Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Nefertiti: The Greatest Ancient Egyptian Queen?

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Ancient Egyptian rulers, incest, the Nazis and female empowerment, all in one episode! 'But how?' You say. 'What story could possibly bring all of these things together?'This is the story of Queen Nefertiti and her bust. Kate is joined by Joyce Tyldesley and Monica Hanna to find out just who this woman was, and how a statue of her ended up in Berlin.Joyce Tyldesley is Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Classics, Ancient History, Archaeology and Egyptology at the University of Manchester. She is the author of many books including ‘Nefertiti's Face: The Creation of an Icon’.Monica Hanna is an Egyptologist, Associate Professor and Acting Dean of the College of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, in Aswan, Egypt. You can find out more about her work here.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Imagine you're on a date. Maybe at a quiet wine bar. Her long neck glows in the warm light. The shadows of the dimly lit room accentuating the fine features of her jaw and high cheekbones. Her eyebrows are immaculate. They must have taken some concentration. Eyebrows aren't easy, you know. And her makeup too looks professionally done. Flicks of eyeliner reaching to the edge of her eye socket. It's so difficult to tear our eyes away from hers.

She is so alluring. But then there are her lips of the million red, upturned in an amused smile. Honestly, we could stare at her for hours. This is a face loved by many. I actually think I might be falling a bit in love myself. I mean, for goodness sake, even her nose is perfect. And she's so serene, she looks so put together, so unflappable. I need to know more about this woman, where she comes from, and who she loves.

Shame that she's not actually real. Shame that what we're looking at here is a statue. Shame about the glass box holding her in in a high-ceilinged museum in Berlin. What we are looking at here is a bust of Queen Nefertiti. So she can't actually tell us very much about herself or how she got here. To learn that, we're going to have to go to the experts.

What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect. The recompense of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the body. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kailister.

Whether it's the pyramids, the pharaohs or the riddle of the sphinx, the ancient Egyptians and their culture have truly transcended time and space. artifacts uncovered by archaeologists in the sand, soil and rocks of North Africa have made their way across the globe. One of the most famous of these artefacts is the bust of Nefertiti, the head and shoulders of a woman who was once queen of Egypt. And that really is about as much as we know for sure. Today we are joined on betwixt the sheets by Egyptologists Monica Hannah and Joyce Tildesley. Monica will be telling us the story of the book

bust of Nefertiti and its journey to Berlin, which involves some sneaky deals, lies and Nazis. It's all sounding very Indiana Jones. But first, let's find out about the woman the bust was modelled after. Who was she? How much power did she have? How much incest was there in her family? And just how many women did she share her husband with? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Joyce Tildesley. How are you doing? I'm fine, thank you. How are you?

Thrilled to be talking to you about a really mysterious woman who I know very little about, apart from the fact she apparently had a beautiful neck. Yes. Queen Nefertiti. Yes. Well, actually, nobody knows much about her. It's one of the mysterious things about her that we think we actually know a lot about her, but actually we don't. So we don't, she might not have had a beautiful neck. She might have had a completely average neck. Absolutely, yes. I mean, we're basing this on some of the art that survived

and we're assuming that it's a portrait. But royal art isn't necessary a portrait. It might just be how she wanted to be portrayed. So, no, we can't even assume that we know what she looked like. Wow. So someone who studies ancient Egypt, an Egyptologist, how do you study someone like Nefertiti when all the sources are so, I don't want to say unstable, but you've got to double check and take them all with a pinch of.

How do you try and get to who this woman was? All you can do, and I think it's great, I love it, but then I like reading detective stories and doing jigsaw. So it's the same sort of thing. Oh, I love a jigsaw. Take every little tiny bit of evidence. So you have, examine it, and then try and piece it together in the way that makes the most sense. It's why, though, if you've got like a room full of Egyptologists together, we would never tell the same story, because we all believe slightly different versions of the past

and they're all kind of okay. You know, they're all backed up by evidence. We don't have the vast amount of information, particularly about nephotitis period, that people imagine we have. But I love that. I love the idea that we can all read through the evidence and slightly make up our own minds.

It's great. So what are some of the things that we do know, or at least we've got some kind of consensus on? What time period are we talking about here? Well, it's the Bronze Age in Egypt. We call it the 18th dynasty, but that's a bit baffling for people who aren't Egyptologists. It doesn't mean a great deal. We have a date for husband's reign.

He seems to have come to the throne in approximately 1352 BCE. And he reigned for approximately 17 years. And throughout his reign, we date it by his regnal year length. So we'll say year one, year two, year three. Because that's actually easier than trying to guess when the real dates are. So that is when we're talking about it. It's a long time ago. Sorry, this just occurred to be now, but how did the ancient Egypt, or at least at this time, how did they quantify time? So if we're saying he ruled for 17 years, if he'd been here, how long would he have said he ruled for?

It's exactly the same thing that he did. They had a really good calendar. The only problem they didn't have a leap year, so it slightly went out of sync every four years. But apart from that, they had a really good calendar. But they did date all the king's reigns to their regnal length so that when the king died, they would start counting again. So time stopped almost and started again. At H new reign was a new beginning. Which obviously really difficult for us to do that, but it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it in a way? Particularly if you think that the king is like semi-divine and so on and connected to the gods and things, it does make sense. And they did think that, didn't they?

Did they believe that it's a divine right of kings, or did they believe that the pharaoh is a god? A bit of both. Basically, you seem to be sort of human until the point you have your coronation. And at that point you change and you become like the one person who stands between the gods and the people. You're technically the one person who can speak to the gods

and they will speak to you and you do services for the gods. And that's why if you go to Egyptian temples on a holiday or see pictures of them, it's always the king who's doing the offerings because technically he's the only person he can. God's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure and actually you can't do it because there's temples all over the place

and they have services or ceremonies, you know, every hourly. You just couldn't do it one person. So he has deputies who are priests who work for him, but in theory it's him. He takes the rap if it goes wrong. So he has to maintain a really good relationship with the gods. And he's sort of semi-divine himself because he's really close to the gods. And then when he dies, he will become completely divine.

