In Our Time - Nefertiti

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the woman who inspired one of the best known artefacts from ancient Egypt. The Bust of Nefertiti is multicoloured and symmetrical, about 49cm/18" high and, despite the missing left eye, still holds the gaze of onlookers below its tall, blue, flat topped headdress. Its discovery in 1912 in Amarna was kept quiet at first but its display in Berlin in the 1920s caused a sensation, with replicas sent out across the world. Ever since, as with Tutankhamun perhaps, the concrete facts about Nefertiti herself have barely kept up with the theories, the legends and the speculation, reinvigorated with each new discovery. WithAidan Dodson Honorary Professor of Egyptology at the University of BristolJoyce Tyldesley Professor of Egyptology at the University of ManchesterAnd Kate Spence Senior Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel CollegeProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Dorothea Arnold (ed.), The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty from Ancient Egypt (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996) Norman de Garis Davies, The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna (6 vols. Egypt Exploration Society, 1903-1908) Aidan Dodson, Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb and the Egyptian Counter-reformation. (American University in Cairo Press, 2009 Aidan Dodson, Nefertiti, Queen and Pharaoh of Egypt: her life and afterlife (American University in Cairo Press, 2020)Aidan Dodson, Tutankhamun: King of Egypt: his life and afterlife (American University in Cairo Press, 2022)Barry Kemp, The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People (Thames and Hudson, 2012)Dominic Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (Routledge, 2002)Friederike Seyfried (ed.), In the Light of Amarna: 100 Years of the Nefertiti Discovery (Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussamlung Staatlich Museen zu Berlin/ Michael Imhof Verlag, 2013)Joyce Tyldesley, Tutankhamun: Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma (Headline, 2022) Joyce Tyldesley, Nefertiti’s Face: The Creation of an Icon (Profile Books, 2018)Joyce Tyldesley, Nefertiti: Egypt’s Sun Queen (Viking, 1998)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, the Bustam Nefertiti is one of the best known artefacts

from ancient Egypt, multicoloured and symmetrical, and despite the missing left eye, still holding the gaze of posterity below her tall, headdress. Its discovery in 1912 in a manner was kept quiet at first, but its display in Berlin in the 1920s caused a sensation with replicas sent out all across the world. And ever since, as with Tutankhamen, the concrete facts about Nefertiti herself have barely kept up with the theories, the legends, the speculation, reinvigorated with each new discovery. With me to discuss

Nefertiti are Aidan Dodson, Honorary Professor of Egyptology at the University of Bristol, George Stilsley, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Manchester, and Kate Spence, Senior Lecture in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College. Kate Spence, and we mentioned Amarna, where was it, and what was it? Amarna was a settlement built in just after 1350 BC by the Pharaoh Arcan Arten as the centre for the worship of his new son cult, the worship of the Arten. and it has palaces, temples, all of the paraphernalia you would expect with the royal city,

and also suburbs and housing that go with it. It's on the east bank of the Nile in a site that's really largely desert, and it was about halfway between Cairo and Luxor. The name Amarna is also given to the whole period of Arcanartan's rule and its immediate aftermath, which has this very distinctive art and literature. and architecture associated with it and is associated with this new form of worship of the solar cult.

The facts about her, if we can use that word, and I'm not being clearly here, there are very few facts about her. There are very few, this really happened at that time and she was really like and so on and so far, aren't there? So can you give us an idea of how few facts and what they are? Yes, so this is the real problem with this whole time period. So somehow the sort of the immediacy and the way we,

react to the art makes us feel a connection to this time period and as if we want to know an awful lot about it and a lot of the time actually the facts are really thin so if we look at what we actually really can be totally secure about in the case of Fetiti we know that she was the great royal wife of Arcanartan we don't know when she was born we know that she had at least six daughters and one of whom married one of whom married Tutankham yeah but we really know beyond that there's there's there are major limits on what we know we don't know when she died so we do have some we have two shabbties which were which are what what shabtys shabtis are little mortuary figurines which were placed in the tomb and we have the remains of at

least two of these which were created for her as a queen but not a huge amount of other funerary equipment and there is a lot of uncertainty about what happened at the end of her reign There's also a lot of discussion about where she came from. The most likely sort of reading of the facts is that she was associated with a very prominent family from the region of Ahmed in southern Egypt. But we can't be totally sure about that. So that's it? Yes, we can argue about the rest of it, but the facts are really thin. And beyond that, scholars, they create pictures which they consider internally consistent.

But a lot of the time, there is so much debate between individual scholars that you come to the, conclusion that we really just don't know. Joyce, can you tell us about the Pharaoh, Akanatham, how he changed worship for people and how that's seen in Amarna? Akhnatham was king of Egypt and he started out as a fairly typical king. He was the son of the previous king, Amman Hotech the 3rd, and he had the same name as his father and came to the throne as Amman Hotech for fourth. But then towards the beginning of his reign, after two or three years maybe,

There was a massive change. I don't think it came suddenly. I think it had been brewing. There are signs if we look for them that things aren't going to be entirely typical. But he suddenly, as it seems from the archaeology, changed his name to Akanaten, revering the sun god, the Arton. He changed the religion of Egypt so that it focused on one god, which is known as the Arton. This wasn't a new god. It was a god that was already known, but it did not be a prominent god.

