The Ancients - Nefertiti

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

Very few figures in history are recognizable from their silhouettes, but included in this small group is Nefertiti, one of the most famous queens of Ancient Egypt. Professor Joyce Tyldesley speaks to Tristan not only about the famous image of Nefertiti, but also about the theories surrounding her life, death and burial (no aliens in sight!). Joyce is a professor at the University of Manchester and an expert on the role of women in Ancient Egypt.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, we are going back to ancient Egypt. We're going back to the second millennium BC to talk about one of the most famous queens from ancient Egyptian history. You've probably heard the name

Nefertiti. And in today's podcast for such a big topic we are joined by a big name and this is the University of Manchester's Professor Joyce Tildesley. Joyce has written a number of books about prominent women from ancient Egyptian history such as Cleopatra and also Nefertiti. She is an absolute joy to talk to. So without further ado, here's Joyce. Joyce, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Oh, it's a pleasure. I love talking about Nefertiti. Well, yes, this is a huge topic. And Nefertiti, in ancient Egyptian history, she seems to be one of the most powerful women in the ancient world for well over a decade in her time.

Well, it's difficult, isn't it? Certainly that's how we see her. The difficulty is trying to disentangle from what we can see from the archaeological evidence and what actually happened. And this has led to all sorts of different interpretations of Nefertiti. So you'll get some people who think that she was relatively insignificant, just led by her husband, and some people who think that she ruled Egypt and everything in between. It's a fantastic subject. Absolutely is. And we will go into those sources and the piecemeal sources that we have very soon. But just quickly, so we can set the background, when we're talking about Nefertiti in ancient Egyptian history, because there's thousands of years of this history, when abouts in ancient Egyptian history are we talking? Well, she's the wife of a king called Akhenaten, and we know that he

roughly came to the throne in about 1352 BCE. So that's when. Obviously, she was married to him before he came to the throne, and he ruled for about 17 years. We don't really see her after that 17 years. So that's roughly it. It's quite a small period of time, but it's an interesting period of time. It's a period that we call the Amarna Age because he built a new city and she lived there with him. And because it's a city that nobody ever built on top of, and because it was purpose built for him, it's not like any other Egyptian city, but it's preserved an awful lot of archaeological evidence.

So she is far more prominent, I would say, than many other Egyptian queens, because there were thousands of Egyptian queens, but she is one of the more prominent ones. And is this archaeological evidence, is this one of the key sources that we have for Egyptologists like yourself trying to piece together the life of Nefertiti? It is. I mean, ideally, we'd like all sorts of evidence, but particularly we'd like written evidence and we would like archaeological evidence. We'd like to be able to marry the two together, but we don't have a great deal of written evidence about her at all. She's mentioned, she's not hidden in any way, but we have conventional phrases. They don't really tell us. We don't have anything like a diary or personal records or letters or anything

like that that mention her. What we have are monumental inscriptions where she's included, but in a very stereotyped way, it could be any queen. So we're very reliant on archaeology for her. And of course, archaeology is fantastic subjects. I love archaeology, but it does depend on interpretation. It's not always obvious. And so because it's not always obvious, trying to piece together this life, it seems as if among Egyptologists and yourself and your colleagues, there's a lot of debate and lots of different theories put forward for various aspects of her life. Yes. The main debate is how important is she? How influential is she during her husband's reign? Did she rule alongside him and maybe take over when he died? Or was she just a stereotypical queen, but we can see more of her, so we get the impression that she was more important than perhaps she really was? That

really is the debate. And you mentioned the Amarna period there, this time of Nefertiti and her husband. And the background to this, of all the dynasties of ancient Egypt, this particular dynasty, the 18th dynasty, does this seem to have been a really, shall we say, powerful time for the kingdom? Well, the 18th dynasty is quite long and it starts at a point where Egypt has been divided. It's been split in two and the first kings of the 18th dynasty reunite the country and it becomes very powerful very quickly. By the time you get up to Akhenaten, who's quite late in the dynasty, and his father, Amenhotep III, they're extraordinarily wealthy. They don't go out and fight and expand the empire.

They don't need to because they're so wealthy and so well established that they don't get any challenges. So they have much more internal life, if you like. They focus on Egypt and they look at things like religion and developing Egypt and so on. But it's a really interesting period. Absolutely, absolutely. And these events some 3,000 years ago, and from the sources that we have available to us, Joyce, if we focus now in on the story of Nefertiti herself, a big question, but also I can appreciate

they might be quite a difficult question to answer. Do we know anything about Nefertiti's background, about her earlier life? No, we don't, which is unfortunate. But again, we can speculate. She never says that she's a king's daughter. King's daughter is what we call princess. Everybody in the royal family was described in relationship to the king because the king was absolutely magnificently powerful. Nobody came close to him. He was almost a god. He was the only Egyptian that could communicate with the gods. So everybody around him describes themselves in relation to the king. If she was born a princess, she would have been a king's daughter.

