Nefertiti- Egyptian FigureMortal"Great Royal Wife"

The Beautiful One Has Come

Her name means "The Beautiful One Has Come," but where she came from is unclear. The courtier Ay, who bore the title "God's Father" and later became pharaoh himself, probably fathered her. His wife Tey was called "Nurse of the Great Royal Wife," a title that suggests she raised Nefertiti but did not bear her. Nefertiti married Amenhotep IV early in his reign, before he changed his name to Akhenaten, abandoned Thebes, and built a new capital in the desert.

The Revolution at Amarna

Akhenaten declared the Aten, the sun disk, the sole god of Egypt and closed the temples of Amun. He abandoned Thebes and built Akhetaten, modern Amarna, in the empty desert of Middle Egypt. Nefertiti stood beside him in every dimension of the new order. In the Aten cult, only the royal couple could worship the god directly. The people of Egypt worshipped through them.

Talatat blocks from dismantled Aten temples at Karnak show her performing acts no queen had performed before: grasping enemies by the hair in the pharaonic smiting pose, offering to the Aten alone without Akhenaten present. She took the additional name Neferneferuaten, "Beautiful are the Beauties of the Aten." In reliefs from the tombs of Amarna courtiers, she appears beside Akhenaten in the "window of appearances," dispensing gold collars to officials below.

The Mourning for Meketaten

Nefertiti bore Akhenaten six daughters. Amarna artists depicted the family with a tenderness unknown in royal art: the parents kissing, embracing, holding their children on their laps. The youngest daughters vanish from the record before the end of Akhenaten's reign, likely taken by the plague that swept the ancient Near East.

Meketaten, the second daughter, died young. In the Royal Tomb at Amarna, reliefs show the king and queen bending over her body with arms extended in grief. A nurse holds a newborn in the adjacent register.

The Vanishing

Nefertiti disappears from the record around Year 12 of Akhenaten's reign. The last securely dated evidence of her is the Year 12 durbar, a grand reception of foreign tribute depicted in the tombs of Huya and Meryre II at Amarna. After that, nothing certain.

Her name was chiseled from some Amarna monuments but left intact on others. Wine jar labels from late Amarna are dated to a ruler called Neferneferuaten, and a graffito in Theban tomb TT139 mentions offerings to Amun in Year 3 of this ruler's reign. Whether Nefertiti took the throne under this name, whether she attempted a restoration of the old gods, or whether she died at Year 12, the evidence does not settle.

The Sculptor's Workshop

In the workshop of Thutmose at Amarna, among plaster casts and sculptor's models, a painted limestone bust stood 48 centimeters tall. The queen wears her flat-topped blue crown with a golden diadem and uraeus cobra. One eye is inlaid with quartz. The other is an empty socket, the iris never set, a master model left unfinished.