And suddenly, this was the major state god of Egypt. and pretty much the only god that Akanatham worshipped. And this change was imposed on the whole country. This was really important because the role of the Pharaoh in Egypt, one of the major roles, if not the major role, was to liaise with the gods. So the Pharaoh sort of was the conduit between the gods and the people, and the Pharaoh ensured that the gods were happy, and in turn the gods ensured that Egypt was happy.

They kept chaos at bay. The Egyptians were very scared that chaos would descend on their land at any time. So this change that Akanaten made was really fundamental. It was quite threatening, quite dangerous to the ordinary Egyptians, who suddenly were faced with a pharaoh who wasn't serving the traditional gods, as he should have been. And there were lots and lots of traditional gods. There were many hundreds of traditional gods with very powerful state gods

who should have the appropriate rituals performed every day, every night, in perpetuity to make sure that it flourishes. So this is a really important change. From our point of view, it's reflected in the building of the new capital city that Kate's already explained, and we can see it particularly in art. There are several changes to art that occur at this time as well. Such as? Well, the new god doesn't have a body, and this is quite unusual for an Egyptian god.

It's just a disc, faceless disc, that hangs in the sky, as you would expect a sun to hang, and it's got long rays that come out of the desk with little hands on the end of them. And these hands hold the ankle of life out of the role. family. But because the god doesn't have a body, it can't behave in the way that traditional gods behave in art. It can't sit on a throne. It can't really accept an offering. It's in the sky. The king is beneath it. The queen, who would normally stand behind the king and still quite often does stand behind the king in formal art, is now able to come forward and stand facing the king to give a sort of symmetrical approach to Egyptian art. So we have that basic changing composition.

Then we have a change in the appearance of Akanarton and his court as well. He moves away from the traditional depiction of a pharaoh, which is of a fairly young-looking, fit-looking, male-wearing traditional clothing and traditional poses. And he becomes, to our eyes, I think, quite eccentric looking. He's got a long thin face. He's got feminine-looking breasts. He's got quite wide hips. He looks very different to other pharaohs before him.

So the royal family would become the... God's. What was a day-to-day role of women, let's stick to women in the court about whom we know something anyway, was their role like before we come to Nephiti herself? We do know that Lekhanatan would have had a Haram full of wives. He wouldn't have just had one. The Haram would have included family members. It would have included princesses who've been sent from abroad. He would have inherited women from his father. Those secondary wives were genuine wives, but they were slightly apart normally from the court. There would also then be one chief wife, and this was Queen Nefertiti, who we're talking about today.

And she had a very different role to the other wives, because she was the consort that would re-represented in formal art and writings. She would be, it was imagined, the mother of the next king, if that was at all possible. There was also his mother, Queen T, who was still alive at the beginning of his reign, and she was also a presence of Tamana in the early years. Thank you. Aidan, Aidan Dodson. we have this bust of Nefertiti which is extraordinary it came to light in 1912

why did that cause such a sensation Well the reasons why Nefertiti bust caused such a sensation was it didn't really fit in with what people's preconceptions were about Egyptian art Egyptian art had always been slightly caricatured certainly by the art

establishment as being very stiff and sort of and very unnatural Yet suddenly when this... Monumental as well. Yes, the whole monumentality. Yet this bust feels modern. The way that the modelling of the features is done,

partly because this is done in a layer of plaster over a stone core, the very bright colouration really meant that when it did appear on the world stage, it was something people hadn't see anything like, and certainly the idea that it was something in Egyptian was quite mind-blowing. And it's just a bust. It's not a figure.

That's another different. It's purely a bust. Not very tall. No. And it's cut off at the shoulders. Very, very unusual. And this seems to be because it was intended as a master portrait for a sculptor's workshop. Also, a very badly damaged example of Akan Arton in the same kind of form was found at the same time.

So it looks as though there were these two busts, presumably the end of a studio, which were the master portraits. So this was found, and it is extraordinary, her left eye is missing. Not quite sure why that is. And it does, when you're looking at it, it does sometimes distract you slightly from the overall look of it.

Presumably this was something to do with the fact it was simply a model. It was never meant to be seen outside the workshop. But it's an odd thing that missing eye. It became controversial when it was, it was executed by a German team, and they took it to Berlin, and has been there ever since.

It was found, I think we need to go back very slightly to its actual discovery at Amarna, so found in this workshop at Amarna. Then at the end of that season, like all finds, the fines of that season had to be divided between the German expedition and the Egyptian authorities.

