Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Nefertiti: King Tut’s Mummy-in-Law

Even if you’ve never heard of Nefertiti, you’ve probably seen her. Her bust, believed to have been carved by the sculptor Thutmose, is one of the most iconic ancient Egyptian artifacts in the modern world.
 Besides Cleopatra, she was the only Ancient Egyptian woman that I could name when I was a kid. But other than her name, and what she looked like, I didn’t know anything else about her until I started doing research for this post.
            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.
 Understandably, undercutting thousands of years of religious tradition, not to mention laying off an entire class of once-powerful people, did not endear the royal couple to much of the populace. Their new cult was especially unpopular because they did not provide any requisite economic or social advances to accompany their new religion. So, after the end of Akhenaten’s seventeen-year reign, both the new capital of Amarna, and the experiment in monotheism were abandoned.
            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.  
 Sources:
Wikipedia
            Neferneferuaten
            Ankhesenamun
            Nefertiti
            Smenkhkare
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
            Desperately Seeking Queen Nefertiti
Khan Academy
            Thutmose Bust of Nefertiti
Encyclopedia Britannica
            Nefertiti
            Aton   
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.

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