Archaeologists
still have many unanswered questions about Nefertiti, but from what is known,
we can piece together a basic understanding of her life.
First,
although Nefertiti was the Great Royal Wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (better
known as Akhenaten), she was NOT his sister. (WHAT?!) Nefertiti brought some
desperately needed genetic diversity to the table, and although she had six,
healthy children with Akhenaten, they were all girls. Nefertiti was Akhenaten’s
favored wife, but she didn’t stop him from also marrying his sister (eww) who
gave birth to his most famous progeny: Tutankhaten, who later changed his name
to Tutankhamun – affectionately nicknamed in the 20th and 21st
centuries as King Tut.
To keep it
all in the family, King Tut married his half-sister, Nefertiti’s daughter,
Ankhesenamun – who may have also had the misfortune of being previously married
to her father, and then married to her maternal grandfather after King Tut’s
death, before she died at the tender age of 26: her only children, stillborn.
(I can’t imagine why – these Ancient Egyptians, man.)
(Note: Some
historians do believe that Nefertiti was King Tut’s mother and Akhenaten’s
sister. DNA tests revealed that the mummified body of a woman in King Tut’s tomb
whom archaeologists call “The Younger Lady” is both Akhenaten’s full sister and
King Tut’s mother but there are also debates over whether this is Nefertiti’s
body or someone else’s. See my notes on my sources for more details.)
Nefertiti
lived and ruled during a tenuous time in 18th Dynasty Egypt (c.
1300s BCE – about a century after Hatshepsut).
The tumult was largely due to a religious revolution launched by Nefertiti and
her husband Akhenaten in the 5th year of Akhenaten’s reign. It is
unknown if this revolution was Nefertiti’s idea, or Akhenaten’s, or a shared
passion of the couple who were so often portrayed together, as equals.
Regardless of the extent of Nefertiti’s agency in this revolution, she
certainly played a role.
As you may
know, the Ancient Egyptians were polytheists, worshipping a pantheon of gods –
one that continued to grow over time as dead Pharaohs were deified, and one
that shifted like desert sands as one god or another became in vogue or else
lost favor as the cult-of-choice for the ruling family. At the time of
Akhenaten’s ascension, the favored deity was Amon – but Akhenaten shifted
worship to a new sun deity: Aten – hence his name change from Amenhotep to
Akhenaten, showing his allegiance to a different god. The radical part was not
that he had shifted primacy to a new god – Pharaohs did that all the time – but
rather, in elevating Aten as supreme deity, Akhenaten declared that all other
gods were false and that Aten was the
only true god, thereby shifting Ancient Egypt into a brief period of
monotheism.
One way to
think about this religious revolution is as a power grab: a way of undercutting
the power of the priesthood which rivaled that of the Pharaoh. By declaring
other gods as false and naming himself and his wife Nefertiti as the high
priests of Aten’s cult – making them the sole
intermediaries between god and earth – Akhenaten completely eliminated the need
for a priesthood. It is not unlike the European monarchs of the 16th
century CE, such as Henry VIII of England, who disliked sharing their power
with the Papacy and Catholic clergy, and saw Protestantism as a way around the
Catholic Church. Henry VIII’s stunt in particular made him, and future English
monarchs, the head of the Anglican Church – similar to Nefertiti and Akhenaten’s
ascension to priesthood. Also like Henry VIII, who confiscated monastic lands
and property and de-frocked priests, Nefertiti and Akhenaten plundered the old
temples at Karnak, fired priests, and then up and moved from the historic
capital of Thebes to build a new city in the desert called Amarna (giving the
reign its name – the Amarna period).
At Amarna,
Nefertiti and Akhenaten built their new city and temples infused with a staggering
amount of propaganda.
