Nefertiti
Page 6
Our lack of knowledge concerning Amenhotep’s adolescence is more unusual, but probably reflects the fact that he was a second son born late in his parents’ marriage. As first-born son, or crown prince, Amenhotep’s older brother, Tuthmosis, would have inherited a well-defined role within the royal family. He was the Horus who would eventually inherit the throne of his dead father, Osiris. His future was assured, and there was an established training programme to ensure that he would grow into a conventional New Kingdom monarch. Since the reign of Tuthmosis I the crown prince had been educated in the school attached to the harem, where he learned his lessons alongside the sons of Egypt’s élite who would one day become his ministers. His theoretical education complete, the prince was transferred to Memphis, the administrative centre of Egypt. Here he was able to experience the workings of the court bureaucracy at first hand, and his leisure time was spent perfecting his hunting skills so that he could become the brave and fearless warrior which Egypt expected.
Our only surviving image of Tuthmosis, an unusual statuette now housed in the collections of the Louvre Museum, Paris, shows the prince dressed in the kilt, side-lock and panther skin of a priest. He is lying prostrate to grind corn before the god Ptah, and the inscription identifies him as ‘… the King’s Son, the Sem-Priest Tuthmosis’.3 Other inscriptions tell us that Tuthmosis, who seems to have been something of an animal-lover, was accorded special responsibility for the burial of the Apis bulls of Memphis. The sarcophagus of his own pet cat, named Ta-Miu or ‘The Cat’, gives his full and final titulary as ‘Crown Prince, Overseer of the Priests of Upper and Lower Egypt, High Priest of Ptah in Memphis and Sem-Priest of Ptah’. The tomb of Tuthmosis has never been found but, given his links with Memphis, it seems likely that he would have been buried at Sakkara.
There was no well-defined role for younger brothers who, unless some tragedy befell the crown prince, were unlikely ever to inherit the throne. In consequence younger sons played a relatively minor part in the official royal family while they waited to see whether they would be required to step into their older brother’s sandals. Egypt’s high infant and child mortality rates and low life expectancy meant that this happened more often than we might expect; within the Tuthmoside royal family both Tuthmosis II and Tuthmosis IV had inherited the throne after the death of their older brother(s). The gods themselves, immune to the scourge of child mortality, avoided the problem of surplus sons by restricting their own families to one child, and triads of local gods (father, mother and child, usually a son) were venerated as one family unit. At Memphis the god Ptah, his wife Sekhmet and their son Nefertum were worshipped together, while the Theban triad was made up of the great god Amen, his consort Mut and their son Khonsu. Where a divine family did include two sons there could be trouble. Seth, the younger brother of Osiris, eventually murdered his brother so that he could inherit the throne of Egypt.
Younger sons spent their earlier years as understudies to the crown prince, and those who did not eventually become king sank into obscurity once the succession was assured. This restricted the immediate royal family to the king, his principal wife, his sisters, aunts, mother, grandmother and children; brothers and uncles, and of course their children, were no longer regarded as fully royal although they enjoyed a well-respected place in Egyptian court life. Grown men were certainly wary of claiming a family relationship with the king at a time when others less well-connected were happy to boast of their monarch’s patronage and, although we have examples of 18th Dynasty individuals classifying themselves as a ‘King’s Son’, it seems remarkable that we have no one claiming to be a ‘King’s Brother’ or ‘King’s Nephew’.
The new Amenhotep IV needed a consort to complete his role as king. Following the precedent set by his father he rejected his sisters and half-sisters and looked outside the immediate royal family to choose as his bride a previously obscure young woman named Nefertiti. Amenhotep is silent about his wife’s origins and, although Nefertiti’s name is constantly associated with that of her husband, her parents are not mentioned in any inscription or document. This in itself is not totally unexpected. Queens drew their status purely from their links with the king. The more links, the more status, so that the highest-ranking woman in the land was invariably a king’s daughter who had become a king’s wife and then a king’s mother. It did not matter that such a lady would almost certainly be linked to three different kings (her father, her brother/husband and her son), as the role of king remained constant no matter how many individuals played it. A princess married to a king would always be given her correct titles which would include ‘King’s Daughter’. Non-royal women, however, were rarely given their filiation on their husband’s monuments as their existence before their marriage was an irrelevance. Amenhotep III had been highly unusual in stressing his own non-royal bride’s parentage.