And because you accumulated titles, you didn't get rid of it. She would have always been a king's daughter. Even when she married a king, she would have become a king's daughter, king's wife. And she never uses this title. And from this, we very, very strongly suspect that she wasn't born royal. But having said that, I think she would have had to have been to have become queen consort because she was one of many wives of King Akhenaten, but she was the important one. She was the one that would appear in formal arts, in formal monumental inscriptions, and it would be her children who would expect to inherit the throne. So she's obviously very important, more important than the other wives. And I don't think you would get to that position without being born quite high up the rankings. My feeling is that she's

possibly his cousin, that she's related to him, but not necessarily a sister. She could have been a sister who's changed her name, but I don't think she was because again, we would expect her to use the king's daughter title if she was. So I'm thinking that possibly she's his cousin. But there's no direct evidence for this, just the rather negative evidence that she doesn't use the title princess. We have some images of her with people at court. There's one lady called T who claims to have been Nefertiti's wet nurse, which is interesting because highborn Egyptians did use wet nurses. She's married to a man called Ai, and Ai seems to be closely connected to Nefertiti. So the suggestion is that maybe Ai is Nefertiti's father, and that maybe Ti is a second

wife, or we're not quite sure what happened. But the interesting thing is that there's also circumstantial evidence to suggest that Ai is connected to the royal family and that he's the brother-in-law of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten's father, so that would make them cousins, and that he has this continuing close relationship to the royal family. Ai might not himself be royal, but he's very close to them. And eventually, Ai will in fact take the throne and become pharaoh himself for a few years at the end of his life. So that's where we would place it, in a very upper class way, I suppose in fact take the throne and become pharaoh himself for a few years at the end of his life. So that's where we would place her in a very upper class way, I suppose we'd say. I mean, we shouldn't really use these terms because they're modern terms, but a very upper class background, but not quite a member of the royal family.

It's interesting, Joyce, isn't it? Like she's not from the royal family directly, but quite closely linked. Does it seem most likely, therefore, as you say, that she's not from a country nearby, as it were, that it's part of a diplomatic move that she marries into the Egyptian dynasty? This has been suggested, and her name means a beautiful woman has come, quite literally, we translate it. So it's been actually suggested that she was a foreign-born princess who came to Egypt to marry the king. And because they couldn't pronounce her name, they basically gave her an Egyptian name that reflected who she was and that they could pronounce. But Nefertiti and variations on that name are not that uncommon. And it's probably the beautiful one who's come is not the queen herself. It's probably the goddess

Hathor. It's a name that was given to people at birth rather than something that was acquired later. We do know that Egypt's kings did make diplomatic marriages. There were two sorts. There were some sorts that they made with what they would consider to be their brother kings. That's quite a loose term, but kings who were roughly equal to them. No one was quite equal to the king of Egypt. He was the best king, but there were kings who we thought were quite close and he would marry their daughters and they would come into the royal harem. And there were kings who you consider more as vassals. He would also marry their daughters and they would come into the royal harem, more as hostages, I would suspect, than actually as brides. But all these foreign women did arrive in Egypt and we know that Akhenaten had foreign brides. But it was very unusual. Well, in fact, it didn't happen for any one of

these foreign brides at this time to become a queen consort, because I think it would have been considered wrong. You wouldn't want a foreign queen consort. I mean, first of consort, because I think it would have been considered wrong. You wouldn't want a foreign queen consort. I mean, first of all, because the queen consort had her own religious duties and obligations to do, which the foreigner presumably wouldn't know about. But secondly, you wouldn't really want to get another royal family involved in the core royal family of Egypt. You don't want foreigners having any claim to the throne. So they tended to keep the queen consort to be egyptian born either a sister a half sister or a cousin would be an ideal match for that so it could be somebody who was brought up to the role who knew what they were doing who came from an impeccable

background but wouldn't bring too many in-laws into the royal family and confuse the succession by the time therefore of nefertiti becoming queen consort of Akhenaten, by that time already, does she already have some precedence of women who've gained quite significant power in that position in the not too distant past? Yes, she does. I mean, within the 18th dynasty, we've had Hatshepsut, who actually served as a female pharaoh. But I think in a way, we should discount her because she is very atypical and living in atypical circumstances. I think the better parallel is Queen T, not to be mixed up with I's wife T, who is Nefertiti's mother-in-law. And there's a lot of evidence to show that she, who is also commoner born, and we know who her

parents are, we're actually told. So in this case case we're absolutely certain that she wasn't born royal we even have their mummies she is a very powerful woman we see her supporting her husband she's shown at the same size as him in statuary she appears in religious contexts she's worshipped in nubia as a living goddess she's a very important person and in fact before the ber Berlin head of Nefertiti, the bust that I think most people will recognise, before that was discovered, Queen T was considered to be the most significant female of this period. And it was only after we started to see the art associated with Nefertiti

that she kind of got promoted and Queen T got demoted. But certainly Queen T was a very powerful woman. It's not unusual for kings at this stage to use women, to use their wives, their mothers and their daughters to support their reign in a very visible way. And in regards to that visibility, I mean, how do we start seeing Nefertiti being portrayed in art, in architecture that survives at the start of her time alongside Akhenaten? Well, this is where it gets really complicated. And this is one of the problems with the story of Nefertiti. You have to consider so much the story of Akhenaten as well. You have to consider

the two together. He comes to the throne as a very conventional pharaoh, just like any other pharaoh. But within two or three years, he's dedicated himself to one god, the Aten. It's called the Aten, the sun disk. It's a faceless disc. It is literally the sun's disc that shines in the sky and has long, thin rays that come down and has little hands on the rays that hold out the anchor of life to the royal family. He's not a monotheist. He will accept other gods. He will admit that they exist, but he focuses very much on this one god. This dedication to this one god really changes everything. First of all, it inspires him to move away from the traditional capital cities of Thebes and Memphis and build

his own city, which I've already mentioned, which today we call Amarna. But it also affects the art and it affects it in two ways. The first way it affects it is that he himself is presented in a very strange way. And he's got a very feminized appearance. He's got a long, thin face. He's got quite narrow shoulders, but he looks like he's got breasts. He's got a narrow waist and wide hips. So he's very distinctive. And the rest of the court start to look like this. So we see Nefertiti almost immediately looking, mirroring, if you like, her husband in this very strange, almost, it's clearly Egyptian. If you look at it, you can tell it's egyptian but at the same time it's not like egyptian art that's gone before so there's that effect on it but there's also the fact that he's pretty much banished most of the