They became gods after death. Yes. He would become one with the god of the underworld, Osiris, or some thought that they would sail in the solar boat that was piloted by the sun god ray. I love that. And some thought they might become a star. Yeah, there were different options.

And you could also combine them. It's a very fluid religion. This is another thing. They don't have anything resembling a Bible or a set book of rules. It's very fluid. You could say that it's not really religion so much as loads and loads of cults, all functioning at the same time. It's very forgiving.

You don't have to believe the same thing as the next person. You can have your own interpretation. That's incredible. Yeah, it's good, isn't it? It's very good. I like that. You can be a star and in a moonboat and at one with the, the god of death. That's incredible.

A sunboat rather than a moonboat. Sunboat, sorry. Yeah, but no, you could probably go in a moonboat as well. Probably could, you couldn't I? So who was Nefertiti then? So she marries into royalty. Is she royalty already? Well, we don't know.

Because she doesn't tell us. The only clear that we have really is that if you are, what we would call the princess, that would be, they called it a king's daughter. And if you have that title, if you're born with it, you keep it all your life. So if you then marry a king, you would become a king's daughter, a king's wife.

And if you, in the fullness of time, you become the mother of a king, you would be a king's daughter, a king's wife, a king's mother. And you'd sort of put them all together. She doesn't do that. She's only a king's wife. And that suggests to us that she isn't born royal. Oh. But she's probably very closely related to the royal family

because we know that her husband, Akhenata, and his mother wasn't born royal either. And we do know who her parents were. And she's obviously quite close to the royal family. So we feel that probably Nefertiti is maybe a cousin on that side of it. So it's, you know, she's not royal, but she's certainly not a commoner. She's not like you and me. She's someone really special to start with.

So she's not a royal and Akanatin, the guy she marries. He's very royal. Oh, he's very royal. He is the son of the previous king. Right. So she's done well then, hadn't she? She has. We don't know if they pick the husbands and wives in the royal family.

Maybe she was always destined to. to do this. It would make sense if she'd been brought up to it because then she could be trained for her role when he was being trained for his, but we really don't know. Do we know much at all about the role of the wife with the Pharaoh? Because in my head, unfortunately, I was raised on the 1998 blockbuster, The Mummy, and that's what I think ancient Egypt was like. Well, that's a great film. It's a great film. It's a great film. But you shouldn't base your historical facts on that. But, so of course, the image of the Pharaoh's wife is, well, to know, what does the Pharaoh's wife do? Did they hold a lot of power?

Yes, yes, more than you think. First of all, he doesn't just have one wife. He has lots of wives. He has a Harim. But the Harrim wives are kept slightly separate because there are loads of them and they can't be at court all the time. So you have Harim Palisys, dotted about,

and he will visit them. But he has favourites with him and he has the consort. And Nefertiti is a Queen Consort and there's a massive gap between the Queen Consort and all the other queens because the Queen Consort, she will be the mother of the heir to the throne.

She is the one that appears in all the royal life. She is the one who is mentioned in diplomatic correspondence if anybody's mentioned. So it's as if there are just two of them. But actually, there are others. And it takes a lot of pressure off her because it means that if she can't produce an air, there's still a chance that otherwise can do. So actually producing babies is, yes, it's good if you can do it because ideally your child would go on to inherit the throne.

But if you can't do it, it's not the end of the world because probably another wife will and that will help you there. But we can see they have a lot of power. Nefertiti's mother-in-law, who's called Queen T, she is very powerful. We see her performing in religious contexts. We see her mentioned in diplomatic correspondence. Nefertiti again. Yes, far more than we thought.

And it's always been a tradition in ancient Egypt that if the king dies and the next king is a baby, the widowed queen will rule on behalf of the infant king until he's old enough to rule himself. So we can see that there's a lot of power in this. No. Yeah, so I think we underestimated it for ages. We just sort of imagined that they were there to be pretty and be baby machines. But actually, there's a lot more to it than that. It sounds like we've also underestimated the Harim.

Because I was quite surprised there when you said that they were his wives in the Harim, not just concubines, courtesans, just randos that they've grabbed off the street, is their wives. I mean, there might have been an element to them. We don't know where they came from. We know some of them were actual diplomatic marriages. and that kings in sort of neighbouring states would send daughters to Egypt to marry to the Egyptian king.

The Egyptians didn't send daughters to marry anyone else. They thought they were the top of the pyramids. So they got daughters in from abroad. And those were obviously high-ranking Harim queens. But really, they're all wives. We shouldn't distinguish between them. The idea that some are concubines and some are wives, I think, is a bit old-fashioned.

We tend to now class them all as Harim queens or Harim wives. But obviously, within the harem itself, there would be massive distinctions. I mean, some of the foreign wives who came in at about this time came with hundreds of attendance who would also presumably have gone into the Harreen Palace. And they would have spent their lives there. I don't know.

It might have been quite good because I was thinking about it. You're probably not going to have too many babies, which would have probably been horrific in the Bronze Age. You might not see the king very often. Now, that could be good or bad depending on your views of the king, but this is someone who you've been made to marry. It's not someone who you've chosen to marry. It might be a very nice life.

We don't know. I've always thought that, you know, of like the best of a bad job. I think as long as you got in there and you didn't have grand aspirations of ruling, if you were someone that went in there and went, I've got a nice setup here. I don't have to see him that often. I think that could actually work out quite nicely. Absolutely. And also, if you're lucky enough that you meet the king and you have a son,

you've also got a chance that your child will go on the throne. It's not going to happen to the foreign queens because they don't like. the idea of a foreign-born king being on the throne of Egypt. But if you are a high-ranking Egyptian woman who's in the Harium and has a son, you've always got a possibility as well that you will actually become the next king's mother. So it's got possibilities for an ambitious woman. It's a career ladder. It's a career ladder.