Innumerable carvings of the royal power couple depict them
together, as equals, often with their young daughters. There are numerous ways
in which reliefs, such as the one shown above, deviate from earlier examples of
Egyptian art. First, there’s the style. Most carvings before (and frankly,
after) the Amarna period give Egyptians very boxy features. The Amarna reliefs
celebrate curviness, and puts the royal family on much more spindly limbs than
other examples of Egyptian sculpture. There are also the messages that are
being sent to the audience, which differ from other Egyptian art. Akhenaten and
Nefertiti depict themselves as a happy couple, and tend to show scenes of
intimate family life – especially them hanging out with their children –
something that is rarely a subject of Ancient Egyptian art. Most radically,
however, is the way that the co-rulers projected themselves as part of a
trinity with their god, Aten. Nefertiti in particular can be understood as the
new fertility goddess of this cult.
Theories
abound about Nefertiti’s fate, with no definitive evidence to 100% prove any of
them. Sometime between the 12th and 14th year of Akhenaten’s
reign, Nefertiti’s name and image disappears from the historical record. Some
Egyptologists suspect that she died. Others think that she was elevated from
Akhenaten’s co-regent (already an astonishing political position for an
Egyptian Queen) to Pharaoh in her own right either as Neferneferuaten or
Smenkhkare. Around the time of Nefertiti’s disappearance from the historical
record, a powerful male advisor called Smenkhkare emerged, and reigned for
about three years between the death of Akhenaten and the ascension of King Tut.
Some believe that Smenkhkare was none other than Nefertiti herself, and the
name and image of a male alias was a ruse, not unlike the one Hatshepsut
exercised.
Smenkhkare –
whoever he or she was – abandoned Amarna and made nice with the temple priests
in Karnak. It is well recorded that King Tut’s birth name was Tutankhaten in honor of his father’s god, Aten,
and that his name was changed to Tutankhamen
to signify the royal family’s return to the cult of Amon. What isn’t clear in
my limited research is whether Tut changed the name himself, or if the change
was made for him by his predecessor, who may or may not have been his
mother-in-law. Egyptologists who ascribe to the theory of
Nefertiti-as-Smenkhkare tend to view Nefertiti as having been much more
pragmatic than her husband, ergo, returning to Karnak to save the empire.
Changing her step-son/son-in-law’s name would not have been out of character
for this version of Nefertiti.
Even if
Nefertiti did spend the last few years of her life as Pharaoh, the
circumstances of her death remain unknown, as her body has yet to be positively
identified. Some speculate there may have been foul play. Nefertiti and her
husband were both symbols of a disgraced cult and a dying dynasty. Not long
after their deaths, the priests of Karnak disassembled Amarna brick by brick,
destroying any image or mention of her. Like Hatshepsut, she was lost to the
sands of time, until 1913, when a German archaeologist discovered a limestone bust
in an ancient artist’s studio, and the world became entranced by her beauty.
An
interesting footnote to Nefertiti and King Tut’s saga is what they have come to
represent in the modern world. After British archaeologists uncovered Tut’s
splendid tomb in 1922, Germany began to display Nefertiti’s bust more prominently
as a rival to King Tut’s treasure and a way of showing off German
archaeological prowess. Even the Nazis revered Nefertiti’s bust as one of their
national treasures: Hitler himself loved it. The contest between the British
and Germans over displaying their discoveries in Egypt turned the artistic
renderings of Tut and Nefertiti into two of the most iconic faces of Ancient
Egypt, despite the fact that in their own times, they were a deviation from the
norm: far from ordinary, and far from revered.
Wikipedia
The Guardian
Discovery
Channel: Queen Nefertiti. This, at times cheesy, 2003 documentary follows
the expedition of Joann Fletcher (sometimes described as an “expert in ancient
hair”) to find Nefertiti. Not all historians agree that she found Nefertiti’s
body, especially given that later DNA tests seem to suggest that this mummy,
sometimes called Lady X or the Younger Lady, is actually Akhenaten’s sister and
King Tut’s mother. The DNA evidence doesn’t necessarily rule out Nefertiti as
the mummy’s identity, but it does contradict other beliefs Egyptologists have
long held about Nefertiti – i.e. that she was neither Akhenaten’s sister, nor
King Tut’s mother.
National Geographic
Khan Academy
Encyclopedia Britannica
Fans of Historical Babes may enjoy the novels of Michelle
Moran, who brings to life historical women through fictional portraits. Her
subjects include not only Nefertiti, but also a subject from one of my previous
posts, Lakshmi
Bai.
