Nefertiti Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  NEFERTITI

  Joyce Ann Tyldesley was born in Bolton, Lancashire. She gained a first-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 without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being 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 offering 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 flimsy 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 e
l-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 identification 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 flurry of more speculative books, each claiming to reveal their own particular ‘truth’ about Nefertiti. In addition, there have been important developments in the field 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 definitely reclassified as a young royal male, while in nearby KV 35 there rests a once-male mummy reclassified 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 fieldwork. 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 influential woman in the ancient world. Standing proud beside her husband Akhenaten, Nefertiti was the envy of all; a beautiful, fertile woman blessed by the sun-god, adored by her six daughters and worshipped by her people. Her image and her name were celebrated throughout Egypt and her future seemed golden. Suddenly Nefertiti disappeared from the heart of the royal family. No record survives to detail her death, no monument serves to mark her passing, and to this day her end remains an enigma. Nefertiti’s body has never been recovered.

  Soon after Nefertiti’s disappearance her husband’s unorthodox reign was erased from Egypt’s official record. With history successfully rewritten, king and queen were conveniently forgotten. It was as if Nefertiti and Akhenaten had never been. The decoding of the hieroglyphic script at the beginning of the nineteenth century restored Nefertiti’s name to scholars, but she remained a shadowy figure, merely one amongst the many faceless queens of Egypt. It was left to archaeology to return her to her unique position in Egyptian history. A succession of egyptologists excavating at the Middle Egyptian site of Amarna did much to reconstruct her story, but it was not until 1924, when a painted limestone bust was put on display in Berlin Museum, that the general public became aware of Nefertiti’s existence (plate 19). This was perfect timing. Western Europe, already experiencing a bout of Egypto-mania following the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen, immediately hailed Nefertiti as one of the most beautiful and fascinating women of all time. Ever since, this image of Nefertiti has stood alongside the death mask of Tutankhamen, the pyramids of Giza and the sphinx as a universally recognized symbol of Egypt’s history. Nefertiti now gazes out from a wide variety of tourist-orientated bric-à-brac. Anything which could feasibly be embellished with her head has been, and the hapless holidaymaker looking for a suitable souvenir is presented with a tempting display ranging from Nefertiti earrings to key-rings, postcards, playing cards, tea-towels, tablecloths and of course ‘ancient’ papyri. Even the carrier bags from Cairo airport’s duty-free shop display Nefertiti’s image, and many of the tourists carefully selecting their Nefertiti-enhanced T-shirts seem completely unaware that the original bust is actually housed almost two thousand miles away in Berlin.

  Nefertiti lived during the late 18th Dynasty, an idyllic period of unprecedented luxury tinged with more than a hint of decadence. Egypt had always been a wealthy country blessed with abundant natural resources and a plentiful supply of water but now, with an empire stretching unchallenged from Nubia to Syria, tribute and gifts poured in until the royal coffers were full as they had never been before. The Egyptian court was the sophisticated centre of the civilized world, and everyone bowed down before its king. Scribes, artists and craftsmen, stimulated by this new internationalism and, of course, by increased funding, started to produce some of their finest work; this was the age of lyric love poetry, sensual sculpture and brightly painted tombs. At the same time monumental architecture flourished and massive stone temples dedicated to a variety of gods started to dominate the skylines of towns and cities up and down the Nile.

  The New Kingdom élite decorated their tombs with images of the idyllic life that they fully expected to enjoy beyond death. Theirs was an afterlife heavily based on their earlier Egyptian experiences. Here we can see the deceased dressed in robes of finest white linen as they enjoy a leisurely sail on the river or dawdle in a field of gleaming corn. Evenings are times of feasting and fun, when vast amounts of food can be washed down with endless cups of wine while listening to an all-female orchestra or watching an exciting troupe of semi-naked dancers. Even allowing for a certain amount of wishful thinking, the Egyptian upper classes had never had it so good. The middle classes, benefiting from the necessary expansion of the state bureaucr
acy, flourished in a more muted manner, while the labourers employed on the royal building projects were kept busy as they had never been before. Meanwhile the peasant farmers, the vast majority of the population, remained largely untouched by Egypt’s new prosperity and continued to live the life led by their parents and grandparents before them.

  The women of the 18th Dynasty enjoyed a freedom that made them unique in the ancient world. They had the same legal rights as men, and were permitted to own property, to work outside the home, and to live alone and raise their children without the protection of a male guardian. Nevertheless, few women received a formal education and, in a country where maybe between two and ten per cent of the population was literate, few women could read or write. Women were not expected to train for careers. They were expected to marry and produce children, and mothers enjoyed a position of great respect within the home and the wider community. Nefertiti was no exception. Born a non-royal member of Egypt’s élite, she was married as a young girl to the most enigmatic individual in Egyptian history. By the age of thirty Nefertiti had borne at least six children and had transformed herself into a semi-divine human being. Meanwhile her husband, Akhenaten, had instigated a religious revolution and founded a capital city.

  Akhenaten dominates Nefertiti’s story making it impossible to entirely separate the two. I make no apology for including him as a major character throughout Nefertiti’s tale. It is through his eyes – his sculptures, his monuments, his city and the unique demands of his religion – that we are allowed to look at his queen. We see only what he sanctioned, only what he wanted us to see, and Akhenaten appears, directly or indirectly, in every chapter of Nefertiti’s life, subtly directing the way that we view his wife. Perhaps this is why so many writers have been keen to grant Nefertiti a life beyond the stifling confinement of Amarna, beyond her husband’s overwhelming influence.