gods and because he's banished most of the gods he needs to fill up his art somehow so the art and is probably for him was a splendid god but it's not particularly good for showing in art in that the art didn't have a body and could only hang in the sky so to make artistic representations look right he used his wife and his family a lot more so they would appear in the art with him either nefertiti standing behind akhenaten and sort of a mirror image so you'd have two akhenatans facing each other and then two Nefertitis behind, and then their daughters coming behind them. Or occasionally Akhenaten and Nefertiti

sitting opposite each other. And in all these cases, they'd have the sun in the sky above them, the god. So these aren't just scenes of royal picnics or royal days out. These are actually religious scenes and they're designed to help the people of Amarna worship the Aten,

because you worship the Aten through the royal family. So because of this, we get a lot of images of Nefertiti and Akhenaten, whereas under normal circumstances, we wouldn't get them because first of all, the ordinary gods would be pictured and there'd be statues of lots of gods, not just the Aten. And secondly, because this is being done at Amarna and because Amarna was never built over, a lot more of this has survived than would have survived, say, had he been doing it at Thebes, which was constantly built over and built over, and things were repurposed, reused, recycled. So it's kind of distorting, I think, what we can see. But certainly what we can see is almost from the beginning, she's with him, she's helping him, she's taking an active role in his art, and she looks quite a lot

like him but that is i think a function of the convention it's not because she actually looked quite a lot like him i mean joyce in these artistic pictures of her with akhenaten i've got to ask about the headdress of nefertiti you can't do a podcast about nefertiti nor ask about the headdress but how is she depicted in regards to her headdress in these artistic depictions? Well, actually it varies. She does wear different headdresses and very occasionally, I think at the beginning,

she wears a wig. But the image that we've all seen of her is that she's got a shaven head and she wears a tall, bluish green crown, which has got a flat top on it. And as far as we know, she's the only queen

that ever wears this. We've not seen anyone else wear it. We'll see something slightly know, she's the only queen that ever wears this. We've not seen anyone else wear it. We'll see something slightly similar in the Ptolemaic age, but that's a long time in the future. So every time we see this crown, we identify the wearer as Nefertiti. And again, the famous Berlin bus that we have, that I've already mentioned, I think that everybody will be familiar with, actually it's not labeled in any way. So we're only identifying that as Nefertiti off the basis of her crown, which obviously crowns are not genetic. If we ever found that she did swap a crown with other people, then we'd be in trouble because we wouldn't know it was her. But as far as we know that this is her crown, but we do have images of her wearing

other crowns. Interestingly, when she's with her husband, her crown might be quite elaborate, but on the whole, his is more elaborate or slightly different. There's nothing to suggest that they wear equal crowns. They wear different crowns. And so is she always portrayed alongside Akhenaten in all the art that we have surviving of her? Sometimes she's by herself. We have some actually quite interesting representations that come from very early in his reigns, actually come from Thebes before he'd moved to his new city. And we have a temple there that was clearly dedicated to the Aten but it was very female based it's been dismantled we only have the blocks and it's been reconstructed we don't have the temple now but the reconstructions show the images that it is there that is Nefertiti who is

offering to the god are not Akhenaten and where in a conventional scene you would expect the king to be followed by his wife to support him, we have Nefertiti being followed by her eldest daughter to support her. So there is no male influence in this temple. And this is actually really interesting because in theory, at least, it's only the king who can communicate with the gods. So we wouldn't expect to see anybody other than the king in a temple scene offering to the gods. Clearly, this is not right because there are so many temples in Egypt and so many different cults and so many offerings had to be made. Every minute there would be an offering being made somewhere to someone.

The king could not possibly do all of those. But the artistic convention decreed that when you depicted the offering, you would show the king doing it. decreed that when you depicted the offering, you would show the king doing it. So the fact that the Aten has a very female-based aspect to its worship is really interesting to him because clearly Akhenaten cannot do this. His wife is doing it for him. And it leads us to wonder, how rare is this? Is this just something that the Aten does, or is this something that has survived? And that there are other female-based rituals that other queens, consorts are doing for other gods, other cults that we just don't see. I think one of the problems here is that for a long time, we just thought of the queen consort as basically as a baby making machine.

And we didn't quite realize that she had such an important role. She does. She's not just there to provide the air. She's also there to do ritual duties and to hold political power if necessary. It's well known that if the king is absent, it's the queen who will rule on his behalf till he comes back. And it's well known that if a king dies, leaving a young son too young to rule, the queen will step in and rule on his behalf until the young king becomes old enough and then he'll take over. So it's recognised that queens have this political power. And I think it's becoming increasingly obvious that they also have religious power. You don't get a king without a queen because clearly the queenship is an important part of the kingship and the two together work really well. And again, with Nefertiti,

is what we're seeing very unusual? Has this never happened before? Has it never been that there were female based cults attached to other cults of other gods or is it that just we're seeing it because the evidence has been preserved and this is what we really don't know it is so interesting like these various depictions of nefertiti and they say if this is something brand new or whether there is evidence before this which just doesn't survive is there also an attempt i've got one particular image in mind here is there any attempt to also try've got one particular image in mind here, is there any attempt to also try and portray Nefertiti

in some of this early art, can we say as a warrior? Maybe not a warrior, because even Akhenaten himself, I mean, he's generally known as a pacifist, actually. I think this is probably wrong, but some of his writings, you know, he talks about nature

and there are nature scenes from Amarna, because again, the gods have gone, so you have to have scenes of something. And we get the impression that he was a pacifist and it was a very peaceful time. I'm sure that's not right. I mean, I would classify him more as a dictator rather than any form of pacifist. He only doesn't fight because no one wants to fight him. We do have images of Nefertiti's boat and we know it's Nefertiti's boat because the steering oars has Nefertiti's head carved onto the top of it. We know it's Nefertiti's boat because the steering oars has Nefertiti's head carved onto the top of it. And in the picture of the boat, we could see the cabin.

