king’s perceived divinity on earth was weakened, although he
still held sole responsibility for the preservation of maat. The New
Kingdom saw an attempt to reverse this trend towards equality,
with the introduction of the concept of the personal divinity of the
king. This started during the reign of Hatchepsut who, in order to
reinforce her right to the throne, claimed the god Amen as her
bodily father. Theology had always recognized the reigning king as
the theoretical son of the creator god, but Hatchepsut made it very
clear that she was the fruit of a physical union between Amen and
her mother, Queen Ahmose:
She smiled at his majesty. He went to her immediately, his penis erect before her. He gave
his heart to her… She was lled with joy at the sight of his beauty. His love passed into her
limbs. The palace was ooded with the god’s fragrance, and all his perfumes were from
Punt.4

Hatchepsut, as the child of a human mother and a divine father,

was a demi-god, but she did not exploit this aspect of her persona,
choosing instead to use her lial relationship to Amen as a
justi cation of her reign. Amenhotep III chose to reintroduce the
legend of divine birth by copying Hatchepsut’s story, suitably
amended, on to the wall of the Luxor Temple. Amenhotep III, the
son of Tuthmosis IV, was a secure monarch with an incontestable
right to inherit the throne; he used the story not as a means of
justifying his rule, but as a means of con rming his own semi-divine
status, promoting himself as personally divine rather than as a god
through his o ce. It is no surprise that Amenhotep III chose to
display this legend at the Luxor Temple, a temple dedicated to the
celebration of the divine royal soul.
Within ve years of his succession Akhenaten had radically
simpli ed Egypt’s polytheistic religion by abolishing most of the
established pantheon, replacing a multitude of deities with one god,
the Aten. The object of his worship was the light of the sun, rather
than the sun itself. Two blocks containing the badly damaged and
sadly disjointed text of a royal pronouncement – perhaps a
justi cation of his unprecedented rejection of the old gods – hint at
Akhenaten’s perception of the traditional gods as worn-out and
ine ective:
The king says… their temples fallen to ruin… they have ceased one after the other,
whether of precious stones…5

At rst the cult of the Aten was able to coexist with the old order.
Then, perhaps because Akhenaten encountered opposition to his
views, or became more entrenched in his beliefs, this peaceful
coexistence became unacceptable. The Egyptian pantheon had
always been willing to absorb fresh deities, and more traditional
gods had simply faded in importance as they were gently displaced
by the new. Akhenaten, however, demanded, and got, a rapid and
somewhat ruthless rejection of the
 Fig. 3.3 Worshipping in the temple

old order. Most of the traditional gods and goddesses could simply
be ignored; it was as if they had never been. But from Year 5
onwards Amen, and to a lesser extent his divine family, was
subjected to a persecution which was to increase in intensity as the
new reign progressed. Amen’s name and, more rarely, his image
were erased or defaced wherever they were found. This persecution
occurred throughout the length and breadth of Egypt although it is
at Karnak that its true extent is felt. Here someone even took the
trouble to remove Amen’s name from the very tip of Hatchepsut’s
obelisk where, as obelisks are primarily associated with the solar
cults, it had probably caused great o ence. Throughout the rest of
Egypt the desecration was somewhat haphazard and unsystematic,
possibly because many of those charged with erasing the name of
the god could not themselves read. Nevertheless, those prominent
individuals unfortunate enough to bear personal names including
the element ‘Amen’ found it wise to rename themselves at once.
As far as we can tell there had been no great quarrel with the old
priesthood to precipitate this extreme reaction, although the
Amarna boundary stelae drop dark and regrettably unspeci c hints
that the king had taken exception to something – possibly
traditional cult practices – which had been repeated during both his
reign and those of his forebears:
… it shall be worse than what I heard in Year 4; it shall be worse than what I heard in Year
3; it shall be worse than what I heard in Year 1; it shall be worse than what Nebmaatre
[Amenhotep III] heard; it shall be worse than what Menkheperure [Tuthmosis IV] heard…6
Nor was there any apparent resistance to the imposition of the new
state religion, although it is of course unlikely that any such
resistance would have been recorded in o cial documents. By
stopping all royal o erings Akhenaten ensured that the old temples
were quickly and e ciently closed down and that their wealth was
diverted to the Aten making this cult and its chief devotee, the king,
extremely wealthy. The property con scated from Amen was to be
administered by centralized government o cials rather than local
priests.
Service of the state gods was at all times seen as a lucrative career
rather than a religious vocation. It is therefore possible that many of
Amen’s priests, now redundant, may have changed allegiance and
sought

Fig. 3.4 The old names of the Aten

positions serving the Aten. Given the size of the Aten’s endowments,
their administrative experience would have proved invaluable. It is
noticeable, though, that the Amarna court contained few members
of the traditional ruling élite. The courtiers most prominent in the
service of the king were men of more humble origins who owed
their position to the king’s patronage rather than to birth. The army
now played a conspicuous role in daily life, lending their silent
support to the king and his innovations. Although we know of no
battles during Akhenaten’s reign, the talatat blocks have revealed
that the king, often viewed as a paci st, chose to surround himself
with soldiers and armed civilians. Even the ‘Agents of the Harem
Ladies’ were armed and ready for action. This heavy military
presence may, of course, explain why there was no open opposition
to any of Akhenaten’s reforms.
The old iconography of a falcon-headed god was abandoned and
the Aten took the form of a faceless sun disc wearing the cobra or
uraeus which signi ed kingship, whose long rays were tipped with
miniature hands which could hold the ankh, symbol of life. Unlike
Egypt’s other gods the Aten was highly visible, yet at the same time
very impersonal – an abstract symbol whose lack of a human body
prevented him from appearing in the traditional religious scenes so
that he was invariably depicted above the royal family, an observer
rather than a participant in the tableaux below. This elevation of the
god, and his relatively small size, allowed the king to become the
most prominent gure in any religious scene: all eyes were now
focused on Akhenaten himself. The Aten required little mystery, no
hidden sanctuary and of course no physical host-statue as the sun
was his own image, visible to king and commoner alike. We might
have expected Akhenaten to extend this reasoning to its logical
conclusion. The Aten, a democratic god, had no obvious need of a
temple as he was accessible for anyone to worship at any time
during the day. But Akhenaten needed his temples as a means of
controlling access to his god, and so Aten worship followed the
traditional pattern. Only the chief priest or his deputy could address
the god, and it was only in the temple that the correct rituals of
worship, including o erings, could be performed. The new temples
were, however, a direct contrast to the gloomy precincts of Amen
and the other traditional gods. Modelled on the solar temples of Re,
they were in essence simple open courtyards which allowed the sun
to shine down on the worship of the faithful.
Although Akhenaten set out to reform and simplify state religion
he had no intention of weakening the position of the monarchy
which, until his reign, had been closely linked with accepted
theology. Indeed, he followed the example set by his semi-divine
father and exploited his new god in order to emphasize the divine
role of the king. Amenhotep III had already been linked with Re-
Harakhty in the tomb of Kheruef. Now Akhenaten was the son of Re
and, as the Aten was the visible, physical aspect of Re, Akhenaten
became the earthly or human manifestation of the sun god. As the
‘Beautiful Child of the Disc’ he was e ectively an interpreter
standing between the god and his people. He alone could recognize
and proclaim the will of his father. In many ways this was a
continuation of the old theology, and the ‘ordinary’ middle- and
lower-class Egyptians would have experienced little challenge to
their personal beliefs. The biggest change was felt by Akhenaten’s
courtiers who, denied access to their o cial god yet needing to
ingratiate themselves with the new regime, were compelled to
worship via Akhenaten and Nefertiti.
Akhenaten’s subjects, accustomed to a wide range of o cial
deities, must have found it hard to understand the austerity of one
simple abstract symbol. In the past there had been not one national
creed but a series of overlapping religious spheres. These included
what in modern terms may be classed as the ‘major tradition’
represented by the universally acknowledged state gods such as
Amen, Isis and Osiris, the ‘minor tradition’ which included magic,
superstition and witchcraft, and a whole series of local cults which
fell somewhere between the two extremes.

Fig. 3.5 The royal family worship the Aten

Most Egyptians worshipped a highly personal mixture of regional

deities and family-based cults, with a heavy emphasis on the spirits
responsible for pregnancy and childbirth, supplemented with strong
doses of superstition and magic. The absence of the great state gods
may therefore not have been a problem for the majority of the
population, although they would certainly have missed the great
festivals and processions which had so far provided regular breaks
in their otherwise monotonous lives. There is no evidence that
Akhenaten ever sought to develop national Aten festivals, and his
intention seems to have been to replace public religious celebrations
with semi-secular events such as the procession of the royal family
through the streets, or the distribution of rewards to his loyal
servants. This somewhat short-sighted policy must surely have
contributed to the general lack of enthusiasm for the new, remote
state god.
What obviously was a problem was the essential nature of the
Aten itself. Like other creator gods the Aten combined male and
female elements so that he could become the ‘father and mother’ of
all things created. He was both asexual and androgynous, had no
anthropomorphic association and, by his very nature as sole creator,
could have no spouse. This in itself was neither unique to the Aten
nor to Egypt.7 In Egypt asexual gods had been known to create life
single-handed; Atum, for example, had either masturbated or
expectorated to produce his gender-speci c children Shu and
Tefnut. However, most gods were clearly either male or female; they
coupled and produced their children by relatively conventional
means. This cosy divine domesticity made the gods far more
accessible to the Egyptian people who, valuing family life above all
things, could understand gods who behaved in a human fashion.
The Aten had no divine wife and no child to make up the usual
triad. He was a remote, characterless entity and his role as a fertile
god was very much a theoretical one. We have no equivalent of the
Luxor or Deir el-Bahri legends of the divine conception of the king
to explain exactly how Akhenaten became the son of the Aten, but it
seems unlikely that any form of divine impregnation of Queen Tiy
was ever envisaged. Furthermore, there was now no o cial
equivalent of the essentially comforting mother-wife goddess who
can be traced back to the female gurines of the predynastic age
and who in recent times had been represented by state goddesses
such as Isis and, more particularly, Hathor in her various guises.
Female goddesses, especially those associated with safe pregnancy
and childbirth, had always played an important role in both popular
and state religion. Now, o cially at least, they were anathema and
even Hapy, the fecund male god of the Nile, had been suppressed,
presumably because his existence was incompatible with the Aten’s
role of sole creator.
Akhenaten, who appears curiously androgynous in many of his
portraits, spent much of his life conspicuous as the one male at the
centre of a family of unusually prominent women. His grandmother,
Mutemwia, his mother, Tiy, and at least three of his four sisters had
been ladies of strong character. The highly publicized children in
the nuclear royal family were all female, while Akhenaten’s wife
was not only a highly capable woman but was – if the evidence from
Amarna is to be believed – the passion of his life and the centre of
his universe. It is therefore not surprising that Akhenaten, conscious
of the lack of a female aspect to the Aten and aware of just how
useful an ally a strong queen could be, promoted Nefertiti to provide
the absent element of the new cult. In a precept which extended to
the royal family, a good Egyptian wife was always seen as her
husband’s most loyal supporter. As a consequence, some early New
Kingdom queens had been allowed a prominent political role at
times when the safety of the monarchy was at stake, and Tetisheri,
Ahhotep and Ahmose Nefertari had all played their part in
establishing the 18th Dynasty.8 At the same time it was always
recognized that the role of the queen, like that of the king, had
semi-divine origins. Numerous queens had served the old gods as
priestesses and, as we have seen with Tiy, queens were permitted to
act as the mortal representative of the deity on earth. This aspect of
Nefertiti’s queenship was now to be emphasized as never before.
Nefertiti was to become Akhenaten’s religious twin, the female
complement to his male role. The Aten, Akhenaten son of Re, and
Nefertiti, his wife, now formed an inverted semi-divine triad which
paralleled the ancient triad formed by the creator god, his son Shu,
and Shu’s twin sister-consort Tefnut.
Tiy, still very much alive and once believed to be the inspiration
behind her son’s beliefs, seems to have become a somewhat
peripheral gure at this time. In the tomb of Kheruef, which spans
the reigns of the two Amenhoteps, we see her alongside her son,
o ering wine to Re-Harakhty and Maat, and incense to Atum and
Hathor. These scenes presumably date to the very beginning of
Akhenaten’s reign. With the advent of Nefertiti Tiy is forced to take
a back seat, as Mutemwia had before her. Her part in the new
religion is not clear and, although we know that Akhenaten built his
mother a ‘sunshade’ temple where she could worship the Aten, there
is no evidence to suggest that she ever abandoned the old beliefs to
dedicate herself exclusively to the new. Where in earlier reigns we
might have expected to nd scenes of the king accompanied by his
mother and his wife, we now see only the royal couple plus their
daughter(s). E ectively there is a secondary triad of king, queen and
royal o spring, with no place for the king’s mother.
At rst sight the Amarna letters suggest that in the eld of politics
the roles of the two queens may have been reversed with, for at
least the rst few years of her son’s reign, Tiy remaining a powerful
gure. We know that Tushratta chose to write directly to Tiy over
the a air of the missing gold statues, in the hope that she could
in uence her son, who must have seemed very much an unknown
quantity. In contrast Nefertiti is never speci cally named in any of
the letters and it would seem that to Akhenaten’s correspondents
she was of negligible signi cance. While it is possible to argue on
the basis of this evidence that Tiy was, for a few years after her
husband’s death, required to act as regent for her young son, it
seems more likely that Tushratta was appealing to Tiy as a friend,
albeit a friend with motherly in uence, rather than a powerful
queen.
Nefertiti’s curious exclusion from the Amarna letters does seem to
suggest that her in uence was con ned to the religious sphere. It
may also be, at least in part, a re ection of her husband’s general
lack of interest in all foreign a airs, although there is perhaps a
danger that Akhenaten’s paci sm and insularity may in turn be
overstated. While no one could claim Akhenaten as one of the great
Egyptian warrior pharaohs, the empire certainly did not collapse
during his reign. Unfortunately, as the sequence of Amarna letters is
obviously incomplete we are forced to draw our deductions from a
markedly one-sided view of events.
The change in religion necessitated immediate changes in
religious art, as scenes of the old gods and their rituals were
displaced by scenes of the new. Just as the traditional temple scenes
had to be replaced by images of Akhenaten and his wife o ering to
the Aten, so the non-royal tombs of Amarna, which under a more
conventional monarch would have been decorated with happy
images of the tomb owner and his wife plus detailed funeral
tableaux, were now dominated by the royal family. Depictions of
the dead are few and far between in the Amarna tombs. Instead we
are presented with scenes of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their children
– the living symbols of royal fertility – worshipping the Aten,
visiting the temple and generally going about their daily routine, to
the extent that the tomb becomes almost a shrine to the activities
and achievements of the royal family. We see o cials raising their
arms to praise the royal couple, while the ordinary people bow low
before the god’s representatives on earth. Tomb owners, forbidden
direct contact with their god, were forced to send their prayers via
either Akhenaten or Nefertiti. The burial petitions in the Amarna
tomb of the temple o cial Panehesy included prayers addressed to
both king and queen, although the petitions directed to Nefertiti
were to a large extent dependent upon her cultivating the good will
of the king:

Akhenaten: May he grant a reception of loaves, presented at every

festival of the living Aten in the hall of the Benben.

Nefertiti: May she grant the entrance of favour and the exit of love,
and a happy recollection in the presence of the king, and that thy
name be welcome in the mouth of the companions.9

The tomb of Huya, steward to Queen Tiy, even included a prayer

addressed to the dowager queen:
Praise to your Ka, O Lady of the Two Lands, who makes the Two Lands bright with her
beauty, the Queen Mother and Great Queen Tiy, Mistress of the Provisions, abundant in fat
things…10

The formal scenes on the tomb walls were replicated in the highly
conspicuous mud-brick kiosks found in the gardens of some, but
perhaps surprisingly not all, of Amarna’s élite. These buildings,
originally misidenti ed as birth bowers or garden pavilions, seem to
have functioned as miniature Aten temples where Akhenaten’s most
loyal subjects could worship the royal couple, and through them the
Aten. Most of the chapels have survived in ground-plan only,
although we can see that they were of varying complexity, ranging
from a simple room built on a raised platform to an entire small-
scale temple complete with forecourt, pylons, portico and subsidiary
rooms. We might reasonably expect to nd that the chapels were
open to the sun, although in the absence of walls this cannot be
con rmed. The fragments of evidence which have been preserved
indicate that their walls were decorated with scenes of Akhenaten
and Nefertiti o ering before the Aten, and that they housed brick or
limestone altars plus stelae and statues of the king and his family.11
More intimate scenes of royal family life were reserved for the
stelae recovered from within the homes of prominent courtiers,
where they almost certainly served as domestic shrines, a scaled-
down version of the garden chapels. In the absence of the traditional
myths and legends these stelae showed the royal couple and their
o spring relaxing in the royal pavilion under the protection of the
Aten’s rays, and an accompanying inscription was usually provided
to stress the subject’s loyalty to the king. The a ection between king
and queen in these scenes seems both obvious and natural, and is a
stark contrast to earlier royal couples whose a ection was expressed
by the queen placing one rather sti arm around her husband’s
waist. Indeed, one badly damaged relief now housed in the Louvre
appears to show Akhenaten sitting with Nefertiti and at least two of
their children on his knee. If Akhenaten rarely appears alone with
his daughters, it is presumably because he regards the children as
being in the care of their mother. He would certainly not be the rst
father to be wary of looking after six small girls. In fact, ‘o
camera’, the young princesses were cared for by their nursemaids;
young women who hover in the background of the palace scenes
and who generally remain anonymous, although we know that
Ankhesenpaaten had a nurse named Tia.
Queen Tiy is remarkable by her absence from these scenes of
Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their family, although the Amarna house of
Panehesy has yielded the famous stela of Amenhotep III and Tiy
where the old king is depicted in all his ‘ abby lethargy’. It would
appear that this stela, carved at the very end of Amenhotep’s reign,
was brought to Amarna by Panehesy as a mark of his devotion to
the old regime.
Almost all Egyptian art is capable of an interpretation beyond the
obvious, and these scenes of relaxed domesticity certainly held a
symbolism for their original artists and owners which is now lost to
us. The identi cation of the Aten, king and queen as a divine triad
seems fairly obvious, as is the assumption that the royal children
were included in the tableaux as physical manifestations of the
couple’s fertility. Akhenaten constantly stressed his role as the son
of the god, and it is not surprising that he should use his own
children as symbols of rejuvenation. Nefertiti, her lower body
emphasized, is presented as the fertile Tefnut, consort to
Akhenaten’s Shu. A scene showing the queen serving the king by
pouring him a drink, or by placing a necklace around his neck, is in
many ways a distortion of the traditional scenes where a king would
o er before a god. Such scenes continue beyond the Amarna age
into the reign of Tutankhamen. Less obvious, but by no means
improbable, is the suggestion that the reed matting and slender
pillars of the royal pavilion may have been intended to represent a
stylized birth bower, the temporary structure used by mothers
during labour and the period of puri cation which followed
delivery, and therefore may have served as a reinforcement of the
theme of fertility and reproduction which was a constant underlying
motif in Amarna art and religion.12
It seems that not everyone was enamoured of the new-style
religion and its emphasis on the domestic life of the royal family,
although resistance was very low-key and took the form of humour
rather than obvious dissent. A series of crude limestone gurines
unique to Amarna which show families of monkeys generally aping
the behaviour of the royal family is probably best explained as an
early attempt at political satire: the monkeys drive chariots, play
musical instruments, eat, drink and even kiss their young.13
Ordinary citizens seem to have encountered little di culty in
maintaining contact with their traditional spirits and deities, many
of which were associated with age-old concerns over fertility,
pregnancy and childbirth. Leonard Woolley, in his 1921–2
excavation of the Amarna workmen’s village, discovered a range of
Bes and Taweret amulets plus eye of Horus ring-bezels and even a
few decorated Hathor heads.14 Glazed Bes pendants, the remnants of
broken necklaces, have been recovered from both private houses
and the royal tomb, while an entire wall of the workmen’s village
Main Street House 3, one of the few Amarna houses whose walls
have survived to yield traces of their original decoration, was
painted with a frieze of dancing Bes and Taweret gures.15 Beset,
the uncommon female version of Bes, was also present at Amarna in
the form of an amulet, while a cupboard in one private house
yielded a small votive collection of two model beds, a fertility gure
and a stela painted with a scene showing a woman, child and
Taweret, the pregnant hippopotamus goddess of childbirth and
bringer of babies to the childless. As far as we can tell, no steps were
taken to hide these images and we must assume that Bes and his
friends were acceptable to Akhenaten, either because they had once
been included among the legendary followers and protectors of the
sun god, or because, as elements of the ‘minor tradition’, they fell
outside the scope of the prohibition extended to the mainstream
deities.16 Neither Bes nor Taweret could have presented any real
threat to the sovereignty of the all-powerful Aten, and Akhenaten’s
tolerance of superstition may well have been a tacit recognition of
his inability to eradicate the beliefs central to the family unit.
Bes, the male protector of women in childbirth, was a demi-god
or a spirit rather than a great state god. Nevertheless, or even
perhaps because of this, he was a universally accepted motif and as
such was by no means con ned to the lower classes. We have
already seen that the Malkata bedroom of Amenhotep III was
decorated with comical Bes gures. Queen Tiy seems to have been
particularly fond of Bes, and her ornate chairs and beds, recovered
from the tomb of Yuya and Thuyu, were decorated with both Bes
and Taweret. An unusual cosmetic jar, now in Turin Museum, even
shows Tiy herself in the form of Taweret. Bes and Taweret had
always played an important role in popular – as opposed to state –
religion. Throughout the dynastic age the whole cycle of human
reproduction was seen as a dangerous yet desirable process, and
childbirth itself was a particularly worrying time when the entire
family would be brought into contact with inexplicable forces of
creation far beyond human control. All labour involved risk to both
mother and baby and conventional medicine could do little to help
either. Mothers-to-be therefore turned to the supernatural for
protection and Bes and Taweret seem to have remained acceptable
as the protectors of the family – men, women and children –
throughout the Amarna age. The fact that images of these gods were
used to decorate the living rooms of the Amarna workmen’s houses,
while at the Theban workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina Bes was
joined by scenes celebrating women and childbirth, is a strong
indication that these female-centred cults were shared by the whole
family and were in no way restricted to women.
It is unlikely that a preoccupation with fertility and childbirth
was con ned to the lower classes, although the walls of the houses
of the Amarna élite have not survived to tell their tale.
The-upper classes, worshipping before their private shrines and in
their garden chapels, were presented not with Bes or Taweret, but
with images of Nefertiti and her children, who served as their living,
and indeed highly fertile, symbol of the state god’s creative powers.
Akhenaten consistently stressed his wife’s fertility, and the
daughters who follow their mother in an ever increasing line play a
symbolic as well as a literal role in all family portraits. It is almost
certainly no coincidence that Nefertiti rose to public prominence
following the birth of her rst child.

Egyptian religion was never centred on a sacred text of divine

revelation conveyed via a human prophet which could be equated
with the Torah, the Bible or the Koran. However, Akhenaten’s vision
of the Aten as the creator of all life was celebrated in a series of
hymns. The Great Hymn to the Aten, preserved on the wall of Ay’s
Amarna tomb and presumed to have been written by the king
himself, was not in itself a great innovation, many of its sentiments
having been expressed in earlier hymns to the sun god. However,
the Great Hymn is unusual in the fact that it ignores the traditional
gods of Egypt and makes reference only to the Aten. This
monotheistic element, combined with the idea that there should be
one supreme god for all races, has encouraged many observers to
draw a direct comparison with Psalm 104, written some 500 years
later in a di erent land and a di erent language. Weigall, for
example, felt that
In the face of this remarkable similarity one can hardly doubt that there is a direct
connection between the two compositions… in consideration of Akhenaton’s [sic] peculiar
ability and originality there seems considerable likelihood that he is the author in the rst
instance of this gem of the Psalter.17

It would, however, be wrong to see Atenism as the forerunner or

inspiration of modern Christianity, or Judaism, on the basis of this
text; the hymn is merely a re ection of the thinking which underlies
many Near Eastern religions, and indeed a hymn dedicated to Amen
and dated to the reign of Amenhotep 11 had already expressed
many similar sentiments:
You are the sole one who made all there is. The unique one who made what exists… it is
he who gives breath to him within the egg, and sustains the son of the worm…18

However, the Great Hymn to the Aten, originally written to be

recited by the king and adapted by Ay for inclusion in his tomb, is
worth quoting in full as, apart from its intrinsic beauty, it permits us
a glimpse into the mind and beliefs of its composer. It is notable
that Nefertiti, the composer’s wife and most probably Ay’s daughter,
is barely mentioned. Here it is Akhenaten alone who is destined to
enjoy an afterlife:
Glorious, you rise on the horizon of heaven, O living Aten, creator of life. When you have
arisen on the eastern horizon you ll every land with your beauty. You are gorgeous, great
and radiant, high over every land. Your rays embrace all the lands that you have made.
You are Re and so you reach their boundaries, limiting them for your beloved son. Though
you are far away, your rays are upon the earth. Though you are seen, your movement is
not.
When you set on the western horizon the land is dark, like death. Night is spent asleep
as in a bedroom with a covered head, one eye does not see the other. If the possessions
under their heads were stolen, no one would notice it. Every lion comes out from its den,
and every serpent bites. Darkness descends and the earth is hushed, because their maker
rests on the horizon.
The earth is illuminated when you rise on the horizon and shine as the Aten in the
daytime. You banish the darkness when you cast your rays. The Two Lands celebrate, lively
and aroused now that you have awakened them; with bodies cleansed and clothed they
raise their arms to adore your rising. Now the whole land begins to work. All the cattle
graze on their fodder, trees and plants grow. Birds y up from their nests, their wings
stretched in praise of your spirit. All the ocks gambol on their feet and everything that
ies and perches lives because you have arisen for them. Ships sail to the north and to the
south, while roads open at your rising. The sh in the river leap before you, for your rays
are in the middle of the sea.
You make the seed grow in women and create people from sperm. You feed the son who
lies in his mother’s womb and comfort him to stop his tears. You are the nurse within the
womb, who gives breath to all that he has made. On the day he is born you open his mouth
to supply his needs. When the chick in the egg chirps within his shell you give him breath
to live, and when his time is ready to break out from the shell he comes out of the egg to
proclaim his birth, walking on his legs. How many are the things you do, although hidden
from view, O unique god, without compare. You created the world as you desired, alone –
all people, all cattle, all ocks, everything which walks with its feet on the earth and
everything which ies with its wings in the air. The northern lands of Asia, the southern
lands of Africa and the land of Egypt – you have set every person in their place and you
have supplied their needs. Everyone has his food and his allotted lifetime. Tongues di er in
their speech, and also characters and skins, for you have di erentiated mankind.
You created the Nile in the Netherworld. You bring him forth at your will to feed the
people, since you made them for yourself, lord of all, who toils for them. Lord of all lands,
the Aten who shines for them in the daytime, great in dignity. You make all distant lands
live, for you have made a heavenly Nile come down for them, to make waves on the
mountains like the sea, to irrigate the elds of their towns. O Lord of eternity, how
excellent are your designs – a Nile from heaven for people of foreign lands, and all the
creatures which walk upon their feet and a Nile for Egypt coming from the Netherworld.
Your rays suckle every eld; when you shine they live and grow for you. You made the
seasons to foster all that you made: winter to cool them and summer that they may feel
you.
You made a distant sky in which you might shine and to see everything you have made.
You are alone, shining as the Living Aten, risen, dazzling, far and yet near you have made
millions of manifestations of yourself. Towns, villages, elds, roads and waterways – every
eye sees you upon them, for you are the Aten of the daytime…
You are my beloved. There is none other that knows you except for your son
Neferkheperure Waenre, whom you have made wise in your plans and your might. The
creatures of the earth exist in your hand as you have made them; when you rise they live,
when you set they die. You yourself are the duration of life, it is by you that men live. Eyes
may behold your beauty until you set, but when you set in the west all work ceases. When
you rise… You raise them up for the son who came forth from your body, the King of
Upper and Lower Egypt, living in Truth, the Lord of the Two Lands Neferkheperure
Waenre, son of Re, living in Truth, Lord of the glorious appearings, Akhenaten the long-
lived. And as for the King’s Great Wife whom he loves, the Mistress of the Two Lands,
Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, may she live and ourish for ever and ever.19

It is a characteristic of Atenism that it eliminates the old gods and

the old traditions – many of them highly comforting to their
believers – without ever nding a satisfactory replacement. The
vivid scenes of the present which play a prominent role in Amarna
art are a re ection of the fact that the Aten was purely a daytime
god. His disciples have little reason to look forward, and indeed
Akhenaten’s hymn promises a grim future for the faithful. The myth
of Osiris, god of the dead, and the promise of a golden afterlife in
the Field of Reeds have vanished, a victim to the purges instigated
in Year 5. The Aten takes responsibility for the deceased, and after
death his devotees can look forward to a bleak existence haunting
the altar of the sun temple by day, sleeping the sleep of the dead at
night – an unwelcome reversion to Old Kingdom beliefs which
allowed only the king to inherit eternal life.
Some traces of the old funerary ritual were permitted to remain,
stripped of their original meaning. As we have seen at the Theban
Gempaaten, Akhenaten was not averse to representing himself as an
Osiriform gure. Mummi cation followed by interment in a rock-
cut tomb remained the acceptable means of disposing of Egypt’s
élite, and canopic jars, scarabs and shabtis all remained a standard
part of the funeral equipment, suitably adapted for Aten worship. A
wooden shabti belonging to the Royal Ornament Py, for example,
incorporated an acceptably edited text from the Book of the Dead:
Breathe the sweet breeze of the north wind which comes forth from the sky upon the hand
of the living Aten. Your body is protected, your heart is glad. No harm shall happen to your
body because you are sand. Your esh will not decay. You will follow the Aten from the
time when he appears in the morning until he sets in life…20

Is it correct to interpret the Amarna period as a true religious

revolution, or was Akhenaten merely restructuring religious thought
as a calculated means of serving his own ends and promoting his
own divinity? Could it even have been an economic rather than a
religious revolution, with Akhenaten deliberately diverting
resources away from the priesthood of Amen in order to nance his
new city? These unanswerable questions have vexed historians for
many decades. At the turn of this century, when the extent of
Akhenaten’s reforms rst became clear, many egyptologists were
themselves Biblical scholars whose studies of egyptology were
inspired by the need to explain the many mysteries of the holy
book. To these scholars monotheism was obviously superior to
polytheism. They tended to interpret Akhenaten’s devotion to
Atenism as an early and wholly admirable attempt to reach out to
the one true God of Judaism or Christianity inspired by the religions
of the Near East, which had in all probability been introduced into
the Egyptian royal family via Tiy or Nefertiti, who were themselves
believed to be of foreign extraction:
Akhenaten believed that his god was the Father of all mankind, and that the Syrian and the
Nubian were as much under his protection as the Egyptian. This is a greater advance in
ethics than may at once be apparent; for the Aten thus becomes the rst deity who was not
tribal or not national ever conceived by mortal mind. This is the Christian’s understanding
of God, though not the Hebrew conception of Jehovah. This is the spirit which sends the
missionary to the utmost parts of the earth…21

Over the past hundred years we have gained a more complete

understanding of both the nature of Akhenaten’s new cult and the
political climate of his reign, while at the same time losing the
missionary zeal which a ected so many early egyptologists. While
the e ects of Akhenaten’s reforms should never be understated, the
term ‘revolution’ now seems inappropriate; many of Akhenaten’s
‘innovations’ were logical if extreme developments stemming from
the religious climate of his father’s reign; and there appears to have
been little if any blood shed in defence of the old gods. Some
modern historians have continued to view the introduction of
Atenism as simple religious conversion, a great intellectual step
forward fuelled by genuine religious conviction:
At no other time did anything approach the utter simpli cation of one creator as
introduced by Akhenaten and Nefertiti, in place of the massive complexities that had gone
before and followed after. Their thought was an intellectual breakthrough; a peak of clarity
which rose above the lowlands of superstition that had existed until then.22

Others have taken a less charitable view, sensing the strong

political and personal motivation behind Akhenaten’s religious
reforms. Donald B. Redford, biographer of Akhenaten, provides
what is probably the most perceptive summary of his subject’s
character and beliefs:
For all that can be said in his favour, Akhenaten in spirit remains to the end totalitarian.
The right of an individual freely to choose was wholly foreign to him. He was the
champion of a universal, celestial power who demanded universal submission, claimed
universal truth, and from whom no further revelation could be expected. I cannot conceive
a more tiresome regime under which to be fated to live.23

As we have seen, Akhenaten’s Atenism has frequently been

interpreted as the world’s rst monotheistic religion with Akhenaten
himself being the inspiration for Moses, and the Aten the forerunner
of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic god. The Aten was never, however,
intended to be a god in this mould. He remained remote and aloof,
he created and observed but did not intervene in events and
certainly did not require his devotees to adhere to any moral code.
Egyptian morality was always separated from religion and, as an
aspect of good social behaviour, was taught by scribes rather than
priests. The religion of the ancient Egyptians was the equivalent of
our modern science. It did not aim to teach men how to behave, but
sought to provide explanations for the seemingly inexplicable. In
fact it is highly debatable whether the new religion can be classed
as true monotheism, the belief in a single supreme deity, rather than
what Norman de Garis Davies, himself a Unitarian minister, has
classed as ‘little more than a beautifully expressed and humanized
henotheism’, henotheism being the belief in a single god without the
assertion that s/he is the sole god.24 Although the Aten was without
question the most prominent deity, he was consistently linked with
Re and the semi-divine Akhenaten. Several of the old gods remained
in circulation for many years, and some were even included in the
Aten’s original name and titulary: ‘May the good god live who takes
pleasure in Truth, Lord of all that the Aten encompasses, Lord of
heaven, Lord of earth, Aten, the living, the great, who illuminates
the two lands, may the father live: Re-Harakhty appearing on the
horizon in his name of Shu who is Aten, who is given life for ever
and ever, Aten, the Living, the Great, who is in jubilee, who dwells
in the temple of Aten in Akhetaten.’
Maat, the divine daughter of Re and personi cation of the
concept of truth, maat or order already discussed, was originally
acceptable to Akhenaten, although eventually she too was displaced
as Nefertiti started to assume the role of companion to the god-king.
Akhenaten constantly stressed his devotion to truth and even
adopted the epithet ‘who lives on maat’. As the reign progressed,
however, the abstract nature of the god gained increasing emphasis
until, during Year 9, the Aten was given

Fig. 3.6 The new names of the Aten

a revised titulary, his name puri ed by the exclusion of the names

of Horus and of Shu. The reference to Re, shorn of its association
with Horus, was allowed to remain: ‘Long live Re, ruler of the two
horizons, he who rejoices in the horizon is his name as Re the father
who returns as Aten.’
This name was written in two cartouches suggesting that the
Aten, who invariably wore the uraeus of kingship, was to be
regarded as a king, and by implication that Akhenaten and the Aten
could either be seen as co-regents, or even as one and the same
person. Indeed, it would appear that Akhenaten’s Theban jubilee
was to be considered to belong as much to the Aten as to the king.
Now all reference to ‘gods’ in the plural was banned, and the
spelling of some words – including ‘Mut’, the name of Amen’s wife
which also translates as ‘mother’ – was changed to avoid the
inclusion of a proscribed god’s name.
 4
Images of Amarna

Giving adoration to the Lord of the Two Lands, and kissing the earth for the sole one of Re,
by the Overseer of Works in the red mountain, the assistant pupil whom His Majesty
himself taught, the Chief of Sculptors in the many great monuments of the king in the house
of the Aten, in the Horizon of Aten, Bak, son of the Chief of Sculptors Men, born of the
lady of the house, Ruy of Heliopolis.1