That division was done, and the head of Nefertiti ended up in the German pile. Exactly how that happened is slightly obscure because although there was this idea of equal division between the Egyptian authorities and the excavators at that period, any unique item should have remained in Egypt. But somehow or other it got signed off as in the other one. Whether this was a question of sleight of hand, whether or not simply that the inspector who was making the division wasn't sort of, it wasn't to have drawn to his attention. properly. There's rumours that it was in a

it was partly in a packing case in a dark corner, all sorts of things. Anyway, ends up going to Berlin. And the fact that Lugvig Bouchard, who was the excavator, who felt slightly uncomfortable, is shown by the fact it then got hidden away for ten years. He, rather than trumpeting the fact that Berlin now had this amazing thing, he kept remarkably quiet about it. and the few photographs which were released were heavily cropped

to make it just appear like it was just simply a face. Then, after the First World War in 1923, the director of the Berlin Egyptian Museum came to conclude to take the view that this was silly hiding this thing away and released it to the world, at which point all hell broke loose, partly because of people's reaction to this amazing piece of art,

but also the Egyptian authorities are saying, how on earth did that leave the country? Because it's clearly not what should have been. And the argument as to whether it should stay in Germany or should go back to Egypt, to him battling around ever since. The German position being that, well, the inspector may have made a mistake,

but legally speaking, he signed off the chit. But they're in various points when it could have gone back. And one of the most remarkable was at the beginning of the Third Reich, because Herman Guring had basically, done a deal whereby it would be given to the King of Egypt as a birthday present. Unfortunately, it wasn't then signed off by the German head of state, Adolf Hitler. So Hitler personally vetoed it going back in the 1930s. Right. We'll move on from that. Kate.

How does this image compare with others? There are numerous images of Nefertiti. The images that we have are followers. As Joyce said earlier, we have differences in the art style at this. particular time period. So many of the statues of this time period are what we would describe as naturalistic than the majority of Egyptian art. So... Why is that? It seems to have been tied in with the religious changes Arcan Art and Made and the decision to change quite a lot of the art of the period. But the figures tend to be a much more relaxed

than the Egyptian representations of women would normally be. We don't quite know why. It's really difficult to tell exactly why this happened. I think generally speaking, what Arcanartan is doing with art is showing that things are different. So there are changes that are very, very appealing to a modern audience, but to an ancient audience would have been profoundly shocking because they're very informal relative to what an Egyptian audience would have expected. The body forms represented are those of more mature women very often.

and so there are several differences that we can actually see there. In terms of the other representations of Nefertiti herself, we have quite a few, but the majority of them are partial images. So there's a lot of composite statuary of the period where the Egyptians were using different stones to make different body parts. So we have quite a lot of body parts, we have quite a lot of faces or heads without crowns, we have quite a lot of bodies. But actually having a sort of a complete sort of head

with the crown and with the upper part of the torso is very, very rare. The majority of the other images are also not coloured in the same way as this particular image is painted, which gives it a more naturalistic appearance that we perhaps don't recognise to the same degree in other statues. Can you tell listeners about the way it's painted? The statue is painted in sort of matte colours which really appear to us to reflect naturalistic tones of of skin and actually of the costume. The face is painted a sort of very, very light brown, slightly pinky colour, depending on the lighting that is actually put on it.

And it has a blue crown and it has very brightly coloured jewellery, which is quite typical of Egyptian representations. It could have been a fashion magazine today, couldn't it, with the chiselled cheeks and the slimness of the nose and the eyebrows very delicately but firmly put where they are. It is curiously modern. It is. It's extraordinarily appealing to modern audiences, and ever since it was first exhibited,

it's been associated with modern standards of beauty, etc. It's been very tied up with those debates. And it is just a stunning piece. People repeatedly write you just have to see it. It's stunning. Joyce, people talk about Nefertiti's beauty. Can you go into that a little bit more? We don't actually have any idea how beautiful or not she was.

we're assuming, it's often assumed anyway, that the bust is an exact representation of Nefertiti, but of course that's very unlikely to be the case. We know that the ancient Egyptians use royal art as a form of propaganda to show the image that they would like to portray. So we can't really say that the bust look like Nefertiti. What we can say is the bust is the image of Nefertiti that Carnartan wanted to present to his people. And Aidan's already mentioned that it's probably from, well, it is from a sculptor's workshop, it's probably the model that was used

so that all the Nepotiti's from that workshop would look the same in the face. Because of this, we really have no idea what Nefertiti look like. If we look at various representations of her, they're similar, but they're not identical. It's also, I think, worth mentioning that this bust, this head is not labelled in any way.

So the way that we're identifying it as Nefertiti is purely based on the crown. The crown that Nefertiti wears and that is associated with her, it's not her only crown, but she wears it quite often it's sort of a tall crown with a flat top in a sort of louis green colour.