But also for women who, you know, it might be easier than having the normal quite hard home life that you would have had. I don't know. I mean, obviously I don't know. but it's not necessarily the bad institution that we imagine it does and it's not like a sort of Turkish harem that we imagine when we think about it. It's much more organised. The women of the hareming for example, they spin flax and they're in the linen trade.

They own property. Wow. Yeah, they work. Obviously not the high-ranking ones, but the lower-down ones, and the lower ones, presumably act as servants for the higher-ranking ones and so on. It's a female sort of... It's a higher-a-old.

Yes, yes. with trade involved. With sewing involved. So imagine if he's got signed up to the harim and you're like, actually, you're in the sewing pool. You'd like, fuck, yes. But how did Nefertiti get to be the top? We don't know for sure.

But how would you distinguish yourself from all these other queens? Well, she was his consort from the very beginning of his reign. So presumably they married either before he came to the throne, Akanaten, or immediately the point that he was crowned, he also got married. You don't really find Egyptian kings without wives because it's a sort of,

you need a wife to help you run the country. She's disting her, she has regalia, so she wears a crown. And in her case, it's quite obvious because quite often she wears a very typical crown, which is quite tall and it's got a sort of flat top. And no other queen wears that. So it's good and it's bad because every time we see that crown, we know it's Nefertiti, even if she's not labelled, the bad thing is, of course, that if she ever lent it to somebody else,

we wouldn't know. I mean, it's unlikely that someone else would be, picked it wearing it, but we do sometimes base it on the crowns and maybe we should just sometimes think about it a little bit before doing that. Even the famous image of Nefertiti, she's wearing that crown. That's the crown. That's the queen crown. That's the I'm the Queen B crown. But she's not labelled. Right. Oh, I see. And how old would she have been when she got married and how old would he have been? Again, really difficult to know. We're guessing, but we imagine that girls got married at about 13-14.

Okay. Boys, we don't know. We just don't know. And was that normal for your regular ancient Egyptians or was that a royal thing that it was that kind of an age? No, it's normal.

But the interesting thing is that the Egyptians don't tell us much about marriage at all. You just know who's together. And we know that where you are with someone and you are married, people are expected to respect that. But you can split up

and then go with other people. That is fine too. And if you're single, you can be with other people. But it's frowned on for, say, a man to go out with a married woman because that's not right. But the actual ceremony itself, we know nothing about it. So it could be something as simple just moving in together and having a party.

We don't think, we don't know that there's any written records in the temple or the state that records this. We just don't know. But it used to confuse the Egyptologists because they were very accustomed to, you know, a sort of Christian sort of marriage ceremony. But actually, it's a lot more like today when you know who's together, don't you? When you know who's not together. Yes, that's a good point. Yeah. There might not be a piece of paper to say it, but you don't need that, you know.

You know, yeah, that's true actually. So do we know anything about that? I'm going to guess, but there's no way of knowing if it was a happy marriage, if they got along. But did they have children? Well, yeah, the propaganda is that it's always a happy marriage, particularly royal propaganda. So when you have the king and the queen consort, they're always happy together. She's always beautiful. They hold hands together and so on.

Sounds very familiar. Well, yes, but we can't tell what's going on behind the scenes. We know that she has six living daughters because we know their names and we see them in the art and they start appearing. The first one appears in the first year. So you can sort of, it's not infallible, but you can sort of date artwork by the number of daughters there are. There's no evidence that she had sons, but that doesn't mean that she didn't have sons. Because at this time, you wouldn't necessarily put sons into a royal family grouping because the daughters would be seen as part of that family. They weren't going to leave it ever really,

whereas the sons were potentially kings in their own right were potentially slightly different. So might not feature in a scene like that. So just because there is no prince there doesn't mean that that prince doesn't exist. Has anyone suggested an artwork and inscription a hieroglyph might be Nefertiti's son? Has anyone put forward that as evidence? Well, yeah, quite a few people. I mean, me included, I've wondered whether Tutankhaman is Nefertiti's son or not. Yeah, I mean, he could be. Joyce, why, why? Why do you think that? I'm completely invested now. Well, because after Akenhaunton dies, there's a very short period where we have absolutely no idea what happens.

And then we find Tutankarman on the throne. Tutankarman is about eight years old when he comes to the throne. We didn't really know this until they found his tomb. It was assumed that Tutankarman was some sort of rich. noble, maybe a prince or something that came in and took the throne, because there was no one around to take it. But when Howard Carter found the body of Tutankhamen, he could see that he was only about 18 years old, and we knew that he reigned for 10 years. So we could work it backwards and see that he must have come to the throne when he was eight. So he's a child. So he's not

conquered Egypt or married into the royal family. He's actually born, we assume, royal or part royal. So the likely explanation is that he is a son of Akanartan. I think it is anyway. Lots of other people have other possible explanations as well. But to me it seems likely that he's a son of Akanaten. The question is who is his mother? And lots of people have different theories on this and use different amounts of evidence.

There's some DNA evidence that people use to suggest that maybe he's born to a sister of Akanatin. But the DNA evidence can be flawed in mummies because of the conditions, the heat and the chemicals and so on that the bodies have undergone over the years. People who think that Tutankan's mother is a Harim queen, a lady called Kea, because we know she's a prominent person. But there's also the possibility,

it's possibly the simplest explanation, that his mother is Nefertiti. A more complicated explanation is that his mother is Nefertiti's first-born daughter, which would make Nefertiti's grandma, which is interesting. They did like to mess with the family trees, didn't they? Yes, yes. And you can spend many a happy hour working out scenario, and counting years and trying to work out whether this person is likely to be old enough

to have had a child at this time and so on. Didn't they do, well, they've obviously done a lot of research on Tutankhamun's Remains, but they did a reconstruction and found that he had a lot of health problems of sort of prominent overbiting a club foot. And I'm sure it was suggested, I might be completely wrong, that he might have been the product of incest as a result, or is that just a NAF documentary that I've watched? Well, there's two things.