For over a thousand years the ‘rules’ of artistic representation had

decreed that all upper-class Egyptians should be physically perfect
with no obvious aws or deformities. Men should either be eternally
young with rm, slender bodies and tanned skins or, towards the
end of their successful lives, mature statesmen with drooping breasts
and pronounced rolls of fat around the waist. Women should be
beautiful, slender and pale with no concession paid to the ravages of
time, although very occasionally during the New Kingdom an older
woman such as Queen Tiy might be presented as a wise elder, the
wrinkled female equivalent of the plump successful man. It was
particularly important that the pharaoh should be depicted as a
awless male with a handsome face and a rm, athletic body as this
was the image which his people expected to see. There had been
variations on this theme – monarchs of the Old Kingdom had been
shown to be remote, god-like creatures, while the pharaohs of the
Middle Kingdom had appeared more caring and compassionate –
but these were subtle di erences in expression, and the underlying
principle had remained constant for centuries.
So strong was this belief in the correct presentation of the king
that the female pharaoh Hatchepsut had, for all her o cial
portraits, assumed the body and clothing of a man. The royal artists
never allowed less than perfect physical specimens to de ect them
from their goal, and simply overlooked such undesirable features as
buck teeth, a deformed foot, or, in the most extreme case, a female
body. By producing essentially the same portrait of successive
monarchs they sought to inspire con dence in the eye of the
beholder by con rming the continuing presence of a traditional king
on the throne. This in turn served as con rmation of the presence of
maat in its widest context. A true likeness to any individual king
may have been regarded as an added bene t but it was certainly not
a necessity as the pharaoh was not to be seen as an individual, but
as merely the latest in a long line of identical rulers. A name, carved
or painted on to the portrait, would con rm the identity of the
individual.
At the start of his reign Akhenaten adhered to tradition, and his
early portraits show a conventional New Kingdom monarch
performing typical kingly deeds. By the end of Year 5, however, the
king had developed a startling range of features. His narrow head,
perched atop a long, thin neck, was now elongated, its length
deliberately emphasized by his preference for tall head-dresses plus
the traditional pharaoh’s false beard. His face, in spite of its narrow
almond-shaped eyes, eshy earlobes, pendulous jaw, long nose,
hollow cheeks, pronounced cheek-bones and thick lips, had a
curious sensuality in its knowing and secretive smile. His body had
become the exact opposite of the king’s traditional manly physique.
His shoulders, chest, arms and lower legs were weedy and
underdeveloped and his collar bone excessively prominent, and yet
he had wide hips, heavy thighs, pronounced breasts, a narrow waist
and a bloated stomach which bulged over his tight- tting kilt. The
colossal statues which once lined the colonnade at the Theban
Gempaaten, when viewed as intended, from below and in pro le lit
by the uncompromising Egyptian sunlight, must be classed among
the most e ective and disturbing pieces of dynastic art. Even today,
housed in the less appropriate setting of Cairo Museum, they retain
a haunting power to disturb. Weigall, a great admirer of Akhenaten,
chose to see in these portraits of the young king:
… a pale sickly youth. His head seemed too large for his body; his eyelids were heavy; his
eyes were eloquent of dreams. His features were delicately moulded, and his mouth, in
spite of a somewhat protruding lower jaw, is reminiscent of the best of the art of Rossetti.2

Others have been less kind, employing emotive words such as

hideous, travesty, grotesque and weird in their descriptions of
Akhenaten’s face and physique:
A son of more unlikely appearance than Amenophis IV [Akhenaten] could hardly have
been born to altogether normal parents. Though his earliest monuments do not present his
features and gure as markedly di erent from those of any earlier Egyptian prince, the
representations of only a few years later provide us with frankly hideous portraits the
general delity of which cannot be doubted… the standing colossi from the peristyle court
at Karnak have a look of fanatical determination such as his subsequent history con rmed
all too fatally.3

The feminization of the king’s body has been obvious to everyone,

while to Grimal, the swollen body of the king is representative of
death itself:
The accentuation of his facial features and the deliberate sagging of his torso produce such
a disease-ridden appearance in the colossal Osirid statues (executed by the sculptor Bak)
that their bloated stomachs might even be interpreted in terms of bodily uids in ating the
decomposed corpse of Osiris.4

The royal artists must have found it di cult to break away from
the old tradition of standardized realism and adapt to a new, more
surreal way of expressing themselves. It has generally been assumed
that their eagerness to change combined with their lack of expertise
in the new style causing them to overcompensate, producing bizarre
portraits of the king and queen with the new elements inadvertently
exaggerated beyond the point of realism. In fact we have no reason
to suppose that these new representations are in any way accidental
or a mistake, and it seems equally, if not more, valid to assume that
we are witnessing a deliberate experimental phase inspired by
Akhenaten and implemented by his chief sculptor, Bak. Bak, trained
in the classical Theban style, was responsible for the earliest and
most unusual monuments of his patron’s reign, and it was only
following his replacement by the chief sculptor Tuthmosis that
Akhenaten’s art mellowed into a softer, more relaxed realism. With
the move to Amarna and the subsequent employment of locally and
northern-trained sculptors, the king became more human in form.
His face seemed less haggard and his body appeared altogether
more masculine, although still abby and out of condition. Even
with these modi cations Akhenaten remained the most striking and
instantly recognizable pharaoh in Egypt’s history. The art of his
reign, with its increased sense of movement and expression plus its
emphasis on informal scenes from daily life and nature, is now
widely recognized as one of the high points of Egyptian culture,
yielding what Egyptian art expert Cyril Aldred has considered to be
‘more than its proper quota of masterpieces’.5
Akhenaten must have been the inspiration behind his own revised
image. No artist would have taken it upon himself to challenge
tradition in such a dramatic fashion, and indeed Bak explicitly tells
us that he was merely ‘the pupil whom His Majesty taught’. Bak
would have learned his technical expertise from his father, Men,
chief sculptor to Amenhotep III and probable author of the Colossi
of Memnon. Father and son are shown together on a rock relief at
Aswan, where a miniature Men worships before a seated statue of
Amenhotep III, possibly one of his own colossi, o ering ‘every good
and pure thing; bread and beer, oxen and fowl and every good
vegetable’, while Bak presents an o ering table heaped with
delicacies to a statue of Akhenaten which is now erased from the
scene.
The move from the old art style to the new seems to come as a
sudden and shocking change, a swift response to the king’s
abandoning of the old religious beliefs. Indeed, the Theban tomb of
Ramose, where the two contrasting styles sit uncomfortably side by
side, gives the impression that the change occurred overnight. In
fact Akhenaten was not so much inventing a new style as speeding
up and exaggerating a natural evolution and, just as his religious
‘revolution’ was rooted in the theology of the past, so several of
Akhenaten’s innovative artistic features may be traced back to the
art of his forebears.
 Egypt’s increased internationalism during the 18th Dynasty had
already allowed foreign in uences to in ltrate the hitherto insular
arts and crafts. Gradually the strict artistic conventions of the Old
and Middle Kingdoms had started to relax and informal poses,
owing draperies, modern clothing and hairstyles, and pierced ears
had already made their way into the repertoire. This trend towards
modernism was re ected in the literature of the period which now
showed a greater freedom of composition and an increased
awareness of modern language; the New Kingdom was the period of
divine hymns, lyrical love poetry and action-packed ction. At the
same time had come an increasing tendency towards realism in
royal portraiture. The wooden head of Tiy recovered from Gurob
(Plate 3) shows the queen not only with her habitual down-turned
lips but with heavy eyelids and deep furrows running from her nose
to her mouth; it is the portrait of an individual rather than a
stereotyped queen, and it shows a woman who is well beyond the
rst ush of youth. While his father and grandfather had already
appeared more stolid than their predecessors, Amenhotep III,
towards the end of his reign, became the rst pharaoh to be
depicted as a fat and frail human rather than an immortal demi-god.
Some of Amenhotep’s statues show the almond-shaped eyes, full
curved lips, sharp features and obvious breasts of the early Amarna
pieces, and he also adopts the more relaxed poses and informal
garments which have contributed to his diagnosis as a sad and
worn-out failure.6
Many early egyptologists sought to interpret Akhenaten’s new
image as a true representation of the king himself. Akhenaten
consistently stressed his devotion to maat, which in its simplest form
may be translated as truth. Thus they reasoned that the king, in the
grip of religious mania, had decided to ‘come clean’ about his
unfortunate appearance. This led, not unnaturally, to the
assumption that Akhenaten su ered from some serious medical
complaint. His body as seen in both two- and three-dimensional art,
with its breasts, narrow waist and wide hips, is certainly not the
body of a healthy male. Indeed the Egyptian historian Manetho had
recorded the succession as passing from Amenhotep III to an
unknown Orus and then to ‘his daughter Acencheres’ who is
presumably the e eminate Akhenaten, although some have taken
Orus to be Nefertiti, and who is reported to have ruled over Egypt
for a little over twelve years. Flinders Petrie, writing in 1894, was
able to dismiss what was perhaps the most bizarre suggestion then
current:
It has been proposed that Amenhotep IV died after a very few years; and that Akhenaten, a
man, or a woman was raised by intrigue into his vacant place, adopted his throne name,
and his diadem name, and introduced the new style. It has been proposed that the new
ruler was a woman, masquerading with a wife and suppositious children; such a notion
resting on the e eminate plumpness of Akhenaten, and the alleged prevalence of feminine
courtiers. It has also been proposed that he was a eunuch.7

As Petrie reasoned, with logic which holds good today:

Is it credible that the most uxorious king of Egypt, who appears with his wife on every
monument, who rides side by side with her in a chariot, and kisses her in public, who
dances her on his knee, who has a steadily increasing family – that this king was either a
woman in masquerade or a eunuch?8

Needless to say, speculation over the nature of the king’s

supposed medical condition was rife. Unfortunately, as Akhenaten’s
mummy has never been identi ed, all diagnoses had through
necessity to be based on the artistic evidence and were therefore, to
say the least, highly speculative.
Weigall’s suggestion that Akhenaten was an epileptic whose
condition caused him to hallucinate and therefore inspired his
devotion to the sun’s disc can be dismissed as mere guesswork
perhaps inspired by the epilepsy attributed to Alexander the Great
and Julius Caesar. Most plausible is the suggestion that Akhenaten
may have su ered from the feminizing Fröhlich’s syndrome, a group
of symptoms caused by damage to the pituitary gland and
thalamus.9 Su erers from Fröhlich’s syndrome may experience a
female-type distribution of fat over the breasts, hips and thighs,
while the genitalia may be so underdeveloped as to seem invisible
amid the surrounding folds of fat. As this disease generally becomes
apparent only at puberty, it would conveniently explain the change
from the conventional images of the young king at his accession to
the new style some four years later.
The major stumbling block in attributing any such feminizing
disease to Akhenaten is the fact that he appears to have fathered at
least six children, and most su erers of Fröhlich’s syndrome are
impotent. Of course, the father of a baby is not always the husband
of its mother, but if Akhenaten was not the father of the princesses,
who was? His fertility was obviously a matter of huge importance to
the king, who displayed his ever-increasing brood of daughters as a
means of reinforcing his link to the Aten, the most powerful creator
god. Is it possible that Akhenaten, aware but ashamed of his illness,
sanctioned or turned a blind eye to the use of an anonymous,
surrogate father? Perhaps, but lacking the bodies of both Akhenaten
and his daughters for DNA testing, this is something which would be
very di cult to prove.
No speci c clue to their paternity is provided by the titles of the
princesses, who are most frequently described as:
King’s bodily daughter whom he loves, [Meritaten], born of the Great King’s Wife whom he
loves, Mistress of the Two Lands, Nefertiti, may she live

As we have already noted, all the women in the royal family bore
titles which re ected their relationship with the king. The closer this
relationship, the more important was the lady. Therefore just as
there was no Egyptian title of ‘queen’, merely ‘King’s Wife’ or ‘King’s
Great Wife’, so there was no equivalent of princess and all the king’s
female o spring were ‘King’s Daughters’, a title which they would
carry all their lives without necessarily needing to mention the
name of the king. It is not therefore unusual that the princesses’
father goes unnamed. What is unusual is that they are speci cally
identi ed as the daughters of Nefertiti; we would not expect to nd
a queen’s name included in her children’s title in this way, as the
queen was very much the minor parent. Just as Tiy’s high status
seems con rmed by her inclusion on the commemorative scarabs of
Amenhotep III, so the inclusion of Nefertiti’s name in her daughters’
titles can be read as a sign of her own prominent position. Their
a liation thus seems entirely in keeping with the hierarchy within
the royal family where the line of authority descended downwards
from the Aten to the king, then to the queen and nally to the royal
children. In fact, towards the end of their father’s reign, two of the
princesses are directly a liated to Akhenaten on blocks recovered
from Hermopolis Magna.
More recently it has been suggested that Akhenaten may have
su ered from Marfan’s Syndrome, a genetically determined
abnormality caused by defective collagen formation; su erers from
Marfan’s Syndrome tend to be tall, with long faces and chest
deformities. There may also be a high palate and eye defects, but a
female-type distribution of fat as shown in Akhenaten’s statuary
would be unusual.
One curious colossal statue recovered from the Theban Gempaaten
must be considered before concluding any discussion of Akhenaten’s
health and sexuality. Gempaaten took the form of an open courtyard
surrounded by at least twenty-four colossal gures of the king.
These statues, which were carved at the start of his reign and were
highly exaggerated in style, were based on traditional Osirid
mummiform statues but show Akhenaten dressed in his favourite
pleated linen kilt, carrying the crook and ail in his crossed arms
and wearing head-cloth plus either the double crown of Upper and
Lower Egypt or the plumed head-dress of Shu. His upper body and
arms are carved with the double cartouche of the Aten and his kilt,
which bears his name on its belt, is actually carved into the stone of
the statue and would originally have been painted. One un nished
and slightly damaged statue, however, displays a naked torso
without any sign of a kilt and without any genitalia (Plate 10). The
long thin head seems to be that of Akhenaten and the gure wears
the king’s beard and double crown, although unusually the head-
cloth is missing. The upper torso again has the crossed arms
carrying the crook and ail, and is decorated with the cartouches of
the Aten. The lower torso has a well-de ned waist and an indented
navel. The upper legs appear in proportion to the body, while the
lower legs and most of the crown are missing.
 Fig. 4.1 Nefertiti’s trademark blue crown and imsy linen robe

It would be wrong, in view of the evidence discussed above, to

leap to the conclusion that the gure must be true to life. Had
Akhenaten been born without any genitalia he would undoubtedly
have been classed as a woman and would never have become king.
Nor is it likely that the genitalia would be omitted simply for
reasons of modesty; the god Min was always depicted with a larger
than life-sized erect penis and this does not appear to have caused
any o ence. While it was very unusual for the king to be portrayed
without any clothing, on those occasions when a monarch was
depicted naked he was shown as nature made him. Egyptian art was
very literal and, as the king was in one of his aspects a fertility god,
it would have been inappropriate to have presented him as in any
way disabled.
Given that all the other Gempaaten statues are clothed, it is
possible to argue that this un nished gure was not in fact intended
to be naked and would have eventually been carved or painted to
show a kilt. However, given the shaping of the torso, the de nition
of the upper legs and the apparent completeness of the navel, this
seems unlikely; the kilt would have needed to be a micro-skirt
which would have hugged the king’s gure in an unprecedented and
impractical fashion. It may be that the sculpture would eventually
have been dressed in clothing made from some separate material,
perhaps a skirt of precious metal. The genitalia may therefore have
been omitted either because they would not be seen or in order to
allow the garment to hang at. However, this again is not a
particularly convincing explanation. The torso bears no sign of any
attachment for a permanent garment of metal or stone, while the
sheer size of the piece makes it unlikely that the body would have
been clothed in a less permanent linen kilt. There are so far no
known examples of colossal statues clothed in this way and, while
composite statues do occur during Akhenaten’s reign, these were
made by manufacturing separate body parts to be attached to much
smaller-scale bodies.
Worthy of more serious consideration is the suggestion that the
gure is that of a woman, Nefertiti rather than Akhenaten. The
lower body certainly has feminine curves and the breasts, although
partially obscured by the arms and perhaps slightly small for a
woman, could have been equally at home on either Akhenaten or
Nefertiti. Male breasts were, however, a feature of the royal family
and Akhenaten’s father and grandfather before him had both been
depicted with well developed chests. The fact that the gure lacks a
pronounced female pubic triangle is perhaps slightly inconsistent
with this interpretation, since Nefertiti is usually shown as decidedly
feminine with a prominent pubic mound. To Julia Samson, the
interpretation of the gure seems obvious:
The breasts are carved more like those of a woman, although Akhenaten was plump-
chested. It must have been one of several colossal statues of Nefertiti … Presumably this
nude feminine gure was to have been nished as Nefertiti, wearing her open robe and the
tall crown of the kings of a united Egypt, a part of which remains on the statue.10
However, it is possible that Samson is in uenced in her
interpretation by her belief that Nefertiti ruled alongside Akhenaten
at Thebes, as previously she has indicated her belief that the
incomplete gure is male.11
The suggestion that the statue would eventually have been carved
or clothed with Nefertiti’s open robe again presents certain
di culties, as the de nition of the legs combined with the carved
cartouches and the positioning of the arms across the upper body
would have made it very di cult to apply to the gure a
voluminous full-length robe with sleeves or shawl. Representations
of Nefertiti did not necessarily conform to modern ideas of feminine
modesty, and her garments are occasionally so clinging that they
can only be detected by the presence of the thin line denoting the
neckline. If the statue does represent the queen it is entirely possible
that a skin-tight sheath dress would eventually have been carved or
painted over her form, or that she would have been left naked. If
this is the case, the statue might have been intended to portray
Nefertiti in the guise of Tefnut, a parallel gure to the colossi
depicting Akhenaten as Tefnut’s twin Shu. Alternatively, the gure
may have been intended to show Nefertiti in her most regal aspect,
as the female counterpart of the king. This interpretation of
Nefertiti’s role would be entirely in keeping with her appearance in
the smiting scenes where she acts as a substitute for the king, and is
perhaps paralleled by her appearance at Akhenaten’s heb-sed
celebrations where she is shown riding in a palanquin carrying royal
regalia.
Despite the scholarly reasoning outlined above, the identi cation
of the gure as Nefertiti is not entirely convincing to those who
have seen the statue. ‘Gut feeling’ is certainly not a scienti c means
of analysing and interpreting ancient art, but in some cases it is all
we have to go on. The long, thin neck and the gaunt face with its
knowing smile seem so clearly to be those of Akhenaten, and the
entire silhouette of the statue so closely resembles the other, kilted,
colossal gures recovered from Gempaaten, that it seems almost
perverse to argue that it could be anyone other than the king. So far,
only one larger-than-life head recovered from Karnak has been
identi ed as Nefertiti, an identi cation which has been made purely
on the basis of the double uraeus worn on the brow and which, in
consequence, is not itself as certain as we might hope. This head,
now housed in Cairo Museum, has been severely damaged and most
of the mouth and all of the chin are missing. It too is carved from
sandstone and what remains of the face is strikingly similar to the
Gempaaten representations of Akhenaten. The hairstyle is, however,
decidedly di erent, and this head wears a curled wig with a deep
fringe.
In spite of the number of paragraphs already devoted to the
Gempaaten gure, it would probably be a mistake to worry
overmuch about the precise meaning behind a single piece which is
merely one of a series of colossal statues created at a time when
artistic experimentation was the rule and departure from realism the
norm. Given the disjointed state of the archaeological evidence
recovered from Karnak, the gure is probably best interpreted as a
non-literal portrayal of Akhenaten, a visual metaphor depicting the
king in his most divine aspect as a genderless entity, denuded of all
primary sexual organs in order to represent the sexless nature of the
Aten himself. There is a tendency for archaeologists to assume that
what they have unearthed is exactly the image that the sculptor
intended to produce, with no allowance made for mistakes or a ‘one
o ’. It would seem that in this case, while the artist (Bak?) set out to
create a sculpture that depicted Akhenaten as both male and female,
what was actually produced was an image which showed him as
female rather than male and therefore lacking all the procreative
powers of the Aten. This is the only representation of the king that
we have in this form; presumably it is an image that proved
unsuccessful and was abandoned soon after its conception.
Wherever the king led the court soon followed. While the
ordinary people continued to be depicted very much as they always
had been, we now nd all high-ranking Egyptians from Nefertiti
downwards developing abby stomachs, breasts and languid poses.
Even Bak felt it appropriate, or politically expedient, to be portrayed
with a bulging pot-belly which gives him an unfortunate, almost
pregnant, appearance. Nefertiti keeps her well-de ned waist but
develops a rounded abdomen, large hips, jodhpur-like thighs and
pronounced buttocks which remind us of the fact that she has borne
at least six children. Her stomach is often highlighted by a single
curved line at the base of the abdomen just above the pubic mound,
while Queen Tiy, perhaps because of her greater age, is endowed
with two such lines to emphasize her sagging stomach plus a double
line under each breast. Nefertiti’s breasts receive little attention;
they were not considered her most important attribute and, as we
have seen, obvious breasts were not an exclusively female trait.
Nefertiti’s usual garment, a transparent, pleated linen robe tied with
a sash worn either under the bust or around the waist, allows us a
clear view of her body. Indeed, the dress is frequently shown with
the front completely open so that the queen’s body is displayed
without any obvious form of undergarment. Alternatively Nefertiti
dons a dress so ne and so close- tting that her entire form can be
seen through the folds.
It is highly unlikely that Nefertiti habitually wore such revealing
and uncomfortable garments. Artistic convention had always
required that the female form should be well de ned although men,
who frequently appeared topless and occasionally wore semi-
transparent kilts, almost invariably had their genitalia concealed
behind a belt or a thickness of cloth. We nd élite Old and Middle
Kingdom ladies dressed in sheath dresses so tight that they would
have been unable to walk or sit down, the curves of their breasts,
stomach, hips and pubic mound clearly visible to all. Linen, the
material used for upper-class garments throughout the dynastic
period, cannot be persuaded to hug the gure in this way without
the addition of Lycra, and the garments are in fact an artistic ideal.
During the New Kingdom goddesses continued to favour the tight
sheath dress but there was change in human fashion towards more
voluminous pleated and fringed garments, and Akhenaten’s artists
emphasized the female body beneath by making the robes appear so
ne as to be transparent. Again this must be an exaggeration.
Although Egyptian linen was the best in the world, it could never
have been so ne. Actual garments recovered from tombs indicate
that women wore a rather baggy linen dress with sleeves, often
covered by a shawl, a practical response to Egypt’s hot days and
much colder evenings and nights.
Throughout the dynastic period it was widely agreed that a
woman’s fertility contributed to her sexual attractions. Nefertiti’s
role as a devoted wife and mother did not prevent her from being
portrayed as a beautiful, even desirable, woman and-the fact that
she was known to have borne many children may even have added
to her considerable charms. Nor did Nefertiti’s religious duties
con ict with her presentation as a sexually attractive or even
sexually active woman. Sex, or more speci cally reproduction, was
acknowledged to be a fundamental aspect of human and divine life
and no attempt was made to separate sex from religion. The gods
and goddesses of ancient Egypt were in no way celibate beings and
their varied and active couplings were well known to all. The gods’
sexual needs were treated with a down-to-earth practicality which
can occasionally appear shocking to those of us accustomed to more
cerebral deities; under the traditional religion, for example, the
queen assumed the role of ‘God’s Wife of Amen’ in order to sexually
arouse the god and ensure the continued re-creation of the world.
The rituals associated with this are not now known. The more
explicit title of ‘God’s Hand of Amen’, also linked with the role of
the queen, is an obvious reference to the masturbation which
allowed the creator god Atum to produce Shu and Tefnut. The hand,
which in the Egyptian language is feminine, is often associated with
Hathor, a goddess who in turn is associated with the queens of
Egypt.12 The hands which terminate the Aten’s rays may thus be
interpreted as symbols of both femininity and queenship.
Although Nefertiti’s new body-shape essentially mirrors that of
her husband, raising the question of who is copying whom, there
seems little doubt that she is being deliberately presented as a
desirable superwoman, a living symbol of fertility.13 On the strength
of these images she has frequently been identi ed as a ‘venus
 gure’, a reference to the European ice-age gurines which, with
their emphasized breasts and buttocks and rudimentary faces, are
generally understood to be female fertility icons. A better parallel
may perhaps be drawn with the ‘mother goddess’ gures recovered
from the predynastic period, which place a heavy emphasis on the
lower body, and with the naked female fertility gurines which,
wearing long wigs and jewellery and often accompanied by a
miniature child, started to appear in 18th Dynasty Egypt. These
were originally interpreted as concubine gures placed in the grave
for the enjoyment of deceased males. However, they are now known
to come from both funerary and domestic contexts, and are often
associated with model beds, snakes and convolvulus, suggesting a
link with childbirth and all aspects of human reproduction.
Approximately sixty of these gures have been recovered from
Amarna. As the new images of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their
children at leisure are being held out to the people as an ideal semi-
divine family worthy of adoration, it is perhaps not surprising to
nd Nefertiti assuming the role of mother-goddess or fertility
symbol within the perfect family. What we cannot know is whether
this role of goddess was attached to Nefertiti personally, or whether
it was associated with her role as queen.

Fig. 4.2 Nefertiti, early Amarna style, in Nubian wig

 Nefertiti’s features quickly start to resemble those of her husband
as his body becomes more like hers until she becomes as ugly and
idiosyncratic as he. Following the move to Amarna, although she
remains strikingly similar to Akhenaten, Nefertiti loses some of her
angularity, with her face becoming slightly rounder and her body
more feminine. As Nefertiti and Akhenaten were most probably
cousins a certain facial likeness is perhaps to be expected, but at its
most extreme, at Thebes, their resemblance goes far beyond realism.
If Akhenaten and Nefertiti are to be interpreted as the earthly
representatives of the divine twins Shu and Tefnut this resemblance
might perhaps be understandable. However, it would seem more
likely that Nefertiti and her daughters were being deliberately
depicted in the image of the king as a means of associating
themselves with his divinity while di erentiating the royal family
from the rest of humanity. This would explain why the placing of
Nefertiti’s feet so often copies that of the king’s, and indeed why
women of the Amarna royal family are often shown as red-brown in
colour, a deliberate reversal of the tradition which decreed that all
women should be a pale contrast to their tanned menfolk. The
mirroring of features and postures was a well-established tradition
used as a means of stressing the link between the king and the gods
and Akhenaten’s version of Re-Harakhty shown on the wall of the
Karnak temple had already displayed a sagging stomach highly
reminiscent of the king himself. Queen Tiy, who might also have
been expected to resemble her son but who played a less prominent
role in the worship of the Aten, was allowed to retain her own
characteristic features, although the wooden head recovered from
Gurob, which was almost certainly carved during her son’s reign, is
clearly in uenced by the Amarna art-style, displaying a more
triangular face and a more obvious bone structure than is usual in
depictions of this lady.
As we have already seen in our consideration of the Gempaaten
colossi, this deliberate similarity of facial features can make it very
di cult to distinguish between damaged or unlabelled
representations of the king and queen. To add to the confusion,
Akhenaten and Nefertiti now frequently appear in the same type of
clothing, although there are subtle di erences if we know where to
look. The hem of Akhenaten’s long pleated dress, for example,
always clears the ground, while Nefertiti’s dress drops straight
down. Similarly, while the folds of Nefertiti’s dress hang vertically
over her hips, the folds of Akhenaten’s linen kilt mostly lie
horizontally or diagonally. The back of Nefertiti’s neck tends to be
concave, while Akhenaten has a slightly convex neck –
unfortunately, the back of the neck is all too often hidden from
view. The so-called Amarna navel, a attened oval rather than a
circle, is usually but unfortunately not always placed higher on
Nefertiti than on Akhenaten, while the Nubian-style wig worn by
Nefertiti is tapered into the back of the neck in contrast to male
wigs which tend to be cut straight across the neck. More subjective
are the di erences to the face, although it is generally agreed that
Nefertiti’s nose is smaller than Akhenaten’s, her chin more pointed
and her cheek-bones more pronounced.
As Akhenaten’s reign progresses Nefertiti’s angular face evolves
until, before Year 12, she loses her drooping jaw and chin,
developing instead a square jaw, obvious cheek-bones, naturally
rounded cheeks and straighter lips.14 At the same time the
proportions of her head and neck are adjusted to allow her a more
natural appearance. The famous Berlin bust, which will be
considered in more detail in the Epilogue, is one of the earliest
examples of the new-style, natural-looking queen. The reasons for
this change are not immediately apparent. It could be connected
with a change in sculptor or workshop but, although Akhenaten’s
face becomes slightly softer, there is no obvious corresponding
adjustment to his features. It is certainly tempting to see Nefertiti’s
changed image, and her move away from Akhenaten’s features, as in
some way connected with her evolving role within the royal
hierarchy.
The appearance of the disembodied Aten high in the sky above
the royal family necessitated changes in artistic composition. The
Egyptians loved symmetry, and so in more traditional scenes
involving a king and a god the two gures had almost invariably
been placed at the centre of the picture so that they balanced each
other. With the elevation of the Aten the king became the most
important standing gure and the queen was promoted from her
usual position behind or beside her husband to stand facing him,
thus providing a pleasing triangular balance and emphasizing the
increased importance of the queen. The Aten now drew the eye
upwards, and in order to emphasize this the proportions of the
humans were adjusted. In particular, the torso above the navel was
lengthened so that the legs appeared somewhat stocky in
comparison with the body. The emphasized head and the hips,
which at rst appeared out of proportion, were soon readjusted to
give a more natural e ect and the ngers were lengthened, allowing
the royal couple to make graceful uttering movements with their
hands, now clearly di erentiated between left and right.15
Egyptian artists had never been particularly interested in
portraying children who played a relatively minor role in public life.
High infant-and child-mortality rates meant that children all too
often led the briefest of lives. Where they were shown, they
appeared either as miniature adults or as symbolic infants: naked,
sporting the side-lock of youth hairstyle and with one nger
permanently in the mouth. Now the royal children were to be
included in family groups as symbols of their parents’ fertility, and
the Amarna artists were forced to rethink their approach. This
resulted in a more natural representation of childhood, with the
young princesses becoming individuals, free to move and perform
child-

Fig. 4.3 Nefertiti pours liquid for Akhenaten

ish actions, although their bodies remained scaled-down versions of

their mother, complete with her wide hips and skinny legs. The little
girls are constantly associated with Nefertiti, and Meritaten, as the
eldest, is always accorded the prominent role, playing most often
with her father. All six daughters look like their mother (who, of
course, looks like their father) and, although they are usually shown
naked, they occasionally imitate her by wearing long, diaphanous
robes. They are curiously free of symbolic head-dresses, and only
their changing hairstyles give an indication of their increasing age
as they advance from bald babies with strange egg-shaped heads to
gawky girls with the side-lock of youth and nally elegant young
ladies sporting a modi ed version of the Nubian-style wig favoured
by their mother.
Their bald heads ensure that the curious elongated skulls of the
Amarna princesses, emphasized by their long, stalk-like necks,
mimic the pro le of the king’s head which is almost invariably
elongated by his sloping crown. Again, the ‘truth’ behind these egg-
shaped heads is open to doubt. If the princesses did indeed have
grossly misshapen heads, was this the result of deliberate
manipulation during childhood, a practice which is so far unknown
in dynastic Egypt, or could they all have been born with some
severe physical abnormality, perhaps inherited from their father
whose head is invariably concealed beneath his crown? The fact
that the adult Ankhesenpaaten displays a perfectly normal head
several years after her father’s death suggests that once again the
royal artists were not attempting realistic portraiture, but were
deliberately choosing to exaggerate the slightly elongated heads of
the princesses in order to prove a theological point. The egg was
accepted by Akhenaten as a symbol of creation, and was indeed
included as such in the hymn to the Aten: ‘… when the chick in the
egg chirps within his shell you give him breath to live, and when his
time is ready to break out from the shell he comes out of the egg to
proclaim his birth…’. Dorothea Arnold has suggested that the
children’s egg-heads may well have been intended to reinforce their
role as embodiments of divine creation, comparing them to a unique
but badly damaged alabaster sculpture recovered from Amarna
which has been reconstructed to show Akhenaten in the form of a
squatting child with one nger raised to his mouth.16 In this gure
Akhenaten is bald, although he wears the side-lock of youth, and he
too has an elongated egg-shaped head.
 5
Horizon of the Aten

Behold Akhetaten which the Aten desires me to make unto him as a monument in his name
for ever. It was the Aten my father that brought me to Akhetaten. Not a noble directed me
to it saying ‘it is tting for his majesty to make Akhetaten in this place’. It was the Aten my
father that directed me to it, to make it for him as Akhetaten…1

As Akhenaten tells us, the site chosen for his new capital Akhetaten
or ‘Horizon of the Aten’ (now widely known as Amarna) was
selected by the great god himself. Unfortunately, we are not told
how the Aten made his choice known, although it is probably not
too fanciful to suggest that Akhenaten was rst attracted to Amarna
by its topography; many modern travellers have noted how,
particularly when viewed from the river, the natural shaping of the
cli s in silhouette resembles the hieroglyph for ‘horizon’.2
The new capital was to lie on the east bank of the Nile in the
Hare Nome of Middle Egypt, almost equidistant between the
southern capital, Thebes, and the northern capital, Memphis, and
several miles to the south-east of the ancient west bank town of
Hermopolis (modern Ashmunein). The chosen site was a wide, hot
and somewhat windswept arc of desert some eleven kilometres long
and ve kilometres wide, sandwiched between the river Nile to the
west and a semi-circle of steep cli s to the east. There was relatively
easy access to water, but although Middle Egypt is in general a
fertile area, a shortage of agricultural land on the east bank meant
that all farming would have to take place on the west, with supplies
being ferried over to feed the city. It was, however, a virgin site
which, because it had never been built on, had never been dedicated
to a particular deity. This may well have heightened its attraction
for the king and his god who wanted to build the Aten’s ‘Seat of the
First Occasion’, a city which would belong exclusively to the

Fig. 5.1 Map of Amarna

Aten. In fact Akhenaten’s decision was almost certainly inspired as

much by practical as by religious considerations. The Nile Valley
could not provide unlimited city-sites, and a late 18th Dynasty king
looking for a large, completely untouched plot of land suitable for
extensive development would certainly not have been spoiled for
choice, as the best sites would have been long occupied. It is
possible that Nefertiti recognized some of Amarna’s shortcomings,
as Akhenaten rather tersely informs us:
Neither shall the queen say unto me ‘behold there is a goodly place for Akhetaten in
another place’… I will not say ‘I will abandon Akhetaten, I will hasten away and make
Akhetaten in this other goodly place’.3