And in the cabin, there's a scene on the wall of the cabin or painted onto a cover or something. And we see Nefertiti smiting an enemy. Now, smiting an enemy, again, is a very traditional thing that pharaohs do. People will have probably seen it on the exteriors of temples. The king grabs either one enemy or sometimes three enemies, the three traditional enemies of Egypt, and hits them with a club or occasionally run them through with a sword. This smiting of the enemy represents the pharaoh's imposition of control and order on the chaos that is represented by foreigners. And it's interesting that on this block that has come from Amarna, we can see this

scene of Nefertiti doing the same. And it looks, I mean, it's small, but it looks as if she's actually smiting a female. So again, we're left wondering, is this what happened? Did kings ritually smite male enemies and queens did a parallel ceremony to smite female enemies? We're left wondering whether this actually happened did they execute enemies or is it just purely ritual it's purely something that is depicted on the outside of a temple or inside of a temple and how typical is this again did queen t do it for example because we do have images of queen t as a sphinx she's a powerful woman so did she do this we don't know i mean fascinating speculation i know it's complete speculation. I'm an outsider on this,

but if that was on a boat, could it possibly be smiting someone from a power further down the River Nile or further up the River Nile, a neighbouring kingdom? But possibly. But it's hard to say that Akhenaten had any enemies who would actually dare to rebel against him.

We're quite lucky because Amarna has survived so well. From Amarna, we have lots of diplomatic correspondence that's also survived. And we call these loosely the Amarna letters. And we can see his interactions with people certainly outside Egypt. And on the whole, the letters that are being passed are all about gift exchange and all about, you sent me some gold, but it wasn't enough. Please send me some more. Towards the end of his reign, it's clear that he's not particularly interested in his foreign vassals and they're asking for help, but we get no sense that there are enemies within Egypt attacking the court or anything.

Having said that, of course, they wouldn't tell us if they were because the Egyptians are great ones for not writing down bad things because the hieroglyphic writing, the written word has its own magical powers. And if you write things down, they might actually become true. So even if something was going terribly wrong, he probably wouldn't tell us. But it would probably be reflected somewhere in the archaeology or in these Amarna letters and so on. And we have no sense of this. So I think this is purely a ritual that is done to ensure that, again, chaos is kept out of Egypt. But it's interesting that she's, again, really, you'd say, performing a male role.

And then you pause and you think, yeah, but we don't have the temples from the earlier queens. So did they also do this or is this something that's coming now? Is this unique to her or not? Questions abound indeed. But if we then go on forward from this, if Egypt was enjoying this time of peace and prosperity at this new capital. As time goes on we've talked about the art at Amarna already but Joyce what does it look like Nefertiti's role does it evolve does it develop over the years following this radical religious change in this

establishing of a new capital by Akhenaten? It evolved very quickly so that she is almost like a living goddess because the people now are not allowed to worship the god directly. They have to worship through images of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. It's strange, isn't it? Because you would think that a sun, particularly in Egypt, which is such a sunny country, you could just go out in the fields and worship and it would be available to everyone and it would be an accessible democratic God. But no, the Aten, even though it can shine down everywhere, still has

temples where the offerings are made. The contact with the God is restricted and the ordinary people worship in front of these images or statues of the royal couple. So this immediately gives her status. And another thing that is worth mentioning at this point is that she starts to have children and Akhenaten makes a great fuss, if you like, in the art anyway, of these children. What we see are daughters. We see that she has eventually six daughters. We don't know whether she has sons or not. And again, this is another archaeological question. You begin to think at this point that there is nothing that we know about this period, but it is traditional not to show royal sons in royal art at this time. So we can't say that she doesn't have sons. All we can say is that she definitely has daughters and they start to appear. And they also give her a degree of status, I would suggest, because if you've got several daughters supporting you and your husband, that's a good thing as well. So her power seems to grow.

to supporting you and your husband, that's a good thing as well. So her power seems to grow. However, she's not mentioned in the diplomatic correspondence, which I think is quite interesting because her mother-in-law is. So again, that's a slight difference, isn't it, that she's not mentioned there. But that may be that we just don't have that letter recovered. She might have been. It's difficult for us to tell, but she's clearly very important.

I think it's really hard for us to understand just how powerful the king was and how powerful because she was close to him the closest anyone could be to him how powerful the queen was and how different to the ordinary people and different to the other wives as well who would have been at amarna well are there any writings that therefore let's say from amarna or from elsewhere, from this high point of Nefertiti and Akhenaten that do mention Nefertiti, that can shine a bit more light on how she was regarded, what her role was at this time? No, not really. I mean, we have what Akhenaten tells us.

We have, for example, around his city, he tells the story of how he's founded the city with the help of his god to worship the god and what will go on in the city. And he mentions it there, but it's very stereotyped. It could be any queen. The elite at Amarna are given rock-cut tombs. So it's almost a bit like the Valley of the Kings, but it's Amarna. And the elite courtiers have these rock-cut tombs because they've had to abandon their family tombs to move to Amarna, of course. And whereas their old tombs would have been decorated with images of the gods,

these tombs are dedicated with images of the royal family. So we can see Nefertiti with Akhenaten, we can see her riding along in chariots with him, we can see her going to the temple with him. You can see them together having a really interesting daily life, but it's not really anywhere explained. And again, you're thinking, oh, is this really what happened? Or is this the propaganda of how it should have been? Difficult for us to tell. There's a royal tomb cut where she's intended to be buried. He tells us that he intends that she will be buried at Amarna when she dies. So that's obviously important.