If we've ever found out that she shared that crown with another woman at the court, then obviously we'd be really, really confused because we couldn't be certain that it was Nefertiti at all. So I think from all this evidence, we can only assume that I cannot and wish his queen to be portrayed in this way,

but it's not necessarily how she looked. What's your take on that, Aidan? The Egyptians very much want to make images eternal, so therefore they want to make people look their very best. I would suspect that they wouldn't have gone so far as to complete, to make a face which was in no way coherent with her real face. But I'm sure there's probably a nip and a tuck here and there just to make sure that it's absolutely perfect.

These things are things for eternity, and you want to look your best for eternity. On the other hand, though, when we look at some people who we have got, their bodies survive, and one looks, at facial reconstructions compared with sculpture. There's all kinds of issues around facial reconstructions are how good or bad they are. But generally speaking, they're recognisable,

but probably they're looking slightly better in their statue or their carved relief than they probably would do in reality. It's inspired by and improved as necessary. Are there many references to Nefertiti? There are a lot of references to her in the royal art and the royal representation. And is there a consistent view in those references? Yes. So she is really prominent. She is unusually prominent during the reign.

She does things that other queens don't do. So she's involved in, she's very, very prominent in images of worship. And she's prominent in images of power in ways that would usually be associated with a king. So she's clearly, really, really important during that time period. Aidan, do you want to come in? Yeah. A couple of things on as far as Nefertiti is, One thing which is remarkable is she's actually the goddess of the dead at Amarna. On the corners of the stone sarcophagus of her husband, where you normally expect to find

the traditional protective goddesses of Egypt, you find an image of Nefertiti. And it's been suggested that a couple of the texts which are to do with funerary matters at this period may actually be statements by Nefertiti. so that and although there are some other queens who have got quite major standing the idea of a queen being goddess of the dead is unheard of. Why do you think she was main goddess of the dead? The thing was with Akinartness, he's abolished all the other gods.

He's got to somehow construct a new theology and part of that which as I think both Joyce and Kate have said is that the new focus for worship is the royal family. So I think to some degree she's sort of being in. It actually begins to think of itself or be thought of as divine. Yes, because they seem to be the sole conduit between this world and next. Quite ironic, you've got a God who is the visible son, yet you're not allowed to worship that visible son.

You have to worship the royal family who will then worship that for you, which I think is a really quite interesting statement. I'm not sure I would see her as a universal god of the dead or goddess of the dead, though. she clearly is important to Akanaten and it's very clear that his immediate family, his wife and his daughters and to a certain extent possibly his father are divine. But this seems to be divinity that really encompasses the royal family.

They're in a sort of divine bubble of their own. I think to the ordinary people of Amarna, Nefertiti isn't really offering them any sort of afterlife at all. It's one of the things that disappears. When Akanaten gets rid of the old gods, he gets rid of the god of the dead, Osiris. and the people of Amarna are denied the afterlife that they've been expecting and they've been working towards all their lives that their ancestors have.

And suddenly they've got this sort of existence beyond death, which will be sort of haunting their tombs and maybe haunting the manor temples. But it's completely different to the afterlife that Akanaten and his family are going to expect. So I think it's really difficult to say, yes, Nakapetiti is connected with death and she's protecting her husband in death as she would protect him in life because that is the role of the queen. But whether we can equate her to the goddess Cyrus

in quite the same way, I'm not quite sure. I think it's more subtle than that. And it's just really unfortunate that none of this has explained to us. So we really have to extrapolate it from the archaeology and the art that's left to us. Okay. When we discussed this previously,

we brought a Habchepshut. She became a pharaoh. There's any indication that Navidita would reach that height? Yes, in slightly different sort of circumstances. So there is evidence which is read as suggesting that Nefertiti does become a king towards the end of Arcanatan's reign. I think what we can say is there is definitely a female king floating around at the end of Akanaten's reign. There's no doubt about that called Nefanefruartan.

The big debate amongst the Egyptologist is who that person actually. is. Some of us, certainly I do, I would argue that it is Nefertiti. Others have argued that other members of the royal family might be the person who then transitioned to become this female Pharaoh Nefer Neferuartan. And I think this sort of reflect very much the way that the study of this period goes. Everybody's got their own working hypothesis, but I think everybody's working hypothesis is slightly different from other peoples. I would say that she's definitely not a ruling Pharaoh on the grounds that there's no evidence that she's born royal. By the time her husband dies in year 17, she has adult daughters who are old enough able to take on this role. So if we are looking for a prominent royal female,

and I think we are this time, I wouldn't be looking to Nefertiti because she's not born royal. Her Chepset was born royal. I'd be looking towards her daughters, her elder daughter, Mary Tarton, who is named in diplomatic correspondence. and who marries a short-lived successor to Akan Aten, or her third-born daughter, Ancasaempa Aten, who marries Tutankarman. So I would be looking for the powerful individuals between one of those two, rather than Nefertiti, purely on the grounds that it would be very, very unusual for a non-royal woman to inherit any sort of power from a husband.