Amarna’s main strength as a site also seems to have been its greatest
weakness. The isolation that allowed Akhenaten to make a new start
away from Egypt’s traditional deities ensured that his city, despite
its status as the capital of a great empire, remained very much apart
from the rest of Egypt. As Amarna went about its unique business of
serving the king and the Aten, elsewhere in Egypt life continued
very much as it had for centuries. However, it is Amarna’s very
unsuitability which has ensured its preservation. Akhenaten’s city
may well have su ered from decay and both ancient and modern
looting, but it has been spared the complete destruction of Amarna
period monuments which we nd at Heliopolis and Thebes.
Akhenaten’s chosen site did not have the obvious geographical
advantages of the other three capitals of the New Kingdom. It is no
coincidence that the ancient capital of Memphis lay only a few
kilometres distant from the modern capital, Cairo. As early as the
beginning of the 1st Dynasty it was realized that the natural centre
of Egypt was the point where the Valley met the Delta, the junction
of Upper and Lower Egypt, and so, throughout the Old and Middle
Kingdoms and for much of the New Kingdom, Memphis remained
the administrative capital of Egypt.4 Memphis was always the
largest and most cosmopolitan of the Egyptian cities. In contrast Pi-
Ramesses, the New Kingdom capital founded by Ramesses II, was
sited not far from the eastern Delta backwater home town of
Ramesses’s family. Sentiment was, however, allied to shrewd
political judgement since the location of Pi-Ramesses near to the old
Hyksos capital of Avaris moved the centre of political life closer to
the eastern border at a time when Egypt was feeling concern over
her military, diplomatic and trading relationships with the
kingdoms and empires of western Asia, particularly the Hittites who
had superseded Mitanni as Egypt’s main rival and competing
international superpower. Thebes, although far to the south, was
conveniently situated for overseeing the administration of Nubia,
vast tracts of which had come under direct Egyptian rule early in
the New Kingdom. Thebes was also a useful starting point for
expeditions into the eastern desert, while access to the Red Sea via
the nearby Wadi Hammamat provided another useful southern trade
route.
The limits of the god’s new territory were de ned in a series of
massive inscriptions carved at strategic points into the limestone
cli s of both the east (eleven stelae) and west (three stelae) banks.
In fact, the area enclosed within these so-called ‘boundary stelae’,
measuring some sixteen by thirteen kilometres, was far larger than
the area eventually occupied by the city itself and included
‘mountains, deserts, meadows, water, villages, embankments, men,
beasts, groves and all things which the Aten shall bring into
existence’. Akhenaten was providing his god with a small self-
contained kingdom which allowed plenty of room for internal
growth but which, the king swore, would never be expanded beyond
its stated boundaries. It is di cult to calculate how much of this
area was fertile land, but it has been suggested that the Amarna
cultivation would have been capable of supporting a population of
up to 45,000.5
The rst three boundary stelae, most probably carved during Year
5, detailed the founding of Amarna. By Year 6 a further eleven
stelae had been carved to mark the nal boundaries of a city which
was already substantially complete. Several of these stelae are now,
due to a combination of ancient and modern vandalism plus natural
damage, completely unreadable. One stela (known as stela P) was
even blown up by local Copts searching for the treasure behind the
‘door’ in the cli . Fortunately the stelae were fully documented at
the turn of the century by Norman de Garis Davies, working on
behalf of the Egypt Exploration Society, and this record, combined
with the surviving sections, has allowed scholars to make a fairly
complete composite reconstruction of Akhenaten’s full message.
From this we learn that the king rst decided to abandon Thebes for
Amarna during Year 4, formally establishing the limits of his new
city in Year 6 when he swore an oath of dedication. This oath was
renewed in Year 8 when the king inspected his boundaries and a
postscript to this e ect was added to eight of the stelae. All the
boundary stelae were carved to the same pattern; they were
rectangular with straight sides and a rounded top which allowed the
Aten to shine in an arched sky. Beneath the Aten there was
inevitably a scene showing Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their daughters
at worship, while beneath this came the text. To either side of all
but three of the stelae, and standing free although carved from the
same rock, were statue groups of the royal family, the king and
queen holding large plaques inscribed with the names of the Aten,
Akhenaten and Nefertiti.
The stela known as boundary stela S, which was by happy
accident carved into a vein of exceptionally hard limestone, is the
best preserved of all Akhenaten’s proclamations. Measuring
approximately one and a half metres wide by two and a half metres
tall, it displays four columns and twenty-six lines of inscription. The
scene at the top of the stela depicts Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Meritaten
and Meketaten worshipping the Aten (Fig. 5.2). All are shown in the
early, deliberately exaggerated Amarna style, so that ‘the work in
the scene above the inscription is beautifully ne, though the
pro les are hideous and the forms of the body outrageous’.6 Nefertiti
wears her usual imsy robe with sleeves, which partially conceals
her breasts but highlights her stomach, hips and pubic region; on
her head she wears the long wig and the uraeus, disc, horns and
double plumes seen in the Hwt-Benben reliefs. Akhenaten wears a
pleated linen kilt which emphasizes his paunch but conceals his
genitals, and his favourite tall blue crown. The family, as always,
line up in order of importance. Nefertiti stands behind her husband,
yet she is virtually the same height as Akhenaten, and has
abandoned the queen’s sistrum to follow her husband in holding out
her arms to the god. The rays of the Aten in turn hold the ankh, sign
of life, before the faces of king and queen. The two little princesses,
dressed like their mother in long transparent robes designed to
emphasize their lower regions, but with elongated bald heads
displaying the side-lock of youth, shake their sistra before the god.
In the damaged statue groups to each side of the stela the king has
his genitals covered by a belt, while Nefertiti and the princesses
appear naked.
Akhenaten intended his new city to be Egypt’s permanent capital,
home of the one state god Aten and the bureaucracy which hitherto

Fig. 5.2 Boundary stela S

had been centred on Memphis. He seems to have rejected the old

peripatetic style of kingship and, although we cannot state for
certain that the king never left his new home, to have settled more
or less permanently in the one base which ful lled all his needs. The
city included a full complement of temples, royal residences,
housing for the civil servants, army chiefs and priests, artisan
housing and a burial ground. The siting of the royal tomb in the
Amarna cli s was a sign of Akhenaten’s certain faith that his new
city would outlast its founder:
A tomb shall be made for me in the eastern mountain of Akhetaten, and my burial shall be
performed in it with a multitude of festivals which the Aten has ordered for me. If the
Great Queen Nefertiti who lives, should die in any town of north, south, west or east, she
shall be brought and buried at Akhetaten. If the King’s Daughter Meritaten should die in
any city of north, south, west or east, she shall be brought and buried in Akhetaten. And
the sepulchre of Mnevis shall be made in the eastern mountain of Akhetaten and they shall
be buried in them.
The Mnevis were sacred animals, living gods in the form of a bull,
consecrated to the solar cult at Heliopolis. Their high status at
Amarna is curious but perhaps indicates both Akhenaten’s respect
for aspects of the old solar cult, and his intention to develop
Amarna, rather than Thebes or Heliopolis, as Egypt’s religious
capital.
Akhenaten had almost unlimited wealth at his disposal. Not only
did he have access to the richest royal treasury in Egypt’s history,
now further swelled by the o erings withheld from Amen, he also
had full control over the funds belonging to the Aten priesthood,
plus the right to commandeer the labour of his people. Nevertheless,
the speed with which Amarna rose from the barren desert is
impressive. Construction had only started during Year 5, yet by the
end of that year the royal family was ensconced in temporary
quarters, ‘the tent of apartments’, while they waited for their palace
to be nished.7 By Year 9, the city was fully functional. The builders
were helped in their task by a crafty choice of construction
materials. As usual, the domestic buildings were made from sun-
dried mud-brick with occasional stone and wooden features. As
Flinders Petrie discovered in his 1891–92 season of excavation at
Amarna, a simple mud-brick hut can easily be built in a day:
We settled to live at the village of Haj Qandil… building a row of mud-brick huts as we
needed them. Such rooms can be built very quickly; a hut twelve feet by eight taking only
a few hours. The bricks can be bought at tenpence a thousand; the boys make a huge mud
pie, a line of bricks is laid on the ground, a line of mud poured over them, another line of
bricks is slapped down in the mud so as to drive it up the joints; and thus a wall of headers,
with an occasional course of stretchers to bind it, is soon run up. The roof is made of
boards, covered with durra stalks to protect them from the sun; and the hut is ready for
use, with a piece of canvas hung over the doorway.8

The inner walls of the ancient houses were plastered and painted
with some of the most lively scenes of the natural world ever to be
seen in dynastic Egypt, which allowed any defects in the structure to
be hidden beneath a thick layer of plaster. The standard of painting
was not, however, always of the highest, and Petrie was able to
detect rooms in the palace where the work of a good artist was
placed next to that of an obviously inferior craftsman.
 Sandstone talatat blocks, even smaller than those used at Thebes,
played a part in the construction of the Amarna temples, but now
extensive use was made of both limestone and mud-brick, while
mud-brick rather than stone was employed as a core. These
buildings, although outwardly impressive, were again not of the
highest standard. All too often the plaster which covered the walls,
and into which were carved the sunken reliefs, served to conceal the
inferior workmanship beneath. It seems likely that within its
enclosure wall the Great Temple complex remained substantially
incomplete; had Amarna continued as the capital of Egypt we would
probably have seen successive monarchs vying to expand and
embellish the temple just as Akhenaten’s predecessors had competed
over the development of the Karnak complex. Archaeological
evidence suggests that this rebuilding had already begun towards
the end of Akhenaten’s reign, when mud-brick temple elements
started to be replaced with stone.9
Naturally the intensive building created a huge demand for
craftsmen, not only labourers but artists, architects, sculptors,
painters and the bureaucrats who would supervise them, while the
cult of the Aten demanded its full complement of priests. Within the
city, although proper care was taken to ensure that the principal
religious and administrative buildings were in the correct
relationship to each other, there was no overall plan. Akhenaten
seems to have resisted the temptation to regulate the private lives of
his citizens, or maybe he lacked the resources to devise and build an
entire city.10 In consequence the city simply grew organically around
its palaces and temples, while the magni cent walled villas of the
nobles served as the focus for clusters of smaller houses which may
well have been economically dependent upon the larger estates. The
city may have been founded to serve the Aten, but it needed a sound
economic basis to survive. It was provided with a full complement
of transport, storage and manufacturing facilities many of which,
but by no means all, fell under the control of the king. The southern
suburb, home to some of the most in uential of Akhenaten’s
courtiers, was also the site of the sculptors’ studios and a large glass
factory, while the northern suburb, where many merchants lived
within easy reach of the quay, even developed what can only be
classed as a slum area.
Like any other city, Amarna required a vast amount of water, not
only for human and animal consumption but to maintain the
elaborate pools and private gardens which were very much a feature
of Akhenaten’s palaces and temples. The city could thus not expand
too far away from the river, and developed into a long ribbon-like
entity running parallel to the line of the Nile and set slightly back
from the thin strip of cultivation. Even so, an entire city could not
rely on water transported from the Nile, and it proved necessary to
develop a system of wells sunk deep into the subsoil. Sanitation
throughout the city was primitive, and few homes had any form of
toilet facility. Although the larger houses were furnished with stone-
lined bathrooms and lavatories, there was no proper drainage
system and the water which was poured over the bather simply
collected in a vessel sunk into the oor or, in the more elaborate
bathrooms, ran o through a conduit in the bathroom wall to sink
into the ground outside. The lavatories, basic earth closets housed in
a small chamber next to the bathroom, consisted of a wooden seat
balanced on two brick pillars and set over a deep bowl of sand. It
was customary to sweep the inside of the houses, but the sweepings
were simply tipped out into the street. Large dumps developed, not
necessarily con ned to the outskirts of the city, which from time to
time would be levelled or burned to allow building on the site. Such
dumps are a conspicuous feature of Egyptian villages today where
the heat brings about rapid decay, and there is a constant problem
with vermin.
If Amarna was not a particularly well-planned city, nor even a
clean one, it was certainly well defended. The task of protecting
Amarna and its royal tombs was made easy by the geography of the
site. To the west the Nile provided an e ective barrier which could
be patrolled by boat, while the cli s to the east rendered a city wall
unnecessary. The military and armed police who had been so
prominent at Thebes maintained their high pro le at Amarna, and
both Egyptian and foreign troops were stationed within the city. The
tracks worn by the soldiers who guarded the eastern cli s and
desert are clearly visible today. What we cannot tell is whether the
guards were engaged in keeping foreigners out, or the citizens in. It
would not be too surprising if some resented their enforced
seclusion in the king’s model city, and perhaps even more so their
enforced burial away from their ancestral tombs. Elizabeth Riefstahl
has gone as far as to compare Amarna with ‘an embattled city, a
luxurious concentration camp’.11
Mahu, Chief of the Medjay (police) and ‘General of the Army of
the Lord of the Two Lands’, was an important gure at Amarna. He
was assisted in his work by a ‘General of the Army’, a battalion
commander and several commanders of the cavalry, including Ay. It
was Mahu’s duty to keep the peace within the city, a job which he
obviously did well, as a badly damaged vignette in his tomb shows
him receiving the gold which rewarded Akhenaten’s favourites. In a
more unusual tomb scene we see Mahu heading the king’s
bodyguard as Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Meritaten leave the temple
and drive in state along the Royal Road in their chariot (Fig. 5.3).
The people assume an uncomfortable posture, bowing low from the
waist, as the royal family pass. As Mahu and his soldiers are
compelled to run alongside the royal chariot, we must assume that
their presence as bodyguards is a formality rather than a necessity.
In fact the ride itself seems fraught with danger. Although
Akhenaten holds the reins of the two prancing horses, his attention
is on Nefertiti whom at rst sight he appears to be kissing, although
it is possible that the two were simply sharing the ankh of life held
between them by one of the Aten’s rays. Whatever the reason for
their distraction, tiny Meritaten is taking full advantage of the
situation as, ignored by her parents, she goads the horses with a
stick.12
The long and fairly straight road which formed the backbone of
 Fig. 5.3 A royal chariot ride

Amarna functioned as the all-important processional way, which

allowed the royal family to display themselves to their subjects in a
semi-secular version of the old religious processions, as shown in the
tomb of Mahu. This road, now known as the Royal Road or the
Sikket es-Sultan, ran from north to south, linking the North
Riverside Palace, the forti ed private home of the royal family
which now lies largely under the modern cultivation, to the city
centre which housed the main religious and administrative
buildings. Beyond the city centre the road ran on to reach the
outlying Maru-Aten cult centre, although by now it was no longer
part of the processional way.
The North Palace lay between the northern suburbs and the North
Riverside Palace. This unforti ed ‘palace’ was an isolated complex
of rooms rst identi ed by its excavators as a kind of zoological
garden,13 but now believed to have been a palace for the use of the
oldest royal daughter, Meritaten, whose name is found
superimposed over that of another, as yet unidenti ed, female. The
complex, centred around a large pool, incorporated a garden
courtyard, an open-air court with altars for the worship of the Aten,
a room with a dais usually interpreted as a throne room, private
quarters including a bathroom and, most surprisingly, beautifully
decorated accommodation for animals, including aviaries and pens
complete with elaborate stone mangers. The ‘Green Room’, whose
walls were painted with a papyrus thicket full of spectacular wild
birds undisturbed by the hunters who so often intrude on Egyptian
scenes of nature, has often been described as a masterpiece. A series
of rooms within the complex has been tentatively identi ed as
harem quarters although, as the excavators noted, ‘it is astounding
that these rooms are not larger than prison cells or bathing cabins
and bear no re ex of any charm of life, no indications of great
ceremonies or splendid equipage’.14 Meritaten, of course, would
have had little need for harem quarters in her palace, although her
attendants would have needed their own accommodation.
To the south of the North Palace the Royal Road passed through
the northern suburbs to reach the city centre. Here, to the west of
the road, lay a vast group of buildings constructed partly of stone
and partly of mud-brick. Although this complex is generally referred
to as the Great Palace, argument over its exact purpose has been
rife. To some the buildings are unquestionably the remains of a
great royal residence whose apartments were home to the royal
family, their dependants and servants and, of course, the royal
harem. Others believe that the stone-built courts and halls, which
originally included colossal statues of the royal couple plus
decoration showing the royal family at worship, must have been in
some way connected with the Aten cult. Unfortunately a great deal
of this structure has been lost to modern cultivation while the
stonework has been salvaged and re-used in both ancient and
modern buildings; it seems unlikely that archaeology will ever be
able to solve the question of its original purpose(s), although it
would perhaps be surprising if such a large complex did not serve
multiple functions.
The Great Palace, whatever its other duties, would seem to have
been a suitable site for the royal harem which must have numbered
many hundreds of women. Nefertiti is so consistently presented as
Akhenaten’s consort, and is so obviously at the centre of the nuclear
royal family, that there is a tendency to forget that Akhenaten
followed New Kingdom tradition in having many secondary wives.
His harem, which may well have been home to his shadowy sisters
and aunts, included not only Akhenaten’s own brides, but all the
women inherited from his father, including Gilukhepa and her niece
Tadukhepa. All these ladies would have needed appropriately regal
accommodation for themselves, their children and their retinues
which, in the case of the foreign princesses, could number several
hundred women. Given Akhenaten’s stated intention to have one
capital city, and his apparent disinclination to travel outside
Amarna, it seems likely that he would have rehoused some, if not
all, of his women close to his home.
The tombs of Tutu, Ay and Parennefer allow us a tantalizing
glimpse into some of the more public rooms which normally remain
hidden behind the palace façade. However, these small-scale
cartoon-like scenes, which merely form the background to the all-
important spectacle of the

Fig. 5.4 The royal harem

tomb owner being rewarded by the royal couple, were never
intended to be faithful reproductions of the palace interior, and in
consequence are liable to pose more questions than they answer. In
the tomb of Ay (Fig. 5.4) we are shown a group of women within
two separate buildings whose doors are guarded, or perhaps
protected, by men whom Davies, for no apparent reason other than
cultural expectation, identi es as eunuchs.15 Almost all the women
are either making music or dancing, while the walls of their rooms
are hung with an assortment of lyres, lutes and harps. The women in
the upper rooms of both houses have strange, un-Egyptian-looking
hairstyles, with their long tresses divided into locks and either
curled or weighted at the end. One woman, again in an upper
chamber, is squatting so that her friend may part and dress her hair
in this atypical style. This, combined with the unusual skirt worn by
at least one of the women, has led to the suggestion that they may
be Syrian musicians, perhaps part of the retinue who accompanied
Tadukhepa of Mitanni to Egypt.
Most high-ranking households maintained a troupe of female
musicians and acrobatic dancers who, dressed in the most scanty of
garments and with their long hair weighted to produce a seductive
swing, would entertain guests at dinner parties. The full extent of
the duties expected of these women is not clear. The connection
between music and sexuality in ancient Egypt was well understood,
with prostitutes often using music as a means of seducing their
clients; this link is made clear by a scene in the Turin erotic papyrus
where a prostitute throws down her lyre to copulate with a client,
while a fragment of wood recovered from a New Kingdom Theban
tomb shows a woman who, although engaged in intercourse, refuses
to put down her lute.16
Less apparent is the link between music and religion, although we
know that the gods were stimulated by sound and that their rituals
had, since the start of the dynastic age, been accompanied by
singing, chanting, clapping and dancing. The Aten, like all his divine
predecessors, was worshipped through the music which encouraged
him to accept the o erings placed before him,17 and the temple
precincts echoed with sound as ‘musicians and chantresses shout for
joy in the court of the Benben temple and every temple in
Akhetaten’.18 Music provided by the queen, whose traditional duties
included the arousal of the gods, was particularly important.
Nefertiti’s sistrum was used to calm and soothe the god, while
references to her vocal charms, ‘one is happy to hear her voice’, or
‘the one who paci es the Aten with a sweet voice and whose hands
carry the sistrum’, should not be read as generalized compliments,
but as speci c references to her ability to complete her religious
duties.
The King’s House was situated opposite the Great Palace and was
linked to it by a mud-brick bridge passing over the Royal Road. This
was the king’s o cial residence within the city and it was from here
that he conducted his a airs of state. Here too, in a room on the
north-east corner of the building, was the Window of Appearance
where the royal couple appeared before their people to announce
promotions, distribute gold to a faithful few and rations to the
masses.19 Consequently the house, although relatively small,
included accommodation for the guards and servants who would
have attended the royal family, plus storage facilities including a
large granary which, under other more orthodox regimes, we might
have expected to nd within the temple precincts. Surrounding the
house were the o ces and archives of the civil service and it was
here, in the remains of the ‘Bureau for the Correspondence of the
Pharaoh’ that the Amarna letters were recovered.
Within the King’s House there were private apartments, including
bathrooms and lavatories, and a garden courtyard. Here John
Pendlebury discovered an independent suite of six separate rooms,
each with a niche to hold a bed; he tentatively identi ed this as the
royal night-nursery, although it is perhaps more realistic to view the
small rooms as accommodation for the large entourage of
anonymous women who invariably accompanied the royal family on
their travels. It was in the King’s House that Flinders Petrie found
and rescued the painting of the two little princesses, now housed in
the Ashmolean Museum, which originally formed part of a much
larger mural of the royal family.
The beautiful painted pavement within the Great Palace su ered
a less happy fate. Petrie tells us how he went to great lengths to
preserve the gypsum oor, painting it with a weak solution of
tapioca applied gently using the side of one nger and building a
gangway to make a walkway for visitors. As word of the magni cent
oor spread Amarna became a tourist attraction, and eventually the
Society for the Preservation of the Monuments of Egypt paid for the
erection of a small protective hut. However, no path through the
elds was provided for the visitors, and the elds were trampled by
the eager tourists. Petrie describes with some bitterness how, on 1
February 1912, at a time when the German expedition led by
Ludwig Borchardt held the Amarna concession:
… One night a man went and hacked it all to pieces to prevent visitors coming. Such was
the mismanaged end of a unique nd. I was never even informed and allowed to pick up
the pieces.20

An alternative interpretation of events, that the pavement was

destroyed by local guards who resented the baksheesh earned by
their colleagues in charge of the oor, is perhaps more convincing
but does not alter the pointless nature of the destruction.21 The
fragments were collected, transferred to Cairo Museum, and
reassembled in a somewhat haphazard manner. Here we may still
see the calm blue pool lled with contented sh and surrounded by
a wonderful assortment of animals, birds and plants.
The two temples of the Aten lay on the east side of the Royal
Road, on opposite sides of the King’s House. Immediately to the
south was Hwt-Aten, or the ‘Mansion of the Aten’, more commonly
called the Small Temple of the Aten, a temple which although
‘small’ was of roughly the same size as the Theban Gempaaten. The
Small Temple, however, lacked the colonnades and colossi found at
Thebes; instead its outer wall was provided with towers and
battlements with niches for agpoles, and it is possible that it was at
least in part roofed. This may well have been a centre for the
celebration of the royal cult, perhaps even the king’s version of a
mortuary temple, and it may be no coincidence that it is aligned
towards the distant royal tomb.
Per-Aten, the ‘House of the Aten’ or Great Temple of the Aten was
a confusing complex of independent stone buildings bounded by a
massive oblong enclosure wall some 229 metres wide and 730
metres long and entered via either a western gateway or a northern
entrance pavilion. Unfortunately, all that now survive are the
foundations, and much of the site has been lost beneath the modern
cemetery of el-Till. We know that within the enclosure wall were a
number of small shrines and so-called sunshade temples associated
with the royal women, a vast open space, and at least three stone
buildings. Per-Hai, ‘The House of Rejoicing’, led to Gempaaten, ‘The
Sun Disc is Found’, a progression of open-air courtyards diminishing
in size and housing many limestone o ering tables arranged in neat
rows. Two hundred and forty metres away, at the eastern end of the
complex, was the sanctuary, occasionally called Hwt-Benben, or the
‘Mansion of the Benben stone’, which was sited close to a sacri cial
butcher’s yard and was associated with a collection of subsidiary
buildings and a rubbish dump.
Conspicuous o erings had been a prominent feature of Aten
worship at Thebes, but at Amarna this became more exaggerated,
with a plot of land to the south of Gempaaten housing 920 mud-
brick o ering tables arranged in orderly ranks (forty-six tables by
twenty tables). It has been suggested that a further array of tables
may have existed on the opposite side of Gempaaten, but aerial
photographs indicate that this is unlikely. The tables were used to
hold the o erings of food, drink and owers which were to be
presented to the great god. Their presence in the temple highlights
the illogical and contradictory mixture of tradition and innovation
which was the cult of the Aten. Akhenaten, who had gone to
considerable lengths to establish his god as a remote, non-
anthropomorphic deity, never discarded the custom of making
o erings. He may well have felt it necessary to retain the ceremony
in order to stress his unique relationship with the god. The light of
the disembodied sun – to modern eyes at least – appears to have no
immediate need of o erings and, indeed, no means of consuming
them. However, the rays of the sun with their tiny hands were able
to reach down and touch or take whatever they wanted. The idea of
the solid physicality of the sun’s rays was certainly not a new one;
the Old Kingdom pyramid texts describe the ramp of the sun’s rays
connecting Egypt with the sky.
The Amarna benben stone was no longer an obelisk, but a free-
standing stela, most probably carved from quartzite. The change in
form of the benben, which may well have been a practical necessity
rather than a theological choice, seems to have gone hand in hand
with a change in the pattern of Aten worship, for at Amarna there is
no sign that the cult of the benben is exclusively connected with
Nefertiti, as it appears to have been at Thebes. Instead the highest-
ranking royal women, including Queen Tiy, were provided with
individual sunshade temples for their exclusive worship of the Aten.
Several of the Amarna tombs show the new-style benben-stone: in
the tomb of Panehesy it takes the form of a large, round-topped
stela which stands on a raised platform with a ramp or stairway, in
front of several o ering tables and next to a larger-than-life-sized
sculpture of the seated king wearing the blue crown.22 Although this
stela has not survived, Petrie tells us how Howard Carter discovered
its probable site:
The site of the temple, or shrine, which was entirely excavated by Mr Carter, is marked by
heaps of broken pieces of mortar and stone; and the cores of the walls consisting of mortar
and chips still remain to show the position. Mr Carter turned over nearly all of this without
nding anything more than two or three blocks of the great stela. This was built up of
small blocks, and bore a life-size gure of Akhenaten (of whom the head was found), and
doubtless similar gures of the queen and princesses, whose titles were also found.23

During Pendlebury’s 1933 excavation many broken pieces of purple

quartzite were discovered in the area between the sanctuary and the
butcher’s yard.
Worship before the benben-stone, no longer an exclusively female
ritual, was still a vital aspect of Akhenaten’s religion. A large,
rectangular, red quartzite stela recovered from Heliopolis, the
original cult centre for solar worship, and now housed in Cairo
Museum, provides a clue to its importance.24 One face of this stela
was recarved during the reign of Horemheb and now depicts an
entirely conventional scene. The other, badly damaged face shows
two aspects of the Amarna royal family at worship. The upper
tableau is of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Meritaten kneeling to pray to
the Aten. Beneath this is a portrayal of the king, a princess and an
unknown male prostrate before the Aten, whose rays can be seen
holding the ankh of life to Akhenaten’s lips. This is an
unprecedentedly humble posture for Akhenaten to adopt.
The southern suburb housed some of Amarna’s most luxurious
private homes including the house of the Vizier Nakht, who owned
one of the largest and most elegant villas. Situated on the fringe of
the suburb, a somewhat inconvenient two kilometres from the
King’s House, Nakht’s home was set in a spacious compound de ned
by a mud-brick wall enclosing the kitchens, storage areas,
outbuildings, servants’ quarters, animal pens, stables, a private
chapel and a walled garden whose plants would be embedded in
fertile Nile mud and watered from the private well. The villa itself
was enormous. Its ground oor, which survives in plan form only,
consisted of almost thirty rooms. The upper oor, which may have
provided accommodation for the children and the household
servants, has vanished, but it has been estimated that this would
probably have represented an additional ten rooms, with further use
being made of the at roof. The villa, in spite of its exceptional size,
followed the standard Egyptian tripartite house-plan, with the main
door leading into public reception rooms. The reception hall, or
‘north loggia’, was a rectangular room with eight wooden pillars
whose elaborately frescoed walls, blue ceiling and red and yellow
oor were clearly designed to impress visitors. Beyond this lay a
series of semi-private family rooms and nally the private area,
including two en-suite bedrooms, which was probably restricted to
women, children and immediate male family members.
The Royal Road, no longer a processional way, continued
southwards, running beyond the southern suburb out into the desert
until it reached Maru-Aten, an isolated complex of walled gardens,
water and open-air shrines including sunshade platforms.25 Maru-
Aten was initially interpreted as a leisure centre where the royal
family could spend a relaxed day eating and drinking away from the
pressures of city life. The discovery of numerous fragments of wine
vessels seemed to con rm this view. However, it is now recognized
that, like so many of Akhenaten’s buildings, Maru-Aten had an as yet
unidenti ed religious purpose, and that it was rmly associated
with one of the royal women. The inscriptions recovered from Maru-
Aten now bear the name and titles of Meritaten, but her name is not
original, it has been written over that of another royal woman. The
erased name and titles are those of a hitherto unknown lady of the
harem, Kiya, ‘wife and greatly beloved of the King of Upper and
Lower Egypt living on Truth, Lord of the Two Lands Neferkheperure
Waenre, the perfect child of the living Aten who shall live for
ever’.26
Kiya’s name, unrecognized until the mid twentieth century, has
since been found on a handful of objects recovered from Amarna,
including a fragment of a badly damaged o ering slab, various
broken cosmetic pots and tubes and the broken lid of a small
wooden box. On blocks recovered from Hermopolis it has even been
found beneath the names of Meritaten and Ankhesenpaaten. Kiya’s
origins, however, remain even more obscure than those of Nefertiti,
and our only clue is provided by her unusual name. It is likely that
‘Kiya’ was a contraction of a longer Egyptian name, although the
theory that Kiya was simply a pet name for Nefertiti must be ruled
out as we have enough evidence to con rm that Kiya was a separate
individual. It is just possible that Kiya bore a foreign name and that,
even though her titulary does not give any indication of high birth,
she may have been one of the foreign princesses who were, as far as
we know, still housed in the royal harem. Kiya could have been
Gilukhepa, the contraction being spelt with a ‘K’ in transcription,
but Gilukhepa, who was married to Amenhotep III during his Year
10, may well have been too old to have borne Akhenaten’s
children.27 Tadukhepa, who was probably of a similar age to
Nefertiti, seems the more likely candidate. It has even been
suggested that the romantic story of Kiya, a princess of Mitanni,
may have been incorporated into the New Kingdom Tale of Two
Brothers, a fable which tells how the pharaoh fell in love with a
beautiful foreign woman after smelling a lock of her hair: ‘His
majesty loved her very much, and he gave her the rank of Great
Lady.’28

Fig. 5.5 Kiya

Kiya never bore the consort’s title of ‘King’s Wife’ and never wore
the royal uraeus, but she was clearly an important and highly
favoured member of the harem, accorded great respect in her
lifetime and allowed to play a part in the rituals of Aten worship
which had previously been con ned to Akhenaten and Nefertiti.29
Not only did Kiya have her own sunshade, which would have come
with its own endowment of land and therefore its own income, she
was allowed to o ciate both alongside Akhenaten and, surprisingly,
alone. We have no con rmed portrait of Kiya in the round, but her
two-dimensional image has survived, enabling us to recognize her
calm and slightly smiling face which appears altogether softer and
less angular than that of Nefertiti. Both women favoured the true
Nubian wig which may well have served as a symbol of their status.
We know that Kiya bore the king at least one daughter as we have a
relief showing the proud parents together with their unnamed
o spring. There is also strong circumstantial evidence to suggest
that Kiya gave Akhenaten at least two sons. Kiya remained in favour
during the middle years of Akhenaten’s reign and her name is
associated with both the earlier and the later forms of the Aten’s
name. By Year 12, however, Kiya had vanished, possibly disgraced
but more likely dead, and her name and image had been erased
from Maru-Aten. She disappeared without making use of the
elaborate grave goods which were being prepared for her and her
mummy has never been found.
The Amarna workmen’s village was tucked into a little valley in
the cli s a discreet 1.2 kilometres to the east of the main city and
conveniently close to the southern group of tombs. Here were
housed the labourers – possibly experienced workers imported from
the Theban workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina – occupied in
cutting the royal and other tombs in the Amarna cli .30 Here also
lived their wives, children and dependants and the o cer in charge
of the workforce, who was provided with a larger and more
elaborate home. In contrast with the more haphazard city proper,
the village was laid out with a strict regularity and was enclosed by
a wall with a single guarded gate. Within the complex each
workman was allocated a small unit measuring a mere ve by ten
metres, and seventy-three such houses were built in six straight
terraced rows facing on to ve narrow streets. The workmen were
provided with only the basic shell of their home, and each house
was nished o by the family using local mud-bricks. This allowed a
degree of diversity in the internal planning of the houses, although
the standard home was divided by cross-walls into four small rooms:
a reception area, a family room, a bedroom or storage room and a
kitchen which did not necessarily have an oven. None of the village
houses contained a bathroom.
Conditions within the houses must have been, to modern eyes at
least, unacceptably crowded, and we may assume that good use was
made of the at roof which could have served as an additional
living and sleeping area. It is even possible that some of the houses
were extended upwards to provide a second storey, perhaps a large
private room reserved for the women of the family and their rituals.
Some of the painted plaster fragments recovered in the earliest
excavations at the village show what appear to be convolvulus
owers twisting around a papyrus stem; these plants were important
elements employed in scenes of childbirth and suckling.31 Outside
the village wall individual families built small private chapels where
they could not only worship but sit in peace, eat meals and perhaps
even keep animals. Some enterprising villagers, undaunted by the
lack of soil and water, every drop of which had to be transported
from the main city, maintained small allotments where they raised
pigs and even attempted to grow vegetables.32
The geography of the Amarna cli s meant that the tombs of the
nobles fell into two distinct groups on either side of the royal wadi.
Generally speaking, Akhenaten’s o cials chose to be buried, as they
had lived, close to their place of work, so we nd the tombs of the
priests and the o cials of the royal residence included in the
northern group, while the southern group houses the tombs of the
great state o cials such as Mahu, Parennefer and Ay. Forty- ve
tombs were started for Amarna’s élite although, due to the short-
lived nature of the site combined with a shortage of skilled
workmen, only twenty-four were inscribed and few were completed.
These élite tombs must represent Akhenaten’s innermost circle of
trusted friends who would have had little choice but to be seen to
support every aspect of the new religion including the establishment
of the new burial ground, and whose tombs may well have been the
gift of the king himself; the decorative scheme within the tombs
certainly suggests that Akhenaten, if not actually their designer,
would have been fully aware of their content. No cemetery for the
wider population has yet been found at Amarna, although there was
a small graveyard associated with the workmen’s village, and it
seems likely that those who could a ord it may well have chosen to
be interred in their ancestral home towns. The less important
members of society were presumably buried, as they were at other
cities, in relatively simple tombs and graves dug into the desert
sand.
 Under normal circumstances the king’s advisers would be the sons
of his father’s ministers who would have been raised alongside him
in the royal school attached to the harem. Throughout the dynastic
age we can trace many families of statesmen who pass down their
royal duties from father to son. Akhenaten, however, displays a
clear and unusual preference for new, but not necessarily young,
blood, and many of his courtiers, whom Alan Gardiner has classed
as novi homines,33 claim to have been discovered, taught or raised to
their present position through the generosity of the king. Clearly,
Akhenaten relished his role as a creator and teacher. Tutu, a
statesman so distinguished that he was

Fig. 5.6 The families of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten

mentioned in the Amarna letters, admits to being ‘a servant

favoured by his Lord; his teaching and his instruction are in my
innermost heart’, while the mayor of Amarna bore a name which
translates as ‘Akhenaten created me’ – a name which can hardly
have been given to him at birth. Even Ay, who almost certainly
came from a distinguished line of civil servants, tells us that ‘my
Lord taught me and I do his teaching’. The Royal Scribe and
Chancellor, May, was perhaps the most fulsome in his public
appreciation of his patron:
Listen to what I say… for I tell to you the bene ts which the ruler did for me. Then truly
you shall say ‘How great are those things that were done for this man of no account!’… I
was a man of low origin on both my father’s and my mother’s side, but the prince
established me. He allowed me to grow… He gave me provisions and rations every day, I
who had once been one who begged bread…34

Parennefer, the royal butler, is the only o cial known to have

followed the royal court from Thebes. This preference for new blood
may simply have been a re ection of the king’s wish to avoid the
advice of those closely associated with the old traditions and the old
cults, but it may perhaps add some support to the suggestion that
Akhenaten did not enjoy an entirely normal royal childhood
networking in the royal nursery. The old families, whose sons would
have expected to serve the king, seem to have been excluded from
the delights of Amarna life. Perhaps generations of political
experience encouraged them to keep a low pro le during such an
innovative regime.
The rock-cut tombs are, due to their nature, in a much better
state of preservation than the mud-brick city, although here too
there has been a great deal of deliberate destruction both ancient
and modern, plus damage due to a variety of natural causes and
problems resulting from post-dynastic usage as homes, burial sites
and even Coptic churches. Bats have proved a particular nuisance in
many of the tombs, not only corroding the walls, but causing an
extremely unpleasant odour. Norman de Garis Davies, whose
inspirational work of recording the tombs at the turn of the century
has ensured that they are today accessible to scholars, gives some
idea of the extent of the problem while working in the tomb of the
Chamberlain and Treasurer, Tutu:
The surface of the stone… is most unsightly and sadly corroded; indeed in the upper parts
the sculpture is almost e aced. This is due to the countless bats that infect the tomb and
make their presence known to the nose as unpleasantly as to the eye… [in a footnote]
When working here I cleared the tomb of them in an hour or two by a massacre of about a
thousand victims – a good proof of how easily the pests could be kept down or
exterminated.35