He could well have been the product of incest, because incestuous marriages within the royal family were absolutely fine. Well, brother-sister or brother-half-sister, not parent-child. People used to think they did that, but there's no real evidence for that at this time at all. So yes, he could well have been the product of an incestuous marriage. But again, some of the evidence from the body, again, it can be interpreted different ways, depending on how you look at it. For example, the club foot, there certainly is twisting to his foot,

but there's also the possibility that if you tightly wrap a body, you can actually twist the foot. So again, you'll get experts arguing that he hasn't got a club foot at all. And it's not that disabled at all. He's not shown us particularly having problems with mobility. We see him riding chariots. We see him fighting quite large animals. But that's art, of course.

We don't know what the truth is there. But again, we have to be very careful. And again, it's another one of those things where there are different aspects to the story. Was Nefertiti related to Akhenart and the Pharaoh she married? I think that she might have been the niece of his mother. His mother. Okay. Cousin.

Okay. By ancient Egyptian standards, that's not so bad. No, no. No. It's not. It's a bit odd, actually. It seems to be a family thing that you don't marry your sister at this point in the family. because Akanaten's parents also weren't brother and sister,

but it is in fact completely normal. They could well have been. Yeah, yeah. He could have, and he had sisters, but he didn't marry one of them, unless, and I'll just put this out there, just to confuse everybody even more, unless one of his sisters changed her name to Nefertiti, and we don't know about it.

But that seems unlikely, but it's a possibility, I guess. I don't think that did happen. I think that there's enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that she is the daughter of a woman, a man named I. Right. And he is a prominent courtier, which you would expect, at the court of Akanaten and Akanaten's father, Aminhotep III. But there's also evidence to suggest that he might have been the brother of the wife of Ammanhotep III.

So he might have been the queen's brother, which would, again, mean that they were cousins. And that would work well. But the interesting thing is that after Tutankham died, I, who is possibly never, to his father then becomes Pharaoh of Egypt. Oh, that suggests something, doesn't it? Yeah, he's very close to the royal family, isn't he? Yeah, very well connected, yes. To suddenly leap in there and go, I'm fair now.

Yeah, I mean, he's also been hanging around for ages because he's been through all these rains. He's quite an old man, but he manages to take the throne as well. You need a piece of paper and a pencil if you stood doing this. You really do. You need to draw it out and look at the possibilities. A spreadsheet or two. Yes.

I remember that brother-sister marriages are okay So you can't do it on one of the commercial packages That let you do family trees Because they won't let you do that That's amazing Every year I set it as a task for my students To do a family tree And they can't do it online

Which is writing into Ancestry.com I've like, please let us include incest in this So did Nefertiti ever rule as Queen Regent then? Possibly for Tut and Carmoon Possibly depends when you think she died Right Because we know she married, we know she has these daughters. Two of her daughters will go on to be Queens of Egypt.

We used to think that she vanished around about year 12 of her husband's reign. And there was a lot of discussion as to, could she really have vanished? Because she's obviously such an important person, which she is. Would she really truly have vanished? I mean, the answer is yes, because queens vanish all the time. And kings sometimes vanished too. We just don't, they don't necessarily tell you that their consort has died. But if you take it that he was so in love with her that he wouldn't have just let her go without mentioning it,

There were various possibilities, and one possibility that was suggested was that she actually ruled Egypt but changed her name and the two of them ruled together. But we now know that that is wrong because we have a piece of graffiti discovered in a quarry not far from his city, Amarna, where they both lived. And that mentions that she is still the queen consort in year 16 of his reign and he will die in year 17. So it looks like right up to the point he died, she was the queen consort, she wasn't ruling Egypt. So we've had to abandon any idea that she might have been ruling during his reign either with him or maybe he was ill and she did it instead of him. That's gone because of this piece of graffiti. But I mention that we're very confused as to what happens immediately after her husband's death. So there is a possibility because we do know from the diplomatic correspondence and from various archaeological evidence.

So there is an important woman around at this time. The trouble is we don't know who she is. They've had no consideration for future historians at all, do they, these people? It might be that she outlifts him and, yes, that she might guide the young Tutankarman. We don't know. Personally, I don't think she does because I don't think she's royal enough. I think this is going to be her problem. I think when her husband dies, because she's not born royal, she's not going to do this,

but her daughter, her eldest daughter might well do it. So I would say that this very important female about this time is her daughter, not her. Right. But again, probably not even most people would agree with me. There's a lot of Egyptology discussion about this one. But it certainly is true that there is a very prominent female here. I mean, I wonder if she died before her husband after year 16, but before he died, we don't know. Yeah.

And we don't have her body. Well, some people think we have her body. I don't think we have her body. People have constantly tried to identify mummies as her body. But it's never been proven. There's always been some sort of thing that makes you think it's this really right. And as I've said, DNA evidence is very useful, but it's not as useful in mummies as you'd hope it would be.

It can be inaccurate. Are there any mummies that have sort of come close that you might be wavering on a little bit of like, well, I see your point, but I don't think so. Nothing with like I am Nefertiti written on it. No. Because I think being realistic, she's not going to be a teenager.

She's had six daughters and she's been queen for 17 years. So I think she's going to be in her 30s or a 40s or even older. I mean, she might outlast eye and carry on even further. We don't know. She might retire to a harring palace, which some queens did. Put her feet up. So I think quite a few of the ones that have been suggested are too young to be Nefertiti.

And I don't think we've found her. But we're still looking. Would she have had a big tomb all of her own? Would she have been important enough for that? It would depend. If she ruled Egypt by herself, then possibly. But a standard queen, no. But it's all very confused again.