But there's just absolutely nothing that spells it out for us exactly what's going on. And if we could find that, it would be fantastic. I appreciate there is so much speculation around it. So it's always difficult for me to ask questions and to expect the clear-cut answer, because sometimes you say they're not there. But that's what makes it so interesting, isn't it, I think? Imagine a millennium that laid the foundations for the modern world as we know it today, when kingdoms were forged, languages shaped, cultures created.

I'm Dr Kat Jarman, and on Gone Medieval, my co-host Matt Lewis and I will tell you just why the so-called Dark Ages really weren't that dark after all. Subscribe to Gone Medieval by History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. If we keep on that now, we're talking about one other area of speculation. Does she possibly have a sister too? Yes, we think she has a sister. Well, we know someone claims to be her sister who appears at the Amarna court and then disappears, either dies, which is quite often why people disappear, or maybe pops up later married to a king called Horemheb, who was also a courtier at Abana, who was a general. So it may be that Nephesis' sister after her death goes on to be queen of Egypt, but we're not sure about the connection.

They have the same name, but it could be a different person. But she certainly has a sister. And that's another reason, I think, for us to believe that she's not a foreigner brought into Amarna. Of course, there's no reason why she couldn't bring a sister with her. When these brides from abroad traveled to Egypt, they traveled with a retinue of hundreds. They didn't just come by themselves. So there's nothing to stop her having brought her sister with her but on the other hand the balanced probability is that it's even more confirming that she's egyptian born and so therefore what's

the next step on nefertiti's story what's the next big thing that's debated that we think might have happened in nefertiti's life once she's at amarna, a few years into Akhenaten and her reign, once she's already been depicted as this living goddess, as it were. Well, round about year 12, there's a big party, for once an international festival, I guess you'd call it. And lots and lots of people come from outside Egypt to Amarna to give their respects and to give gifts to the king. And people travel from all over Egypt's areas of influence and bring things. And we can see that the whole royal family is sitting there watching this occur.

And then after this, in year 12, things seem to fall apart quite quickly. One of the princesses dies, and we have images of her death in the royal tomb. And three of them vanish. So that leaves, she had six daughters. Suddenly there are only really two prominent daughters left. Queen Ti disappears.

She's been at Amarna. She disappears. One of the prominent wives disappears, Kier. And for a time, Nefertiti too seemed to disappear. And this sparked a great deal of interest from archaeologists. I think we found it very hard to accept that she could have died because we'd expect it to be mentioned. So the theory was that she hadn't died,

but she'd gone on to do something else. Maybe she'd been banished. Maybe she'd had a falling out with Akhenaten, either because she thought that he wasn't doing enough solar religion or because she thought he was doing too much solar religion and had been banished. Or maybe she had changed her name and she was there all the time, but was using a different name but

we've had to dial back on that one a bit because we now have found some graffiti dating to year 16 of Akhenaten's reign and Akhenaten reigns for 17 years and we have evidence from wine jars to suggest this and this graffiti mentions Nefertiti still as being the queen consort so we now know that actually right up to year 16 of his 17 year reign, she's still the queen consort. She has not changed her name and started to rule alongside him. She's still the queen consort. And that's kind of where we are at the moment. But we do find towards the end of the reign, several characters pop up and we don't know who they are. And we wonder if one of them could be Nefertiti under a different

name. So my view, because I think I always go for the simplest view until the evidence persuades me otherwise, I would suggest that she remains queen consort until you're 16 and then either dies or dies shortly after her husband and just has a conventional end to her period as queen consort. But it is possible to suggest that she stepped forward and ruled Amarna at the point that her husband died. There is certainly evidence for a powerful royal woman round about the time of Akhenaten's death. I wouldn't deny that in the slightest, but what I would say is that I suggest that that is his eldest daughter, not his wife, because his eldest daughter is born royal and because there's evidence that his eldest daughter married his successor, Smenkar-Re, and that the two of them

ruled together. And this to me fits together as a nicer story than the fact that Nefertiti, who I think we've established is probably not royal born, coming forward to rule Egypt. So is this evidence from the end of Akhenaten's reign? Is this the evidence that people have used as a nucleus, shall we say, for this idea that around this time, Nefertiti possibly adopted the title of pharaoh? Yes. We can see that someone comes to the fore called Smenkhare,

and there was a lot of debate as to whether this was a man or a woman. People are fairly well agreed now that Smenkhare is a man. To me, I would place Smenkaray as Akhenaten's son, and I would place him as someone who inherits the throne at the end of his father's reign, possibly even as a co-regent, and who is married to the eldest princess, Meritaten, but who dies very soon, and who is then succeeded by his brother, Tutankhamen, who is married to the

other remaining Amarna princess, Ankhesempa Aten. And to me, that makes a nice, neat story. But the evidence can be read different ways. You could also interpret it to say that a powerful woman came to the fore. We don't have the names. We don't have the precise names. And what names we do have could be applicable to various people, which this is what really, really confuses it. We don't have anything as straightforward as Nefertiti came to the throne or Nefertiti died that would really, really help us here. There is evidence for this powerful woman. Some people would say that she ruled Egypt.