It is in the scenes that decorate the tomb walls that we are

permitted a glimpse of the royal family as they go about their daily
duties in a city whose architecture is represented in a somewhat
idiosyncratic form. The most elaborate tomb is that belonging to Ay
and Tey and here, as we might expect, Nefertiti features
prominently. We have already considered the scene at the Window
of Appearance where both husband and wife receive gold from the
king and queen (Fig. 2.3). Here Nefertiti, in contrast to the
equivalent scene in the tomb of Ramose, is permitted to play a full
part in the ceremony and, although she still stands behind
Akhenaten, she joins in the presentation. The three little girls are
making a valiant attempt to be helpful; Meritaten is actually holding
a tray of collars and also presents directly to her putative
grandparents. Meketaten holds a tray but stands with one arm
around her mother’s neck – it looks as if she too has the right to
present gold, but is too young to cooperate – while baby
Ankhesenpaaten, perhaps bored with the ritual, turns to caress her
mother. All the royal family appear to be completely naked,
although it seems likely that the garments of the king, if not those of
the queen, are merely hidden behind the balcony wall. Both Ay and
Tey are clearly having a wonderful time. Ay already has ve
necklaces around his neck as he reaches out to catch another, and
included in a pile of loot at his feet is a remarkable pair of red
leather gloves. The next scene shows Ay departing the palace,
wearing his gloves and holding them out to the admiring crowds.
The Amarna tomb of Parennefer, ‘he who washes the hands of His
Majesty’, includes a Window scene which was largely completed and
painted in antiquity, but which has su ered extensive modern
damage. Fortunately, with the help of earlier copies, Norman de
Garis Davies was able to restore the scene to a remarkable extent.36
His reconstruction shows the royal family again on the balcony,
with the Aten caressing Nefertiti in an almost sexual way; one ray
encircles her waist, a small hand is placed on her left breast which is
exposed by the folds of her dress, and a third hand appears round
the side of her crown. Akhenaten too is gripped rmly around the
chest by the Aten ‘as if to prevent them [i.e. the king and queen]
losing their balance as they lean over the window-sill’. Nefertiti,
shown at a slightly smaller scale than Akhenaten, stands behind her
husband and observes while the king leans forward and waves his
arms. Her face is largely destroyed, but we can see that both king
and queen are blessed with remarkably long necks and exaggerated
Amarna pro les. It is very obvious that the queen has two left
hands; the Amarna workmen only mastered the distinction between
left and right hands and feet at some time between Years 6 and 9,
and even then this distinction was reserved for the royals, with the
less important citizens condemned to hop through life on two left
feet. The three royal daughters are in the room behind the window,
in the company of two bowing attendants and their aunt,
Mutnodjmet.
 Elsewhere in the tomb of Parennefer we see the royal family
enjoying a stroll, possibly on a visit to the tombs. The king is
grasped rmly by the Aten, while he in turn has his right arm
passing around Nefertiti’s neck so that the ngers of their right
hands are somewhat clumsily entwined. The artist, evidently
wishing to stress this unusual handhold, has both extended the
length of Akhenaten’s right arm and exaggerated the size of the two
right hands. Nefertiti’s dress is again transparent and open to reveal
her abdomen, hips and thighs, and she has abandoned her
trademark crown in favour of a simple wig and uraeus. She is of
even smaller stature than in the Window scene; here the top of
Nefertiti’s head barely reaches Akhenaten’s armpit.
The tomb of Huya is of particular interest to those following the
movements of the extended royal family. Huya, Superintendent of
the royal harem, Superintendent of the Treasury, Steward in the
house of the King’s Mother, the King’s Wife, Tiy’, was, as his titles
imply, the major-domo of Queen Tiy and a favourite of Akhenaten.
His tomb, which includes the standard scene of its owner receiving
gold from the king and queen, is in many ways a celebration of Tiy’s
visits to Amarna. Although we know that Tiy had her own Amarna
sunshade, and is likely to have had her own Amarna home, there is
no evidence to suggest that she took up permanent residence at the
new city. For a long time egyptologists were convinced that,
following the death of her husband, Tiy had gone into semi-
retirement at the palace of Medinet el-Gurob on the edge of the
Faiyum. Here stood a mud-brick complex which has yielded many
inscriptions of Amenhotep III and Tiy, including the famous yew
head which shows Tiy as an elderly woman (Plate 3). However, the
assumption that the building functioned as an 18th Dynasty harem
palace is by no means proven; many of the recovered artefacts are
religious or even funerary rather than domestic, implying that
Gurob

Fig. 5.7 Nefertiti and Akhenaten entertain Tiy

may well have been a cult centre for the worship of the dead
Amenhotep III.37 Tiy, a commoner queen who owed her exalted
position to her marriage with the king rather than to her birth, may
well have been determined to keep her deceased husband’s memory
alive. Her inscriptions, which come complete with references to
Osiris, make it clear that she at least had not entirely abandoned the
old ways of thinking:
The King’s Chief Wife, his beloved, the Lady of the Two Lands Tiy made it as her
monument for her beloved brother [husband] for the Ka of the Osiris the King [Amenhotep
III] justi ed.

Tiy’s devotion to her dead husband, and Akhenaten’s respect for

his father, may explain why Amenhotep III appears on the lintel to
the north doorway of the rst hall in the tomb of Huya (Fig. 5.6).
The decoration of this lintel is curiously asymmetrical and
unbalanced by Egyptian standards. The lintel is divided in two by a
vertical line. The right-hand side shows Amenhotep III seated to face
Tiy and one of the royal princesses, while the left-hand side shows
Akhenaten and Nefertiti who both face left, although Nefertiti’s
head is turned towards Akhenaten, and four of their daughters who
are approaching from the left.
In the same tomb we see Queen Tiy enjoying a meal with
Akhenaten and Nefertiti. The royal couple sit side by side opposite
the dowager queen, their feet raised on hassocks, with the two
eldest princesses seated on small chairs beside their mother. Huya
appears as a small, bowing gure at his mistress’s feet. Scenes of the
royal family eating and drinking are very rare, yet here Akhenaten
is tucking into something which looks very much like a giant kebab
or even a rack of ribs, while Nefertiti gnaws on a duck. Beside the
royal diners, individual food stands are piled high with every
delicacy Egypt could o er. Drink ows freely, and in a parallel
scene we are shown Tiy, Akhenaten and Nefertiti with goblets raised
to their lips (Fig. 5.7). This conspicuous consumption and obvious
enjoyment of the bounties of the Aten, which brings to mind the
generous o erings which Akhenaten felt it appropriate to supply for
the enjoyment of his god, may perhaps go some way to explaining
Akhenaten’s less than streamlined shape.
Amenhotep III is absent from the scene, but seated beside Tiy is a
young girl wearing a side-lock who is identi ed merely as the
‘King’s Daughter’ Beketaten. Neither her father the king nor her
mother is named. Beketaten, whose name means ‘Handmaiden of
the Aten’, is clearly associated with Queen Tiy and we would expect
her to be Tiy’s daughter by the late Amenhotep III. Con rmation of
this parentage is suggested by her inclusion in Huya’s ‘lintel scene’
where she appears with Tiy before Amenhotep III. However, this is
the rst time that we have heard of Beketaten, who seems to have
sprung from nowhere. Her obvious youth, the observation that her
name includes the ‘Aten’ element and the fact that she is never
speci cally identi ed as the daughter of Amenhotep III have
combined with a mistaken assumption that Queen Tiy’s visit to
Amarna must have occurred during Akhenaten’s Year 12, and have
led to speculation that Beketaten must have been born after the start
of Akhenaten’s rule. That would imply either that she was not the
daughter of Amenhotep III, who was presumably dead when she
was conceived, or that Amenhotep III was alive during his son’s
reign.38 Unfortunately, Huya neglects to date this intriguing scene,
and we have no idea which year or years Tiy visited her son.
Neither her size nor her side-lock should necessarily be taken as
an indication that Beketaten was a very young child at the time of
her visit to Amarna. The artists who decorated the tombs were not
always consistent in their depictions of the royal children and
Beketaten may well be much older than her portrait suggests, maybe
as old as thirteen or fourteen. If we are correct in the assumption
that Tiy married at the age of twelve and remained fertile into her
mid-forties, it is perfectly possible for her to have had a ve-year-
old daughter at the time of Amenhotep III’s death. All these
assumptions, although nothing more than educated guesswork,
allow little di culty in inserting Beketaten into the royal family as
Akhenaten’s sister, and it is tempting to speculate whether
Beketaten could in fact be the renamed Princess Nebetah,
Akhenaten’s youngest sister, about whom so little is known. An
alternative theory, that Beketaten may have been Tiy’s
granddaughter adopted by her grandmother, is plausible but su ers
somewhat from a lack of evidence,39 while the suggestion that
Beketaten was Tiy’s daughter by her son Akhenaten, which was rst
put forward by Velikovsky and then taken up by some of the more
sensational writers of historical ‘biography’, is entirely groundless.40
 6
Queen, King or Goddess?

I breathe the sweet breath that comes forth from your mouth and shall behold your beauty
daily. My prayer is that I may hear your sweet voices of the north wind, that my esh may
grow young with life through your love, that you may give me your hands bearing your
spirit and I receive it and live by it, and that you may call upon my name eternally, and it
shall not fail…1

A private devotional stela of unknown provenance (Plate 16) allows

us to catch a glimpse of the royal family at the time of their arrival
at Amarna. The family relax in a stylized tent whose walls are
denoted by slender papyrus pillars. The tent has a oor of reed
matting but no roof – it is open to the sky, allowing the rays of the
sun to o er the ankh, symbol of life, to the royal couple and their
children.
Akhenaten sits on a simple padded stool with his feet raised on a
hassock. He is dressed in his favourite pleated kilt and sandals, and
wears a blue crown ornamented with multiple uraei, a decorated
band and two streamers. He is holding his eldest daughter
somewhat awkwardly in his arms and is slightly bending forward,
apparently about to kiss her. Meritaten twists to stroke her father’s
chin with her right hand while pointing towards her mother and
sisters with her left. Akhenaten’s long but not unduly grotesque face
is emphasized by his tall crown. His neck, too, is long and sinuous,
while his upper arms, shoulders and lower legs are strikingly
underdeveloped. His kilt does nothing to hide his paunch. Behind
the king is a stand holding four pairs of wine jars.
Facing her husband Nefertiti sits on a more regal looking but
slightly lower stool decorated with the sma-tawy, the bound papyrus
and lily symbol of the Unity of the Two Lands. Her sandalled feet
rest on a footstool. Nefertiti’s face has the plain features of the early
Amarna period and her slightly slumped body mirrors that of the
king. She wears a long, delicately pleated gown casually tied with a
sash under the bust. The pleated sash hangs downwards, partially
obscuring the sma-tawy. While her upper arms are covered, her
rounded stomach, oval navel and inner right calf are exposed. She
wears no jewellery, but her trademark blue crown is embellished
with a decorated llet and banded streamers that, with artistic
licence, utter in the breeze in the opposite direction to the
streamers on the king’s crown.
Nefertiti has Meketaten on her knee, and the child is looking over
her shoulder at her mother while gesturing towards her father and
sister with her right hand; this overlapping of bodies gives the scene
a feeling of depth not usually found in Egyptian art. Meanwhile
baby Ankhesenpaaten, a miniature adult, is clambering over her
mother’s left shoulder and reaching for a tempting ornament
suspended from Nefertiti’s crown. All three daughters are naked and
have elongated bald heads, although the eldest two wear ear-
ornaments and we may assume that all three sport a side-lock
which, in the cases of Meritaten and Ankhesenpaaten who have
their heads turned towards the left, cannot be seen.
At rst sight this stela o ers the simple image of a perfect family
in an ideal world far beyond the experiences of most Egyptians. A
second glance, however, reveals a curious mixed message.
Akhenaten, as we might expect, appears the taller and more
dominant gure. He is associated with the eldest and most
important princess while Nefertiti, a typical wife, cares for the
babies. Yet he is allocated the plain stool while his wife occupies the
seat decorated with an unmistakable regal motif. Under normal
circumstances we would expect the more important person to sit on
this stool. What are we to read into this? Is it a simple, irrelevant
mistake in a private stela that was never intended to be an accurate
portrait, and certainly never intended for public display? Or is it a
deliberate message from the artist? Who exactly is the dominant
partner here?
 This stela has fuelled heated debate over the precise nature of
Nefertiti’s role at Amarna. Everyone accepts that Nefertiti was
Akhenaten’s consort – the evidence for this is overwhelming. But
some historians have gone much further, suggesting that she acted
as Akhenaten’s co-regent and, maybe, ultimately as sole ruler of
Egypt. This theory, rst proposed by Gaston Maspero, is perhaps
best expressed in the work of Julia Samson who, in writing about
the earlier Theban images of Nefertiti, comments:
Here was not a goddess but a Regnant Queen. The determined and powerful purpose is
obvious behind the numerous carvings, and they spell aloud that Akhenaten wanted no
mistake made! He was writing and displaying in the various carved scenes the new social
and religious development as well as showing to his people his wife’s equality at his side.
In Thebes this policy was pictured many years before their co-rule was actually recorded at
Amarna…2

One could, of course, argue that the best way for Akhenaten to
ensure that ‘no mistakes were made’ with regard to his wife’s
unusual status would be to publicly proclaim his wife’s co-regency
and carve it in stone throughout his land. But perhaps he did, and it
has been lost or deliberately destroyed along with much else of
Akhenaten’s world?
Here, straightaway, we come to the heart of the Nefertiti-as-co-
regent problem. A complete and utter lack of any positive evidence.
Nowhere is the precise nature of Nefertiti’s role spelt out to us.
Those who would argue that she did rule Egypt alongside her
husband are compelled to rely on inferences and deductions and, at
the end of the day, can o er no real proof to support their theory.
Those who would argue that she did not rule must rely on an
absence of evidence; the fact that there is no record of Nefertiti ever
using a full king’s titulary, no record of her coronation, no writing
which unequivocally refers to her acting in a kingly capacity. It can
be hard to disprove a popular theory without appearing negative
and stick-in-the-mud. And certainly for many readers (and
publishers), the image of Nefertiti as king of Egypt makes a far more
satisfying end to her story.
 Could Nefertiti have acted as king? In theory, yes. The ideal king
of Egypt was the son of the previous king, the Horus to his dead
father’s Osiris, but the father-son chain occasionally snapped.
Tuthmosis I, great-great-great-great grandfather to Akhenaten and
head of his dynastic bloodline, had himself been adopted into the
royal family when the elderly Amenhotep I found himself in need of
an heir. Nor did the king have to be a man, although again that was
considered the ideal. Sobeknofru, the one queen known to have
inherited the throne in the absence of a male king, had been
accepted by her people.
If it was rare for a woman to rule alone, it was relatively common
for a widowed queen to rule on behalf of her infant son. Egyptian
history is littered with competent queens whose successful rule was
destined to be absorbed into their sons’ reigns. Ahhotep and Ahmose
Nefertari, the mother and daughter who were the last queen of the
17th Dynasty and the rst queen of the 18th respectively, fall into
this category as they ruled Egypt temporarily on behalf of their sons
Ahmose and Amenhotep I. Hatchepsut, the best known of Egypt’s
female kings, can also be included in the group of queens who ruled
through their link with a young king, although Hatchepsut’s case is
complicated by her refusal to give up the throne when Tuthmosis III
came of age.
So, there are precedents for female kings inheriting the throne,
and precedents for queens ruling Egypt on a temporary (and in
Hatchepsut’s case not so temporary) basis on behalf of a young son
or stepson. There are also precedents for kings taking co-rulers as a
means of introducing the heir apparent to his future subjects and his
future work. But, although many queens must have in uenced the
pattern of their husband’s reigns, there is no precedent for a queen
consort formally ruling alongside her husband as an equal. Nor is
this a situation that will ever occur in later dynastic history.
Akhenaten was not a man to be bound by pointless tradition, but
there was always a purpose to his deviation from convention, and
his innovative reforms were actually rooted in long-standing
tradition. Why would he appoint Nefertiti as co-regent? There could
be only one possible reason: he intended her to rule after him. This
might, perhaps, make some sense if Akhenaten had no children. But
the king had at least six daughters by the queen, plus an unspeci ed
number of children, sons as well as daughters, by the other women
in the royal harem. Any one of these would have made a more
acceptable heir to the throne.
In the absence of any textual evidence to support the theory of
Nefertiti as co-regent, hints as to her precise role have been sought
in an examination of her appearance, her actions and her
accessories as represented in reliefs and sculpture. The conclusions
which can be drawn from such a survey are meagre and will always
be open to doubt. Even though she is frequently depicted at the
same scale as her husband, Nefertiti’s size does not provide us with
any clue to her status. The concept of the queen shown at the same
scale as her husband had already been introduced with art of
Amenhotep III and Tiy, and this naturally continues into the reign of
their son. In fact Nefertiti’s height di ers from scene to scene; she
variously appears at near-equal size to or much smaller than the
king, and it seems that she was occasionally depicted at a smaller
scale for artistic rather than political purposes, so that the
descending line of king, queen and daughters would re ect the
sloping rays of the Aten.3
Nefertiti’s clothing is almost invariably feminine, and seems
designed to stress her female form. Only in the handful of scenes
where she is shown slaying the enemies of Egypt does the queen
adopt the traditional king’s smiting out t of simple skirt and bare
chest. As the smiting scene is very much a ritual one, it seems that
Nefertiti needed to be dressed in the appropriate clothes for her
task. Other images of Nefertiti, such as the Window of Appearance
scene in the tomb of Ay, may well show her topless or naked, king-
style, although, as Nefertiti’s garments are frequently both clinging
and transparent, and as the whole scene had yet to be painted, we
cannot be sure that the artist did not intend to paint a dress over her
outline:
 Nefertiti’s crowns and wigs tell a similarly vague story. We have
already seen that during the early years at Thebes she favours the
cow horns, disc and plumes introduced by her mother-in-law and
associated with the cult of Hathor. By the time of the move to
Amarna she is also wearing the tall, at-topped crown that is likely
to be her own version of Akhenaten’s blue war crown. This new
headdress carries its own overtones of fertility and rejuvenation and
links the queen with the solar goddess Tefnut. The blue crown
quickly becomes Nefertiti’s favourite, worn with increasing
frequency as the reign progresses, although occasionally she dons a
close- tting rounded cap which is sometimes mistaken for the true
blue crown. The blue crown, which ts bonnet-style close to the
head, is usually worn without a wig. Where her hair is shown,
Nefertiti favours the true Nubian wig, a style originally reserved for
men but which is now adopted by the most prominent of the royal
women, Nefertiti and Kiya. Nefertiti also wears the khat head-cloth,
a bag-like head cover usually worn by kings but also worn by Tiy,
and by the female deities Isis and Nephthys.
Nefertiti never appropriates the king’s blue crown, and even in
the smiting scenes where we might expect to nd her donning a
more masculine headdress, she retains her own feminine crown.
Only the un nished stela of the soldier Pasi, recovered from Amarna
and now housed in Berlin, appears to show a regally crowned
Nefertiti as she sits alongside Akhenaten beneath the rays of the
Aten.4 The identi cation of these two gures of undetermined
gender is, however, by no means certain and it is unfortunate that
the cartouches that would have named the couple have been left
blank. The ‘male’ gure on the right, which wears the double crown
and what appears to be a pectoral, appears slightly larger that the
‘female’ gure on the left, which wears the blue crown and has
more prominent breasts. The a ection between the two is obvious.
The left arm of the left-hand gure is placed protectively around
her/his companion, while the right-hand gure turns towards
his/her companion and raises his/her hand in a tender gesture. Are
we looking at Akhenaten and Nefertiti? Or at Akhenaten and a
young male co-regent, his son perhaps? Or are we looking at
Akhenaten and his father, Amenhotep III?
Our only positive sighting of Nefertiti dressed in a kingly crown
comes from the Amarna tomb of Panehesy (Fig 6.1), where we see
the queen wearing a khat head-cloth topped by a highly ornate atef
crown while directly in front of her stands the larger-scale
Akhenaten sporting what appears to be a nemes head-cloth and an
even more elaborate atef crown complete with two additional cobras
and with three extra falcons perched on top.5 The atef, a highly
complicated headdress which, during the New Kingdom,
incorporated ostrich feathers, ram and bull horns, a solar disc and
numerous uraei, was invariably associated with kings and with the
cult of Osiris; the only other woman known to have worn this crown
was Hatchepsut in her role as female pharaoh. As Panehesy clearly
shows Nefertiti in the atef, we can assume that she did wear this
crown on at least one occasion, although we again run up against
the problem that this is a stereotypical scene rather than a
photograph – just how true-to-life should we expect such scenes to
be? As he does not accord her kingly titles, it is tempting to
speculate that the artist may well have confused his crowns.
However, Nefertiti’s crown is by no means identical to that worn by
the king and need not signify either equality or kingship.
Akhenaten’s crown is larger, has more elements, and appears far
more regal. Nefertiti’s is a scaled-down, less elaborate version. We
know that Nefertiti was by no means averse to appropriating ‘male’
wigs and headdresses, adapting them to her own use. The transfer of
elements of kingly regalia and iconography to the queen has good
precedent: the tall plumed crown, the uraeus, and even the
cartouche had all originally been con ned to the king.
 Fig. 6.1 Nefertiti and Akhenaten wearing the atef crown

All this visual evidence combines to con rm what we might have

expected from the complete evidence of textual references to
Nefertiti as co-regent. While Nefertiti was undeniably a powerful
woman, we have absolutely no proof that she was ever a queen
regnant, sharing power with Akhenaten. The most compelling
evidence that can be cited, the handful of striking scenes, the seat
decorated with the Unity of the Two Lands and the occasional
wearing of a scaled-down atef crown, is far outweighed by the many
more scenes which show Nefertiti as an in uential but relatively
conventional consort taking second place to her husband. Her
regalia, her association with the sphinx, and her appearance in the
smiting scenes, seem to be very much a continuation of the
elevation of the queenship which was started during the reign of
Amenhotep III.
 In fact we have no archaeological or historical evidence to
indicate that Akhenaten ever regarded Nefertiti as anything
approaching his equal. She is undeniably an active participant in all
aspects of state ritual; in addition to the smiting scenes the Amarna
tombs show her awarding gold to the élite, parading in a royal
palanquin and even driving her own chariot. However, Nefertiti’s
prominence remains very much a function of her relationship to
Akhenaten, and stems directly from him. She may act in parallel to
the king but she never usurps his authority and wherever the two
appear together Akhenaten remains the dominant gure, Nefertiti
the dutiful wife.
If Nefertiti is not a king, is she a goddess? She is certainly able to
function as a priestess. At Thebes we have seen Nefertiti
worshipping the Aten in the role normally reserved for the king.
Now, at Amarna, we see her worshipping alongside her husband and
can presume that she continues to o er alone in the privacy of her
sunshade. She is allowed to play a far more important, and far more
public, role in state religion than her predecessors although, as both
her elder daughters and Kiya are also occasionally allowed to put
down their sistra and present o erings to the god, it may be prudent
to interpret this as an increase in the religious status of all the
Amarna royal women rather than a promotion speci c to Nefertiti.
Nefertiti is now presented as the feminine element in the divine
triad of Aten, Akhenaten and Nefertiti, where she plays the role of
Tefnut to Akhenaten’s Shu. She is also the mother- gure in the
lesser triad formed by the king, queen and their children. Her
sexuality, emphasized by her exaggerated body shape and her
revealing garments, and her fecundity, stressed by the constant
appearance of the royal princesses, indicate that she is to be
regarded as a living fertility symbol. Again we have no means of
telling whether Nefertiti herself is now divine, or whether she
merely serves as a conduit to the king and his god. It would not
have been unprecedented for a queen to be dei ed and indeed the
earlier 18th Dynasty queen Ahmose Nefertari was worshipped as
‘Mistress of the Sky’ at Deir el-Medina for many years after her
death; there is, however, no evidence to suggest that Ahmose
Nefertari was worshipped in this way during her lifetime. Tiy, who
had a temple dedicated to her at Sedeinga in Nubia was, in the
colonies at least, acknowledged as semi-divine but never
worshipped as a fully edged goddess in Egypt proper. The fact that
prayers were addressed to Nefertiti at Amarna cannot be taken as
proof of her divine status, as we know that within the tomb of Huya
prayers were also addressed to Queen Tiy.
The debate over Nefertiti’s divinity has been fuelled by the
evidence provided by Akhenaten’s sarcophagus which was
recovered in fragments from the Amarna royal tomb and
subsequently reconstructed.6 The sarcophagus was, as convention
dictated, a carved stone-lidded box, made in this case from polished
red Aswan granite. The four corners of the sarcophagus were
embellished with representations of Nefertiti in raised relief,
standing with her arms outstretched and palms at along the
sarcophagus sides as if to embrace and protect the dead king. The
carving of the gures is somewhat clumsy, and does not bear much
resemblance to other images of the queen, but she is clearly labelled
and there can be little doubt over her identity. Nefertiti wears a ne
pleated dress, a long curled wig, a double uraeus and a complicated
and unusual crown incorporating a sun disc, cobra frieze, double
uraeus and two tall feathers.
The kings of the post-Amarna period, Tutankhamen, Ay and
Horemheb, also chose to embellish their sarcophagi with images of
women. However, rather than their queens, they followed a
precedent suggested by the canopic chest of Amenhotep II and
selected the goddesses Isis, Nephthys, Neith and Selket. Under the
old Osirid mythology these goddesses would protect the dead king,
Isis and Nephthys being the two sisters who guarded the dead Osiris
and Neith and Selket being added so that the four goddesses might
complement the four sons of Horus who protected the canopic jars
holding the intestines, stomach, liver and lungs of the deceased.
Should we then have expected Akhenaten to employ a goddess to
protect his remains? If so, is Nefertiti herself such a goddess?
 This would almost certainly be too simplistic a conclusion. We
have already noted how Akhenaten was happy to change the
message of the old religion without necessarily changing its form,
continuing to employ mummi cation, shabtis, canopic jars and
scarabs even though their original meaning had gone. The idea of a
woman to protect his body may have seemed appealing, but the
traditional goddesses were now barred to him. What could be more
natural than to replace them with a secular, and highly comforting,
image of the wife who had supported him in life? Only if it could be
proved that others, not intimately connected with the royal family,
also included Nefertiti on their sarcophagus, could we start to
assume that she was herself possessed of divine powers.
Unfortunately, there is only one contemporary sarcophagus
available for us to examine. The quartzite sarcophagus recovered
from the tomb of Tutankhamen, Akhenaten’s almost immediate
successor, currently shows the four now-traditional goddesses with
outstretched wings. However, it is clear that the sarcophagus has
undergone extensive alteration, and that although the goddesses
were carved according to the traditional proportions used in the pre-
and post-Amarna era, they were provided originally with
outstretched arms rather than wings. This strongly suggests that the
gures were conceived as humans and converted to the divine
following the change in o cial religious beliefs, an assumption
which is reinforced by the observation that the goddess gures on
Tutankhamen’s canopic canopy also seem to have been made as
Amarna queens, and later converted into goddesses. If it could be
proved that these protective gures were intended to represent
Nefertiti, we might by extension be able to prove that Nefertiti was
herself a goddess. However, it is not possible to identify the lady or
ladies, who may well have been Tutankhamen’s wife, mother, sister
or even a generalized female form.7
Although scholars have argued long and hard over the question of
Nefertiti’s divine status, it may well be that such arguments are
essentially meaningless.8 There is, to the modern western reader
accustomed to the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition, a strong
distinction between the divine and the mortal: the idea that one
could be semi-divine seems very similar to the old joke of a naive
girl claiming to be just a little bit pregnant. We should therefore be
able to nd a precise de nition of Nefertiti’s status. The Egyptians,
however, did not draw such ne distinctions, and were capable of
understanding a wide spectrum of divinity. Nefertiti was certainly
presented in a way that associated her with the Aten cult and more
speci cally with fertility within the Aten cult. But her exact role was
never made explicit, and it may be that many of those who
worshipped before her image were themselves unsure of a
distinction that even in our so-called sophisticated society many nd
hard to understand. Is the person who worships before a statue of
the Virgin Mary worshipping the statue itself, or Mary herself, or
God through the intervention of Mary? Presumably the answers to
this question are as varied as the people who pray before the statue,
although in ancient Egypt we do gain the impression that most of
the people are in fact praying to the statue.
So, if the available evidence for Nefertiti as Akhenaten’s consort
ranges from the scanty to the non-existent depending on viewpoint,
why has anyone suggested that Nefertiti advanced from co-regent to
become sole king of Egypt? To understand the complexities of the
Nefertiti-as-king argument, we need to understand the chain of
events that saw the ending of the Amarna idyll.
 7
Sunset

Why should messengers be made to stay constantly out in the sun and so die in the sun?…
They are made to die in the sun.1

Year 12 saw tremendous celebrations at Amarna, recorded in the

tombs of Huya and Meryre II, Steward of Nefertiti. The king,
accompanied by his queen and all six daughters (although only four
appear in the tomb of Huya), presents himself before a host of
ambassadors and vassals summoned from Nubia, Libya, the
Mediterranean islands and the Near East. There is feasting,
merriment, and a great deal of standing about in the hot Egyptian
sun, a tedious feature of Amarna life for all except the royal family
who are prudently provided with sunshades. Best of all is the
reception of a huge amount of tribute including horses, chariots,
women and gold. No reason is given for the fantasia, but its purpose
seems clear. Akhenaten is celebrating his role as the head of a vast
empire, perhaps even as its living god, in his wonderful new city.
Meryre II (Fig. 7.1) shows us Akhenaten sitting on a throne with
Nefertiti beside him, although Nefertiti is represented only as an
outline drawn around the gure of her husband, a method of
drawing which may simply be a means of overcoming a lack of
space, but which also con rms the queen’s unity with the king. Six
small-scale daughters stand in groups of three behind their parents.
This is the last time that we see the royal family together.
Suddenly the seemingly perfect life of the royal family was
shattered as Meketaten, who can have been no more than twelve
years old, died. The date of this tragedy goes unrecorded although,
as we have seen Meketaten participating in the Year 12 celebrations,
we can tentatively suggest that she passed away in Year 13 or 14.
Akhenaten had already started to carve a splendid royal tomb into
the Amarna cli s. This work would never be completed, although
the main corridors, principal burial

Fig. 7.1 Nefertiti, Akhenaten and family at the Year 12 celebrations

chamber and two subsidiary suites, one of which was intended for
Nefertiti, had by now been cut. Meketaten was laid to rest within
her father’s tomb and it is here (Room Gamma, wall A), in some of
the most simple and poignant illustrations of the entire dynastic
period, that we see Nefertiti and Akhenaten grieving over their dead
daughter.
The Amarna letters con rm that Meketaten died at a time when
plague was rampant in the Near East. Perhaps, following the
international festivities of Year 12, plague had arrived to threaten
the security of life at Amarna. It may be no coincidence that other
members of the royal family disappear at this time, and Kiya, Tiy
and the three younger sisters Neferneferuaten-the-Younger,
Neferneferure and baby Setepenre all fade out of view. Indeed, the
fact that Neferneferuaten was plastered out of a family group within
the royal tomb suggests that she, and her youngest sister Setepenre
who was never included in the scene, may already have died. Both
Neferneferure and Setepenre are excluded from a scene of mourning
for Meketaten, although the other three princesses are present. The
discovery of an amphora handle stamped with a reference to the
‘robing room of Neferneferure’ found within a dump outside an
un nished tomb close to the royal tomb provides us with a clue to
her nal resting place, but there is no trace of the tombs of the
others.2
This series of deaths, or perhaps the plague which accompanied
them, signalled the beginning of the end of the Amarna idyll, and it
may be no coincidence that Akhenaten now intensi ed his campaign
against the old gods. Meanwhile, work on the non-royal Amarna
tombs ground to a halt.
The royal sculptors set to work chiselling out the image and titles
of the deceased Kiya, removing her name from the sunshade temple
Maru-Aten and replacing it with the name of Meritaten. The ease
with which the king was prepared to substitute one beloved
woman’s name for another is slightly shocking to over-sentimental
modern eyes. It may have been a practical response to a crisis – an
immediate replacement may have been necessary for the
continuation of a female-orientated cult at Maru-Aten – but the
impression given, fairly or not, is that that to Akhenaten, one royal
woman was very much the same as another.
Nefertiti vanishes from the political scene soon after the death of
her daughter. The obvious inference is that she too is dead, possibly
another victim of the plague. If so, we might reasonably expect to
nd traces of her interment within the royal tomb. Akhenaten’s grief
over the death of his daughter had been expressed on the tomb
walls with a sincere dignity. How much more would he
commemorate the loss of his beloved wife, and how much more
splendid would have been her funeral? And yet, the royal tomb
gives no evidence of any such burial and there is no o cial
pronouncement of the queen’s passing. The only evidence to suggest
that she was interred at Amarna is provided by a broken shabti
gure whose separate pieces are now housed in the Louvre and
Brooklyn Museums, and whose inscription has been reconstructed
by Christian Loeben:
The Heiress, high and mighty in the palace, one trusted of the King of Upper and Lower
Egypt Neferkheperure Waenre, the Son of Re [Akhenaten], Great in his lifetime, The Chief
Wife of the King, Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, Living for ever and ever.3

As the Egyptian royal family spent many years preparing their tomb
equipment, there is no means of telling whether this gure was
inscribed during Nefertiti’s lifetime or after her death. Nor, of
course, do we know that it was actually used in her burial.
Earlier twentieth-century historians noted the sudden,
unexplained, disappearance of the queen. They linked this to the
abrupt change of name at Maru-Aten but, erroneously, they believed
that the obliterated name was that of Nefertiti rather than Kiya. This
was a crucial mistake that led to a dramatic conclusion. Nefertiti
had committed some heinous crime and had been banished. John
Pendlebury envisaged a terrible family quarrel over Akhenaten’s
foreign policy which left Nefertiti, still the Aten’s most faithful
disciple, disgraced, divorced and con ned to a northern palace
named Hwt Aten, or the Mansion of the Aten.4 Not everyone was
convinced. It made little political sense that Nefertiti, now
Akhenaten’s implacable enemy, should have been allowed to
establish a rival court at Amarna where she could cultivate her own
pro-Aten supporters. Norman de Garis Davies, again basing his
reasoning on the misinterpreted Maru-Aten inscriptions, proposed an
alternative scenario where Nefertiti was not the defender of the new
faith, but its rst and greatest traitor:
One might even venture into the dangerous eld of pure, or almost pure, conjecture and
suppose that, when to shrewd sight the coming victory of Amun [sic] cast its shadow
before it, the faithless Nefertiti allowed herself to be proclaimed by the faction as rival
monarch at Thebes…5
He tentatively suggested that the underlying cause of Nefertiti’s
banishment was the fact that Akhenaten, anxious for a son and heir,
had actually married his own daughter Meritaten. Davies was
reluctant, however, to believe his own theory, and he added a
footnote to his text that ‘this would be a double blow to the idyll of
El-Amarnah, and we may hope that evidence for it will fail’.
Davies was not the only egyptologist reluctant to abandon the
ideal of the loving royal family. Many found it simply impossible to
reconcile what they saw as Akhenaten’s obvious a ection for
Nefertiti with such harsh treatment, and Baikie again spoke for
many:
The Egypt Exploration Society’s excavators have most unkindly and ungraciously tried to
insinuate a serpent into this little Eden in the shape of a suggestion that the absence of the
name of Queen Nefertiti from the fragmentary inscriptions which have been recovered
from Maru-Aten points to domestic trouble in the royal family, and to the breaking up of
that idyllic love and unity of which so may pictures have survived. Surely such a
suggestion is an entirely unnecessary outrage upon our feelings, and upon the memory of a
couple whose mutual a ection must have been the only stay of their hearts in sore trouble.
Akhenaten has had to bear enough blame, living and dead, without saddling him, almost
gratuitously, with that of having quarrelled with his beautiful wife.6