One hopefully I would say there is also the other female pharaoh of the new kingdom, Tawostret. There's no evidence that she has any royal blood either. I think it's all to do with high politics. And for me, the key thing to say that Nefer Neferuatun is Nefertiti is the fact that Nefertiti's full name was Nefer Neferuartan. But then simply that when she becomes initially co-ruler with her husband, she drops the Nefertiti and the name becomes Nefer Neferwartan. And also there is a major problem with Merit Arton, the eldest daughter being Nefer Neferuartan, because there is an inscriterate. which named Akhen-Ahrou-Arton and Merit-Arton as separate individuals.

So I think you have to have some rather sort of weird argumentation to be able to say that the same person is there twice in this inscription with different names. I think I'd agree with Aden on that one. I mean, certainly we all disagree on these things, but my view is there is enough evidence probably to suggest that Nefertiti and Nefnerwartan and for the time being is the best association of that particular name. With something you said earlier, both of you, all three of you, I didn't pick it up then, but I'd like to pick it up now.

All these gods are abolished. A lot of people believe in one or two or three or 17 of these gods. Why wasn't there a revolution? This is really difficult to answer, but I think, you know, Egyptian kings at this time period have large police forces and armies. How would you describe a police force? at that period.

We have a lot of images from the Toms of Nobles at Amarna which show a lot of sort of soldiers running alongside sort of the king in his chariot, etc. And there's references in the boundary steel at Tex at Amarna to some form of discontent

or backlash. But other than that, we have no references whatsoever to there being any problems. But I think generally speaking, if the Egyptian king decides to do something, people really just go along with it or they're going to be in a bad way. And I think also what's notable is at the moment Akinartan's dead, effectively the new religion is dead as well. Certainly within three years, we know that there's an Amman cult is back running again.

We've even got representation of Tutankhamun when he first comes to the throne, and he's still called Tutank Arten, with the name of the revolutionary god, actually worshipping Amman and Mood. So I think it's one of the first. other cases, yeah, what the king says is law, everybody will sort of just about go along with it. The moment he's no longer around, everybody just then flips back to the status quo. Just to digress for a second, that year. How did it come into the consciousness of Egyptologists like yourself? And what significance did it have when that did happen in Amana?

The site had actually been known for quite a long time by visitors, but excavations there really started at the end. of the 19th century. The amazing thing about it is it's one of very few settlement sites that we have from Egypt, so it's been enormously significant for understanding daily life and urbanism. What do you mean my settlement sites? Towns. We actually have remarkably few well-preserved towns from ancient Egypt, and this is one of very few that we have. So it's an extraordinary place to actually begin to understand architecture, urban life, and how ordinary people lived in Egypt. And it also has these extraordinary sort of stories and finds associated with the Marna period, which we've made there.

And so you have the whole thing, palaces, fountains, gardens, and also humbler dwellings around the edges? We do, yes. We've got workforces, we've got cemeteries, we've got tombs of the nobles and of the royal family, and we also have now tombs of ordinary people as well. So it's almost the only place in Egypt where you can study that sort of complete cross-section of society. How does it fit? Well, you've said it. It's the only place. If it's the only place, it isn't how does it fit in, but how does the rest of it fit into it? It's a really interesting site because we've got all this evidence for it, but because of its association with Arcanatan, there are always questions being raised about whether it's representative of life generally in Egypt or not. Okay, Aidan, how much do you?

I think the way to the interesting thing is that it's actually a purpose-built capital city, which is something we don't find anywhere else. in Egypt, all the other cities grew organically, yet this was created from scratch. So it gives us an idea of what an Egyptian town planner thought a capital city ought to be like at this time. Okay, you've been excavating there, and you told us it was a town and a nice city, it's got fountains and wells and forth. Can you tell us a bit more about it? Amana's an amazing site, so we have these incredible palaces. We have palaces which were associated. We can go and see those now, can we?

You can. They're ruins, their sort of ground plans with low walls, but you can visit the site and actually see them. What's amazing about the palaces of the royal family is that they're very, very different. So we have a number of really different palaces. We have big temple structures. We have outlying ritual enclosures with large sort of gardens in them. And then we have thousands of houses ranging for the big houses of wealthy people, right down to the very, very small houses of people who are just. just building some shelter for themselves in sort of smaller areas in between.

