Nefertiti

Nefertiti was the great royal wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BCE and, alongside him, a central figure in the short-lived religious revolution centred on the sun disc, the Aten. She appears in more images than almost any other Egyptian queen, often acting with an authority usually reserved for kings. Her painted limestone bust, found in 1912 and now in Berlin, has made her face one of the best known from the ancient world, yet her origins, her later life and her death remain uncertain.

Her name means "the beautiful one has come". Egyptologists render it Nefertiti, but it was probably pronounced something closer to Nafteta. She was born around 1370 BCE, but nothing is recorded about her childhood or parents. Her titles never call her a king's daughter or king's sister, so she was probably not of royal blood.

The most widely held view is that her father was Ay, a powerful courtier who held the title God's Father, sometimes used for the father-in-law of a king, and who much later became pharaoh himself. Ay's wife Tey was called the queen's nurse, which suggests she may have been Nefertiti's stepmother rather than her mother. Tombs at Amarna also name a sister, Mutbenret. None of these sources states the relationship outright, so Ay's fatherhood is a reasonable inference rather than a fact. An older theory that Nefertiti was a foreign princess from the kingdom of Mitanni has little support.

Nefertiti first appears at Thebes in the early years of her husband's reign, when he was still called Amenhotep IV. At Karnak, a temple built for the Aten was decorated with scenes in which she plays a leading part, including some in which she makes offerings to the god alone, without the king. In one striking motif she is shown in the traditional pose of a pharaoh, smiting foreign enemies with a mace, an image normally reserved for kings.

When Akhenaten founded the new capital of Akhetaten, at the site now called Amarna, she moved there with the court. The art of the period shows the royal couple as the only channel between the Aten and humanity, with the sun's rays reaching down to them alone. Nefertiti appears riding in chariots, presiding at ceremonies and sharing in the worship of the god, and is often shown at the same scale as her husband. Around year 5 or 6 she added Neferneferuaten, "beautiful are the beauties of the Aten", to her name. In domestic scenes she sits with the king and their daughters in a way unusual in Egyptian royal art.

The couple had six known daughters: Meritaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Neferneferuaten Tasherit, Neferneferure and Setepenre. Meketaten died young, around year 13 or 14 of the reign, and her parents are shown grieving over her body in the royal tomb at Amarna. Ankhesenpaaten later married Tutankhamun and changed her name to Ankhesenamun. Nefertiti was long considered a candidate for Tutankhamun's mother, but DNA studies published in 2010 pointed to another woman, the so-called Younger Lady. A few scholars still argue that the genetic results are compatible with Nefertiti, so the question is not entirely closed.

For much of the twentieth century, historians believed Nefertiti disappeared around year 12 or 14 of the reign, and explained this by death, disgrace or a fall from favour. That view changed in 2012, when an inscription in red ink was published from a limestone quarry at Dayr Abu Hinnis, north of Amarna. Dated to year 16, it names her as great royal wife, showing that she was alive and still queen about a year before Akhenaten's death.

What happened next is one of the most debated questions in Egyptology. At the end of Akhenaten's reign and just after it, a ruler with the name Neferneferuaten appears, sometimes with female grammatical forms, as well as a king called Smenkhkare. Some scholars think Nefertiti became her husband's co-regent and then ruled briefly on her own under one or both of these names before Tutankhamun came to the throne. Others identify the female ruler as her daughter Meritaten, or see Smenkhkare as a separate man. The evidence is fragmentary and the debate unresolved. A letter in the Hittite archives, from a widowed Egyptian queen asking for a Hittite prince to marry, has sometimes been attributed to her, though most scholars link it to Ankhesenamun.

When and how Nefertiti died is unknown; a date around 1330 BCE is often given, but it is an estimate. A burial for her was probably planned in the royal tomb at Amarna, and if she was buried there her remains may later have been moved to Thebes along with others of the family. Her mummy has never been securely identified. Claims that she is the Younger Lady or the Elder Lady from tomb KV35 have not been accepted, and suggestions from radar surveys since 2015 that a hidden chamber behind the walls of Tutankhamun's tomb might hold her burial have not been confirmed. After the return to the old religion, her images, like her husband's, were defaced and her name dropped from the official record.

On 6 December 1912 a German expedition led by Ludwig Borchardt found the painted bust in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose at Amarna, where it had probably been left as a model for other portraits. It went to Germany under the division of finds agreed with the Egyptian antiquities service, and has been on public display in Berlin since 1924, apart from the war years, and is now in the Neues Museum. Egypt has repeatedly asked for its return, arguing that its importance was concealed at the time of the division, and the dispute has never been settled.

The bust made Nefertiti a modern icon of beauty and female power, reproduced endlessly in art, fashion and popular culture. Historians stress that her real importance lies elsewhere: she was one of the most prominent queens in the history of ancient Egypt, sharing in the religious programme of the late New Kingdom to a degree with few parallels, and possibly ruling in her own right. Her era is covered on the History of Egypt page.