I would think that if she was ruling Egypt, she was doing it on behalf of her son, because we know that there are heirs to the throne. There's this Smenkhare, very shadowy character, but there's also Tutankhamen, who clearly is an heir to the throne, because he inherits the throne at about eight years of age. And you don't do that if you're not in the line of succession, you can't as an eight-year-old just ride up and take the throne. There's got to be a reason for you to have it. So it could be that this queen is ruling on behalf of Tutankhamen for a time and

then steps back. I've already mentioned that this occasionally happens. It's a very, very muddled period. And because it's muddled, it's about two or three muddled years and then we get back to certainties because we can see Akhenaten has died in about 1336 and Tutankhamen comes to the throne but between these two a period maybe as much as two years maybe only a few weeks of complete confusion as to what goes on and we have to slot Smenkhare in there I think we can be fairly clear that he's married to the eldest princess we have to slot Smenkhare in there. I think we can be fairly clear that he's married to the eldest princess. We have to try and work out whose parents are who as well, because Smenkhare certainly doesn't tell us who he is. And Tutankhamen doesn't tell us who his parents are, which is really, really frustrating. If he told us that, we would probably have a much better grasp of what is going on at this time. So this totally allows us, I mean, I don't believe that

she ruled Egypt, I have to be honest about this. I think it would be too exceptional. I think her daughters are so much more royal than she is, that it would be odd for her to do it. But certainly you could use the evidence to say that she did. I wouldn't deny that. We need more evidence to be really, really clear on this one. Well, if we follow that strand then for this podcast, what do you believe about her death and burial? What seems most likely? Okay, to me, she either predeceased her husband or died soon after and was buried at Amarna or outlived him. What you need to know before we can discuss this is that when Tutankhamen comes to the throne, he basically closes down Amarna and they move back to the old ways of being. And he takes the bodies from the royal tombs

to Thebes, to the Valley of the Kings, because if he left them behind at Amarna, they would be robbed and there'd be nothing left. So just because a body is found in the Valley of the Kings doesn't mean it was originally buried there. This is just, again, another layer of confusion. But yeah, so I would either see her being buried at Amarna

because she died either within her husband's reign or shortly after it, or she outlives him, is still a powerful woman. And when she dies, she's possibly buried either in a harem cemetery or even at Thebes. All of these are possible. Some people would say that as a husband dies, there's no proper successor. She rules Egypt for a short period of time before Tutankhamen is able to come to the throne. And again, in that case, she was likely to be buried either at Amarna and then transferred to Thebes by Tutankhamen, or might have originally been buried at Thebes herself. If she was the one who contributed towards Amarna being closed down and the old religion being restored, then she might have died at Thebes and she would have a burial in the Valley of the Kings straight away.

But what happens to her after her death, her immediate legacy, shall we say? Well, immediately, she seems to be pretty much forgotten. Certainly in Tutankhamun's reign, there is evidence that he goes back to Amarna and that he moves the bodies. And this is as much of his own interest as anything else, because presumably they were buried with lots of gold and grave goods and so on, which, of course, he'd rather have it himself rather than have the thieves take it. So he distributes the Amarna bodies in the Valley of the Kings, and they're basically forgotten. And then history goes on to forget the entire Amarna period. Tutankhamun is on the throne for about 10 years, dies unexpectedly, is succeeded by Ai, who is already very old, rules a few years, is succeeded

by General Horemheb, who may or may not be married to Nefertiti's sister. Horemheb and his successors, the Ramesside kings, take quite a dim view of the Amarna period. They don't want to be associated with it. And effectively, they cut it out of Egyptian history. So suddenly, official history goes from Amenhotep III, Akhenaten's father, leaps forward to Horemheb. And the whole period with Akhenaten, Smenkare, Tutankhamen, and Ai is cut out of history. So they're kind of forgotten. And because nobody goes back to live at Amarna, the temples there, which would have been built of stone or dismantled, the housing kind of crumbles away and people forget about them. And the stone blocks that are put into later temples themselves get reused as those later temples get demolished and reused again. And basically the whole Amarna period kind of

disappears. There's evidence that it kind of lingers in a folk memory. Herodotus, the classical historian who visits Egypt towards the end of the dynastic age, mentions that there was some sort of oddness going on here, but nobody really knows what happens to the Marner period. And it pretty much remains hidden until the beginning of the last century, really, or the end of the 19th century, when people start to excavate at Amarna and start to find evidence of this period and suddenly they're finding evidence for people who didn't exist if you see what I mean because they've been written out of history so it took quite a bit of adjusting for us to understand what had gone on and obviously it's this cutting out of history is what is really confusing us

because we have to slot them into the place that's left for them. I mean, Joyce, it's really interesting. One thing I'd just like to hang on to before we go on to the famous Buster Nefertiti and its rediscovery. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are.

So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. onepeloton.ca. Is this whole idea once again of Amarna and how Nefertiti's body may well have been moved to the Valley of the Kings?

Because it seems as if in their lifetime they had prepared Akhenaten, Nefertiti, they had prepared these tombs for their death, these great royal tombs. But the fact is, it doesn't seem like if we know where these tombs are, they were never buried there. So I find it fascinating that you have these tombs. But the fact is, it doesn't seem like if we know where these tombs are, they were never buried there. So I find it fascinating that you have these tombs which are potentially just

empty of any significant Egyptian figure. I think they were buried there. I don't think the elite who had the rock cut tombs, I don't think they used them. I think as soon as they could, they left Amarna and died elsewhere. And if they had used them, they would take their bodies with them, I think. Nobody would want to be left alone because they would know what would happen to a body that was left alone in an isolated graveyard. But I think certainly Akhenaten was buried in it.