So it's a really extraordinary place. And the royal buildings are linked by these long roads, which the images from the tombs show the royal family actually travelling in chariots down the road. So they would have been in these golden, shining chariots beneath the sun with ordinary people sort of seeing them pass. Although you do have to use your imagination when you're there to there now. Yeah. You do need somebody to explain exactly what that particular bit of wall actually.

actually is. But if you sort of understand a little bit before you go what the place was like, you can start getting the feel for it. And it's certainly got an amazing atmosphere to it. There's a lot of sand and mud bricks these days. It didn't last very long this place, did it? It was a brilliant flash in the pan almost. It wasn't we talking as if it were typical, was it? No, it certainly wasn't typical. It was set up. It probably lasted between 15 and 20 years maximum as the royal centre of the time and then it was abandoned, which means it's not a typical city in any ways

because most cities would have become denser and been inbuilt over time, but it does give us an extraordinary opportunity archaeologically because we can actually understand how everything interrelated with each other over a single time period, which is often really difficult to do archaeologically when you have lots of changes and you're always trying to work out which building is there at which time period, etc. When it came towards an end The stones and a lot of it was taken elsewhere Appropriated would be a polite word

To Luxor and why did they take it and not leave it After the end of Arcanatan's reign And the reversion to the traditional gods They left Amarna and they went back to the traditional centre at Memphis And also the traditional religious centre at Luxor And the buildings were abandoned Now Arcanaten had had this very cunning idea that in order to build stone buildings quickly,

he'd build them with smaller stones like blocks, which made building much more efficient, much quicker, much easier to decorate. It also, unfortunately for him, made them much easier to deconstruct. So all of these stones were simply taken down and taken away, and they were used as the foundations

and the filling material for the buildings of the majority of subsequent kings over the next couple of hundred years. Joyce, do you want to come in here to continue what is being said, but also to begin to tell the listeners about the connection with Tutankhamen. Tutankham is a sort of fixed point. We know that Akanata was on the throne. We're not quite sure what happened around about the time that he died. Our next fixed point is Tutankarman.

So if we slightly ignore the possibilities of shared reigns and so on, we see Tutankhamen Carmen come to the throne. And obviously, there's a connection between Tutankarman and the on a court because he comes to the throne as an eight-year-old boy and eight-year-old boys don't just take the throne, they inherit it. Who his parents are? We don't know. He never tells us, like Nefertiti never tells us her parents.

It's possible that he was a son of Nefertiti. We do know that she had six daughters, but that doesn't mean that she didn't have sons. At this time in Egyptian art, it wasn't, or in writing as well, it wasn't normal to mention royal sons. They were

seen as something special, whereas royal daughters were considered to be a part of the royal family. So it wouldn't be at all surprising to find out that Nefertiti had not only six surviving daughters, but also several sons. But if he's not the son of Nefertiti and Akanaten, there's the possibility that he's the son of Akanaten and a secondary queen. And there's a lady we know named Kea, who seems to be a high contender for this position. There are also other possibilities. He could have been possibly just about a grandson of Akaner. by his eldest daughter, Mary Tartan. And it's also been suggested some people believe that he might have been a brother of Akanatenaten.

So there's all these possibilities as to who Tutankham was, but he was definitely related in some way to the royal family, including Nefertiti. How many stories are there about Nefertiti that you think, oh, you'd like to believe them, but you don't quite? Oh, I'm afraid I tend to go with I don't believe it, unless there really is enough evidence that I really can't say, And I have changed my mind on something. So I wouldn't, five years ago, have accepted that Nefertiti was the same as Nefer Neferuartan.

But I think I have now been convinced of that one. There's an awful lot else I just, there were too many scholars arguing about it. And when you see clever people arguing that much about what's going on, sometimes it's easier just to say, right, well, that just means we haven't got a clue, have we? and just wait for some more evidence to come up. There's also what I call some of the zombie facts about Nefertiti. Because back in the 1920s, there was a theory that she'd had a major bust up with Akanatenant and they'd had a divorce or split up or something like that.

And that's still what you get told by tour guides when you go to Amarna nowadays. However, this was all based on mistaken identity because in the 1920s some reliefs had been found with a wife of Akanatenaten hacked out and the name replaced by that of his eldest daughter. At the time in the 1920s, the only wife of Akanatan we knew of was Nefertiti. So put people two and two together and made five on this. It turns out that the wife whose name has been hacked out here is Kea, this secondary wife, which has already been mentioned.

And that was proven back in the 1960s. However, by that time, this sort of very romantic kind of. idea of the great couple Nefertiti and Akanata, having had a bust up, had found its way into the popular literature, and therefore, although sort of now 60, 70 years after the last Egyptologist would have believed this idea, it's still what is being told to visitors today. But we also have interesting, so every now and then we find new evidence, and a few years ago there was a graffiti found in a quarry not far from a marina, which actually gave a year 16 date for Nefertiti.

So suddenly, from the majority of people thinking she probably disappeared or from the record around year 12, suddenly she's there four years later. So you never know quite what you're going to find, which may encourage us to revise our opinions at some point in the future. Joyce Tewan to come into this. I was just thinking there's a very odd story that the missing eye from the bust is missing because the sculptor thothmosis

was sculpting away and he was in love with Nefertiti. and somehow they had a quarrel and he plucked out the iron flunied away to punish her forever, which is quite clearly not a true story in any way and it completely misunderstands the entire functioning of a sculptor's workshop because although the sculptor's workshop was owned by Tuthmosis,

he was very much a businessman, it's very unlikely that he did all the sculpting himself and it's very, very unlikely that Queen sat for him to have a sculpture of herself made. But it's just a sort of romantic story that pops up a lot. It's fairly typical of the stories that were associated with Nefertiti and which really are not at all true.