You probably don't need to want to hear this. But because Akan Aten built a special city that he and Nefertiti lived in, he called it a mana, he went there and he did this because he dedicated himself to a new cult, the cult of a god named as the Arton, which is the light of the sun. And he only wanted to worship this God. And this is really bad news because as I started off saying, the king is actually responsible for all the cults in Egypt and all the gods. So this was quite actually a frightening time for Egypt because the king is refusing to interact with most of the gods and only dealing with one of them. So that could have been really dangerous. So he retreats to his city with Nefertiti and they live there and then kind of overthrow all tradition this has been before. So for example, we start to see more art of the royal family and Nefertiti is prominent

and we're asking ourselves, well, is this because she really is more prominent or is this because he's got rid of all the old gods? So where you would have had old gods in the art she and he are appearing, they're taking the place of the gods at this point. So it's very difficult to know what would have happened with the burial if she died before him. But he did intend, he had built a tomb at Amarna

for the royal family, and he did intend her to be buried there because he did actually write this down for us. So maybe the simplest explanation is to say she died at Amarna and was buried there. He died at Amarna, was buried there. And then when Tutankham came to the throne after a couple of years, he actually abandoned the old religion that his father had brought him up in and went back to the traditional religion of ancient Egypt, started to where he was. He said, worship all the gods and abandon the city that Akanaten and Nefertiti had ruled from, he transported the bodies from Amarna back to the valley of the kings because if he'd left them at Amarna, anyone who died and who was in a tomb there, if he'd left them there, they would have been robbed.

Right. So he transported them back. He seems to have denuded them of all their property as well. Obviously, that's quite a good way of acquiring your own grave goods. And then he'd place them in different tombs in the valley of the kings. I'll be back with Joyce after this short break. Have we ever found Akanatin? I say we like I've ever looked,

but have archaeologists ever found Akanaten? Some people think that we have. There's a body that we call KV-55. We wouldn't like that, would he? No. It was found in a tomb that had been used as a workshop. So when Tutankarman brought all the Amarna royal family that had died back from Amarna to the Valley of the Kings Sea,

put them in a workshop, stripped them off, rebandage them and then send them out to different places. But one body was left in this tomb. The tomb is also coincidentally called KV-55. So this body is a male body. Now, some people think that it's Akan Atenarton. Right. Some people think it's Tutankarman's half-brother or full brother,

a man named Smencaray, who possibly ruled in that tiny little period between Tutankarman and Akanatin. I think it's Semencaray because I think it's too young to be Akanatun. Right. The body seems too young. seems to be in the early 20s, but other people have put the age much older. So again, it's a thing that people might want to read up on because it's absolutely fascinating.

That is, isn't it? And I have heard it suggested that maybe Nefertiti's body was in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Is that just a complete no-go for you? I can't see how it would happen because I don't think she ruled Egypt. So if she didn't rule Egypt, she died as a queen consort, she wouldn't expect to be in a prime team in the Valley of the Kings. But then some people think she did rule Egypt, or at least helped Tutankhamen even if she didn't step forward herself.

And what happened is that they were scanning the walls in Tutankarman's burial chamber because they were going to make a replica tomb so that tourists could visit a replica tomb, a really good replica tomb, rather than visiting the original tomb because it's damaging the walls of the original tomb for too many people to go in it.

And there's what looked like a bump of the wall and an academic came up with the idea that maybe there would be a door through there may be that Nefertiti is buried beyond that door, Dr Nicholas Reeves. And maybe it is, but I think it's very difficult to tell. Have we never checked? Are we not allowed? Well, we'd have to take the tomb apart, basically.

We have to take the paintings off the wall and, you know, it's not going to happen. I don't think it happened because I can't see the scenario that it would happen and it would be odd for Tutankhamen to effectively be buried in someone else's antechamber. But Tutankhammer's burial is odd anyway. It's almost certainly not the tomb he was intended to be buried in. He looks like another workshop tomb because we think that the tomb that Tutankhamen was building for himself

in the Valley of the Kings when he'd left Amarna and gone back to the old religion. After he died, I said that I took the tomb. The idea is that I booted Tutankarman out of his really grand tomb and put him into the small tomb that I had been using for himself or reserving for himself so that they swapped. But yeah, it's really interesting, but there's no aspect of this story that's simple, is there?

No, nothing at all. It's fascinating. But if we think about Queen Nefertiti, so what I'm taking away from this is we don't know where she was born, we don't really know who her family was, we don't know what she was like, we don't really know when they got married or how old she was, we don't know if it was a happy marriage.

We don't know when she died, where she was buried, or if she ruled Egypt. So why is there this legend and this mythology about this particular woman, given how little we actually know about her? I think we've been seduced by her beauty, in the art that we see her and we think that such a fascinating

looking woman. There is one particular image that a lot of people have seen that's of a piece that is currently in Berlin Museum and she's very striking. She's absolutely beautiful. And she's got no hair, she's got the tall crown on, she's got no hair, so that stops her being dated in a way and she's very regal looking, very colourful.

Got a picture of her up on my computer right now and she's, like she could be walking down any catwalk in the world, couldn't she? She could. And she appeals to pretty much everybody, like men like her, women, like a people of all ages, all ethnicities like her. She's really, really attractive. And I think we've just been seduced by this. It sounds like I'm trying to do it down and I'm not.

I do think she's a really important woman. But I think what she is is a woman in a family of really important women. And that by boosting her up, where maybe taking away from her mother-in-law tea, who was, again, a very powerful woman. And her two daughters who ruled Egypt, Mary Tartan and Anka-Sempa-Arton, and they're also very powerful women. This is clearly an era where women can come to the fore and can really perform. I had no idea that two of her daughters ruled.

That seems even more impressive than a mum who's got a lovely neck. But we don't hear about them. One of them, Anka Sampara Atom was married to Tutankarman, and we know that for a find. Okay, they kept it in the family. Yes, they started to brother-sister, marry at this point. That bus that's in Berlin, is that the most immediate image that we have of her? Does she survive in other artwork?