With one exception, we know of no one claiming to be related to Nefertiti. This is somewhat unexpected as Egyptians routinely included within their tombs details of their more important and glamorous relatives, thereby impressing visitors and adding to their own status. There was a marked reluctance for men to make a direct acknowledgement of any link with the royal family forged via marriage, to the extent that neither Yuya nor Anen made any reference to their kinship with Tiy. This taboo, however, did not seem to apply to women, and Thuyu had certainly felt no need to suppress her pride in her daughter’s achievements. As the discoverers of her tomb noted, her title of ‘Royal Mother of the Chief Wife of the King’ was everywhere:
… repeated jealously on the coffins, on the furniture, on the ouashbaatiou [shabti figures], in such a manner that the day an intruder should penetrate into the tomb, he would know from what to refrain on account of the quality of one of the persons resting there, and would not be able to plead the excuse of ignorance if he persisted in his intention of despoiling the mummy.4
It seems curious to modern eyes that Thuyu sought to impress visitors to her tomb by emphasizing her relationship with the queen, while the husband who lay by her side made no mention of his identical relationship. Indeed, if it were not for the commemorative scarabs which make Tiy’s parentage clear, we would be justified in assuming that Tiy was not Yuya’s daughter. The evidence provided by Yuya and Thuyu’s tomb suggests that, while we might expect to find that Nefertiti’s father and brother would stress their association with the king rather than their kinship with the queen, Nefertiti’s mother would have felt free to boast of her daughter. As we have no woman claiming to be Nefertiti’s mother, should we assume either that the tomb of Nefertiti’s mother has yet to be discovered, or that Nefertiti’s mother died before her daughter married the king? Could Nefertiti even have been born abroad?
As Nefertiti appears to have sprung from nowhere, speculation regarding her origins has been rife. Her name, an unusual one, translates as ‘A Beautiful Woman Has Come’. This has naturally led to the suggestion that the new queen may have been a foreigner who, quite literally, arrived at the Egyptian court in order to marry the king. The idea of a foreign queen has a certain attraction, in the way that the theories of Amenhotep’s Syrian education or Tiy’s Near Eastern parentage had earlier appealed to egyptologists, because it allows Nefertiti to introduce strange, un-Egyptian religious ideas into the hitherto highly conservative royal family and thus provides a neat explanation for Amenhotep’s defection from the traditional Egyptian gods. It also allows Nefertiti a certain romantic glamour to match her regal status. Although there is no evidence for the arrival of any foreign bride at the start of Amenhotep’s reign, the harem which Amenhotep had inherited from his father already contained several suitable princesses. Could one of these have been transformed into Nefertiti?
We have no firm date for the royal marriage, although monumental evidence suggests that it occurred either just before or shortly after Amenhotep’s accession to the throne. We can, however, deduce that Nefertiti was relatively young when she married Amenhotep, as she went on to bear at least six
children. The most obvious candidate for the role of queen consort must therefore be the youngest of the foreign royal brides, Princess Tadukhepa, daughter of Tushratta of Mitanni. Tadukhepa had been sent to Egypt to marry the ailing Amenhotep III but the marriage was almost certainly unconsummated as her arrival coincided with the death of her elderly bridegroom. We know that Tadukhepa remained in Egypt, becoming the wife of Amenhotep IV, but from this point on she disappears from public view. Could she have become his consort, changing her outlandish foreign name to a more suitable Egyptian one? Tushratta had certainly hoped that his daughter would one day become queen of Egypt; during the original marriage negotiations he had stipulated that Tadukhepa should take the title of ‘Mistress of Egypt’ although, with Queen Tiy firmly in place, this must have seemed a remote possibility. A change of ruler, however, would have meant a change of circumstances, and a new name would certainly account for Tadukhepa’s disappearance at precisely the time that Nefertiti emerges. Although there was no precedent for a foreign princess becoming queen of Egypt, this was in no way forbidden. Indeed, during the 19th Dynasty a Hittite princess, presented by her father as a peace offering to Ramesses II, was renamed Maathorneferure and made ‘Great King’s Wife’.