How would you explain the fact that this very beautiful woman appears to us without an eye? Personally, I just think it fell out. It's a very old statue. It was abandoned for a long time. I know that they looked for it when they found their head, but the early excavators missed an awful lot of stuff. It wouldn't have been very big at all. It's made out of rock crystal.

There's a dab of black wax in it. it's not particularly obvious. It would have been easy to lose it. And I just feel that that's probably what happened to it. Or maybe it wasn't put in place, but it would seem odd not to have put it in place, to put one in place and not the other. So I would probably go for it just having fallen out.

There's the trouble that we've got so few in the way of facts. We have to start filling in the gaps, whether it be what's happened to the eye, what happened to somebody, who were their parents. And I think, as Kate points out, Things can change overnight. I think often people expect that history is something vaguely fixed. Yet, as far as ancient Egyptian history is concerned,

it can change overnight, literally, just by that one discovery. And I think, you know, I to emphasise to people that whatever I sort of put forward as my version of Nefertiti is my working hypothesis. It may not be the same as anybody else's working hypothesis, and I might change it tomorrow if the data changes. and that's something which I think people find very difficult to grasp when dealing with ancient Egypt. Or very irritating. Oh, absolutely.

But people just say, but I read this in the book. Well, that book was 60 years old by a very distinguished professor. Yeah, but since then things have moved on. And we'll probably move on again in the next 10, 15 years. Kate, you mean you've excavated there. Do you feel there's a great deal more to be discovered? At Amarna, there's a huge amount more to be discovered. the Amarna project is working out there

a couple of times a year for several months there have been major excavations in the great temple so the main temple at the site and also really important big excavations over the last sort of decade and more into the cemeteries of ordinary people there which have told us a huge amount about the lives of people at the other end of the social scale

the people who were building the buildings who were fulfilling all the functions that kept the city running. Joyce, we've talked about Nefertica. Were there any contenders, female contenders, around her at the time, that we might discuss in this similar terms? Well, I think we very much underestimate her mother-in-law, Queen T, who is also very prominent in her husband's art.

It was mentioned in diplomatic correspondence, who takes the role of a goddess and has a temple dedicated to her in Nubia. She was clearly very influential and important. And I think also the two daughters, the two, well, the firstborn and the thirdborn daughters, went on to be influential women as well. So to me, I think we make a mistake if we single Nefertiti out as being a powerful woman.

Yes, she was powerful, absolutely. She did have a divine role, and she would also have political power. But I see her very much as one of a group of politically active, religious, active women surrounding the Egyptian throne at this time. And I think it would be nice sometimes if we could just step back away from Nefertiti. without wishing to don't play her role,

but to see it as part of a wider event that's happening in the royal family at this time. Except there's that bust, isn't that? I think that's the problem is we're always coming back to that bus. It's interesting, until that bust was discovered, the number of people who were even aware of Nefertis, who was a small number of specialists, it's often the case when somebody has got something which is spectacular, the mask of Tutankhamun, as in that is the other great icon of the same sort of period,

is it sort of blots out everything else to do with somebody and the idea and the idea of somebody as being a beauty icon as well that also in some way devalues them when one is looking at them in their terms as what they might have been as political animals and so on and also the fact that they used to blot out some of these other individuals who may well have been equally significant we do focus too much on that particular image

and the political power of some of these women was huge and it's very, very significant and Joyce is absolutely right that we see a number of these across the whole of this time period. It's just that Nefertiti is associated specifically with Arcanatan and we do have more evidence for her than we do for some of these other, particularly for than for her daughters,

which is probably to do with how long she was around for and how long she was queen for, whereas certainly with Anxan Amun and Meritartan, the time periods associated with them tend to be slightly shorter. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Joyce Tilsley, to Kate Spence and Aidan Dodson, and to our studio engineer Sue Mayo. Next week, panpsychism, the intriguing idea that some basic mentality

is found throughout the world and beyond and can give rise to consciousness. Amazing. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now, with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you not find time to say what you wanted to say? The thing that interests me that we never ever really talk about is the effect of the Amarna period on the ordinary people. It would be really interesting if we could explore.

I don't know how we do this. The trouble is all the evidence is so much focused on Amarna and particularly on the royal family, the work, the excavation work that's going on, that's brilliant at the moment, is expanding that. But it's almost like Amarna. The Marna world is in a little bubble in Middle Egypt. And we never really consider what's happening to the ordinary people outside that.

It would be really interesting to know what they thought about Nefertiti and the Role family at that time, how much they were actually affected by the changing religion, because I suspect that many of the ordinary people, I mean, you asked why there wasn't a revolution, but certainly many of the peasants who weren't, I mean, you didn't attend a great state temple. It wasn't like a cathedral where you would go to a service or anything. How much did they actually know about this? How much did they actually know about what was happening with Akanaten and Nefertiti?