Yes, we have a lot of artworks of her because when Akan Atenham built his new city, there was nothing there, so he builds it, but he needed artwork absolutely everywhere. So he had studios set up that were churning out royal images, which were going all over the city. Because these were important. Because the old gods have gone,

he was encouraging the elite of Amarna, the people who lived there that really mattered, were encouraged to worship the new god the artin. Well, you couldn't just go in a field and worship the sun. You had to worship via the royal family. So a lot of these images would have been to help people worship or people would have better than in the houses. And also, of course, obviously to show allegiance to the king,

but everywhere needed to be decorated. So we have so many of these. But she looks different. She looks different in two dimensions when she's carved or painted on a wall and she looks in three dimensions in sculpture. To keep some consistency. They're obviously using a model in the workshop.

So there is a general similarity. And you can see that they're looking the same. but as I said before, it doesn't mean necessarily that's what she looks like. It means that's the image that they've chosen for her to look like. I guess all royal art really has always been the same, hasn't it? Yes, you can kind of choose what you want to look like because not many people will actually see you.

Nobody will know how accurate it is. So you probably never really saw herself very much because they have little tiny metal mirrors. The elite have them. But there's no big looking glass. When we're looking at images of her across different art forms, they are reasonably consistent, the big hat and the large. long neck. She doesn't always wear that crown. She wears other ones as well, but that's the

one that she's most common than. But no, not really. I would say the two-dimensional one, she's much more, looks much more like a husband. Obviously there's two sets of artists working here. She's much more sort of haggard looking. Oh, you'd shoot the artist, wouldn't you? Well, we think Akanatham wanted himself to be depicted in quite a strange way, because yet another aspect of his reign is when he comes to the throne. He abandons the traditional art form that kings normally have. Normally Egyptian kings all look the same and it's deliberate. So you'll recognise the king and the gods all recognise the king and you can see them doing their traditional actions. They beat up foreigners and they worship gods and so on. And they have kiltz and they look

quite young and fit always no matter what they actually look like. But Akan Aten looks completely different. He must have been telling his artist what to do because no one would have dared to do this without his permission. But he's got a very long thin face and he makes he look longer. He's He's got a long thin beard and he quite often wears a tall crumb. So he looks very long and thin. He's got almond-shaped eyes. He's got a long nose, which he emphasises it. And his body has got very narrow shoulders,

and he's got what looked like feminine breasts and well-developed waist and quite wide hips. Why do you think they made him a bit more booby than he probably was? Well, that's not a word. We don't know. A bit curfier. Presumably he proved it, because otherwise something terrible would have happened. And there are enough of them.

It was not just a one. off. And it does get gradually slightly more normal looking as things go on. But we wondered, first of all, does he look like that? There is some evidence actually that Tutankarman had really wide hips because he had some garments buried in his tomb. And when they've been reconstructed by archaeologists and they've tried to try them on, they have actually got quite, his kilts are quite wider and the waist. Yeah, so maybe it's a family trait to start with. Some people have suggested it might even be an illness. But other people have suggested, no, it's not what he looked like, but it's what he wanted to convey. And he's worshipping this new God, which is both a father and a mother. So he doesn't want to be

necessarily gender-specific. And maybe this is what he's trying to convey, but it's such a new idea to the Egyptians. It's never happened before that it's confusing everybody. But as he assumes this form, his court, particularly in two-dimensional sort of art, they all start to look the same. So Nefertiti starts to mirror him. And it's a flattering thing for the king. you all start to look like the king. Yeah, that makes sense. And you don't get it so much at a manor in the sculpture. But at Thebes, before he goes to this new city,

we've got some very striking images of Akanaten. Some people hate them, and some people actually are quite attracted to him. He's got quite sort of sensuous lips. You know, they sound like they should be horrible, but they're not. They're not. They're very striking. And of course, they designed to be seen from below. A lot of these are colossal statues.

Very compelling. So final question then. What do you think is the legacy of Queen Nefertiti? Because I sort of get the sense from talk to you that, like, she's fascinating, she's amazing, but there are better for better queens. I wouldn't say better. Better is too judgmental. I think for me, the legacy is not to just pick out individuals from history and focus on them

and ignore everyone else around because you can miss some really interesting people if you do that. I think we focus maybe on the wrong things with Nefertiti. it's not really right to focus on someone because of their beauty, is it? It's a trap to fall into. You have to fight your way out of it. And we can't assume that just because someone is beautiful, that they're good and kind and all that. And we sort of a bit do that with Nefertiti.

We do. So I think that's the lesson to learn from it. But the whole family was absolutely family full of fascinating women. I can't believe that you've managed to cover it all in the short space that we've had. It's absolutely mind-boggling. And your office must just have one of those boards with lots of pieces of string trying to work out who everybody is.

If people want to know more about you and your work, Joyce, where can they find you? I'm at Manchester University, so... I have written a book called Nefertiti's Face, which deals with some of the things that we've talked about here. Also, there's the whole effect of how art can influence us to how we regard the past. We can be influenced without realizing that we're being influenced.

And just how clever the ancient Egyptians were, how they use symbols and how they... Everything is absolutely fascinating. I love Egyptology. You can probably tell. After this break, we're going to cross over to Monica Hannah to hear tales of the fraudulent papers and Nazi hordes that have kept Nefertiti's bust from her home. Monica Hannah, how are you doing? I'm good, Kate. How's everything? I'm ecstatic because I get to talk to you about the bust of Nefertiti. Obviously, I knew the bust. It's iconic. It's beautiful.

I hadn't realized the troubled history behind it. I had been quite ignorant of that until I knew I was going to come and talk to you. So I suppose my first question is going to be, the bust of Nefertiti, it's in Berlin. It's been in Germany for 100 years. How did an Egyptian bust of Nefertiti end up in Berlin? It's a very long story that starts actually with Napoleon Bonaparte. So Napoleon comes to Egypt, thinking of himself as a descendant of Alexander the Great. He wants to appropriate the glory of Alexander the Great.