Baikie may have been basing his argument on intuition rather than
scienti c evidence, and his blaming of the unfortunate excavators
for their message is perhaps slightly unfair, but it would appear that
he was substantially correct in his instincts. We now know that it
was Kiya’s name, not Nefertiti’s, which was originally carved at
Maru-Aten. If anyone was disgraced – and there is no need to
assume that anyone was – that person was Kiya.
So what had happened to Nefertiti? In the 1970s John Harris used
philology to develop an ingenious theory. Nefertiti had not died.
She had remained at Amarna where, using an evolving succession of
names, she had ruled as king rst alongside and then as successor to
Akhenaten.7 Egyptologists already knew of one or maybe two
potential co-regents/successors to Akhenaten. The names
Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten and Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare
had been discovered in sound archaeological contexts, but the
names could refer to one individual or two. Harris convincingly
demonstrated that it is possible to trace Nefertiti’s name as it
evolves from the simple Nefertiti to Neferneferuaten Nefertiti, then
through the use of the double cartouche and the use of an enhanced
form of the title King’s Great Wife which occurred towards the end
of Akhenaten’s reign. Far more speculative is his proposed
subsequent evolution, even later in the reign, to the use of a
prenomen and nomen, until nally Nefertiti emerges as Akhenaten’s
co-ruler using the name Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten. Following
the death of Akhenaten, the theory holds, Ankhkheperure
Neferneferuaten (Nefertiti) ruled alone as Ankhkheperure
Smenkhkare, before handing over the reins of power to the young
Tutankhamen.
Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare, more usually known as Smenkhkare,
was a real but shadowy gure, little more than a carved name. Like
Beketaten before him, Smenkhkare seemed to spring from nowhere,
exist for a short period as heir of Akhenaten, and then vanish. He
had no known relationship to the royal family, no tomb, and no
body. The attraction of the Nefertiti as Smenkhkare theory is
obvious. By linking the sudden appearance of Smenkhkare with the
sudden disappearance of Nefertiti, two archaeological mysteries
could be cleared up with one elegant solution. However, recent
research on human remains recovered from a small rock-cut tomb in
the Valley of the Kings has highlighted a seemingly insurmountable
aw in this argument.
The modest entrance to Tomb KV 55 was discovered during the
1906–7 season of Theodore M. Davis’s expedition to the Valley of
the Kings, which was led by the English archaeologist Edward
Ayrton.8 The recording of the excavation and tomb clearance was
lamentable. As Cyril Aldred has remarked, without exaggeration:
The evidence is all too clear that instead of proceeding with caution and skill, these men,
two of them at least with specialist training and experience, somehow managed to carry
out one of the worst pieces of excavation on record in the Valley [of the Kings].9

Hindsight and superior modern techniques of excavation make it all

too easy to criticize the excavators of the past. But in this case
Aldred is absolutely right to be critical. KV 55, de nitely one of the
most complex and potentially one of the most informative tombs in
the Valley of the Kings, was swiftly stripped of its contents without
any proper photographic or written record, and with no real attempt
at conservation. This failure to keep proper records has caused
modern archaeologists to revisit the burial time and time again in
an attempt to reconstruct its contents and make sense of its
meaning.
The tomb itself was deceptively simple. The outer door, reached
by a ight of steps, opened into a sloping rubble- lled corridor that
led in turn to the single burial chamber. This was a high,
undecorated room that was, when discovered, in a state of total
disarray. Wooden panels, boxes, mud bricks, stone chips, fallen
plaster and tools dropped by the ancient labourers were jumbled on
the oor, and all were dusted with a thin lm of gold leaf which
had aked o the more fragile pieces. Mrs Emma B. Andrews, who
entered the tomb soon after its opening as the guest of Mr Davis,
made a note of her visit in her diary:
1907, Jan 19. At the Valley. Dr Wiedemann and wife and Mr Sayce were over and lunched
with us in the lunch tomb. I went down to the burial chamber and it is now almost easy of
access; and saw the poor Queen as she lies now just a bit outside her magni cent co n,
with the vulture crown on her head. All the woodwork of the shrine, doors &c. is heavily
overlaid with gold foil and I seemed to be walking on gold, and even the Arab working
inside had some of it sticking in his woolly hair.10

The vulture crown observed by Mrs Andrews was in fact a displaced

pectoral. There was no stone sarcophagus, perhaps a sign that the
tomb had been lled in a hurry, but four human-headed canopic jars
stood in a recess cut into the right-hand wall and there were
magical bricks intended to protect the deceased.
The elaborate inlaid anthropoid co n had originally been placed
on a low wooden bed. But a narrow crack in the ceiling had proved
disastrous, allowing oodwater to drip into the tomb and rot the
wood beneath. When the bed collapsed the co n was thrown to the
ground where it lay with its lid dislodged and the head of the
mummy exposed. The mummy, now lying in a pool of water, started
to decompose. Further damage to both mummy and co n was
caused when a rock fell from the roof and split the co n in two. By
the time it was removed from the tomb the co n had disintegrated
into hundreds of pieces; it was later re-assembled in Cairo Museum
where it is displayed today.
The co n was made of wood, covered with gold leaf and
decorated with semi-precious stones. Its head was dressed with a
wig rather than a royal crown, but some time after its manufacture
it had been tted with the beard and uraeus that would have made
it suitable for the burial of a royal male. Following the burial both
the uraeus and the gold mask that covered the face had been torn
o , leaving the underlying wood exposed.11 A uraeus recovered by
the excavators bore the name of the Aten, but it is by no means
certain that this is the original uraeus from the co n, as at least one
other uraeus was recovered from the tomb.
The measurements and design of the reconstructed co n show
that it had originally been made for a woman. The twelve lines of
text on the foot-end and the ve bands of hieroglyphs that
decorated the co n agreed with this; they were words intended to
be spoken by a woman, someone who could be described as the
beloved of Waenre (Akhenaten). However, some time after the
co n had been completed, the inscriptions had been altered from
feminine to masculine while the name of the original owner had
been replaced by a royal name in a cartouche, which was itself later
erased.
The confusion over the ownership of the co n – a woman
followed by a royal male whose name was later obliterated – merely
added to the confusion over the ownership of the tomb. This was
clearly an incomplete re-burial with a jumble of artifacts taken from
di erent tombs; Davis found royal names ranging from Amenhotep
II through Amenhotep III, Tiy and Akhenaten to Tutankhamen. Only
one thing seemed clear. The discovery of Tutankhamen’s sealings
con rmed that KV 55 must have been closed some time after
Tutankhamen had come to the throne, and as his was the last name
in the tomb, it seemed safe to assume that he had been responsible
for the re-burial.
The magical bricks bore the name of Akhenaten, and had
presumably come from his burial equipment. The inscribed golden
bands recovered within the mummy wrappings apparently also bore
the name of Akhenaten, but these were stolen from Elliot Smith’s
laboratory before they could be properly recorded.
A series of large gilded wooden panels recovered from both the
corridor and the burial chamber were the constituent parts of a
shrine made by Akhenaten for inclusion with Tiy’s burial equipment
where it would have been erected around her co n. The shrine’s
inscriptions made its ownership clear: ‘The King of Upper and Lower
Egypt, living on truth [Akhenaten]; what he made for the King’s
Mother, the Great King’s Wife Tiy’. Akhenaten’s image had been
erased from the panels, but Tiy remained to worship beneath the
Aten’s rays. Unfortunately the panels were in a highly fragile state,
and disintegrated, again before they could be properly recorded.
The four alabaster canopic jars were equally perplexing. They had
originally been carved with the name of their owner but this too
had been erased, leaving the jars anonymous. We now know that
they probably belonged to Kiya.12 The lids of these jars do not
display the traditional four sons of Horus but four delicately carved
heads wearing Nubian-style wigs. These beautiful lids are
remarkably ill- tting, so much so that it is generally accepted that
they may not be the original stoppers. Various identi cations of the
heads have been attempted; on the basis of the wigs and the
features of the faces, it would appear that the heads most probably
represent either Kiya or Meritaten. Of the three jars which have
been subjected to analysis two were found to contain a ‘hard,
compact, black, pitch-like mass surrounding a well-de ned centrally
situated zone of di erent material, which was of a brown colour and
friable nature’, while the third yielded the same compact black
mass, but the inner material had been removed some time after its
discovery.13 This friable brown substance was almost certainly the
remains of the original viscera, and it would seem that the jars
when discovered held their original contents. These three jars are
now in the collections of Cairo Museum. The fourth jar was given to
Davis and is now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.
The golden shrine clearly belonged to Queen Tiy, and on this
basis it was rst assumed that both the co n and the body were
those of Tiy. Following the analysis of the co n this theory had to
be amended, so that the co n became that of Tiy, usurped by
Akhenaten. Sir Alan Gardiner proposed a di erent owner.14 Pointing
out that the inscription on the foot-end, quoted as the introduction
to Chapter 6, did not indicate a female occupant of the co n,
merely a female speaker, and comparing KV 55 with more
traditional royal burials where the foot-end of the co n was the
position held by Isis, he tentatively suggested that the speaker might
be Nefertiti, taking over the role of Isis in the funerary ritual. This
would imply that the co n was originally intended for Akhenaten,
but that the text had been attacked and defaced during the post-
Amarna period when the mummy of Akhenaten may even have been
removed from the tomb and that of Smenkhkare put in its place.
This argument, however, ignored the fact that the co n was
originally built for a woman. More recently the textual evidence has
been reviewed and it is now generally accepted that the co n, like
the canopic jars, had initially been prepared for Kiya. The
inscription which decorated the three bands on the exterior of the
co n had originally read:
[Wife and greatly beloved of] the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, living in order, Lord of
the Two Lands [Neferkheperure Waenre], the perfect little one of the living disk, who shall
be alive continuously for ever, [Kiya, justi ed].15

The body within the tomb seemed, super cially at least, relatively
well preserved. Davis was present as it was removed from its co n:
Presently, we cleared the mummy from the co n, and found that it was a smallish person,
with a delicate head and hands. The mouth was partly open, showing a perfect set of upper
and lower teeth. The body was enclosed in mummy-cloth of ne texture, but all of the
cloth covering the body was of a very dark colour. Naturally it ought to be a much brighter
colour. Rather suspecting injury from the evident dampness, I gently touched one of the
front teeth (3,000 years old) and alas! it fell into dust, thereby showing that the mummy
could not be preserved. We then cleared the entire mummy…16
Ayrton adds to this description, telling us that the left arm was bent
with the hand on the breast and the right arm was straight with the
hand on the thigh, while Walter Tyndale records a ‘dried-up face,
sunken cheeks, and thin leathery-looking lips, exposing a few
teeth’.17 Unfortunately, the unwrapping of the mummy was never
properly recorded, and no photographs were taken. Once it was
agreed that the body was damaged beyond salvation, little care was
taken as the rotten bandages were stripped away to expose the bare
bones.
From almost the moment of its discovery there was controversy
over the identity of the body. Theodore Davis never wavered in his
belief that he had discovered Queen Tiy, and sought to prove his
case by calling on the services of a local doctor, Dr Pollock, and an
American obstetrician who was fortunately spending the winter in
Luxor. These two examined the body, or rather the ‘disconnected
bones with a few shreds of dried skin and esh adhering to or
hanging from them’ which were all that remained of the unfortunate
corpse, and pronounced the remains to be female on the basis of the
wide pelvis. It was as the tomb of Queen Tiy that Davis published
his record of the discovery, and as Arthur Weigall, no great admirer
of Mr Davis, observed:
… Owing to some curious idiosyncrasy of old age Mr Davis entertained a most violent and
obstinate objection to the suggestion that he had discovered the body of Akhenaten. He
had hoped that he had found Queen Taia [sic], and when he was at last forced to abandon
this fallacy, he seemed to act almost as though desiring to obscure the identi cation of the
body. He was still in a passionate state of mind in this regard when, a few years later, his
brain gave way, and a tragic oblivion descended upon him.18

Elliot Smith, however, begged to di er. Examining the bones in the

Cairo Museum he found them to be the remains of a young man
about twenty- ve years old. This was what many had been waiting
to hear; virtual con rmation that the body was that of Akhenaten
himself. Admittedly, Akhenaten was generally supposed to have
lived for longer than twenty- ve years, but Smith, when pressed,
cheerfully amended his diagnosis to admit that ‘the skeleton is that
of a man of twenty- ve or twenty-six years of age, without
excluding the possibility that he may have been several years
older’.19 He himself had always been convinced that the bones were
those of Akhenaten:
I do not suppose that any unprejudiced scholar who studies the archaeological evidence
alone would harbour any doubt of the identity of this mummy, if it were not for the fact
that it is di cult from the anatomical evidence to assign an age to this skeleton su ciently
great to satisfy the demands of most historians, who want at least 30 years into which to
crowd the events of Khouniatonou’s eventful reign.20

Weigall, perhaps Akhenaten’s greatest admirer, was delighted to

think that he had gazed on the misshapen skull of ‘the rst of the
wise men of history’. He had already made his own rather belated
attempt to preserve the remains:
I may mention, in order to debar any possible suggestion of confusion or mistake in regard
to the body, that I soaked the bones in para n wax so as to preserve them, and that the
bones examined by Elliot Smith were thus distinguished.21

Weigall’s attempt at conservation archaeology was far too little, far

too late; the skull was already broken, possibly as a result of the
rock fall within the tomb. By the time Professor Douglas Derry
examined the remains in the late 1920s the skull was in fragments.
‘Fortunately the majority of the most important parts of the face
were found in the box containing the skeleton, as well as the
missing parts from the side of the cranium, and with a little trouble
these were replaced and the face restored.’22 Professor Derry
disputed the identi cation as Akhenaten, feeling that the unfused
epiphyses and an unerupted right upper third molar indicated that
their owner could have been no more than twenty- ve years old at
death, whereas Akhenaten is likely to have been in his forties when
he died.
Professor Harrison, re-examining the bones in 1963, similarly
concluded that they were the remains of a male less than twenty-
ve years old who had shared the same relatively rare blood group
(A2 and MN) as Tutankhamen and Thuyu, a blood group which
seems to have run through the Amarna royal family.23 Later, X-ray
and skull-shape analysis allowed Dr James Harris to conclude that
there is a high degree of probability that the bones from KV 55 are
those of a slight-framed male whose cranio-facial morphology bore
a striking resemblance to the skulls of both Tutankhamen and
Tuthmosis IV.24 The most recent analysis of the KV 55 bones was
conducted in 2000 by egyptologist and physical anthropologist
Joyce Filer. Her analysis coincides exactly with the diagnosis of
Professors Derry and Harrison: ‘The human remains from Tomb 55,
as presented to me, are those of a young man who had no apparent
abnormalities and was no older than his early twenties at death and
probably a few years younger.’25
So, the bones in KV 55 represent a young man closely related to
Tutankhamen: either his son, his brother or his father. Tutankhamen
does not give details of his parentage in his tomb, but a block
recovered from Hermopolis Magna, originally from Amarna,
describes him as ‘the bodily son of the King, his beloved’.26
Curiously, on the Prudhoe lions recovered from Soleb and now
housed in the British Museum, he claims to be the son of
Amenhotep III, ‘he who renewed the monument for his father, the
King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands, Nebmaatre,
image of Re, Son of Re, Amenhotep Ruler of Thebes’. However, this
text was inscribed relatively late in Tutankhamen’s reign, at a time
when he may well have felt it prudent to associate himself with the
orthodox Amenhotep III rather than the heretic Akhenaten. The
word used for ‘father’ is in any case a word that may with equal
validity be taken as meaning grandfather or even forefather. The
most likely king to have fathered Tutankhamen is Akhenaten – we
would have to accept a very long Amenhotep III–Akhenaten co-
regency for Amenhotep to have fathered Tutankhamen. As the KV
55 mummy died in his late teens/early twenties, he is unlikely to be
Akhenaten who ruled for seventeen years, and he is even less likely
to be the aged Amenhotep III. The body cannot be Tutankhamen’s
son, as Tutankhamen himself died in his late teens or early twenties,
too young to have buried a twenty-year-old son. The KV 55 body
must therefore be Tutankhamen’s brother. The person who best ts
this description is the ephemeral Smenkhkare, the ruler who
enjoyed a brief reign between Akhenaten and Tutankhamen.
If Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen are brothers, both sons of
Akhenaten and therefore both heirs to the throne, who was their
mother? There is a possibility that Nefertiti bore sons as well as
daughters, although it is curious that we have not one mention of
sons in the nuclear royal family. A stronger contender for the role of
mother is Kiya. We know that she was Akhenaten’s favourite during
the middle years of his reign, when we may assume that the boys
were born, and the fact that she was able to provide the king with a
son may well have accounted for her position of unusual honour at
Amarna. This would explain the exclusion of the boys from formal
depictions of the royal family, and their sudden appearance as from
nowhere towards the end of their father’s reign.
Indirect evidence as to Tutankhamen’s parentage is provided by a
more detailed consideration of the reliefs within the royal tomb at
Amarna. Two scenes, carved on wall F of room Alpha, lie one above
the other (Fig. 7.2). In the rst scene, which is set at the palace, we
see Akhenaten and Nefertiti with their right arms raised to their
heads in grief as they stand before something or someone who has
unfortunately been lost to us. Outside the room a woman cradles a
tiny baby in her arms, while an attendant holds an open fan, symbol
of royalty, over the baby. Behind them female attendants grieve,
and a group of male dignitaries raise their arms in sorrow. In the
scene below we see the sti body of a young woman lying on a bier.
Akhenaten and Nefertiti are again shown in an attitude of
mourning, and Akhenaten reaches out to grasp his wife’s arm in a
poignant gesture of comfort and solidarity.
 Fig. 7.2 The death of Kiya

There is no sign of the baby, but female attendants again weep and
one, overcome by sorrow, is supported by two men.
The story behind the tragedy seems clear and simple. A mother
has died giving birth to a royal child. The presence of the queen in
her distinctive at-topped crown rules Nefertiti out as the mother. It
is possible that the dead mother is one of the royal daughters, but
this seems unlikely given that Meketaten’s death is depicted
elsewhere in the tomb, while Meritaten and Ankhesenpaaten, the
only other daughters old enough to themselves bear children,
outlived their parents. Instead, Geo rey Martin has suggested that
the lady on the bier might be Kiya, dying as she gave birth to
Tutankhamen.27
If the KV 55 body is Smenkhkare, it follows that Nefertiti and
Smenkhkare cannot be the same person. It does not exclude the
possibility that Nefertiti (or someone else, perhaps a missing royal
brother?) took the throne as Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten before
power passed to Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare, and this might well
explain why their shared name is occasionally found written in a
feminine form.28 This reasoning has led to the development of two
con icting scenarios, outlined brie y below. Argument for and
against both the original and the revised theory has raged long and
 erce, with all sides being handicapped by a lack of direct evidence
with which either to prove their case or disprove their rivals.
In the rst scenario, Akhenaten and Ankhkheperure
Neferneferuaten ruled together until Akhenaten died, when
Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten retired and Ankhkheperure
Smenkhkare took the throne. To explain the fact that neither
Nefertiti nor Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten are mentioned in the
contemporary diplomatic correspondence, James P. Allen has gone
further in suggesting that the co-regency may have been an actual
rather than a theoretical division of the king’s role, with ‘Akhenaten
as pharaoh in Amarna and in foreign a airs (which would explain
the co-regent’s absence – if not accidental – from the Amarna
letters) and Neferneferuaten ruling the rest of Egypt’.29 If this is the
case Nefertiti may well have lived through the reign of Smenkhkare
and into the reign of Tutankhamen.
In the second version, Akhenaten’s intended successor
Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare was married to Princess Meritaten and
made co-regent but died either before or soon after Akhenaten. The
next in line for the throne, Smenkhkare’s brother Tutankhamen, was
too young to rule unaided and Nefertiti rather than Meritaten was
called upon to act as regent under the name Ankhkheperure
Neferneferuaten. This would t quite well with the tradition that a
widowed queen might rule on behalf of her son, although Nefertiti
is likely to have been Tutankhamen’s stepmother rather than birth-
mother, but it does not explain why a queen regent would feel it
necessary to take her own throne name. Are we to imagine that
Nefertiti was making the preliminary moves towards annexing the
kingship?
In considering Nefertiti’s fate we have wandered far into the
dangerous realm of speculation. The only type of evidence that we
have not so far considered is that provided by Amarna’s sculptors.
Here we are able to witness an interesting progression. Mid-way
through Akhenaten’s reign Nefertiti has evolved from a queen who
very much mirrors her husband’s exaggerated, ugly look into a
woman whom we today recognize as beautiful. The best-known
representation of the new-style Nefertiti is provided by the world-
famous Berlin bust (cover illustration and Plate 19). A yellow
quartzite head also recovered from the Amarna workshop of
Tuthmosis (Plate 14) shows a woman of equal beauty. To Dorothea
Arnold:
The serene expression on the lean, austere face speaks of strength, equanimity, and that
unwavering sense of justice that the ancient Egyptians understood to be the quintessential
quality of a pharaoh. This is a queen who looks as if she is entirely capable of joining the
king, at the great Year 12 festivities, on his ‘carrying chair of electrum in order to receive
the products of Kharu [lands in the Near East] and Kush [Nubia], the west and the east…
while granting that the breath of life is made to them’…30

The last sculpture recovered from the workshop of Tuthmosis (Plate

17) tells a di erent story. This broken and probably un nished
limestone statuette shows Nefertiti as a middle-aged woman. She
stands erect, with her hands by her side, wearing a dress so clinging
that all the features of her body are revealed and we can clearly see
her drooping breasts and rounded tummy. On her bald head she
wears the cap crown, and she has sandals on her feet. The face of
the gure is that of a woman well past her prime; the cheeks are
plumper than usual making the eyes appear small, the skin sags and
the mouth is dragged downwards giving an expression of sadness
tinged with resignation. We are here being presented with the
Amarna equivalent of Tiy’s wrinkled and elderly Gurob head.
It may be that this sad and somehow lonely gure, carved after
the deaths of the royal children, is intended to show a mother aged
by grief. However, this would be unusual as Egyptian art tended to
ignore un attering signs of female aging. Could Tiy have died,
allowing her daughter-in-law to advance from the role of fertility
symbol to family ‘wise woman’? If so, would this be a promotion,
allowing Nefertiti to become Akhenaten’s near equal and even co-
regent, or, as we might expect from a consideration of Tiy’s
peripheral role within the Amarna family, a demotion into semi-
retirement? Are we looking at a woman whose in uence has started
to wain as she loses her fertility? Setepenre was born sometime
before Year 10, and Nefertiti’s last recorded appearance is at the
funeral of Meketaten, some four or ve years later. We have already
noted how Nefertiti’s in uence increased with the birth of the rst
three children; could it have started to decline as it became evident
that she was never going to produce a son?
Now, as so many female members of the royal family disappear,
Meritaten attains new importance, until eventually she is recognized
as a royal wife. But wife to whom? For a long time egyptologists
toyed with the idea that Meritaten may have married her father. But
now we have Smenkhkare as a living, esh-and-blood heir to the
throne, it makes far more sense to suggest that she married
Smenkhkare, co-regent to Akhenaten. We might go further. We
know that Ankhesenpaaten was later to marry Tutankhamen her
half-brother and full brother to Smenkhkare. Could the middle
sister, Meketaten, have married a third half-brother, perhaps even
the ephemeral Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten?
Although Meketaten died at a time when plague was sweeping
across the Near East, she did not necessarily die from plague. Within
the Amarna royal tomb the scene of Nefertiti and Akhenaten
mourning over their daughter’s bier is depicted on Room Gamma
wall A, while Room Alpha wall F shows the death of Kiya in
childbirth. In Room Gamma we are presented with a tableau highly
reminiscent of that in Room Alpha, although here there has been
extensive damage to the wall so that the body and most of the
grieving parents are missing (Fig. 7.3). An inscription carved above
the dead princess is now largely obscured but, as it was recorded by
Bouriant at the turn of the century, we know that it originally read
‘King’s Daughter of his body, his beloved, Meketaten, born of the
Great Royal Wife Nefertiti, may she live for ever and eternally’. The
identity of the deceased is therefore not in doubt.
Once again the royal couple are facing a bier and, although only
their feet remain, we can imagine Akhenaten again reaching out to
comfort his wife in her distress as she views her dead daughter.
Outside the chamber there are three registers of gures. The bottom
row is taken up by a row of tables prepared for a feast. Above this
we see a nurse, standing before a group of mourners and holding a
child in her arms. The nurse is followed by two female attendants
who carry the fans customarily used to signal royalty. The upper
register shows a distressed female gure being restrained and
groups of frenzied mourners including a dignitary who may have
been summoned to witness an imminent royal birth. It is the
greatest misfortune that the inscription which would have named
the baby is now lost. Although some have sought to identify

Fig. 7.3 The death of Meketaten

the infant as either Setepenre or a subsequent child of Nefertiti, or

even a baby born to Kiya, the otherwise unexplained presence of an
infant at a death scene leads to the inevitable conclusion that
twelve-year-old Meketaten has died in labour.
A subsequent scene in the royal tomb, recorded on Room Gamma
wall B (Fig. 7.4), shows the dead Meketaten, or perhaps her statue,
standing within a garden bower or pavilion whose papyrus columns
are entwined with convolvulus and lotus blossom. Meketaten, again
speci cally named, wears a long transparent robe, a short wig and a
perfume cone. She stands to face her grieving parents and three of
her sisters who raise their arms to their heads in an attitude of
extreme mourning. Neferneferure and Setepenre are missing from
the family group, and may already be dead. Beneath the mourners
are shown tables laden with food, drink and owers. Meketaten’s
bower is strongly reminiscent of the birth bowers used by pregnant
women in labour, and adds weight to the suggestion that she has
died giving birth. However, bowers or temporary booths holding
food and drink were a part of the Memphite, but not Theban,
funeral ritual, and so the connection with childbirth may be a more
subtle one, with Meketaten’s symbolic bower intended to signify the
wish for her re-birth rather than the cause of her own death.31
There is no record of any Meketaten-the-Younger at Amarna,
although it is of course possible that the baby was male, died in
infancy, or was given a more original name. But there are two
unexplained princesses. Meritaten-the-Younger and
Ankhesenpaaten-the-Younger, who may well be children born to
Meritaten and/or Meketaten and/or Ankhesenpaaten.32 Their titles
rank them as the daughters of an unnamed king, who for a long
time was assumed to be Akhenaten, but who might more
realistically be his co-regent Smenkhkare and/or his lost brother.
Alternatively, the two princesses may be the daughters of Kiya and
Akhenaten, who may well have chosen to name their daughters
after their illustrious half-sisters. The ultimate fate of these two
princesses is as unclear as their origins. Like so many Amarna
characters they are ephemeral, appearing for a brief time only to
fade into obscurity.
So, what really happened at the end of the Amarna Age? During
Year 14 or 15 of her father’s reign, Meritaten married her half-
brother and heir to the throne, Smenkhkare. Smenkhkare then
assumed the role of

Fig. 7.4 Meketaten in her bower

co-regent alongside his father Akhenaten. The Amarna tomb of

Meryre II provides us with a glimpse of changes in the royal family
at this time.33 Here, on the south wall of the main chamber, we see
the royal family in a conventional scene. Akhenaten and Nefertiti
stand at the Window of Appearance to hand golden collars to the
miniature Meryre. Only ve princesses are present; they are
unnamed, but it would appear that it is Setepenre who is missing,
possibly because she was too young to take part in the ritual. On the
east wall of the same chamber we see the royal family, now with all
six princesses, enjoying the international celebrations of Year 12.
However, the north wall shows a very di erent scene. The picture is
un nished and has su ered damage, but it shows a king and queen
standing beneath the rays of the Aten to reward their faithful
servant. The gures of the royal couple are sketched in typical
Amarna style, and could well be Akhenaten and Nefertiti. But the
cartouches which accompanied them were, when the tomb was
recorded during the late nineteenth century, those of the ‘King of
Upper and Lower’ Egypt, Ankhkeprure son of Re, Smenkhkare’ and
the ‘King’s Great Wife Meritaten’. The wall has since been attacked
by thieves, and only the queen’s cartouche remains. A comparison
with the Theban tomb of Ramose would suggest that Akhenaten had
died while Meryre’s tomb was being prepared, and the artists had
adapted the decoration to incorporate the new monarch and his
wife, possibly altering a scene of Akhenaten and Nefertiti and re-
writing the cartouches to convert them into Smenkhkare and
Meritaten. No o cial record of Akhenaten’s death has survived, but
we know from a wine jar sealing, whose date of Year 17 is crossed
out and rewritten as Year 1 (of an unnamed successor), that
Akhenaten died during his seventeenth year on the throne. Given
that it was Akhenaten’s express wish that he be buried at Amarna,
we may assume that the un nished royal tomb was hastily made
ready for its king.
Smenkhkare enjoyed a very brief reign, most, if not all, of which
was spent ruling alongside his father. Barely had Smenkhkare
interred his predecessor in the royal tomb, when he himself died
and was in turn buried, presumably at Amarna. As he left no male
heir, Smenkhkare was succeeded by his young brother Tutankhaten
and his sister-queen, Ankhesenpaaten. It was now Meritaten’s turn
to vanish; her body has never been traced and we know neither
when she died or where she was buried.
By this time Nefertiti has completely disappeared. The last
delivery of wine from her estate, the ‘House of Neferuaten’ is dated
to Year 11 and, although wine from the ‘House of the King’s Wife’ is
known to have been delivered to Amarna in Years 14, 15 and 17, it
is by no means certain Nefertiti is the king’s wife of the label. We
must assume, for the want of any evidence to the contrary, that she
too is dead and buried, most probably within the Amarna royal
tomb. It is unsatisfying to have to end a biography by admitting that
we have no details of the subject’s ultimate fate, but such discomfort
can never be an excuse for shirking unwelcome archaeological
conclusions.
Tutankhaten and Ankhesenpaaten ruled from Amarna for three or
four years. Then, with a seemingly sudden rejection of Akhenaten’s
beliefs, they moved the royal court to Thebes. At the same time they
altered their given names to remove the reference to the Aten,
becoming Tutankhamen and Ankhesenamen. From this point
onwards Tutankhamen showed a determined devotion to Amen, and
regarded Thebes rather than Amarna or Memphis as his capital.34
Here the old temples were o cially re-opened, the old priesthoods
re-established, and at Amen’s home, the Karnak Temple,
Tutankhamen erected a large stela which was to proclaim his
devotion to the traditional deities of Egypt. This ‘restoration stela’
explains how it has fallen to the new king to restore the gods to
their rightful place:
When his majesty arose as king, the temples of the gods and goddesses, beginning from
Elephantine down to the marshes of the Delta, had fallen into decay, their shrines had
fallen into desolation and become ruins overgrown with weeds, their chapels as though
they had never been and their halls serving as footpaths. The land was topsy-turvy and the
gods turned their backs on the land.35

The restoration of the old temples was the best move that a new
king could make to appease the old gods who might reasonably
have been expected to feel angry over the Amarna heresy.
Tutankhamen’s proclamation is intended to restore con dence in
the monarchy by appealing to the Egyptians’ innate conservatism; a
traditional pharaoh has returned to the throne, chaos will soon be
banished and maat will be restored throughout the land. In spite of
his youth and his unconventional Amarna upbringing, Tutankhamen
(or his advisors) was very aware of the duties expected of a
conventional New Kingdom monarch. During his reign we see him
performing all the approved kingly deeds. There is a spate of
building work at Karnak, extensive restoration of the monuments of
his forebears, and even the re-emergence of the huntin’, shootin’
and ghting pharaoh with the king practising his archery and the
army employed in military action in Syria.
Ankhesenamen, following the precedent set by her mother and
paternal grandmother, retains a high queenly pro le. With her once
egg-shaped head restored to normal proportions she appears on
many of Tutankhamen’s public monuments and on more private
items recovered from his tomb. Here, on the king’s golden shrine
which is decorated in the Amarna style, we are treated to what
Howard Carter identi ed as simple domestic scenes:
… depicting, in delightfully naive fashion a number of episodes in the daily life of king and
queen. In all these scenes the dominant note is that of friendly relationship between the
husband and wife, the unselfconscious friendliness that marks the Tell el Amarna school.36