He had one big royal tomb, actually. He didn't build separate ones. He built one massive one with sort of sub-chambers for different branches of the family. And there were also other tombs near the big Amarna royal tomb. It's called the Royal Wadi, we call it now. It's like a dried riverbed with these very, very royal tombs in it.

And he did plan to be buried there. He tells us so. And I think he himself probably was buried there. I suspect that Ben-Kare was buried there. I think Queen Ti was probably buried there. I think that his favourite other wife, Kia, was probably buried there. His daughter, Meritata, we know was buried there because we have an image on the tomb wall.

So it was used. But when Tutankhamen left Amarna, he emptied it. It had probably already been robbed. Grave robbing went on the whole time. So you wouldn't leave a cemetery unprotected. It would be interesting to know how often it would be that pharaohs would actually move bodies around like this because Tutankhamen did it here. And it was a sensible thing to do that he could take the bodies, take them to Thebes, process them again. He put them into sort of storage tombs, process them. Presumably he took all their goodies, all their grave goods, used them because we can see in his own burial that there are artifacts made for other people. All his grave goods aren't made for him. There's a whole mishmash of Amarna stuff in there as well. And we can tell this from both the artistic style and also because it's got other people's names on

it. So we know that he used some of this stuff himself. And then he would, I think, just slotted them into appropriate tombs in the Valley of the Kings, but greatly denuded so they wouldn't attract thieves anymore. But then that makes us very difficult, of course, for us to recognise them. Well, yes. So Nefertiti's body may still well be out there somewhere. We just don't know where. The possibilities are that she died and was buried at Amarna, either with her husband's reign or after it, and then was transferred by Tutankhamen, put in a cash tomb, processed and put somewhere else. Or we have the idea that she died at Thebes after Amarna closed down, after everyone had moved, and she was buried

straight away in the Valley of the Kings. But again, even that wasn't the end of the story, because at the end of the New Kingdom, the priests who were in charge of the necropolis also went through the royal tombs and also emptied them out and stripped the bodies of their goods and put them into cash tombs. Some of them we can recognize because they labeled them, but we have a lot of bodies who we can't recognise who they are. And they did this for the same reason that Tutankhamun would have done it, because they were vulnerable to attack because of the value of the kings had become quite disordered by this time. And they wanted to use the gold for themselves. They wanted to preserve the bodies. It makes it very difficult because really the only bodies we can be absolutely certain of from this period in the Valley of the Kings are Tutankhamen's, Queen T's parents, Yuya and Thuya, who are found in their

own tombs, almost entirely undisturbed. They've had robberies, but they basically, we know that those bodies are who they say they are. The other bodies, they've had such a journey. Some have come from Amarna and been moved around the necropolis several times. Some have been buried there, but been moved at least once. And this is why it's so difficult these days, because with the growing interest in mummy DNA, it's now possible to try and reconstruct a family history for the mummies that we have and try and link them together. Not everybody agrees that mummy DNA works as well as we'd like it to.

There are all sorts of problems with it because the heat doesn't help. There's massive problems of contamination. I mean, you can imagine because the mummies have been wrapped, unwrapped, wrapped, found by excavators and unwrapped. But still, people are starting to examine the mummies that we know of and maybe suggest links to them. And even if we've not got it entirely right, it presumably in the future is something that everyone will agree we've got it right. And on the basis of this sort of analysis bodies in the valley of the kings have been identified some have been identified but nobody has entirely agreed that we actually have nefertiti so that's very much a continuing story i think absolutely ancient history is still very much alive and

kicking yeah well it's fascinating to me how often these mummies move that they're not where they should be yeah you should be more like the Ptolemies later on okay just put them all in one big place where we know and just need to figure out where that place was where was the Soma but anyways just before we wrap up going to more modern history going to archaeology got to talk about the bust of Nefertiti that famous legendary bust What's the story of its discovery? When and how was this bust discovered? It was discovered by a German team of archaeologists working at the beginning of the last century.

And it was found in the remains of a workshop, which we think belonged to a sculptor called Tuthmosis. And he'd obviously, when Amarna was abandoned, he'd had to abandon his workshop because obviously without the court being there, nobody wanted royal sculpture. So he left the unwanted stuff behind. It wouldn't have been his anyway. It was royal sculpture. That's what he did. He wasn't running a shop. He actually did it for the royal family and his sculpture, presumably when it was completed, would go into Amana city and be displayed. Amana seems to be full of images

of the royal family and he was contributing to this. So he left it behind and he went away and it was found in the remains of basically a big cupboard. It wasn't found alone though. Other things were found with it as well. I think we tend to forget this is there was a focus on this one piece, but no, there was a companion piece for Akhenaten and there were lots of plaster heads as well, which are very interesting. What we think now is that these are models that the workshop used. So you'd have a model Nefertiti and a model Akhenaten head to make sure that all your future Nefertitis and Akhenaten look the same. So that's what we think it was. Anyway, it was obviously a very beautiful piece. At the time, the antiquities laws said that excavators could have half the finds from the site,

and they were expected to drop two lists of equal value. So you started with your two most expensive pieces and put one on the top of each list, and then you went down the list of everything you'd found. And then an antiquities inspector, who would be French because the French ran the antiquities service, would come along, pick one of the lists, and you kept what was left. The list that was picked by the antiquities service went to Cairo Museum. The antiquities inspector was allowed to swap things across. So you shouldn't be able to fiddle it in theory. And very surprisingly, what happened is the antiquities inspector did not pick the list that had this head at the top of it. We don't really know why.