Okay. He fails miserably in the military, in the campaign, Nelson, the British general, burns all his fleet in Abu Qir. So Napoleon, to spin off such a hard defeat, he creates the Institute Egypt and he writes the book the Description de l'Egypt. And a lot of the savants that he brought, because he had this grandiose ideas of bringing enlightenment to the Egyptians, we poor Egyptians who needed to be enlightened. Oh, dear. He came, and many of the objects were stolen. The 17 famous big objects that were part of the Abukir Treaty, they go to the British, they take them as a spoil of war, out of which there is the famous Rosetta Stone

at the British Museum. The French have a terrible military defeat. They leave Egypt, withdraw, but Egyptology becomes French. The study of the ancient Egyptian past becomes a French monopoly, especially after François-Champollon decifers the Rosetta Stone

and were able to read the Egyptian texts and so on. During the whole 19th century, Egypt becomes ransack. There is a famous book by Brian Facon that describes this period, and he calls he actually entitles his book, The Rape of the Nile. So basically, the Nile is raped by all these imperialist and colonialist powers trying to snatch an obelisk from here, a stila from there, a statue from what have you. Did Egypt have a government of its own? Did it have anybody going, hang on a minute, give me a second. Nobody was doing that. Nobody was representing Egypt in any of this. There wasn't a government.

No. Egypt was under-layered colonialism. First, the French and the Ottomans, who formed the combined army. Then, by the end of the 19th century, the Ottomans and the British. Wow. So we were always, not just under the colonialism of one force, but we were continuously under such layered colonialism. So nobody's representing Egypt and all these people just come in and start stealing, basically. Precisely. And, you know, Mehmet Ali, the Turkish sovereign of Egypt, wanted all the European consuls to be happy about him. So he would give them the antiquities with permissions. He writes a decree that regulates the export, so no one can export unless he gives them approval.

So basically, it was also using this as a political tool. If you bring me arms from England, I'll give you antiquities. If you bring me arms from France, I'll give you antiquities. Then by the end of the 19th century, Egypt was under the British colonialism and the Ottoman colonialism. There was a decree since 1891 that finally said that all Egyptian antiquities belong to the Egyptian state. And Egypt, in return for the favors that the excavators put to dig the antiquities, Egypt can cede half of what is found to the excavator. Half. That was in 1891.

But Articles 5 and 6 of this Cadill Decree said that Egypt had the right to buy any object from the excavator's lot and that both lots should be completely equal and no masterpieces would leave Egypt. So how did Necetiti get out? Because that's a masterpiece, even I know that. Exactly. Everybody knows it's a march. It's a deceit. It's a proper deceit. So the Egyptians were never part of the antiquity service even at that time. By that time, we had a few Egyptians. who were working, but the French then took control after Mariette Basha came. French Mariette was a Louvre curator, came and became the head of the antiquities service, and he would forbid Egyptians from going to the museum to study texts, because he was afraid that if Egyptians would become very good in the study of their ancient past, the French and the British and the Germans would have no jobs in Egyptology,

and they can no longer trade in antiquities. By the end of the 19th century, we hear of Ludwig Burkhart, who is the person who later discovered Nefertiti. He was trained as an architect, and he comes and works in the German consulate around 1898, 1899. Then he becomes part of the Egyptian Egyptological Committee, which is the committee that was managing the Antiquity Service. And it never had an Egyptian until 1952. So back then they were mostly French. Then with Lord Kromer, the British sovereign, he would put forth so that there would be more British. And then we had one German who was Ludwig Pohat.

They are the people officially protecting the Egyptian antiquities. Yes, you know, this is how you put a wolf in the then of him. So in 1905, he becomes a member of the Egyptology committee. He excavates in Egypt, in Abbasir, in Abidos in different places. Then he becomes the excavator of a very rich German cotton trader called James Simon, who wants to buy antiquities from all the Middle East to put in the De Oghé or the Deutsche Orientalishkaelschaft in Berlin. So he commissions Borchard to go and excavate. Burkhart, of course, knew that he was not allowed to take masterpieces,

especially that in 1912, in June 1912, the first Egyptian law was issued, you know, the first antiquities protection law was in Italy, 1905, then the second was in Egypt in 1912 to protect the antiquities. And it emphatically stated that no masterpieces are allowed to leave the country, that Egypt owned all the objects but could give some of them to the excavate. Borghardt knew this. There's no way he didn't know it. Of course. I mean, he was part of the Egyptology committee who implemented the law on other Egyptologists. So it's like a judge taking a bribe, basically. The same ethical situation.

It is. This is really dodgy. Who finds Nefertiti? He found Nefertiti, I think, on the 6th of December in 1912. So six months or five months from the issuance of the first antiquities law. He writes in his diary a letter that it's wonderful, that you have to see it, that it's amazing, that I cannot explain it in words about the finding. Okay. Then he takes all the objects from Tellal Amarna that he discovered. He takes it to Cairo for the division of findings. And of course, still no Egyptians worked at the antiquity service, which was monopolized by the French. And in fact, you can read in a study by Gadir that he writes that one of the French journalists said that if Egypt had fleeted us politically, Egyptology is French.

So he would be really, or ancient Egypt is French. This is the amount of cultural appropriation that you could see even said by a journalist in your space. Wow. So Monsieur Lefevre was the inspector of the Antiquities Service under Gaston Maspiro. they would check the findings, probably wrote in the division verbal, that she was ahead of an Amarna princess, although he knew very well from her crown that she was the queen. But he dubiously said it's an Amarna princess. We don't know whether he covered her with mud or whether he just did not show it.

We really do not know exactly what happened. But there was lies being told. Of course. Yeah. Then he returns to Germany. the whole collection from Tellel Amarna becomes the property of James Simon, the Jewish cotton trader,

who shows it and exhibits it at home for very German notables who see it. Then James Simon, by the end of the First World, decides to give the whole collection to the Berlin Museum. But in his will of giving the whole object, he writes that if Egypt asks back for the bust of Nefertis, the museum must return it. So this was the clause of giving Nefertiti to the Berlin Museum by James Simon.