In fact the queen is now assuming a priestly role before her

husband. Ankhesenamen pours liquid into a ceremonial goblet held
by her seated husband just as, years before, her mother had poured
wine for Akhenaten. In other images she mirrors the traditional
postures of Maat, companion to the king, as she squats at her
husband’s feet to receive the water which Tutankhamen pours into
her cupped hands, or hands him an arrow to shoot in the marshes,
while in the more formal scenes on Tutankhamen’s shrine she takes
the role of Weret Hekau, Mistress of the Palace.37
The collapse of Akhenaten’s religion seems to have been greeted
with a general feeling of quiet relief, and those who had formerly
expressed their public devotion to the Aten were quickly re-
converted back to the old ways. The changeover appears to have
been relatively low-key and painless. There was no sudden attack on
the memories of Nefertiti and Akhenaten, and no attempt was made
to remove the Aten from the pantheon. However, the cult of the
Aten now became a very minor part of the pantheistic state religion.
With the re-opening of the temple of Amen, and the restoration of
its o erings, the Aten temples at Karnak quickly fell into decay.
No real reason is given for Tutankhamen’s return to the old gods.
But Akhenaten’s insistence on centring the cult of the Aten on his
own immediate family can have done little to ensure its long-term
survival. Aten worship had always been Akhenaten’s austere and
demanding individual dream, o ering little to others, even to
members of his own family. The death of its only prophet naturally
brought the experiment to a close. Beyond the isolation of Amarna
twenty centuries of tradition had not been wiped out by a mere
seventeen years of idiosyncratic monotheism. The relative ease with
which the country was able to return to pre-Amarna theology
following the death of the king must serve as proof that the religious
‘revolution’ was due very much to the e orts of Akhenaten alone.
We may hazard a guess that outside Amarna the old ways had never
been fully abandoned. Once the decision had been taken to
discontinue Akhenaten’s religious programme it became possible,
and indeed sensible, to leave Amarna in favour of a more
convenient bureaucratic base.
Amarna was not abandoned immediately. The wealthier members
of society merely boarded up their houses and waited to see what
would happen. Eventually, however, as it became clear that the
court would not be returning, some of the more valuable parts of
the houses, the wooden and stone elements, were salvaged, while
the mud-brick walls were left to decay. There was still a signi cant
population at Amarna during the reign of Tutankhamen, but slowly
the numbers dwindled until the town was deserted. In contrast, the
workmen’s village, which had been abandoned as the court moved
away, was reoccupied and even underwent a phase of expansion
during Tutankhamen’s reign, before being nally abandoned during
the reign of Horemheb.
The transfer of the court away from Amarna forced the
abandonment of the royal tomb. Whether this was left sealed, under
guard, or whether it was immediately opened and the bodies
moved, is not clear. The Egyptians were certainly not shy of
transplanting their forebears, and an unpopulated and therefore
largely unsupervised Amarna may not have been considered a
suitable, or more particularly a secure, resting place. Tutankhamen
may well have reasoned that he, rather than the thieves, should
rescue the Amarna royal gold. Several of the items included in
Tutankhamen’s own burial, including one of his golden co ns, were
made for Smenkhkare and other members of the Amarna family.
Can we assume that Tutankhamen opened the tomb, took the best
for himself, and gave his beloved elder brother a semblance of a
royal burial, complete with valueless but still e ective funerary
artifacts, at Thebes? If we can make this assumption, we have to ask
what happened to the other Amarna bodies. Had they already been
destroyed by robbers? Or were they, too, taken back to Thebes? Are
they still buried at Thebes, or are they included in one of the known
royal caches?
The rst Amarna queen to have been ‘identi ed’ at Thebes is Tiy.
We know that Tiy lived long into her son’s reign; the shrine that
Akhenaten prepared for her bore the later form of the Aten’s name,
only used after Year 9, while a single wine docket shows that wine
from her estate was still being delivered to Amarna during Year 14.
Although it has been suggested that Tiy and Sitamen were interred
in the Valley of the Kings tomb of Amenhotep III, it seems highly
unlikely that Akhenaten would have buried his mother anywhere
other than at Amarna, and indeed fragments of Tiy’s sarcophagus
were found inside the Amarna royal tomb. However, the presence of
Tiy’s shrine in KV 55 shows that at least part of her burial was
transported to Thebes. Are we to imagine that Tiy was rst interred
at Amarna, then transferred with Smenkhkare to KV 55 during the
reign of Tutankhamen, and nally moved again to a mummy cache,
possibly via a sojourn in the tomb of Amenhotep III where
fragments of Tiy’s shabti gures have been found?
We have several anonymous New Kingdom female mummies
recovered from the Valley of the Kings. And there are many missing
New Kingdom royal women, including Tiy, Kiya, Nefertiti, and all
her daughters. It is natural, but frustrating, to try to match up the
two. For a long time Amarna scholars have focused their attention
on a trio of mummies recovered from the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV
35). Here, in 1898, Victor Loret discovered seventeen royal
mummies of the 18th, 19th and 20th Dynasties, stripped of their
riches and stored in the tomb by the Third Intermediate Period
necropolis o cials. Amenhotep II still lay in his open sarcophagus,
and a large walled-up room held nine co ns housing, amongst
others, Tuthmosis IV, Seti II, Ramesses IV–VI and ‘Amenhotep III’
who may have been mislabelled. Another mummy was found in the
tomb corridor. Meanwhile a small side room held three naked,
co nless and unlabelled mummies, each showing damage to the
head and abdomen. Loret rst identi ed these as an older woman, a
little prince and a young man. Soon after the ‘man’ was reclassi ed,
and the trio became widely known as the Elder Lady, the Younger
Lady (the man) and a prince.
For a long time it was accepted that the Elder Lady might be Tiy.
This mummy, described by Elliot Smith as ‘a middle-aged woman
with long, brown wavy, lustrous hair’,38 had been recovered in a
quasi-regal pose with her left arm bent in front of her chest and her
left hand clenched as if to hold a symbol of rank. Subsequent
examination proved her to be a woman in her forties, highly similar
in cranio-facial morphology to Thuyu, mother of Tiy.39 This estimate
of the lady’s age made her perhaps slightly younger than might have
been expected, but when a strand of hair taken from the mummy
was matched to a lock of hair found within a miniature co n
labelled with Tiy’s name and included amongst Tutankhamen’s
grave goods, the identi cation seemed complete. However, it
sometimes seems that nothing in egyptology is ever simple – how
can we know that the hair in the tomb of Tutankhamen actually
came from Tiy? Meanwhile, more recent research suggests that the
mummy may not be as ‘elderly’ as was rst supposed and, unless we
are again to accept a long co-regency between Amenhotep III and
Akhenaten, Tiy must have been relatively old when she died.
Although mummy ages obtained by X-ray analysis need to be
treated with some caution, this leaves us with a tantalizing question.
If not Tiy, who could this lady be?
Lately attention has turned to the second ‘Lady’, originally
identi ed by Loret as a man of somewhat unusual appearance:
The last corpse nearest the wall seemed to be that of a man. His head was shaved but a wig
lay on the ground not far from him. The face of this person displayed something horrible
and something droll at the same time. The mouth, running obliquely from one side nearly
to the middle of the cheek, bit a pad of linen whose two ends hung from the corner of the
lips. The half-closed eyes had a strange expression; he could have died choking on a gag
but he looked like a young, playful cat with a piece of cloth. Death, which had respected
the severe beauty of the woman and the impish grace of the boy, had turned in derision
and amused itself with the countenance of the man.40

Marianne Luban was the rst to propose, on the grounds of skull

shape, bone structure, the shaven head and evidence of ear-piercing,
that this mummy may be Nefertiti.41 Such identi cation is hard to
sustain, however, without any positive proof. Certainly super cial
appearance can be no guide to the identity of a mummy. Leaving
aside the tendency for all female mummies to look pretty much the
same, and Nefertiti’s tendency to have a startlingly di erent
appearance from year to year, styles in hairstyles, wigs and ear-
piercings lingered for decades, and we might reasonably expect
Nefertiti, Kiya and her daughters to have adopted the same fashions.
More recently a team from York University, led by Dr Joann
Fletcher, has had the opportunity of carrying out a non-invasive
examination of the mummy, and they too have suggested that she
might be Nefertiti – a suggestion that the Sunday Times took to
extremes by proclaiming on its cover ‘This is Nefertiti, the fabled
queen of Egypt. Before Cleopatra, the Queen of Sheba and even
Helen of Troy she was the most powerful and famous woman in the
world. The Sunday Times Magazine was there when she was
discovered.’42 Unfortunately the situation is not as clear-cut as the
Sunday Times would suggest, and the age of the mummy indicates
that she may simply be too young to be Nefertiti. If she has to be an
Amarna mummy, she is more likely to be one of the royal
daughters. But there is no real reason to assume that she is an
Amarna mummy; the fact that she was found without a co n
suggests that she, and her two companions, may be original
occupants of the tomb, perhaps relations of Amenhotep II whose
co ns had been destroyed long ago by thieves. How else would the
Third Intermediate Period restorers have transferred three co nless
mummies to their last resting place?
The nal word – for the moment – on the identi cation of the
mummy must rest with the Egyptian Supreme Council of
Antiquities, headed by Dr Zahi Hawass, who have recently released
a report indicating that DNA testing shows the ‘Younger Lady’ to be
male.

Chief amongst the prominent converts to the restored religion was

God’s Father Ay, who served as vizier under the young
Tutankhamen. Throughout this tale of Amarna Nefertiti’s putative
father has been a constant background gure, his career stretching
from the end of the reign of Amenhotep III through that of
Akhenaten, Smenkhkare and now Tutankhamen. A tiny piece of
gold foil, recovered from tomb KV 58, gives an indication of Ay’s
exalted status during his step-grandson’s reign. Here we see
Tutankhamen slaying an enemy, with Ankhesenamen standing in
the approved wifely position behind him. To the left of the royal
couple, dressed as a fan-bearer, stands Ay. Traditionally, such
smiting scenes were performed in the presence of the god, not the
vizier. The inclusion of a private individual in such a ritual is
unprecedented, and surely indicates that Ay, Tutankhamen’s
mentor, has become a force to be reckoned with. In fact, Ay is
described as the ‘eldest king’s son’, an obviously honorary title
which nevertheless implies that the elderly Ay is recognized as the
young Tutankhamen’s heir. The adoption of a successor, no matter
how elderly, must have seemed a prudent measure. Already two
still-born daughters had been born to Ankhesenpaaten; their tiny
bodies, carefully mummi ed and each encased in a double
anthropoid co n, were found stored in a box within Tutankhamen’s
tomb. Professor Douglas Derry conducted an autopsy on the babies
in 1932, nding that one had been born after approximately ve
months gestation, the other after seven or eight. More recent re-
examination led by Professor Harrison has suggested that the older
child may have su ered from a condition known as Sprengel’s
deformity, which would have led to spina bi da and scoliosis.43
It fell to Ay to inter Tutankhamen in a private tomb hastily
adapted to accommodate its royal occupant. This tomb (KV 62),
possibly the tomb which Ay was preparing for himself, is now
perhaps the best-known tomb in the world. Tutankhamen’s own
tomb was un nished at his premature death; its completion may
well have been handicapped by the need to re-establish the Deir el-
Medina workmen’s village following the return from Amarna. Ay’s
burial of Tutankhamen was a highly signi cant act, as it was by
burying his predecessor that the king of Egypt con rmed his right to
rule. However, there is no evidence to prove that Ay killed
Tutankhamen in order to seize the throne.
Copies of a cuneiform text dating to this period have survived to
tell a remarkable tale. A widowed queen of Egypt, without a son,
took the highly unusual step of writing to Suppiluliumas, king of the
Hittites, asking that a prince be sent as a husband and future
pharaoh:
My husband has died. I do not have a son. But, they say, many are your sons. If you would
give me one of your sons he would become my husband. I shall never pick out a servant of
mine and make him my husband.44

Suppiluliumas was both surprised and suspicious. Everyone knew

that the Egyptian princesses did not marry foreigners, while a
promise of inheriting the throne of Egypt seemed too good to be
true. An ambassador was sent to investigate, and eventually a
prince, Zannanza, was dispatched. The unfortunate bridegroom was
ambushed and killed on his way to meet his bride, and relations
between Egypt and the Hittites plunged to a new low.
The name of the letter-writer has not been preserved in a
recognizable form; she is referred to as Dahamunzu, a phonetic
version of the queen’s standard title ta hemet nesu or ‘king’s wife’.
However, there are only three queens who could possibly have
written such a letter and as two of these, Nefertiti and Meritaten,
were, if not already dead, certainly one step removed from the
problem as dowagers rather than queens, Ankhesenamen is
generally accepted as the author. If the whole letter-writing episode
is not itself to be regarded as a cunning diplomatic trick, we must
assume that Tutankhamen’s successor did not take kindly to the
queen’s actions. We do not see Ankhesenamen again and her
ultimate fate, like that of her sisters, is unknown.
Ay, adopted heir to Tutankhamen, took the throne as ‘God’s
Father Ay, Divine ruler of Thebes, beloved of Amen’ with his wife
Tey as queen.45 He could never have been anything other than a
stop-gap king as, by the time he became pharaoh, he would have
been an old man even by modern standards. After a reign of only
four years Ay too died and was buried in a relatively simple
un nished tomb in the Western Valley (WV 23), close by the tomb
of Amenhotep III and possibly the tomb which Tutankhamen had
intended for himself. The excavation of this tomb has yielded
fragments of co n, statues, and pieces of uraeus but no mummy.
However scattered fragments of human skeletal material recovered
from the vicinity of the tomb and believed by the excavator to be
female, may well represent the last remains of Nefertiti’s nurse
Tey.46
Ay was followed on the throne by General Horemheb, a soldier of
obscure origins who had served under both Tutankhamen and Ay.
Horemheb was not himself of royal birth, but his second wife was a
lady with close links to the royal family. Queen Mutnodjmet, ‘God’s
Wife of Amen’, is now widely recognized as the younger sister of
Nefertiti whom we last saw in the Amarna tomb of Ay and Tey. She
is therefore the last known surviving member of Nefertiti’s family.47
Like her sister before her, Mutnodjmet proved to be a strong queen;
we see her seated beside her husband, at equal scale, on his
coronation statue, and scene on the side of the royal throne shows
her in the guise of a winged sphinx wearing the at-topped crown
associated with Tefnut. Mutnodjmet died aged thirty- ve to forty
during Year 14 or 15 of her husband’s rule, and was buried in the
tomb that Horemheb had prepared for himself at Memphis. Included
in her grave was the tiny skeleton of a baby or foetus, suggesting
that Mutnodjmet had died in childbirth.
Horemheb developed into a solid, old-fashioned Egyptian
pharaoh, ruling Egypt for over twenty years. He did not share
Tutankhamen’s devotion to Amen. As an experienced politician he
may, with good reason, have been wary of allowing the re-
established priesthood too much power too soon and so we nd,
throughout his reign, the other major gods of the pantheon allowed
an increased prominence. Traditionally the persecution of the
memory of Akhenaten and Nefertiti has been assigned to the
personal spite and excessive religious zeal of Horemheb. While
Horemheb was certainly responsible for the closing, demolition and
re-use of much of Akhenaten’s Karnak temples, there is increasing
evidence to show that some buildings had already been dismantled
during the reign of Tutankhamen and, indeed the persecution of
Akhenaten’s memory lasted well into the reign of Ramesses II when
much of the stone was taken from Amarna for re-use in the pylons
of Hermopolis.
The removal of the name and image of a dead person,
occasionally called a damnatio memoriae, served two distinct
purposes. Firstly, it permitted a valid re-writing of history, allowing
Akhenaten’s successors to convince themselves that his reign had
never occured. Secondly, it provided a means of attacking the spirit
of the deceased. Traditional theology dictated that, in order for the
spirit or soul to live for ever, the body, the image or at least the
name of the deceased must survive; it was this need to preserve the
dead body which led to the development of mummi cation, a
practice which Akhenaten continued even if he did not subscribe to
all its theological implications. If all memory of a dead person was
lost or destroyed the spirit too would perish, and then would come
the dreaded ‘Second Death’; total obliteration from which there
could be no return. We have already seen how Tutankhamen, as his
reign progressed, stressed his role as a traditional New Kingdom
monarch, preferring to be associated with Amenhotep III rather than
Akhenaten. It is therefore unfortunate that, as far as Egypt’s o cial
historians were concerned, Akhenaten and his descendants were all
tarred with the same heretical brush. Akhenaten, Nefertiti,
Smenkhkare, Tutankhamen and Ay were all omitted from the
o cial King Lists, which jumped from Amenhotep III to Horemheb.
Nefertiti’s name was rapidly lost in the mists of time while
Akhenaten himself was dismissed as the ‘criminal of Akhetaten’.
1. Statue of Amenhotep III with the god Sobek
 2. The Colossi of Memnon at Thebes

3. Wooden head of Queen Tiy

4. Stela depicting Amenhotep III in old age, with Tiy

5. Gold mummy mask of Yuya, father of Tiy
6. Head of the mummy of Yuya
7. Gold mummy mask of Thuyu, mother of Tiy
 8. Head of the mummy of Thuyu

9. A colossal statue of Akhenaten

10. An asexual colossus of Akhenaten/Nefertiti

11. Relief depicting Akhenaten

12. Sandstone portrait of Nefertiti

13. Relief depicting the family of Akhenaten o ering to the Aten

14. Quartzite head of Nefertiti

15. Relief showing Ay and Tey receiving royal gold

16. Stela showing Akhenaten and Nefertiti with their family

17. Statuette of Nefertiti in old age

18. Painted relief depicting Smenkhkare and Meritaten

19. The most widely recognized image of Nefertiti
 Epilogue
The Beautiful Woman Returns

Tell el-Amarna is not usually included in the itinerary of a visitor to Egypt. This is partially
due to the not undeserved reputation for wickedness on the part of the inhabitants.1

Amarna, once proud capital of a mighty empire, rapidly deteriorated

into a ghost town, surviving only as a useful quarry for the stone
which was needed in the extensive building works at nearby
Hermopolis. Once the supply was exhausted the city was quickly
forgotten and, over the centuries, the mud-brick walls gradually
collapsed to be buried beneath a blanket of wind-borne sand,
leaving a low, bumpy landscape punctuated by occasional mud-
brick ruins. Amarna remained an obvious archaeological site, but
one of little interest to anyone. Its geographical limitations ensured
the preservation of its secrets. No other pharaoh was tempted to
establish a city on the Amarna plain and no substantial modern
town ever developed, although the site is sprinkled-with evidence of
late Roman/Christian occupation and a handful of modern villages
have caused the riverside sections of the Great Palace to disappear
under cultivated elds. As the desert sands blew over their city, and
the temple scribes adjusted their country’s o cial history to exclude
the heretic kings, the names of Akhenaten and Nefertiti vanished
from Egypt.2
Our rst modern reference to the as yet unnamed archaeological
site comes from the writings of Edme Jomard, a Frenchman who
visited Amarna during the 1798–9 Napoleonic invasion and who
made a plan of his discovery, noting ‘a great mass of ruins…
[which] does not feature on any map’.3 Twenty- ve years later John
Gardner Wilkinson, under the mistaken impression that he was
exploring Alabastronopolis, became the rst egyptologist to visit the
tombs of the Amarna nobles. Sketches of some of the scenes within
Meryre’s tomb, together with a hastily drawn map of the city, were
later to appear in his great work Manners and Customs of the Ancient
Egyptians.4 Other antiquarians followed over the years but, although
the tombs were recorded by Robert Hay, Nestor L’Hote and A. Prisse
d’Avennes, their work remained unpublished and the city site
generally unknown. It was only in 1842 with the arrival of Richard
Lepsius, leader of the Prussian epigraphic expedition, that a
thorough record was made of the then known monuments and tomb
scenes.
The brief Prussian expedition, two seasons totalling a mere twelve
days of what must have been extremely hard labour, was followed
by a far longer French mission which again concentrated on the
cli s. The French held the concession to work at Amarna between
1883 and 1902, during which time they uncovered more of the
southern tombs of the nobles and tted protective iron gates to
prevent the theft of engraved scenes which enterprising tomb
robbers were eager to saw o the walls and sell to western
collectors. This precaution almost certainly came too late. Amarna
had already become the focus of gangs of uno cial excavators, local
people employed by black-market traders to dig for treasures which
could be sold on the increasingly rapacious antiquities market. Their
furtive digging disrupted the stratigraphy, robbed the site of its
valuables and threw up vast piles of ancient potsherds, which may
still be seen on the surface today.
The ‘accidental’ discovery, in 1887, of the Amarna letters by a
local woman reportedly digging for sebakh, sparked a renewed
interest in the site, which was gradually establishing itself on the
tourist map. Already in 1873 Amelia B. Edwards, author of the rst
travellers’ guide to Egypt, A Thousand Miles up the Nile, had included
Amarna in her list of important Middle Egyptian sites, although due
to bad weather conditions she herself was thwarted in her intention
to visit the tombs.5 Miss Edwards, like many other European visitors
accustomed to the westernized luxury of Cairo, was shocked by the
levels of poverty and disease to be seen in Middle Egypt:
It may be that ophthalmia especially prevailed in this part of the country, or that being
brought unexpectedly into the midst of a large crowd, one observed the people more
narrowly, but I certainly never saw so many one-eyed human beings as that morning at
Minieh… I believe it is no exaggeration to say that at least every twentieth person, down to
little toddling children of three and four years of age, was blind of an eye. Not being a
particularly well-favoured race, this defect added the last touch of repulsiveness to faces
already sullen, ignorant and unfriendly.6

So a ected was Miss Edwards by the sight of the native Egyptians

that she found herself unable to visit modern towns. She was not
alone in her shock. Almost half a century later Mary Chubb, who
accompanied the Egypt Exploration Society’s expedition to Amarna
at a time when the western archaeologists were expected to treat
the illnesses of the local people, was similarly struck by the high
level of ‘pink eye’, ‘eyelids badly swollen and red, the eye closed
and discharging, and the eyeball, if you could manage to see it at
all, very bloodshot’, which fortunately responded well to an
application of warm boracic water.7
Amarna never ranked highly as a casual tourist attraction. Sadly
de cient in spectacular temples and awe-inspiring pyramids, the
nearby modern towns were not geared up to the tourist trade and,
lacking the sophistication of Cairo and the romance of Thebes, had
very little to o er the visitor with a limited interest in egyptological
research. Access to the site could be a problem for those who did
not enjoy the luxury of their own boat; in John Pendlebury’s 1930
account of Amarna he stressed how di cult it was to actually reach
the antiquities. The intrepid traveller was instructed to drive out
from Malawi in a hired car and cross the river by boat having rst
arranged for donkeys on the opposite bank. Failure to arrange for
the donkeys in advance would mean ‘the complete absence of
transport at the proper price of ve piastres the donkey and three
the boy, and also of the guards who are supposed to keep the keys
of the tombs’.8 The local people enjoyed a bad reputation for theft
and general unspeci ed wickedness, and as Norman de Garis Davies
noted, ‘the evil reputation of the inhabitants of El Amarna seems to
have deterred early visitors from penetrating inland’.9 This local
churlishness and lack of respect for their own womenfolk was
something that the western archaeologists could turn to their own
advantage:
The introduction of girls [into the workforce], never used by us at Abydos, is explained by
the fact that in the district round Tell el-Amarna women hold a distinctly lower position in
the eyes of their men-folk than in the villages further south, and consequently do much
more of the hard work.10

Flinders Petrie, who worked at Amarna for a 1891–2 season,

brought the rst scienti c excavation to the city site, although his
technique of what was essentially rapid random sampling combined
with occasional conservation now seems very dated in comparison
with modern archaeological practice. He was followed, in 1902, by
Norman de Garis Davies who, working under the aegis of the Egypt
Exploration Society founded by Miss Edwards, commenced a
detailed epigraphic study of the tombs of the nobles. The tombs
were dirty, dark and bat-infested; their walls had su ered from
ancient and modern vandalism and much of the plaster which held
the reliefs had started to crumble from the walls. The American
egyptologist James Breasted, visiting Amarna while on honeymoon
in 1895 and taking the opportunity to copy some of the tomb
scenes, had been shocked by what he found:
Unfortunately, and to the shame and disgrace of the French administration, I nd the nest
inscriptions in Amarna so mutilated by the fellahin that I can hardly use them. I told
Brugsch of it at the museum today – he was greatly surprised, having known nothing of it. I
am so lled with indignation against the French and their empty, blatant boasting, ‘la
gloire de la France’, that I can hardly contain myself. I could have wept my eyes out in
Amarna. Scarcely less indignant must one feel against the English who are here only for the
commerce and the politics of it, and who might reform matters if they would. A
combination of French rascality, of English philistine indi erence & of German lack of
money is gradually allowing Egypt to be pillaged and plundered from end to end. In
another generation there will be nothing to be had or saved.11

Davies, working under the most trying of conditions, recorded the

tombs and boundary stelae from 1902 to 1905, eventually
publishing his Rock Tombs of el-Amarna in six volumes,12 a
magni cent achievement and one which, as the walls of the tombs
have continued to deteriorate over the years, is of ever increasing
value to egyptologists.
The royal tomb, which had been discovered by locals in the early
1880s, had been thoroughly stripped of all valuables by the time the
secret of its entrance was revealed to the French mission. A. H.
Sayce, writing from Luxor on 26 February 1890, was able to give
details of the ‘new’ tomb:
The tomb and mummy of Amenophis IV, the ‘Heretic King’ of Egyptian history, have been
found at Tel el-Amarna… The tomb has proved a second pit of Der el-Bahari to the
antiquity dealers of Ekhmim, by whom it has been worked. Now that it has been despoiled
of the precious objects it once contained, they have condescended to inform us of its exact
position… The mummy of the king has, unfortunately, been torn to pieces… The beautiful
objects of ivory and alabaster which have lately been on the market of ‘antikas’, the bronze
rings and enamelled porcelain [faience] which bear the cartouches of Amenophis IV and
the solar disc, the delicate glass and bracelets of solid gold which have been o ered for sale
to travellers, have all come from the desecrated sepulchre.13

Despite Sayce’s fear that the inscriptions within the tomb must be
hopelessly ruined, those scenes which had escaped the New
Kingdom vandalism in icted by those determined to eradicate all
memory of Akhenaten’s reign were at this time substantially
complete. It is therefore the greatest misfortune that the
photographic record of the French mission has been lost, while the
surviving line drawings are both incomplete and inaccurate. Since
the o cial discovery of the tomb the walls have su ered greatly,
particularly during 1934 when a feud between rival groups of
guards resulted in the deliberate mutilation of rooms Alpha and
Gamma. Work on the clearance and recording of the tomb had
started in the 1930s but was interrupted by the war, so that the rst
publication of the tomb was eventually made a century after its
discovery.14
In 1907 the Amarna concession was awarded to a team of
archaeologists from the German Oriental Society working under the
direction of Ludwig Borchardt. Their initial work, a survey of the
whole city site and an exploratory series of trial trenches, was
followed by an excavation proper. Working in the eastern section of
the city they made their way down what was known as ‘High Priest
Street’, digging a small strip trench along the road. It was during
this expedition that the now world-famous bust of Nefertiti was
recovered from the workshop of the sculptor Tuthmosis. The advent
of the First World War put an end to the German excavations, and
the furore which followed the unveiling of the Nefertiti head in
Berlin ensured that their concession was never renewed. Instead, in
1921 the Egypt Exploration Society started work at Amarna where
they have continued intermittently ever since under a series of
highly distinguished directors including T. Eric Peet, Leonard
Woolley, Francis Newton (who was taken ill during the 1924 season
at Amarna and sadly died at Asyut), F. Ll. Gri ths, Henry Frankfort
and John Pendlebury. The present phase of work, which started in
1979, is under the direction of Barry Kemp of Cambridge University.
His team has so far produced a detailed survey of the site, and has
conducted a series of excavations focusing primarily on the
workmen’s village.
The decoding of hieroglyphics at the beginning of the nineteenth
century had allowed egyptologists to read the inscriptions carved
into the great Amarna boundary stelae. Once again the names of
Akhenaten and Nefertiti could be spoken at Amarna. However, far
from casting light on the hitherto little-known late 18th Dynasty,
the readings at rst caused intense confusion. Who was this new
pharaoh? None of the rediscovered names could be tied in to the
King Lists which formed the backbone of Egyptian history. It took
several years for the fragmented evidence for Akhenaten’s
unconventional reign to be pieced together, and for the reasons
behind his subsequent obliteration to be understood. Although
Nefertiti was now recognized as Akhenaten’s consort, and her name
was matched to her image on the boundary stelae, little was known
of her role within the royal family. The stelae made it obvious that
Akhenaten held his wife and daughters in great a ection, but it was
Queen Tiy, whose monuments had not been erased during the
purges which followed the Amarna period, who was cast as the
in uential female gure in Akhenaten’s life. Nefertiti attracted little
attention, and it was only with the discovery, or more particularly
the display, of the Berlin bust, that the general public became
Nefertiti-conscious. Instantly, Nefertiti became the most recognized
female gure from ancient Egypt, famous not for her achievements,
which were still largely unknown, but for her beauty. Many scholars
of the Amarna period have seen the recovery of the bust as the true
start of Nefertiti’s tale, and have begun their accounts of her life
accordingly.
The studio of ‘the Chief of Works, the Sculptor’, Tuthmosis, lay in
the southern suburb, home to several workshops producing goods
for the temples and palaces of the central city.15 Tuthmosis is one of
the few Amarna period sculptors whom we know by name, the
others being Bak, son of Men, whose works had held pride of place
at Thebes, and Iuty (or Auta), chief sculptor of Queen Tiy, who is
shown in the tomb

Fig. 8.1 The workshop of the sculptor Iuty

of Huya working on a statue of the ephemeral Princess Beketaten.
As Chief of Works Tuthmosis was as much a civil servant as an
artist, administering a large factory-like workshop whose sculptors
and apprentices would have been dedicated to producing endless
portraits of the royal family.
Excavation of his studio, and the attached house where Tuthmosis
lived with his family, at rst suggested that the workshop must have
had two separate production lines: the carving of heads and limbs
for inclusion in composite stone statues, and the production of
gypsum plaster casts of both royal and non-royal heads. In fact these
plaster heads, some so realistic that they were originally identi ed
as ‘death masks’, played an important part in the production of the
stone sculptures.16 It would have been unthinkable for the royal
family to spend endless hours sitting before a sculptor as he
laboriously chipped away at a stone block. Instead, the stone
sculpture was preceded by a clay or wax model of the subject,
plaster casts of the model being submitted to the commissioning
o cial for approval at various stages in its development. When all
were agreed that the model conformed to accepted artistic
standards, and was as good a likeness as required, it was copied in
stone. At this stage the plaster casts would have become redundant
and, being of no further use, were presumably thrown away.
Twenty-three plaster heads and faces were recovered from
Tuthmosis’s workshop, and we must assume that these represent
either busts which were in the process of being carved when
Amarna was abandoned, or plaster casts which Tuthmosis had kept
for some reason, possibly as a form of reference library. Two of the
female heads have been identi ed on stylistic grounds as depictions
of Nefertiti, and it seems highly likely that Kiya is represented
among the anonymous non-royal women.
Tuthmosis was forced to relocate his studio when the court
moved from Amarna. We may assume that he removed everything
which he considered to be of value, leaving only the unwanted and
broken fruits of his labours. Model heads, un nished statues and
miscellaneous limbs of the Amarna royal family, now dead and not
particularly revered, were not worth transporting to Thebes, and
Tuthmosis packed over fty examples of his work into a small
storeroom which he sealed before departing. The now world-famous
limestone bust of Nefertiti was left sitting on a shelf, but eventually,
as the shelf collapsed, toppled forward to be buried knee-deep in
rubble.
The discovery of the head, and the story of its export – or its
smuggling – to Germany, is an archaeological tale which has grown
in the telling, entering the realms of mythology with accounts of
Borchardt concealing the bust among a bushel of vegetables or
encasing it in plaster so that it resembled a plain block of stone.17
We know that the bust was discovered by a local workman on the
afternoon of 6 December 1912. The rules by which concessions were
then granted dictated that all nds should be split 50:50 between
the museum service, then run by the French, and the excavator, who
would normally distribute his share of the booty among his
sponsors. This ‘division’ occurred at the end of the digging season,
and the authorities always had rst pick of the nds. Instead of the
bust of Nefertiti, Inspector Lefebvre accepted on behalf of the
museum service a painted relief of the royal family. Borchardt’s role
in this choice is unclear. Did he deliberately conceal the true nature
of the head by displaying it to the inspector coated in grime? Was
the inspector merely shown a bad photograph, or even a crude copy
of the bust? Did Borchardt argue that Berlin already had a relief of
the royal family, while Cairo had other statue heads of the royal
family? Now, having seen the bust cleaned and displayed in its full
glory in Berlin, Lefebvre’s choice seems inexplicable. To the
inspector, however, faced with the task of dividing up the spoils of
an entire season, and perhaps confronted with a dirty bust in a dark
Egyptian room, the true value of the head may not have seemed
obvious.
When, in November 1913, the Amarna nds were exhibited in
Berlin, the head was excluded from the display: It had been given to
James Simon, the backer of Borchardt’s expedition, and it was not
until 1920 that the bust was donated to the New Museum, Berlin. In
1924 Nefertiti also went on display. Public reaction was immediate
and enthusiastic. Egyptology was all the rage in post-war Europe
and the well-publicized discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen some
two years earlier had already sparked a wave of interest in
Egyptian-style jewellery, clothing and interior design.18 Nefertiti
with her clean-cut, almost contemporary good looks tted well into
the current craze and soon became the museum’s star exhibit.
Predictably, the Egyptian government responded to the publicity by
demanding the immediate return of their ‘stolen’ treasure, and all
German excavations in Egypt were stopped. The Germans, however,
would not consider losing Nefertiti without some compensation. The
return of an archaeological artefact apparently obtained by
legitimate means would set a dangerous precedent and, in any case,
Nefertiti had acquired a symbolic value beyond her artistic or
historical importance and she continued to draw large crowds to the
museum.
Eventually a swap was negotiated. In return for the head, Berlin
would receive two famous statues, each of great artistic merit: a
standing statue of Ranefer and a seated statue of Amenhotep son of
Hapu. From an egyptological point of view, this was an eminently
sensible exchange. However, public opinion was very much against
the deal, and it was eventually called o . Another move was made
to return Nefertiti to mark the accession of King Fuad in 1933, but
Hitler, who is rumoured to have included the bust among his
favourite pieces of art, ensured that the head remained in Berlin.
During the Second World War the bust was hidden for safety in a
salt mine whence it was recovered by American troops and
eventually donated to the Egyptian Museum, (West) Berlin. Today
Nefertiti’s head, accession number 21300, remains in the reunited
Berlin Museum. Whether it is right that it should do so is very much
a matter of opinion. While most archaeologists would agree that a
collection of artefacts should not be broken up without good reason,
Cairo Museum is undoubtedly a very crowded place su ering from a
permanent shortage of funds and a chronic lack of space. In Berlin
Nefertiti receives the care and attention tting to a star exhibit. She
stands as a symbol of Egypt, a useful ambassadress who introduces
visitors to the history of her homeland. Whether she would ever
have attracted this kind of attention as just one among the many
exhibits of Cairo is a moot point.
The bust is carved from a brittle limestone coated with a layer of
gypsum plaster moulded to even out faults in the symmetry of the
piece. Forty-eight centimetres high, it shows Nefertiti’s head, her
long neck and her collar region but is deliberately cut o before her
shoulders. Nefertiti wears her unique at-topped blue crown
decorated with golden streamers whose red, blue and green inlays
re ect the colours in her broad beaded necklace. Her whole head,
with the exception of the eye sockets, is painted in natural colours;
Nefertiti has a delicate pink-brown skin, deeper red-brown lips, a
straight nose and delicately arched black eyebrows. There is no hair
visible under her heavy crown. She has su ered remarkably little
damage, although the tips of the ears and the top edge of the crown
have been slightly chipped, but the left eye is missing from its
socket. The right eye, which glances slightly downwards, is inlaid
with rock crystal, ringed with a black kohl line and has a black
pupil. Despite an intensive search Borchardt was unable to nd the
missing left eye and, as the socket shows no trace of any adhesive, it
is generally accepted that this was not in place when the head was
stored away.
Various explanations have been put forward to explain the
missing eye, some more fanciful than others. Several authorities
have, for example, suggested that Nefertiti must have su ered from
a serious eye complaint; either cataracts, which would cause the eye
to appear opaque, or an ancient equivalent of the eye diseases
observed at Amarna thousands of years later by Amelia Edwards
and Mary Chubb. None of her other images, however, con rms this
diagnosis and all show two matching, apparently healthy eyes. At
least one writer of romantic biography has suggested that the eye
was deliberately omitted by Tuthmosis as a means of gaining
revenge on the promiscuous queen who had spurned him as a
lover.19 It is unlikely that the bust is simply un nished, as its style
would indicate that it is a relatively early piece falling somewhere
between the exaggerated Theban depictions of the queen and her
later, more realistic images. Nor is it likely that a single eye would
be gouged out as a means of attacking the memory of the dead
queen. More reasonable is the theory that the piece was intended to
serve as an artist’s model and teaching aid, the eye socket being
deliberately left empty to allow pupils to study inlay techniques.
Nefertiti, on the strength of this one piece, is now widely
recognized as an international, timeless beauty:
The portraits of other queens of romance, such as Cleopatra and Mary of Scotland, are apt
to leave one wondering where the charm came in about which all men raved, but no one
could question for a moment the beauty of Nefertiti. Features of exquisite modelling and
delicacy, the long graceful neck of an Italian princess of the Renaissance, and an expression
of gentleness not untouched with melancholy, make up the presentation of a royal lady
about whom we should like to know a great deal and actually know almost nothing.20

Everyone accepts that beauty is a highly subjective concept, and

that features which appear beautiful to one race or generation may
not have any appeal to others. Undoubtedly, the fact that this image
of Nefertiti ts well into a westernized ideal of beauty, her pale
skin, slender neck and delicate bone structure occasionally leading
to comparisons with the late, and undeniably beautiful, Audrey
Hepburn, has added to her public appeal. Several writers have
attempted to explain the impact of the bust on those seeing it for the
rst time. Julia Samson, for example, has described watching
visitors approach Nefertiti:
All are held in wonderment, spellbound by its appearance; some immobilized longer than
others; some returning not once, but again and again, almost unbelievingly.21

Personal experience suggests that others, less well informed, may be

faintly disappointed as they view the queen for the rst time. They
do not expect to nd the left eye missing; most modern
reproductions either make good the defect, or show the queen in
pro le. Nor do they quite expect the stark symmetry of the queen’s
face. Few of us are blessed with absolutely symmetrical features but
Nefertiti, in the form of her bust, has been, and this contributes to
her perfect but remote and faintly inhuman appearance.22 To
Borchardt this symmetry endows Nefertiti with an aura of peace,
making her ‘the epitome of tranquillity and harmony’.23 To Camille
Paglia, who uses Nefertiti’s name and image in the title of her
exploration of the continuity of western culture through art,
Nefertiti in the form of her bust appears beautiful but streamlined,
severe and untouchable:
As we have it the bust of Nefertiti is artistically and ritualistically complete, exalted, harsh
and alien… This is the least consoling of great art works. Its popularity is based on
misunderstanding and suppression of its unique features. The proper response to the
Nefertiti bust is fear.24

Nefertiti herself would probably have approved.