I suspect, I don't know, he wasn't doing his job properly. He probably didn't look properly. I mean, you wouldn't expect that to be there, I guess. So, you know, it's an ordinary day at the office. You turn up, you pick a list, you have lunch, you go away again. So the head almost immediately was sent to Germany, I think, before anybody could change their mind. Anyone could see that clearly something had gone wrong. And it was quite some time later that it went on display in the museum in Berlin.

And almost immediately when it did, it went on display actually after the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb. So after the First World War and after the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb, when it became obvious that the French were not going to allow the Germans to excavate again at Amarna, because obviously, well, the French antiquities chief had been fighting the Germans and was not particularly pro-German. So he removed their permission to excavate at Amarna, and it gave the Germans something to balance off the British discovery of Tutankhamen. So she went on display and almost immediately, of course, the antiquity service asked for her to be returned to Egypt on the grounds that a mistake had clearly been made, but the German authorities didn't agree. And this has been continuing right to the present day

with the Egyptian authorities asking for the return, the German authorities saying no. But it's very interesting. I mean, even leaving that to one side, and that's a really interesting debate. By finding this beautiful, beautiful image of Nefertiti, it really seems to have shifted our perceptions of her that up to that point, she was seen, yes, she was a queen,

she was a consort but not as important as queen teen maybe not as important as her daughters but suddenly with this beautiful image and displayed in the berlin museum everything started to focus on nefertiti and suddenly although the evidence itself hadn't materially changed she started to be perceived as the dominant amarna character much more dominant than she had done before. And I think we regard her as such a person of interest because of the beauty of this piece. Absolutely. And it is really interesting when you look at that in the early 20th century and you look at those discoveries that were made. You mentioned Tutankhamen there. What timing, really.

A couple of years later, you then have this figure who has also this link, potential link to Tutankhamen also being discovered too. I mean, it's almost as if the stars had completely aligned. It is. And it's just after the First World War. I mean, Tutankhamen is 1922. There's a great interest in ancient Egypt. There's a great interest in alternative theologies and connecting with the dead and all that sort of thing is going on. And there's also a new modern age and the Amana art style is very sort of art deco looking. I mean, it fits very well with the times. I'm sure it influences the development of

art deco, which is just about to come actually about 1925. So it all fits together really well. It's very off the moment. People are interested in Akhenaten as being different, as being someone who maybe is enlightened. And so Nefertiti really slots into that time period. And because of her look, she's got a very clean, androgynous look to her. She seems to appeal to everybody. And all ages, all generations, all heritages, everybody seems to agree that she is a very stunning piece. And with this stunning piece just the joe broggs like myself what are the main features of this bust the main feature is the fact it's colored to be honest painted we're not expecting to see color on sculpture we get so accustomed to seeing ancient sculpture as a stone that's how it's displayed in our museums and we forget that it wasn't like that

egypt's sculpture was on the whole painted, plastered and painted sometimes. This is limestone head, it's been plastered, it's been painted, it's colourful. She was known as the colourful queen or the colourful princess to the extent that a lot of people have felt that it's wrong and think she might be a fake because she is so colourful. But it really sort of brings her to life and people are taken aback when they see her. Again, she's very striking looking, she when they see her again she's very striking looking she's very modern looking she's very contemporary looking and this again she doesn't look you look like you could know her and this is i think what appeals to everybody but this whole idea of the colorful use of paint is i think it's the one that really struck a chord with people but also it's a bit of a slow burner first people went to berlin museum to see her and they started to go more and

more but berlin museum were quite clever as. They started to create replicas in their plaster workshop and to sell these. So at the same time that she was on display in the actual museum, replicas were being sent worldwide to certain Western museums and they were going on display as well. My own local museum, Bolton Museum, had a replica Nefertiti. Manchester Museum has a replica Nefertiti, and they're really good replicas. So people also became very familiar with it very quickly, and then, of course, wanted to go and see the original. So it was quite clever as well. She almost had a marketing campaign, if you like.

Absolutely. I mean, that leads us on really to this good ending point, which is the legacy of the bust of Nefertiti. To this day, whether it's the replicas, you seem to see these images, these portraits, these replicas of this bust everywhere. I mean, its legacy is so significant. And to think it was only a hundred years ago, just under a hundred years ago that it was discovered.

Yes, yes. I mean, we did know her name. She hadn't been forgotten, but it suddenly changed our entire perception of her and almost that period and it's amazing yes i have a collection of replica nefertiti replicas and the variation is enormous some of them very very careful quite a lot of them the eye is missing from the bust but you often don't see that in photographs they twist ahead so you can't see that the eye is missing

people will replicate this just as a silhouette and people can recognize it with the crown on as well everybody knows that it's Nefertiti it's a really good branding exercise and I'm sure it wasn't thought of it quite this way but it's something that really has drawn her to attention and she just gets more and more famous remarkably so absolutely and this legacy of beauty I know there was so much more to Nefertiti than just beauty from all the work you've been doing but it is astonishing how that has survived and remained so strong and is just getting even stronger into the 21st century. Yes. And what is remarkable is that she appears beautiful to pretty much everyone who sees her. There's a great consensus of opinion that she is indeed beautiful. Not necessarily alluring, I would say. She can appear quite austere,

but as a piece, it's remarkable. Joyce, this has been a fantastic chat all about Nefertiti and her legacy. Last but certainly not least, your books on Nefertiti are called? Well, the recent one is called Nefertiti's Face, and it's about the Berlin bust. But I've also written a book that's just called Nefertiti, because as new information arrives, we're updating it all the time. So not the last word on Nefertiti, I think. Not the last word. Absolutely. Fantastic. Always good to hear you. Egyptologists are always constantly busy. Joyce, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. Thank you.