Because we see it as hugely important and hugely influential aspect of Egyptian history. But would the ordinary people actually see it in the same way? I'd love to know that. Yeah, I think I very much agree with Joyce on that. Because the trouble is, say, we just look at the elite bubble. And actually, if you look at sort of more recent times, you don't realize that people often just carry on with their love. lives without really taking, having really being impacted. Unless an army or the set of police come and do something to you, just get on with tilling your field, just get on with

things. You probably quite happily get on with your own relationship with whatever your preferred God is, because that's probably going to be inside the house. It's not as though you're doing anything publicly. So I think for the majority of people, particularly if you're living a distance away from Amarna, they probably didn't really know much about what was going on. probably only if you actually much closer in and you had interaction with people in the elite that you might have been aware of what was going on. What sort of documentation do you have, Kate?

Well, as Joyce has said, if we actually look outside of Omanah, we don't have a huge amount, we do have this contemporary settlement, this colonial town that was built in Nubia called Seseby, which is from exactly the same time period. So that gives us some indication of what people, how people might have lived and what they might have been doing at that sort of time period.

But again, it's very, very similar. So it has a big temple, which has images of Arcanatan and Nefertiti associated with it. But I think Joyce is absolutely right. It would be really nice to know more about what's going on. But, you know, what would they have thought? Most of the time, people are more interested in what they're going to eat and how their families are. I suspect they wouldn't have been totally unaware of it because boats would have been going up on the Nile.

There must have been stories, probably wild stories circulating as people who knew something about what was happening in court, travelled up the Nile, relayed some stories. And presumably there was some, the idea about the gods, that must have travelled. It's difficult to say what impact it would have had, whether people just talked about it and stopped making things or having visible signs.

But it's hard to say if there's this much impact on, for example, life after death, and suddenly as Iris is prescribed, what does that do for ordinary people? Because mortality is one thing that people do tend to come back to. Actually, one thing which we often talk about, sort of the prescription of the other gods, but actually, apart from Ammon, one could also just see that the other ones are simply ignored.

because there is actually that the images of Amon, the king of the gods are hacked out, his names are. But virtually there's very few examples of any other gods suffering in the same way. And I sometimes wonder whether what simply he did was,

in modern terms, withdrew the funding. So suddenly these gods no longer had their sort of state pensions. The temples themselves effectively ceased to cease to run. But not that they were formally attacked.

And it has been sort of suggested that rather than being only believing in one God, what Akanatenaten's position was, he only believed there was one God worth worshipping. So therefore he put all his effort into the Arton. And really what everybody else did, perhaps they didn't really care too much about, apart from Amman, who he did definitely have a major downer on.

So I think there's another part of the whole issue when we're discussing this period is we sort of have this idea that he might, well, he was he probably was persecuting those didn't believe the same thing as he did. We don't actually know that. And so that's another of the working

hypotheses, which is, you know, they're completely incompatible ones where the idea is that the police are going around, rooting out anybody worshipping anybody else, and others where actually it's just ignoring them because he knows who is the God, who matters.

and nobody else does. That's just the other extreme of the same discussion. Yes. You could even push it even further and you could say, actually, this isn't so much a religious revolution as a financial revolution that Akan Aten isn't particularly bothered

about the gods of Egypt or the Aten, but actually he's doing it to withdraw funds from the other cults and to take far more control over the religious aspect of Egyptian life. We don't know, and I wouldn't say that to me, I think it is a genuine religious belief, but you could make an argument that he's doing it from a very cynical viewpoint to gather more resources

and to cut down the power of the other priesthoods, and that's what's driving forward. You mean the Henry VIII approach? Yes, yes, exactly, yes. No, I don't believe that, but it's possible. Kate, you're going to come in. Yeah, I think we could all argue about this. So, yeah, I mean, I think diverting the income

which was going to the other temples would have been associated with that, whether one sees that as the cause or the effect is difficult. I think I would see more aggression towards other cults than perhaps Aden does. But again, it's only really the royal family and the nobles who actually leave any evidence. So it's really difficult. We wouldn't really know if other people were not happy because we don't know in Egypt. Well, he was about to come in, the producer, Simon.

Would anybody like to your coffee? I think I'd like a cup of tea. I wouldn't mind. Yes, I'd drop of tea, that'd be good. Two, three teas. Lovely. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. I'm John Ronson and I'm back with Season 2 of Things Fell Apart.

I show for BBC Radio 4 that unearths the origin stories of the culture wars. This time around, the stories are all about the battlefronts that engulfed us during lockdown. The stories twist and turn until each one ends with the explosion of a new, far-reaching culture war. If you tell me that my nephew had superhuman strength, if you tell me that he didn't feel any pain, well, he's dead now. That's Things Fell Apart, Season 2. Listen on BBC Sounds.