 Historical Events
Years
Before LOCAL CHRONOLOGY EGYPT
Christ  
3000   Archaic Period (Dynasties 1–2) Uni cation of Egypt
Djoser step-pyramid at Sakkara
2500   Old Kingdom (Dynasties 3–6)
Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza
First Intermediate Period (Dynasties 7–
2000    
11)
Middle Kingdom (Dynasties 11–13) Theban kings re-unify Egypt
Second Intermediate Period (Dynasties
1500   Hyksos kings in Northern Egypt
14–17)
Amarna Period
New Kingdom (Dynasties 18–20)
Ramesses II

Third Intermediate Period (Dynasties Kings at Tanis

1000  
21–25) Nubian kings
500   Late Period (Dynasties 26–31)  
Ptolemaic Period Egypt part of Roman Empire
A.D.1
 Notes

Introduction
1 Description of Nefertiti from the tomb of Apy; Davies, N. de G.
(1906), The Rock Tombs of el-Amama, vol. 4, London: 19–20.
2 Breasted, J. H. (1924), Ikhnaton, The Religious Revolutionary,
The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 2, Cambridge: 109.
3 The modern myths and legends surrounding Akhenaten are fully
explored in Monserrat, D. (2000), Akhenaten; history, fantasy and
ancient Egypt, London.
4 Desroches-Noblecourt, C. (1963), Tutankhamen: life and death of a
pharaoh, London: 75.
5. Velikovsky, I. (1960), Oedipus and Akhnaton, New York: 201.
6 Weigall, A. (1922), The Life and Times of Akhenaton, London: 44.
7 Buttles, J. (1908), The Queens of Egypt, London: 131–6.
 Chapter 1 The Imperial Family
1 From the legend of the divine birth of Amenhotep III as recorded
on the walls of the Luxor Temple. For a full translation of this
text consult Davies, B. G. (1992), Egyptian Historical Records of
the Later Eighteenth Dynasty, fascicule 4, Warminster: 28–31.
2 The conception of Amenhotep III. See Davies, Egyptian Historical
Records of the Later Eighteenth Dynasty, fascicule 4: 28–31.
3 During the 18th Dynasty it was believed that the sphinx was a
representation of the sun god Re-Harakhty.
4 Smith, G. E. (1912), The Royal Mummies, Catalogue Général des
Antiquités Egyptiennes du Musée du Caire, Cairo: 42–6.
5 Amarna Letter 19. For a full translation and commentary on this
and all other Amarna letters consult Moran, W. L. (1992), The
Amarna Letters, Baltimore and London.
6 Mortuary temple stela of Amenhotep III. Translated in Davies,
Egyptian Historical Records of the Later Eighteenth Dynasty,
fascicule 4: 1–5.
7 We know that the marriage was celebrated before Year 2 as one
of Amenhotep’s hunting scarabs, dated to that year, includes the
name of the queen. It is highly unlikely that Tiy was younger
than ten years of age as Egyptian girls were not usually married
before they reached puberty.
8 For a full translation of this and other Amenhotep III scarabs
consult Blankenberg-van Delden, C. (1969), The Large
Commemorative Scarabs of Amenhotep III, Leiden.
9 As suggested by Maspero in Davis, T. M. et al. (1910), The Tomb
of Queen Tiyi, London: xv. A parallel may perhaps be drawn with
the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981;
the future Princess of Wales may have been technically a
commoner, but she was certainly not of ‘mediocre extraction’.
10 Aldred, C. (1957), The end of the el-Amarna period, Journal of
Egyptian Archaeology 43: 30–41: 35.
11 It is now recognized that the name Yuya does not bear any
resemblance to known Asiatic names of the period.
12 The opinions of Petrie and Budge are quoted and discussed in
Davis, T. M. (1907), The Tomb of Iouiya and Touiyou, London:
xviii–xxi.
13 Simon, V. S. (1984), Tiye: Nubian queen of Egypt, in I. van
Sertima (ed.), Black Women in Antiquity, Journal of African
Civilizations 6:1: 56–63.
14 For a discussion of ‘race’ in ancient Egypt consult Baird, K. A.
(1996), Ancient Egyptians and the issue of race, in Lefkowitz, M.
R. and Rogers, G. M. (eds), Black Athena Revisited, Chapel Hill
and London: 103–11.
15 Davis, The Tomb of Iouiya and Touiyou: xxviii. See the
commentary on Davis’s text given by Dennis Forbes in Forbes, D.
C. (1991), Finding pharaoh’s in-laws, Amarna Letters 1, 4–14.
16 Osiris beds were a physical manifestation of the re-creative
powers of Osiris, god of the underworld. A seed bed in the shape
of the god was planted so that it would sprout with life in the
same way that the god himself was reborn after death.
17 Discussed in Troy, L. (1986), Patterns of Queenship in Ancient
Egyptian Myth and History, Uppsala: 86.
18 The Epigraphic Survey (1980), The Tomb of Kheruef, Chicago: 42.
19 Buttles, J. (1908), The Queens of Egypt, London.
20 Aldred, C. (1980), Egyptian Art, London: 170.
21 Scott, N. (1957), Amun-Hotpe the magni cent, Bulletin of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 15.6: 149.
22 Amarna Letter EA 4.
23 Amarna Letter EA 1.
24 See Blankenberg-van Delden, The Large Commemorative Scarabs of
Amenhotep III, 18, 129–33. Schulman discusses this scarab
together with all the evidence for Amenhotep’s diplomatic
marriages in Schulman, A. R. (1979), Diplomatic marriage in the
 Egyptian New Kingdom, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 38: 177–
93.
25 Amarna Letter EA 29.
26 Amarna Letter EA 22.
27 Amarna Letter EA 17.
28 Davis, The Tomb of Iouiya and Touiyou: 37–41.
29 The Epigraphic Survey, The Tomb of Kheruef: 43. For a
description of Amenhotep’s festivals consult Kemp, B. J. (1989),
Ancient Egypt: anatomy of a civilization, London: 213–17.
30 Davies, Egyptian Historical Records of the Later Eighteenth Dynasty,
fascicule 4: 36.
31 For a description of the site, its history and its inscribed material
see Hayes, W. C. (1951), Inscriptions from the Palace of
Amenhotep III, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 10: 35–40, 82–104,
156–83, 231–42.
32 For a comprehensive review of the later sculpture of Amenhotep
III consult Johnson, W. R. (1996), Amenhotep III and Amarna:
some new considerations, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 82: 65–
82.
33 Steindor , G. and Seele, K. C. (1957), When Egypt Ruled the East,
Chicago: 79; for the publication of this stela see Gri ths, F. Ll
(1926), Stela in honour of Amenhotep III and Taya from Tell el-
Amarnah, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 12: 1–2.
34 Baikie, J. (1926), The Amarna Age: a study of the crisis of the
ancient world, London.
35 Some believe that the fact that both kings were depicted in this
kind of garment is intended to convey a speci c meaning; consult
Sourouzian, H. (1994), Inventaire iconographique des statues en
manteau jubilaire de l’époque thinite jusqu’à leur disparition sous
Amenhotep III, in C. Berger et al., Hommages à Jean Leclant I,
Paris.
36 Velikovsky, I. (1960), Oedipus and Akhnaton, New York: 48–9.
Velikovsky is the strongest proponent of the idea that Amenhotep
 was now a bisexual cross-dresser, as this ts well with his theory
linking Amenhotep IV with the legend of Oedipus.
37 Baikie, The Amarna Age: 236.
38 Amarna Letter EA 23. W. L. Moran, The Amarna Letters: 61–2,
believes that the statue of the goddess was sent to Egypt not to
cure the ailing king but so that she could be present as a religious
symbol at his marriage to Tadukhepa.
39 Amarna Letter ΕA 59. Tunip was never an o cial vassal of Egypt
and could more properly have expected to receive protection
from Mitanni.
40 For a full description of the mummi ed remains of ‘Amenhotep
III’ see Smith, G. E. (1912), The Royal Mummies, Catalogue
Général des Antiquités Egyptiennes du Musée du Caire, Cairo:
46–51.
41 See Wente, Ε. F. and Harris, J. E. (1992), Royal Mummies of the
18th Dynasty, in Reeves, C. N. (ed.), After Tutankhamun: research
and excavation in the royal necropolis at Thebes, London and New
York: 2–20.
 Chapter 2 A Beautiful Woman Has Come
1 Text taken from the colonnade of the ‘Mansion of the Benben-
Stone’, Karnak. Translated in Redford, D. B. (1984), Akhenaten:
the heretic king, Princeton: 77.
2 See for example Redford, Akhenaten: the heretic king: 57: ‘It may
well be that he [Amenhotep] was kept in the background
because of a congenital ailment which made him hideous to
behold.’
3 Dodson, A. (1990), Crown Prince Djhutmose and the royal sons
of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 76:
87–96. See also Dodson, A. (1991), Two who might have been
king, Amarna Letters 1: 26–30.
4 Davis, T. M. (1907), The Tomb of Iouiya and Touiyou, London.
5 See for example Petrie, W. M. F. (1894), Tell el Amarna, London:
38 .
6 Redford has given a detailed account of all the evidence
presented in favour of a joint reign. Consult Redford, D. B.
(1967), Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, History and Chronology of
the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt: seven studies, Toronto: 88–169.
7 Amarna Letter EA 26.
8 The question of Nefertiti’s parentage is discussed in Seele, K. C.
(1955), King Ay and the close of the Amarna Age, Journal of Near
Eastern Studies 14: 168–80, and in Aldred, C. (1957), The end of
the el-Amarna period, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 43: 30–41.
These two experts employ the same evidence but draw di erent
conclusions.
9 The suggestion that the two women could be Tey and Nefertiti
was rst made by Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt and accepted
by Julia Samson: see Desroches-Noblecourt, C. (1978), Une
exceptionnelle décoration pour ‘la nourrice qui devint reine’, La
Revue du Louvre et des Musées de France 28: 20–27; Samson, J.
(1985, revised 1990), Nefertiti and Cleopatra: queen-monarchs of
ancient Egypt, London: 57–8. The equally plausible suggestion
 that they may in fact be Nefertiti and Meritaten is made by
Dorothea Arnold in Arnold, D. (ed.) (1996), The Royal Women of
Amarna: images of beauty from ancient Egypt, New York: 91–3.
10 The suggestion that ‘God’s Father’ should be translated as ‘King’s
father-in-law’ was rst made by L. Borchardt (1905), Der
Agyptische Titel ‘Vater des Gottes’ als Bezeichnung für ‘Vater
oder Schwiegervater des Königs’, Berichte über die Verhandlungen,
Leipzig: 254.
11 For a review of all the evidence for Mutnodjmet at Amarna
consult Hari, R. (1964), Horemheb et la Reine Moutnedjemet,
Geneva.
12 As suggested by Aldred, The end of the el-Amarna period, JEA
43: 30–41, 39.
13 Davies, N. de G. (1908), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 6:
Tombs of Parennefer, Tutu and Ay, London: 21.
14 Now housed in the Petrie Museum, London.
15 Davies, N. de G. (1923), Akhenaten at Thebes, Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology 9: 136–45.
16 For the history of the Nubian-style wig, consult Aldred, C.
(1957), Hair styles and history, Bulletin of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 15.6: 141–8; Eaton-Krauss, M. (1981),
Miscellanea Amarnensia, Chronique d’Egypte 56: 245–64.
17 Petrie, W. M. F. (1931), Seventy Years in Archaeology, London:
138–9.
18 Extract from the second Amarna boundary stela, translation
adapted from Davies, B. G. (1995), Egyptian Historical Records of
the Later Eighteenth Dynasty, fascicule 6, Warminster: 12.
19 See Ray, J. D. (1985), Review article of Redford’s Akhenaten,
Göttinger Miszellen 86: 81–93. Ray suggests that Akhenaten may
have been celebrating his thirtieth birthday. This would,
however, make the king older at the time of his accession than is
generally supposed.
20 The origins of the word talatat in this context are obscure,
although it may be derived from the Arabic word for three,
 referring to the fact that the blocks are three hand-spans long.
21 The work of the Akhenaten Temple Project is described in detail
in Smith, R. W. and Redford, D. B. (1976), The Akhenaten Temple
Project, Warminster. See also Smith, R. W. (1970), Computer
helps scholars re-create an Egyptian temple, National Geographic
138: 5: 634–55. Younger readers will be amused to nd that
Smith’s ‘space-age’ computer employed punch cards and
magnetic tape.
22 Figures taken from Smith and Redford, The Akhenaten Temple
Project: 78.
23 Ibid. 34.
24 See Cooney, J. D. (1965), Amarna Reliefs from Hermopolis in
American Collections, Brooklyn.
25 Consult Hall, E. S. (1986), The Pharaoh Smites His Enemies, Berlin:
4.
26 For a discussion of this crown consult Samson, J. (1973), Amarna
crowns and wigs, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 59: 47–59;
Green, L. (1992), Queen as Goddess, the religious role of royal
women in the late-eighteenth dynasty, Amarna Letters 2: 28–41.
27 Discussed with references in Arnold, The Royal Women of
Amarna: 107–8.
28 Some Hwt-Benben blocks display the shorter form of her name
carved deeply and on a large scale beside the longer name which,
scratched lightly and at a smaller scale, appears to have been
added as an afterthought by the mason. For a discussion of the
development of Nefertiti’s name, see Samson, J. (1976), Royal
Names in Amarna, Chronique d’Egypte 51: 30–38.
 Chapter 3 The Aten Dazzles
1 From the Great Hymn to the Aten, preserved in the tomb of Ay at
Amarna. For a full translation see chapter text.
2 Johnson, W. R. (1993), The Dei ed Amenhotep III as the living
Re-Herakhty; stylistic and iconographic considerations, Sesto
Congresso Internazionale de Egittologia, vol. 2, Turin: 231–6.
3 Discussed in Johnson, W. R. (1996), Amenhotep III and Amarna:
some new considerations, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 82: 65–
82.
4 From the divine conception of Hatchepsut carved on the wall of
the Deir el-Bahri mortuary temple. Consult Sethe, K. and Helck,
W. (1906–58), Urkunden des 18. Dynastie, Leipzig and Berlin,
4.219, 13–220, 6; Breasted, J. H. (1988), Ancient Records of
Egypt, 2nd edition, vol. 2, part 2, Chicago: 187–212.
5 Redford, D. B. (1981), Bulletin of the Egyptological Seminar of New
York 3: 87 .
6 Amarna boundary stela. For a full translation of this text consult
Davies, B. G. (1995), Egyptian Historical Records of the Later
Eighteenth Dynasty, fascicule 6, Warminster: 9.
7 Androgyny and creation is discussed in detail in Troy, L. (1986),
Patterns of Queenship in Ancient Egyptian Myth and History,
Uppsala: 1.2.
8 Even Hatchepsut, whose lack of a husband and son allowed her
to step outside the traditional queen’s role, acted as she did in
order to preserve her dynasty. Consult Tyldesley, J. A. (1996),
Hatchepsut: the female pharaoh, London.
9 Inscription from the Amarna tomb of Panehesy. For a full
publication of this tomb consult Davies, N. de G. (1905), The
Rock Tombs of el-Amama, vol. 2, London. Davies’s footnote to the
quoted text (p. 31) reads: ‘It will be noticed that these court
favours, although in the gift of the king, would largely depend
upon the goodwill of the queen.’
10 Davies, N. de G. (1905), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 3,
London: 18.
11 Consult Ikram, S. (1989), Domestic shrines and the cult of the
royal family, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 75: 89–101.
12 As discussed in Arnold, D. (ed.) (1996), The Royal Women of
Amarna: images of beauty from ancient Egypt, New York: 100. The
garden shrines associated with the private houses were believed
by their original excavators to be birth bowers.
13 See Silverman, D. P. (1982), Wit and Humour, Egypt’s Golden
Age, Boston Museum, Boston: 277–81.
14 Woolley, C. L. (1922), Excavations at Tell el-Amarna, Journal of
Egyptian Archaeology 8: 48–81.
15 Kemp, B. J. (1979), Wall paintings from the workmen’s village at
el-Amarna, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 65: 47–53.
16 For a discussion of the role of Bes at Amarna consult Bosse-
Gri ths, K. (1977), A Beset Amulet from the Amarna Period,
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 63: 98–106.
17 Weigall, A. (1922), The Life and Times of Akhenaton, revised
edition, London: 136.
18 Aldred, C. (1968), Akhenaten, Pharaoh of Egypt: A New Study,
London: 189.
19 This interpretation of the Great Hymn to the Aten is based on a
translation suggested by Steven Snape. Many versions of this
hymn have been published, some literal, others more lyrical. See,
for example, Gardiner, A. (1961), Egypt of the Pharaohs, Oxford:
225–7; Lichtheim, M. (1976), Ancient Egyptian Literature II: the
New Kingdom, Los Angeles: 96–100; Simpson, W. K. (ed.) (1973),
The Literature of Ancient Egypt, New Haven and London: 289–95.
20 Translation given in Martin, G. T. (1986), Shabtis of private
persons in the Amarna Period, Mitteilungen der Deutschen
Archäologischen Instituts Abteilung Kairo 42: 109–29.
21 Weigall, The Life and Times of Akhenaton: 166.
22 Samson, J. (1985, revised 1990), Nefertiti and Cleopatra: queen-
monarchs of ancient Egypt, London: 27.
23 Redford, D. B. (1984), Akhenaten: the heretic king, Princeton: 235.
24 Davies, N. de G. (1923), Akhenaten at Thebes, Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology 23: 132–52: 150.
 Chapter 4 Images of Amarna
1 Extract from the rock stela of father and son sculptors Men and
Bak, at Aswan. For a full translation of this stela consult Davies,
B. G. (1994) Egyptian Historical Records of the Later Eighteenth
Dynasty, fascicule 5, Warminster: 71.
2 Weigall, A. (1922), The Life and Times of Akhenaton, London: 51–
2.
3 Gardiner, A. (1961), Egypt of the Pharaohs, Oxford: 214.
4 Grimal, N., A History of Egypt, translated by I. Shaw (1992),
Oxford: 233.
5 Aldred, C. (1973), Akhenaten and Nefertiti, London: 11.
6 The more louche of Amenhotep’s representations may well have
been carved some time after his death.
7 Petrie, W. M. F. (1894), Tell el Amarna, London: 38.
8 Ibid.: 39.
9 This is the solution considered by Aldred in Aldred, C. (1968),
Akhenaten: Pharaoh of Egypt: A New Study, London: 133–9.
10 Samson, J. (1985, revised 1990), Nefertiti and Cleopatra: queen-
monarchs of ancient Egypt, London: 22.
11 See, for example, Samson, J. (1972), Amarna, City of Akhenaten
and Nefertiti, London: 23. The fact that Mrs Samson has had the
courage to reconsider her published opinion does not, of course,
make her revised views invalid, and she is certainly not the only
egyptologist to interpret the piece as Nefertiti. See, for example,
Reeves, C. N. (1990), The Complete Tutankhamun: the king, the
tomb, the royal treasure, London: 19.
12 The role of ‘God’s Wife’ and ‘God’s Hand’ is brie y discussed in
Robins, G. (1993), Women in Ancient Egypt, London: 152 .
13 See, for example, Aldred, C. (1980), Egyptian Art, London: 182:
‘She [Nefertiti] is shown in relief and in the round as a woman of
great allure, according to the Oriental ideal of voluptuousness…’
14 The changes in Nefertiti’s appearance are discussed in Arnold, D.
(ed.) (1996), The Royal Women of Amarna: images of beauty from
 ancient Egypt, New York: 38 .
15 For a simple description of the revised canon of proportions
during this reign consult Robins, G. (1986), Egyptian Painting and
Relief, Princes Risborough: 43–52.
16 Arnold, The Royal Women of Amarna: 56.
 Chapter 5 Horizon of the Aten
1 This extract, and all subsequent extracts from the Amarna
boundary stelae, is based on the translation given in Davies, N.
de G. (1908a), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 5, London: 28–
34. For a more modern translation consult Davies, B. G. (1995),
Egyptian Historical Records of the Later Eighteenth Dynasty,
fascicule 5, Warminster: 5–13.
2 As suggested by Cyril Aldred, in Aldred, C. (1976), The Horizon
of the Aten, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 62: 184.
3 Davies, The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 5: 30.
4 I am here making the assumption that the Middle Kingdom
capital, Itj-Tawi, was a suburb of Memphis.
5 Estimate given by Barry Kemp; see Kemp, B. J. (1989), Ancient
Egypt: anatomy of a civilization, London: 269. Estimates of the
population of the city vary between 20,000 and 50,000.
6 Davies, The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 5: 26.
7 Discussed in Redford, D. B. (1984), Akhenaten: the heretic king,
Princeton: 142.
8 Petrie, W. M. F. (1894), Tell el Amarna, London: 1.
9 See, for example, M. Mallinson’s comments on the replacement
of brick by stone at the Small Temple of Aten, in Kemp, B. J.
(ed.) (1989), Amarna Reports 5, London, 115–42; 138.
10 Discussed in Kemp, B. J. (1977), The city of Amarna as a source
for the study of urban society in ancient Egypt, World
Archaeology 9:2: 123–39.
11 Riefstahl, E. (1964), Thebes in the time of Amunhotep III,
Oklahoma: 189.
12 Davies, N. de. G. (1906), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 4,
London: 16. Davies’s interpretation of the scene di ers slightly
from my own: ‘The queen, regardless of the situation, seems to
pester the king with talk, though his whole thought is given to
the management of his steeds.’
13 Whittemore, T. (1926), The Excavations at El-Amarnah, Season
1924–5, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 12: 3–12.
14 Ibid.: 6.
15 As we have good reason to believe that the Window of
Appearance may have been a part of the King’s House, rather
than the Great Palace, the women’s quarters here depicted may
well have been a part of the House. However, it is apparent that
the ancient artists were not averse to combining elements of
separate buildings for greater artistic e ect. For the mention of
eunuchs see Davies, N. de G. (1908b), The Rock Tombs of el-
Amarna, vol. 6, London: 20.
16 Discussed in Tyldesley, J. A. (1994), Daughters of Isis: women of
ancient Egypt, London: 130.
17 See, for example, Manniche, L. (1991), Music at the court of the
Aten, Amarna Letters 1, 62–5: 65: ‘It is possible that invisible
essence (sound) emanating from the tangible object (the
musician or his instrument) was interpreted as symbolic of the
immaterial substance transferred to the deity [the Aten] from the
actual food o erings presented in the temple or palace.’
18 Sandman, M. (1938), Texts from the time of Akhenaten, Brussels:
13:11.9–13.
19 See Kemp, B. J. (1976), The Window of Appearance at el-Amarna
and the basic structure of this city, Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology 62: 81–99.
20 Petrie, W. M. F. (1931), Seventy Years in Archaeology, London:
138.
21 This is discussed with references to the various accounts in
Kemp, B. J. and Gar , S. (1993), A Survey of the Ancient City of El-
Amarna, London: 58.
22 For a reference to the Heliopolis benben consult Habachi, L.
(1971), Beitrage zur Ägyptischen Bauforschung und Altertumskunde
12, 42: g. 20. Davies illustrates and describes the Panehesy
stone in Davies, N. de G. (1905), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna,
vol. 2, London: 24, Plate XIX.
23 Petrie, Tell el Amarna: 18.
24 Discussed and reproduced in Shaw, I. (1994), Balustrades, stairs
and altars in the cult of the Aten at al-Amarna, Journal of
Egyptian Archaeology 80: 109–27: 119. Shaw gives earlier
references to this piece.
25 The history of this building is discussed in Badawy, A. (1956),
Maru-Aten: pleasure resort or temple?, Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology 42: 58–64.
26 For references to Kiya consult Harris, J. R. (1974), Kiya,
Chronique d’Egypte 49: 25–30; Eaton-Krauss, M. (1981),
Miscellanea Amarnensia, Chronique d’Egypte 56: 245–64: 2;
Reeves, C. N. (1988), New Light on Kiya from texts in the British
Museum, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 74: 91–101.
27 Suggestion put forward in Redford, D. B. (1984), Akhenaten: the
heretic king, Princeton: 150.
28 Suggestion made in Manniche, L. (1975), The wife of Bata,
Göttinger Miszellen 18: 33–8. For a translation of this story consult
Lichtheim, M. (1976), Ancient Egyptian Literature 2: The New
Kingdom, Los Angeles: 203–11.
29 A relief in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, shows Kiya
apparently standing before an o ering table, a role usually taken
by a priest.
30 There is no absolute proof that this village was the home of the
labourers who worked on the Amarna tombs, although a
comparison with the Theban workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina
makes this seem very likely. There is, however, an unexcavated
village further to the east which may have housed the workers
involved on the royal tomb. For a discussion of all aspects of the
excavation of the workmen’s village see Kemp, B. J. (ed.) (1984,
1985, 1986, 1987), Amarna Reports 1–4, London: 1.
31 ‘This material, as well as paintings of Bes and Thoeris [Taweret]
in other houses in the village, point to the importance placed on
womanhood and childbirth in New Kingdom society, including
 that of the Amarna workmen’s village.’ Kemp, B. J. (ed.) (1986),
Amarna Reports 3, London: 25.
32 For the history of and further references to the Amarna chapels
consult Bomann, A. P. (1991), The Private Chapel in Ancient Egypt,
London.
33 Gardiner, A. (1961), Egypt of the Pharaohs, Oxford: 223.
34 Davies, The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 5: 4.
35 Davies, N. de G. (1908b), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 6,
London: 10.
36 Ibid.: Plate IV.
37 Discussed in Arnold, D. (ed.) (1996), The Royal Women of
Amarna: images of beauty from ancient Egypt, New York: 28.
38 Beketaten and the Huya scenes, and their importance with regard
to a proposed Amenhotep III–Akhenaten co-regency, are
discussed in Redford, D. B. (1967), History and Chronology of the
Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt: seven studies, Toronto: 105–9.
39 Discussed in Gabolde, M. (1992), Baketaten lle de Kiya?,
Bulletin de la Société d’Egyptologie Genève 16: 27–40.
40 Velikovsky, I. (1960), Oedipus and Akhnaton, New York: 101.
Velikovsky, wishing to promote the equation of Akhenaten with
Oedipus, had to make Tiy into a knowing Jocasta. Believing Tiy
to be of foreign extraction, he speculates that ‘the kings of
Mitanni, being worshippers of the Indo-Iranian gods, must have
regarded incest between mother and son as not only a
pardonable relation but a holy union.’
 Chapter 6 Queen, King or Goddess?
1 Inscription engraved on the foot-end of the co n recovered from
tomb KV 55. Translation based on that of Sir Alan Gardiner, cited
in Gardiner, A. (1957), The so-called tomb of Queen Tiye,
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 43: 10–25: 19.
2 Maspero, G. (1912), in Gauthier, H. (ed.) Livre des Rois II, Cairo:
344:2. The quotation is taken from Samson, J. (1985 revised
1990), Nefertiti and Cleopatra, London: 22.
3 Robins, G. (1986), Egyptian Paintings and Reliefs, Princes
Risborough: 50.
4 Discussed in detail in Harris, J. R. (1973), Nefertiti Redivia, Acta
Orientalia 35: 5–13. See also Taw k, S. (1975), Aten studies,
Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts Abteilung Kairo
31: 159–168.
5 It is just possible that we have a second representation of
Nefertiti wearing this crown in the tomb of Ay. Both scenes are
illustrated and discussed in Ertman, E. L. (1992), Is there visual
evidence for a ‘king’ Nefertiti?, Amarna Letters 2; 50–55.
6 Described in Martin, G. T. The Royal Tomb at el-Amarna I: the
objects, London: section A.
7 For a discussion of Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus consult Eaton-
Krauss, M. (1993), The Sarcophagus in the Tomb of Tutankhamen,
Oxford. The canopic canopy is discussed in Robins, G. (1984),
Isis, Nephthys, Selket and Neith represented on the sarcophagus
of Tutankhamun and in four free-standing statues found in KV
62, Göttinger Miszellen 72: 21–5.
8 See, for example, Green, L. (1992), Queen as Goddess: the
religious role of royal women in the late-eighteenth dynasty,
Amarna Letters I: 28–41.
 Chapter 7 Sunset
1 Amarna Letter EA 16, written by the king of Assyria. For a full
translation of this and other letters consult Moran, W. L. (1992),
The Amarna Letters, Baltimore: 38–41.
2 See El-Khouly, A. and Martin, G. T (1984), Excavations in the
Royal Necropolis at El-Amarna, Cairo: 8, 16.
3 Loeben, C. E. (1986), Eine Bestrattung der grossen Königlichen
Gemahlin Nofretete in Amarna, Mitteilungen des Deutschen
Archaologischen Instituts Abteilung Kairo 42: 99–107. Aldred
suggests that the shabti would have been inscribed during the
embalming period; if he is correct, it would indicate that
Nefertiti had indeed died at Amarna. See Aldred, C. (1988),
Akhenaten King of Egypt, London: 229.
4 Pendlebury, J. (1935), Tell el-Amarna, London: 28–9. For other
references to Nefertiti’s ‘disgrace’ see Seele, K. C. (1955), King Ay
and the close of the Amarna Age, Journal of Near Eastern Studies
14: 168–180.
5 Davies, N. de G. (1923), Akhenaten at Thebes, Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology 9: 132–152: 133.
6 Baikie, J. (1926), The Amarna Age; a study of the crisis of the
ancient world, London: 281.
7 Consult Harris, J. (1973), Nefernefruaten, Göttinger Miszellen 4:
15–17; (1973), Nefertiti Rediviva, Acta Orientalia 35: 5–13;
(1974), Nefernefruaten Regnans, Acta Orientalia 36: 11–21. See
also the work of Perepelkin, Y. Y. (1967), Perevorot Amen-Hotpa
IV, i, Moscow: sect 87; idem (1968), Taina Zolotogo groba,
translated as The Secret of the Golden Co n, 120.
8 For a modern description of the opening of this tomb see Romer,
J. (1981), Valley of the Kings, London: 211–220. See also Reeves’
introduction to the re-publication of Davis’ 1910 report, in Davis,
T. M. et al (1990), The Tomb of Queen Tiyi, San Francisco. For
further references to the opening of the tomb see Gardiner, A.
(1957), The so-called tomb of Queen Tiye, Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology 43:10–25.
 9 Aldred, C. (1988), Akhenaten, king of Egypt, London: 195.
10 Quoted in Gardiner, A. (1957), op. cit.: 25.
11 Most experts are agreed that the gold mask had been torn o the
co n in antiquity, but see the comment in el Mahdy, C. (1999),
Tutankhamen; life and death of a boy king, London: 45, that ‘the
few surviving photographs of the co n within the tomb show
that at the time of discovery the face was made of gold… later
when the co n lid arrived in Cairo, the golden face was
missing…’ This would not be the only gold from KV 55 to go
missing post-discovery, but the photograph published by Davis of
the co n lying in situ (op. cit Plate XXX) shows a mummy whose
face has been ripped away. Davis’s text (2), tells us that ‘on the
oor… lay the co n made of wood, but entirely covered with
gold foil and inlaid with semi-precious stones…’. In contrast, the
catalogue of nds compiled by George Daressy and published in
the same volume mentions (16) ‘The face was covered by a gold
mask… Of this the lower part is missing from below the eyes.’
12 Krauss, R. (1986), Kija–ursprüngliche Besitzerin der Kanopen aus
KV 55, Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts
Abteilung Kairo 42: 67–80.
13 Lucas, A. (1931), The canopic vases from the ‘tomb of Queen
Tiyi’, Annales du Services des Antiquités: 120–122.
14 Gardiner, A. (1957), op. cit.
15 Translation given in Allen, J. P. (1988), Two altered inscriptions
of the Late Amarna Period, Journal of the American Research
Center in Egypt 25: 117–126.
16 Davis, T. M. et al. (1910), The Tomb of Queen Tiyi, London: 2.
17 Tyndale, W. (1907), Below the Cataracts, London.
18 Weigall, A. (1922), The Mummy of Akhenaton, Journal of
Egyptian Archaeology 8: 193–200: 194.
19 G. Elliot Smith, writing in Davis, T. M. et al. (1910), op. cit.: xxiv.
20 Smith, G. E. (1912), The Royal Mummies, Cairo: 51–56.
21 Weigall, A. (1922), The Life and Times of Akhnaton: pharaoh of
Egypt (revised edition), London: xxii.
22 Derry, D. E. in Engelbach, R. (1931), The so-called co n of
Akhenaten, Annales du Service des Antiquités 31: 98–114, 116.
23 Harrison, R. G. (1966), An anatomical examination of the
pharaonic remains purported to be Akhenaten, Journal of
Egyptian Archaeology 52: 95-119. Connoley, R. C., Harrison R. G.
& Ahmed, S. (1976), Serological evidence for the parentage of
Tutankhamun and Smenkhkare, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
62: 184–6. See also Costa, P. (1978), The frontal sinuses of the
remains purported to be Akhenaten, Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology 64: 76–9.
24 Wente, E. F. and Harris, J. E. (1992), Royal Mummies of the
Eighteenth Dynasty, in C. N. Reeves (ed.) After Tutankhamun:
research and excavation in the royal necropolis at Thebes, London
and New York, 2–20.
25 Filer, J. M. (2002), Anatomy of a Mummy, Archaeology
March/April 2002, 26–9. See also the discussion of this analysis
in J. Tyldesley (2000), Private Lives of the Pharaohs, London,
Study 2.
26 Discussed in Ray, J. (1975), The parentage of Tutankhamun,
Antiquity 49: 45–7.
27 Martin, G. T. (1989), The Royal Tomb at El-Amarna II, London:
37–48.
28 Or could the feminine form have been deliberately adopted by
Smenkhkare’s wife, as suggested in Krauss, R. (1978), Das Ende
de Amarnazeit, Hildesheim?
29 Allen, J. P. (1994), Nefertiti and Smenkh-ka-re, Göttinger
Miszellen 141: 7–17: 13. Allen provides a detailed summary of the
evidence for and against a joint reign.
30 Arnold, D. (1996), The Royal Women of Amarna: images of beauty
from ancient Egypt, New York: 74. Arnold is writing about a
brown quartzite head of Nefertiti, recovered from Memphis but
almost certainly created by an artist of the Amarna school.
31 Discussed in Arnold, D. (1996) op. cit.: 115.
32 Discussed in Redford, D. B. (1975), Studies on Akhenaten at
Thebes II, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 12, 9–
14; Robins, G. (1981), Hmt nsw wrt Meritaten, Göttinger Miszellen
52: 75–81.
33 Davies, N. de G. (1905), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna 2, London:
36–45.
34 See discussion in van Dijk, J. and Eaton-Krauss, M. (1986),
Tutankhamun and Memphis, Mitteillungen des Deutschen
Archäologischen Instituts Abteilung Kairo 42: 35–41.
35 Gardiner, A. (1961), Egypt of the Pharaohs, Oxford: 236–7.
36 Carter, H. and Mace, A. C. (1923), The Tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen,
London: 119.
37 These scenes are discussed with further references in Troy, L
(1986), Patterns of Queenship in Ancient Egyptian Myth and History,
Uppsala: 100 . See also Bosse-Gri ths, K. (1973), The Little
Golden Shrine of Tutankhamen, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
59: 100–108.
38 Elliot Smith, G. (1912), The Royal Mummies, Cairo: 38.
39 Harris, J. E. et al. (1978), Mummy of the ‘elder lady’ in the tomb
of Amunhotep II, Science 200:9: 1149–1151.
40 Quoted in Luban, M. (1999), Do We Have The Mummy of
Nefertiti?, www.geocities.com.
41 Luban, M. (1999) op. cit.
42 Fletcher, J. (2004), The Search for Nefertiti; the true story of a
remarkable discovery, London. The quotation is taken from the
cover of the Sunday Times Magazine 8th June 2003.
43 See Harrison R. G. et al (1979), A Mummi ed Foetus from the
tomb of Tutankhamun, Antiquity 53: 19–21.
44 Translation after H. G. Guterbock, as quoted in Schulman, A. R.
(1978), Ankhesenamun, Nofretity and the Amka A air, Journal of
the American Research Center in Egypt 15: 43–8.
45 Suggestions that Ay had consolidated his claim to the throne by
marrying his widowed granddaughter Ankhesenamen are now
 known to be based on a single piece of doubtful evidence.
46 See Schaden, O. J. (1992), The God’s Father Ay, Amarna Letters
2, 92–115: 108. Schaden gives a full discussion of Ay’s known
career.
47 See Hari, R (1965), Horemheb et la Reine Moutnedjemet, Geneva.;
Hari, R. (1976), La reine d’Horemheb était-elle la soeur de
Nefertiti?, Chronique d’Egypte 51: 39–46.
 Epilogue The Beautiful Woman Returns
1 Pendlebury, J. D. S. (1935), Tell el-Amama, London: ix.
2 Accounts of the history of the archaeology of Amarna are given
in Aldred, C. (1988), Akhenaten, King of Egypt, London; Kemp, B.
J. and Gar , S. (1993), A Survey of the Ancient City of el-Amarna,
London.
3 Jomard, E. (1818), Antiquités de l’Heptanomide, Déscription de
l’Egypte, Antiquités, Déscriptions, vol. 2, Paris: XVI: 13.
4 Wilkinson, J. G. (1837), Manners and Customs of the Ancient
Egyptians, London: Plate VI.
5 Edwards, A. B. (1877, revised 1888), A Thousand Miles up the
Nile, London: 69.
6 Ibid.: 85.
7 Chubb, M. (1954), Nefertiti Lived Here, London: 75.
8 Pendlebury, Tell el-Amarna: x.
9 Davies, N. de G. (1903), The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna, vol. 1,
London: 3.
10 Peet, T. E. (1921), Excavations at Tell el-Amarna: a preliminary
report, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 7: 169.
11 Letter written by Breasted from Cairo, dated 24 January 1895.
Quoted in Larson, J. A. (1992), Other Amarna Letters, Amarna
Letters 2: 116–25: 124.
12 Published by the Egypt Exploration Society, London.
13 Sayce, A. H. (1990), [Letter from Egypt] Luxor: Feb. 26, 1890,
The Academy 933: 195. This letter and its subsequent postscript is
quoted in full in Martin, G. T. (1989), The Royal Tomb at El-
Amarna 2: the reliefs, inscriptions and architecture, London: 1.
14 Martin, The Royal Tomb at El-Amarna 2.
15 For a full description of this workshop and its contents consult
Arnold, D. (ed.) (1996), The Royal Women of Amarna: images of
beauty from ancient Egypt, New York: 41–83. See also Phillips, J.
(1991), Sculpture Ateliers of Akhetaten, Amarna Letters 1: 31–40.
 A second sculptor’s workshop, specializing in inlay work and
tentatively attributed to ‘Ipu’ was also excavated by Borchardt.
16 Roeder, G. (1941), Lebensgrosse Tonmodelle aus einer
altägyptischen Bildhauerwerkstatt, Jahrbuch der preussischen
Kunstsammlungen 62:4: 145-70: 154–60.
17 The history of the discovery of the bust is brie y discussed by
Wiedemann, H. G. and Bayer, G. (1982), The Bust of Nefertiti,
Analytical Chemistry 54:4: 619–28. It was also the subject of a
television programme presented by Nicholas Ward Jackson for
Channel 4, produced by Brian Lapping Associates.
18 For a review of the in uence of the Tutankhamen discovery on
contemporary society see Frayling, C. F. (1992), The Face of
Tutankhamun, London.
19 Vandenberg, P. (1978), Nefertiti: an archaeological biography,
translated by R. Hein, London.
20 Baikie, J. (1926), The Amarna Age: a study of the crisis of the
ancient world, London: 242–3.
21 Samson, J. (1985, revised 1990), Nefertiti and Cleopatra: queen-
monarchs of ancient Egypt, London: 7.
22 Discussed in Krauss, R. (1991), Nefertiti – a drawing-board
beauty, Amarna Letters 1, 47–9.
23 Borchardt, L. (1923), Porträts der Königin Nofret-ete, Leipzig: 33.
24 Paglia, C. (1990), Sexual Personae; art and decadence from Nefertiti
to Emily Dickinson, Yale and London: 68.
 Further Reading

Literally hundreds of books and articles of varying degrees of

specialization and complexity have been published on the Amarna
period. The references listed below include the more basic and
accessible publications with preference given to those written in
English. All the works listed include bibliographies that will be of
interest to those seeking more detailed references on speci c
subjects. Those seeking further references should also consult the
notes on each chapter, and Martin, G. T. (1991), A Bibliography of
the Amarna Period and its Aftermath, London.