And did they ask for it back? Of course, many times. So in 1990, Egypt has its first national revolution. People take the streets, wanting all sorts of colonialists to be away. And there is a new, found sense of an Egyptian modern. identity. So 1992, Carter discovers the

tomb of Tutankhamun, the news go wildfire, and because of the colonialist rivalry between the Germans and the British, they put Nefertiti on display. They have been hiding it all this time because they did not want the Egyptians to claim it back. But they could not

tolerate the imperialist rivalry. They thought that all the collection of Tutankhammon was going to the British Museum. So they put Nefertiti on display, and then Egypt finds out that such a masterpiece has left Egypt. Of course, we go to very long negotiations. Usually between Pierre Lacos was the French after Maspero was responsible for the Antiquities Service in Egypt, and Heinrich Schaefer, the director of the Berlin Museum.

The negotiations failed, but then Hassan Nash-At-Besha, the Egyptian ambassador in Berlin, tries to pull through a deal with the Prussian government. The Prussian government is the actual owner of the bust, I think, even until today. Then it fails because Hitler, Third Reich, vetoes the final approval to return back the bust of Nefertiti and lose that chance. But even at that time, speaking again of this idea of layered colonialism, in the Q archive of the British National Archive, we find correspondence of the British ambassador. in Berlin, writing notes to the chief curator of the British Museum, making sure that the negotiations between the Egyptians and the Germans fail. And they write that, or else will

have to restitute back the Rosetta Stone to the Egyptians and the personal marbles to the Greek. It's so sneaky. Of course. Wait, wait, it even gets more interesting. Then in In 1946, after World War II, Noorashi Basha, the foreign minister, sends letters to the Quadripartite army asking back for the bus that was found in Wieszabad after World War II. The British and the French say that the bus was found in an American control area. The Russians say, yes, you can have the bus back. But when the letters go to Washington, the so-called monuments men that we've seen their beautiful film, and so how brave they were in restituting the different objects, they actually object and say we will not return objects before the war

because then the museums will lose important objects as the Rosetta Stone and as the Parson and Marbles, even without them knowing, but it's the same colonialist rationale, even in the heads of the most progressive people that we thought were the monuments men. So to recap, Nefertiti was found, but she was basically not quite snuck out of the country, but she wasn't declared for what she was. He knew that was the Nefertiti bust, and he did not declare it. She gets taken to Berlin, where everyone's really excited to have this bust,

but they don't want to show anybody because they know the Egyptians will get upset. Then Tutankhamun is found because they said, well, we've got Egyptian things. too, they put the bust on display and then it all kicks off. Precisely, yes. Wow. Okay. Didn't Hitler really like Nefertiti? Didn't he get involved in this?

Yes. And he said that he was in love with her and that part of his hallucinations of this Grand Europa Museum was to have Nefertiti as the centerpiece. And I think that one of the references mentioned that he said that what belongs to the Germans, the Germans keep. It seems strange for Hitler to have such an attraction to an Egyptian woman. I mean, I know he was mad, but what was... Because she was king and she was powerful, and I think he was attracted to power.

And he even went along and said she might even have Aryan blood. He would have people write articles in the new German newspaper saying that Nefertiti was Aryan. Wow. So basically all the museums close ranks, if they have to give Nefertiti back, then they're going to have to give a lot of other stuff back. Yes, it will open the doors that they don't want to open. And is that still the state of it today? Where's Nefertiti to this day?

She's still in Berlin. She's still in Berlin. And what's the argument? Why, it seems really clear cut to me that she was deceptively taken out of the country and that it broke the contract at the time, which was that you can't take masterpieces. Then it breaks the will of the guy Simon, who said it has to be returned.

Exactly. They would even lie in the correspondence to the Egyptians and say we're trying to reach Mr. James Simon to get his permission in 1928, although he had already said that clause in giving the whole collection. So they would even lie to the Egyptians and the negotiations. Just it's so bad. Can I ask, what does Nefertiti mean to Egypt? I mean, even if obviously this is a terror, she should never have been taken. But, Why is this bust so important to Egypt and Egypt's identity? I think because also for Egyptian women, there is this idea of feminism where Nefertiti is one of the chief patrons. You see her even, you know, when women were sexually harassed in 2011 revolution, they would carry flags with the bus. For them, she was this powerful woman that is a symbol of powerful Egyptian women. I think she has to be back also because it's part of the identity and the image of modern and contemporary Egyptian society. She's hugely important and it's so iconic.

Have they ever changed the argument as to why they can't give them back? They have the silliest excuses. Like, we have a law in Germany that what stays in Germany for 25 years cannot be returned back. Right. Okay. Yeah, exactly. And that what Borchard did was legal. And I was even once attacked by someone who supported the against argument that it's unfair to do this to Borchart because Borchart was Jewish. But then the argument the other way around is that James Simon was Jewish and they ignored his will.

Yes. They don't want to give it back because it's producing so much money for the museum. Can you imagine the amount of merchandise that the museum is selling with Nefertiti? the amount of tickets they're selling for people just who they only want to go and see Nefertiti. It's money. It's the amount of money they've made in this 100 years that's making them not wanting to give it back. They would rather give aid money to Egypt, but they would not give Nefertiti because Nefertiti is this sustainable object that keeps bringing the money to their museum institution. Do you think we could go and steal her, Monica?

We'll just bust her out. Actually, there were two great artists, Nora El-Badri and Nellis Nikolai, who did the digital heist. So they went with a scanner and they actually leaked because even until I think 2015 or 2014, the digital scanning of the Nefertiti was also kept imprisoned in the museum. And they snuck in and scanned there was, they also did a digital heist. Malika, you have been fascinated to talk to. And if people want to find you and learn more about your work, are you on social media? Do you have a website?

Yes, there is a website that we've created called bring nefertiti home.com. People can read about our research and they can also sign a petition. Thank you so much for talking to me today. And free Nefertiti? Free Nefertiti, yes. Thanks for listening. Thank you so much to Joyce and Monica for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along

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although not at the same time. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.