Aldred, C. (1973), Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Brooklyn.

Aldred, C. (1988), Akhenaten, King of Egypt, London.
Arnold, D. (1996), The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty
from Ancient Egypt, New York.
Desroches-Noblecourt, C. (1963), Tutankhamen: Life and Death of a
Pharaoh, London.
El Mahdy, C. (1999), Tutankhamen: the Life and Death of a Boy King,
London.
Filer, J. M. (2004), Health in Ancient Egypt and Nubia: Sources and
Issues, London.
Freed, R. E. et al. (1999), Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti,
Tutankhamen, London and Boston.
Kemp. B.J. (1989), Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, London.
Kemp, B.J. and Gar , S. (1993), A Survey of the Ancient City of El-
Amarna, London.
Monserrat, D. (2000), Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt,
London and New York.
Pendlebury, J. D. S. (1935), Tell el-Amarna, London.
Redford, D. B. (1984), Akhenaten: the Heretic King, Princeton.
Reeves, C. N. (2001), Akhenaten, Egypt’s False Prophet, London.
Reeves, C. N. (1990), The Complete Tutankhamun: the King, the Tomb,
the Royal Treasure, London.
Romer, J. (1981), Valley of the Kings: Exploring the Tombs of the
Pharaohs, New York.
Samson, J. (1978), Amarna, city of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Nefertiti
as Pharaoh, Warminster.
Samson, J. (1985 revised 1990), Nefertiti and Cleopatra, queen-
monarchs of ancient Egypt, London.
Smith, W. S., revised by W. K. Simpson (1981), The Art and
Architecture of Ancient Egypt, London.
Thomas, A. P. (1988), Akhenaten’s Egypt, Aylesbury.
Troy, L. (1986), Patterns of Queenship in Ancient Egyptian Myth and
History, Uppsala.
 Index
(Figures in italics refer to illustrations.)

Abdi-Ashirta (prince of Amurru), 34

Abu Ghurab, 70
Abydos, 183
Acencheres (unknown princess), 96
Achilles, 18
Ahhotep (queen), 79, 142
Ahmose (king), 67, 142
Ahmose Nefertari (queen), 79, 142, 146–7
Ahmose (queen), 72
Akhenaten (king), 3, 8, 9, 58, 65, 119, 120, 127, 131, 132, 135,
137, 148, 157, 160, 161, 174, 179, 186
as Amenhotep IV, 3, 9, 20, 24, 29, 35, 36, 37, 42, 44, 45, 47, 55,
65, 66, 71, 96, 185
appearance, 38, 79, 92–102, 104–6, 109, 136; pl.9, pl.10, pl.11
building works, 7, 56–8, 110–30, 150–51
childhood, 37–9, 42, 109
children, 52, 54, 81, 83, 97–8, 119, 137, 142, 150–52, 162–3,
165, 166–8, 168; pl.13, pl.16
co-regencies, 43–4, 91, 140–41, 142, 145–6, 154, 155, 164, 165,
166, 168, 170
crowns, 64, 143–5
death and burial, 158–9, 160–61, 170
death of Tiy, 174
dress, 52
foreign policy, 45, 80, 153
hebsed, 56, 65–6, 91, 101
husband of Kiya, 128–30
 husband of Meritaten, 153, 166
husband of Nefertiti, 1, 40–43, 47, 50, 58, 63, 82, 108, 153, 154
images, 49, 62–4, 82, 127, 134, 135, 139, 140, 145, 151, 170
mummy, 97
as Napkhururiya, 44–5
as Neferkheperure Waenre, 37, 87, 128, 153, 157, 159
persecution of memory, 7, 56–7, 172, 179, 180, 181
religious reforms, 3–4, 42, 73–91, 104–5, 112, 126, 127, 142,
146, 147–8, 171, 172–3
sarcophagus, 147
sexuality, 4–5, 98–102
son of Aten, 78, 82–3
Akhenaten Temple Project, 57–8
Akhetaten. See Amarna
Akhmim, 19, 20, 47
as Ekhmim, 185
Alabastronopolis. See Amarna
Aldred, Cyril, 20, 95
Alexander the Great, 97
Allen, James P, 164
Amarna, 1, 6, 7, 9, 32, 44, 45, 48, 50, 52, 65, 66, 71, 79, 82, 85,
92, 94, 105, 107, 109, 111, 124, 135, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144,
146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 161, 162, 165, 168, 171,
172, 173, 177, 179, 180, 183, 184, 188
as Akhetaten, 7, 9, 66, 110, 112, 180
as Alabastronopolis, 181
court, 48, 49, 75, 131–3, 173
defences, 119
desertion and destruction of, 7, 57, 173–4, 181–2
founding of, 110–28
Gempaaten, 125, 126
Great Palace, 121–2, 124–5, 182
Great Temple of the Aten, 117, 125–6
 Hwt-Aten (palace), 153
Hwt-Benben, 123, 126
King’s House, 52, 124, 127
Maru-Aten, 120, 128, 130, 152, 153, 154
North Palace, 120–21
North Riverside Palace, 120
Per-hai, 125
Royal Road, 119–20, 121, 124, 125, 128
Royal Tomb, 116, 130, 147, 150–51, 152, 162–3, 166–8, 171,
173, 184
sanitiation, 118–19
Small Temple of the Aten, 125
superstition, 84
tombs, 46, 55, 80–82, 130, 131–5, 146
Workmen’s Village, 83, 84, 130–31, 173, 186
Amarna boundary stelae. See boundary stelae
Amarna letters, 8, 27–8, 80, 124, 132, 151, 164, 182
Amen (god), 11, 12, 13, 20, 40, 45, 56, 58, 64, 66, 68, 76, 85, 88,
116, 153, 171, 178, 179
development of cult, 20, 67–9
father of king, 72–3
persecution, 66, 74
priesthood, 15
temples, 16, 17, 18, 31, 76, 171, 172–3 (See also Karnak Temple,
Luxor Temple)
Amenhotep I (king), 141, 142
Amenhotep II (king), 12, 19, 69, 85, 157
mummy cache, 35, 174–6 (See also KV 35)
Amenhotep III (king), 5, 7, 12, 24, 43, 45, 65, 74, 84, 95, 132, 133,
135, 142, 144, 157, 174–6, 178, 180; pl.1, pl.4. See also Malkata
Palace
a ection for Tiy, 25
bravery, 13
building works, 17–18, 30–31, 55–6
 canopic chest, 147
chief priest, 15
children, 29, 38, 138, 161
Colossi of Memnon, 18, 71, 95; pl.2
co-regency, 43–4
death and burial, 35–6, 174
divine birth, 11–12, 17, 72–3
foreign policy, 13, 34–5
harem, 26, 32
head of army, 15, 33, 62
head of civil service, 15
heb-sed, 29–30, 69, 71
images, 31–3, 142
Lord of Nubia, 24, 71
marriages, 19, 23, 26–8, 41, 42, 43, 129
mortuary temple, 17–18, 24, 31, 71
mummy, 35–6, 174
as Nimmuaria, 44
old age, 31–4
religion and divinity, 69, 70–71, 76, 135–7
scarabs, 19, 27–8, 30–31, 41, 98
sexuality, 33
Soleb temple, 24, 71
wealth, 13–14
Amenhotep IV (king). See Akhenaten
Amenhotep (name), 45
Amenhotep son of Hapu (administrator), 15–16, 29, 189
Amen-Re. See Amen
Amurru, 34–5
Anatolia, 34
Andrews, Emma B, 156
Anen (brother of Tiy), 20, 41, 47
titles, 20
Aneski (name), 46
Ankhesenamen (daughter of Nefertiti)
as Ankhesenpaaten, 52, 82, 109, 128, 134, 140, 163, 166, 168,
170, 177
as Dahamunzu, 178
as queen, 170, 171, 172, 178
Ankhesenpaaten. See Ankhesenamen
Ankhesenpaaten-the-younger, 168
Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten. See Neferititi
Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare. See Smenkhkare
Apis bulls, 39
archaeology
bias, 6–7, 56–7, 121
conclusions, 171
evidence, 117, 155
interpretation, 101–2, 121
practice, 184
rescue, 12, 160
army, 13, 15, 33, 75, 116, 119
Arnold, Dorothea, 109, 165
Art
Armana style, 87, 92–109, 114, 117
artistic conventions, 33, 38, 103, 105–6, 142–3
artists, 2, 186–7
children, 107–9, 138
domestic scenes, 82, 139–40, 172
evolution of style, 164–5
humour, 83
interpretation, 82–3
religious scenes, 80–82
Artatama I (king of Mitanni), 12, 27
Arzawa, 27
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 54, 124
Ashmunein. See Hermapolis
Aswan, 13, 95, 146
granite, 147
Asyut, 186
Aten (god), 1, 3, 49, 52, 58, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 75, 77, 82, 99,
106, 107, 110, 112, 113, 114, 118, 121, 127, 128, 130, 134, 135,
137, 138, 143, 146, 153, 157, 171, 172–3, 174
appearance, 104, 107, 134
desecration of image, 60
development of cult, 56, 66, 69, 70–71, 73–91, 146, 148
garden chapels, 81–2
Great Hymn to the Aten, 85–8, 109
names and titles, 75, 90–91, 91, 99
nature, 78, 102, 107
priesthood, 116, 117
temples, 76, 125–7
worship, 123–4, 126
Athribis, 15
Atum (god), 78, 79, 104
Aurora (goddess). See Eos
Auta (sculptor). See Iuty
Avaris (capital), 112
Ay (brother of Tiy). See also WV 23
as king, 147, 177, 178, 180
titles and rewards, 20, 47, 119, 132, 134, 176–7;
pl.15
tomb, 46, 48, 49, 53, 85, 86, 122, 123, 131, 134, 143
Ayrton, Edward, 155, 159
Aziru (prince of Amurru), 34

Babylon, 8, 26, 27
Baikie, James, 32, 33, 154
Bak (artist), 92, 94, 95, 102, 186
bats, 133, 184
beer, 13, 14, 17
Beketaten (princess), 138, 155, 187
Benben-stone, 56, 58, 70, 81, 123, 126–7. See also Hwt-Benben
Beni Amran, 9
Berlin Museum, 1, 140, 143, 189, 190
Nefertiti bust, 1, 2, 8, 64, 107, 164, 185, 186, 188–92
Bes (demi-god), 31, 83–4, 85
Beset (demi-goddess), 83
Bible, 4, 85
Birket Habu, 30–31
Book of the Dead, 88
Borchadt, Ludwig, 125, 185, 189, 190, 192
boundary stelae, 55, 74, 113–14, 115, 184, 186
Bouriant, Urbain, 166
Breasted, James, 184
British Museum, London, 161
Brooklyn Museum, 152
Brugsch, Heinrich, 184
Budge, Wallis, 20
Buttles, Janet, 6

Cairo, 2, 112, 182, 183

Museum, 22, 23, 35, 93, 102, 125, 127, 156, 158, 160, 189, 190
calendar, 9
Cambridge University, 186
canopic jars, 88, 147, 156, 158
Carter, Howard, 127, 172
cartouche, 25, 29, 64–5, 91, 99, 101, 144, 154, 157, 170
Castle of Nebmaatre-United-with Ptah, 16, 70
Chevrier, Henri, 60
childbirth, 64, 78, 79, 83, 84, 130, 147, 168
Christianity, 4, 85, 88, 89, 90, 148
Chubb, Mary, 183, 191
civil service, 13, 15, 124, 187
Cleopatra (queen), 191
Colossi of Memnon. See Amenhotep III
crowns, 52, 63–4, 99, 101, 109, 114, 127, 134, 139, 140, 143–5,
145, 147, 156, 165, 179
Nefertiti’s blue crown, 62, 64, 99, 135, 140, 143–4, 163, 190

Dahamunzu. See Ankhesenamen

damnatio memoriae, 179
Davies, Norman de Garis, 90, 113, 123, 133, 134, 153, 183, 184
Davis, Theodore M, 22–3, 155, 156, 157, 158
Deir-el-Bahri, 16, 17, 32, 78, 185
Deir-el-Medina, 17, 84, 130, 146, 177
Derry, Douglas, 160–1, 177
desecration of monuments. See destruction and defacement
destruction and defacement of monuments, 6, 7–8, 18, 56–7, 59–
60, 70, 74, 112, 113, 121, 125, 133, 182, 184
Diana, Princess of Wales, 4
diplomatic corrrespondence, 8, 14–15, 27–8, 34, 41, 43, 44–5, 164,
177–8
divine triads, 40, 78, 79, 80, 82–3, 146
Djarukha, 31
domestic shrines, 82
double uraeus. See uraeus
dwarfs, 49

Edwards, Amelia B, 182–3, 184, 191

Egypt Exploration Society, 113, 154, 183, 184, 185
Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, 176
Ekhmim. See Akhmim
Elder Lady, 175
Elephantine, 16, 171
el-Till, 9, 125
Eos (goddess), 18
epilepsy, 97
eunuch, 96, 123
eye disease, 182–3, 191

Faiyum, 13, 135

Filer, Joyce, 161
Fletcher, Joann, 176
food, 13–14, 30, 34, 137
Frankfort, Henry, 186
French Mission to Amarna, 182
Frölich’s syndrome, 97
Fuad (king), 190

Gardiner, Sir Alan, 131, 158

Gebel-el-Silsila, 56
Gempaaten (Amarna). See Amarna
Gempaaten (Thebes), 56, 58, 60, 65, 88, 93
asexual statues, 98–102, 106
German Oriental Society, 185
Gilukhepa (princess of Mitanni), 27–8, 47, 122, 129
Giza, 12. See also sphinx
pyramids, 2
God, 89, 147
God’s Hand of Amen, 104
God’s Wife of Amen, 103
Grace, Princess of Monaco, 4
Great Enchantress (goddess), 46
Great Hymn to the Aten. See Aten
Green Room. See Amarna: North Palace
Gri ths, F. L., 186
Grimal, Nicolas, 94
Gurob
harem palace, 135–7
head of Tiy, 21, 96, 106, 135, 165

Haj Qandil, 117

Hapy (god), 79
harem, 19, 25–6, 28, 31, 32, 38, 42, 49, 121, 135
Agents of the Harem Ladies, 75
Amarna, 121–3, 122, 128, 129
school, 15, 38, 39, 131
Hare Nome, 110
Harris, James, 161
Harris, John, 154
Harrison, Robert, 161, 177
Hatchepsut (female king), 17, 72, 74, 92, 142, 144
Hathor (goddess), 20, 24, 25, 29, 46, 58, 63, 78, 79, 83, 104, 143
Hawass, Zahi, 176
Hay, Robert, 182
heb-sed, 29–30, 56, 65–6, 69, 71, 101
Heliopolis, 16, 56, 58, 70, 92, 110, 112, 116, 127
henotheism, 90
Henut-Taneb (daughter of Tiy), 29, 30
Hepburn, Audrey, 191
Hermopolis, 16, 57, 61, 62, 98, 128, 161, 179, 181
hieroglyphs, 1, 9, 110, 186
Hitler, Adolf, 190
Hittites, 34, 46, 113, 177
Horemheb (king), 60, 127, 147, 173, 178–9, 180
Horus (god), 18, 39, 43, 54, 70, 91, 147, 158
compounded with Re (See Re-Harakhty)
eye of, 83
temple, 16
Huya (steward of Tiy), 81, 135–8, 147, 150, 187
Hwt-Aten (palace). See Amarna
Hwt-Aten (temple). See Amarna: Small Temple of the Aten
Hwt-Benben (Amarna). See Amarna
Hwt-Benben (Thebes), 56, 58–60, 64, 114
Hyksos, 112

Ibhat, 13, 33
incest, 19
inundation, 13, 68
Ishtar (goddess), 34, 35
Isis (daughter of Tiy), 29
Isis (goddess), 18, 76, 78, 143, 147, 158
Islam, 90, 148
Iunu (ancient Heliopolis). See Heliopolis
Iuty (sculptor), 186, 187
Jehovah, 89
Jomard, Edme, 181
jubilee. See Heb-sed
Judaism, 85, 88, 89, 90, 148
Julius Caesar, 97

Kadeshman-Enlil (King of Babylon), 27

Karnak Temple, 6, 16, 20, 60, 62, 64, 67, 68, 74, 94, 101, 102,
106, 117, 173
building works of Amenhotep III, 16–17, 69
building works of Amenhotep IV, 55–6, 57, 179
building works of Tutankhamen, 172
depictions of prisoners, 21
obelisks, 12, 58
pylons, 56, 59, 60
restoration stela, 171
talatat blocks, 57–8, 62, 64
Ka (soul), 17
Kemp, Barry J., 186
Kharu, 165
Khep (royal nursery), 47
Kheruef (steward of Tiy). See also TT 192
heb-sed, 30
tomb, 24, 25, 61, 71, 76, 79
Khnum (god), 16
Khonsu (god), 40, 68
King Lists, 7–8, 9, 180, 186
King’s House. See Amarna
Kiya (queen), 128–30, 129, 143, 146, 152, 153, 154, 158, 162, 163,
166, 168, 176, 188
Koran, 85
Kurigalzu (king of Babylon), 27
Kush. See Nabia
KV 35 (tomb of Amenhotep II), 174–6
KV 46 (tomb of Yuya and Thuyu), 22–3
KV 55 (tomb of unknown royal), 155–62, 163, 174
KV 58 (robbers’ cache), 177
KV 62 (tomb of Tutankhamen), 177

Lefebvre, Inspector, 189

Lepsius, Richard, 182
L’Hote, Nestor, 182
Libya, 150
linen, 103
Loeben, Christian, 152
Loret, Victor, 35, 174, 175
Louvre Museum, Paris, 39, 46, 82, 152
Luban, Marianne, 176
Luxor, 184
Temple, 17, 69, 72–3, 78

maat (concept), 71–2, 90, 93, 96, 171

Maat (goddess), 24, 62, 63, 79, 90, 172
Maathorneferure (Hittite princess), 42
Mahu (chief of police), 119, 120, 131
Malawi (modern town), 183
Malkata Palace, 7, 30–31, 37, 55, 84
Manetho, 96
Mansion of the Benben stone. See Hwt-Benben
Martin, Geo rey T., 163
Maru-Aten. See Amarna
Mary Queen of Scots, 191
Maspero, Gaston, 19, 22–3, 140
Mayatu. See Meritaten
May (scribe and chancellor), 132
Medinet el-Gurob. See Gurob
Medjay, 119
Meketaten (daughter of Nefertiti)
childhood, 52, 55, 114, 134, 140
death, 150–51, 152, 163, 165, 166–8, 167, 169
Meketaten-the-younger, 168
Memnon. See Amenhotep III: Colossi of Memnon
Memphis (northern capital), 16, 30, 37, 38, 39, 40, 56, 69, 70, 110,
112, 116, 179
Men (artist), 92, 95, 186
menit beads, 29
Menkheperure. See Tuthmosis IV
Merenptah (king), 18
Merimose (viceroy), 33
Meritaten (daughter of Nefertiti), 47, 98; pl.18 at
Amarna, 52, 55, 109, 114, 116, 119, 120, 121, 127, 128, 134,
139, 140, 152, 163, 164, 168
at Karnak, 58, 59
as queen, 153, 158, 166, 168, 170, 178
Meritaten-the-younger, 168
Meryre II (steward of Nefertiti), 150, 170, 181
Metropolitan Museum, New York, 23, 25, 158
Min (god), 20, 67, 99
temple, 17
Minieh (modern town), 182
Mitanni, 12, 26, 27, 34, 42, 44, 45, 113, 123, 129
Mnevis bulls, 116
monotheism, 4, 85, 88, 90, 173
Montu (god), 16–17
Moses, 90
music, 123–4
Mutemwia (queen), 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 58, 79, 80
Mut (goddess), 40, 48, 64, 68, 91
temple, 16
Mutnodjmet (sister of Mefertiti), 48, 135
Mutnodjmet (sister of Nefertiti), 24, 48–9
queen, 179

Nakht (o cial), house of, 127–8

Napkhururiya. See Akhenaten
Narmer (king), 62
Nebetah (daughter of Tiy), 29, 138
Nebmaatre Amenhotep III. See Amenhotep III
Neferkheperure Waenre. See Akhenaten
Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti. See Nefertiti
Neferneferuaten-the-younger (daughter of Nefertiti), 52, 54, 152
Neferneferure (daughter of Nefertiti), 52, 54, 152, 168
Neferteni (name), 46
Nefertiti (queen), 1–2, 37, 49, 86, 96, 121, 173, 179, 186
at Amarna, 116, 119, 134
as Ankheperure Neferneferuaten, 154–5, 163
as Ankheperure Smenkhkare (See Smenkhkare)
appearance and dress, 4, 49–52, 59, 59, 81, 99, 100–101, 102–3,
104–7, 105, 114, 120, 129, 134–5, 136, 142–6, 164–5, 176,
186, 191
Berlin bust, 8, 185, 188–92
co-regent, 142, 155, 164
 death, 116, 153, 158, 171, 178
disappearance, 155, 164
disgrace, 153–5
family groups, 82, 108, 114, 119, 127, 134, 135, 137, 139–40,
151, 152, 170
at Heb-sed, 66
image, 1, 2, 186;
pl.12, pl.14, pl.17, pl.19
at Karnak, 58–62 (See also Hwt-Benben)
marriage, 3, 42, 79, 121
motherhood, 3, 52, 54–5, 98, 109, 152, 162–3, 165, 166;
pl.16
name, 9, 41–2, 45, 129, 153
as Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, 9, 55, 64, 64–5, 87, 153, 154
origins and family, 40–49, 89, 96, 128–9, 176, 179
persecution of memory, 7, 60, 172, 180, 181
political role, 6, 80, 112, 140–46, 164, 192
religious and ritual role, 5, 59, 60–63, 61, 76, 79–81, 82, 83, 85,
86, 90, 101, 103–5, 107, 123–4, 126, 127, 134, 145–9, 158,
165, 172
as tourist symbol, 2, 189
Nefertum (god), 40
Nefert-Waty (name), 45
Neith (goddess), 147
Nephthys (goddess), 143, 147
Newton, Francis, 186
Nile, River, 2, 7, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 26, 31, 67, 68, 79, 87, 110,
118, 119, 127. See also inundation
Cataract, 13
Valley, 112
Nimmuaria. See Amenhotep III
Ninevah, 34
Nabia, 2, 12, 13, 14, 16, 21, 24, 56, 113, 147, 150, 165
obelisk, 12, 58, 70, 74, 126
obesity, 32
Oedipus complex, 5
Opet Festival, 17
Orus (unknown king), 96
Osiris (god), 18, 39, 40, 43, 54, 76, 87, 94, 137, 144, 147
Ottoman Empire, 26

Paglia, Camille, 192

Panehesy (temple o cial), 31, 81, 82, 126, 144
Parennefer (royal butler), 50, 122, 131, 132, 134, 135. See also TT
188
Pasi (soldier), 143
Peet, T. Eric, 186
Pendlebury, John, 124, 127, 153, 183, 186
Per-Aten. See Amarna: Great Temple of the Aten
Per-Hai. See Amarna
Petrie, W. M. Flinders, 20, 43, 52–3, 96, 97, 116–17, 124–5, 127,
184
Pi-Ramesses (capital), 7, 112
plague, 151, 152, 153, 166
Pollock, Dr, 159
Prisse d’Avennes, A. C. T. E., 182
Prudhoe lions, 161
Prussian epigraphic expedition, 182
Psalm 104, 85
Ptah (god), 16, 39, 40, 70
Punt, 72
Queen of, 32
Puy (royal ornament), 88

queen. See women

race, 21–2
Ramesses II (king), 7, 42, 57, 71, 112, 179
Ramose (vizier), 24, 50, 51, 60, 95, 134, 170. See also TT 55
Ranefer (Old Kingdom nobleman), 189
Redford, Donald B., 89
Red Sea, 113
Re (god), 11, 12, 20, 24, 28, 37, 52, 58, 63, 69, 71, 76, 86, 90, 91,
92, 153, 161
eye of, 63
origins of cult, 69–70
Re-Harakhty (god), 70, 76, 79, 90
appears in dream, 12
at Karnak, 56, 106
Riefstahl, Elisabeth, 119
Rossetti, Gabriel D., 93
Ruy (lady), 92

sacred boat, 17
Sakkara, 16, 39
Samson, Julia, 100, 101, 140–41, 191–2
Sayce, A.H., 156, 184–5
sebakh, 7, 8, 182
Second Death, 180. See also damnatio memoriae
Sedeinga temple, 24
sed festival. See heb-sed
Sekhmet (goddess), 24, 25, 34, 40
Selket (goddess), 147
Senwasret I (king) White Chapel, 16
Septimus Severus (emperor), 18
Serapeum, 16
Setepenre (daughter of Nefertiti), 52, 152, 166, 168, 170
Seth (god), 40
sexuality and sexual behaviour, 33, 104, 123, 146
Sheik Abd el-Gurna (burial site), 20
Shu (god), 78, 79, 83, 90, 91, 99, 101, 104, 105, 146
Shuttarna (king of Mitanni), 27, 28, 29
Sikket es-Sultan. See Amarna: Royal Road
Simon, James, 189
sistrum, 24, 29, 58, 59, 60, 114, 123, 146
Sitamen (daughter of Tiy), 29, 31, 47, 174
Smenkhkare (king), 154, 155, 158, 162, 163–4, 166, 168–70, 170,
174, 176, 180; pl.18
Smith, G. Elliott, 12, 35–6, 157, 160, 175
Smith, Ray Win eld, 60
smiting scenes, 61, 62, 101, 143, 145, 146, 177
Sobek, pl.1
Sobeknofru (female king), 141
social structure, 2–3, 15
Society for the Preservation of the Monuments of Egypt, 124
Sohag (modern town), 19
Soleb, 56, 71, 161
sphinx, 2, 12, 17
queen as, 24–5, 61, 64, 146, 179
Sprengel’s deformity, 177
Sunday Times, 176
Sun disc. See Aten
sunshade temples, 80, 125, 126, 128, 129, 135
Suppiluliumas (king of the Hittites), 177–8
Syria, 2, 12, 13, 21, 26, 34, 172

Tadukhepa (princess of Mitanni), 29, 42–3, 44, 49, 122, 123, 129
talatat blocks, 57, 60, 62, 64, 65–6, 75, 117
Tale of Two Brothers, 129
Ta-Miu (cat), 39
Taweret (goddess), 83–4, 85
Tefnut (goddess), 24, 25, 64, 78, 79, 83, 101, 104, 105, 143, 146,
179
tell, 9
Tell Amarna. See Amarna
Tell el-Amarna. See Amarna
Tetisheri (queen), 79
Tey (wife of Ay), 9
as nurse, 46–8, 178
as queen, 178
titles and rewards, 46, 134;
pl.15
tomb, 49, 134, 178
Thebes (southern capital), 7, 11, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 28, 30, 35, 37,
51, 52, 55, 57, 65, 67, 68, 71, 101, 105, 110, 112, 113, 116, 117,
119, 125, 126, 132, 140, 143, 146, 153, 161, 171, 174, 178, 183,
186, 188. See also Karnak; Luxor
Thoth (god), 11, 16, 45
Thuyu (mother of Tiy), 19–20, 21–2, 41, 47, 161, 175; pl.7, pl.8
burial, 22–3, 84
titles, 20
Tia (nurse), 82
Tiy (queen), 5, 9, 28, 31, 42, 81, 82, 84, 135, 186
 appearance, 21, 25, 31, 92, 96, 102–3, 106, 142, 143, 165, 186;
pl.3, pl.4 (See also Gurob)
burial, 157, 158–60, 174, 175
death, 152, 159, 165
family and origins, 19–23, 38, 41, 42, 47, 82, 89
as Hathor, 24
in uence over husband, 33, 45, 99
in uence over son, 5, 33, 45, 79–80, 186
as Maat, 24
marriage, 19, 63
monuments, 6
motherhood, 29, 78, 138
pleasure lake, 30–31, 69
political and religious roles, 5, 23–5, 29, 63, 71, 78, 79–80, 81,
126, 147
Sedeinga temple, 24, 147
as sphinx, 24–5, 61, 64
as Taweret, 84
titles, 23, 99
widowhood, 44–5, 135–8, 136
tomb robbery, 182, 184–5
toothache, 33
Torah, 85
triads. See divine triads
Troy, 18
TT 55 (tomb of Ramose), 24, 50, 51
TT 188 (tomb of Parennefer), 50
TT 192 (tomb of Kheruef), 24
Tunip, 34
Turin
erotic papyrus, 123
Museum, 84
Tushrata (king of Mitanni), 14–15, 28, 34, 42, 43, 44–5, 80
Tutankhamen (king), 71, 147, 161, 164, 173–4, 175, 177, 178, 180
death, 177, 178
discovery of tomb, 1, 189 (See also KV 62 (tomb of
Tutankhamen))
parentage, 161, 162, 163
restoration of religion, 171–3, 179
sarcophagus, 148, 157
as Tutankhaten, 155, 170, 171
Tuthmosis I (king), 39, 54, 141
Tuthmosis II (king), 39, 54
Tuthmosis III (king), 19, 54, 142
Tuthmosis IV (king), 11, 12, 27, 58, 69, 72, 74, 161, 174
Tuthmosis (name), 45
Tuthmosis (sculptor), 8, 94, 165, 186, 191. See also Berlin bust
excavation of workshop, 8, 185, 186, 187–8
Tuthmosis (son of Amenhotep III), 29, 35, 39
Tutu (chamberlain and treasurer), 122, 131–2, 133
Tyndale, Walter, 159

uraeus, 50, 59, 63, 64, 75, 91, 102, 114, 129, 135, 144, 147, 156,
157, 178
double, 29, 63, 102, 147

Valley of the Kings, 17, 22, 35, 155, 174. See also KV
Velikovsky, Immanuel, 5, 138
Venus gure, 104
Virgin Mary, 149

Wadi Hammermat, 113

Weigall, Arthur, 5–6, 22, 85, 93, 97, 159–60
Weret Hekau, 172
Western Valley, 35. See also WV
wet-nurse, 46–7, 48, 166
Wiedemann, Dr, 156
wigs, 15, 21, 25, 29, 50–52, 59, 102, 105, 106, 109, 114, 129, 135,
143, 144, 147, 156, 168
Wilkinson, John Gardiner, 181–2
Window of Appearance, 50, 51, 53, 124, 134, 143, 170
women
contemporary attitudes, 183
queen’s retinue, 48
in religion, 58
representations, 8, 92, 103, 106
role of the queen, 24, 58, 79, 99, 104, 141–2
status, 3, 40–41, 99
Woolley, Leonard, 83, 186
WV 22 (tomb of Amenhotep III), 35
WV 23 (tomb of Ay), 178

York University, 176

Younger Lady, 175–6
Yuya (father of Tiy), 19, 21–2, 41, 47; pl.5, pl.6
burial, 22–3, 84
name, 21
titles, 19, 47

Zannanza (prince of the Hittites), 178