Flinders Petrie, a strong supporter of the Nefertiti as Tadukhepa theory, took matters one step further by suggesting that Tadukhepa was herself of mixed Egyptian-Mitannian parentage and an ‘heiress’ capable of transmitting the right to rule Egypt to her husband. He believed that she had never been intended as a bride for the old king, but had always been meant for his son.5 Assuming, incorrectly, that Nefertiti/ Tadukhepa’s daughters start to appear on their father’s monuments only during his Year 6, and hazarding a guess that the first princess would probably have been conceived soon after her parents’ marriage, Petrie decided that the royal wedding must have occurred during Year 4. However, Tushratta’s correspondence with Amenhotep III makes it clear that the marriage was celebrated – but not necessarily consummated – before the death of the old king. For Petrie’s theory to be correct, Amenhotep IV’s Year 4 must have occurred during his father’s lifetime, and the two would thus have spent at least four years as joint consorts.
Co-regencies had been an accepted feature of 12th Dynasty Egypt when many kings ended their reigns by ruling alongside their chosen successor. The Theban kings who founded the 18th Dynasty regarded the 12th Dynasty as the height of Egyptian civilization and, seeking to emulate their forebears in establishing an unquestionable line of descent, reintroduced the custom. These joint reigns must have posed many practical problems. How was such a reign to be dated, and who was to be the senior monarch? How could a co-regency be reconciled with the legend of the dying king Osiris passing his crown to his living son Horus, the myth which underpinned the whole dynastic system? However, the fact that the tradition persisted shows that, whatever the drawbacks of co-regencies, the benefits outweighed the obvious disadvantages. Co-regencies certainly had the advantage of making the succession crystal clear, an important message at a time when kings were fathering many tens of sons. Petrie’s theory of a four-year co-regency, based as it was on flawed evidence, was quickly discarded but the suggestion of a joint rule between Amenhotep III and his son was revived in the 1930s with several experts proposing joint reigns of varying lengths ranging from three to twelve years.6
Co-regencies can prove almost impossible to detect. Does the presence of a king’s name at an archaeological site confirm that he actually lived there? Is the image of a king standing alongside his successor intended to show two living monarchs or a dead father and his living son? Only when a monument is double-dated, that is it shows the dates of both the ‘senior’ and the ‘junior’ kings, can we be certain that there are two rulers on the throne. Unfortunately, New Kingdom co-regencies did not employ this double-dating system, and in all known joint reigns the ‘junior’ king started to count his own years only from the death of his co-monarch. All the ‘evidence’ put forward in favour of the proposed co-regency of Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV is highly ambiguous and capable of a variety of interpretations; there are, for example, a handful of instances where the names or images of the two kings are linked on monuments, but filial piety may well have caused the new king to associate his name with that of his dead father. Similarly, wine dockets recovered from Amarna bearing the regnal years 28 and 30, and so assumed to belong to the reign of Amenhotep III, need not have been taken to Amarna during the old king’s reign.
As yet there is absolutely no direct evidence to prove that Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV ever ruled together. Indeed, King Tushratta’s letter of condolence, written to Queen Tiy soon after news of her husband’s demise had reached Mitanni, strongly suggests that the old king had been succeeded by the new without any period of joint rule. Tushratta manages to combine his expressions of sorrow at the passing of the old king with a lengthy grumble about the quality of gold statues sent to Mitanni by the new king. Apparently Amenhotep III (called Nimmuaria by Tushratta) had promised to send statues of solid gold ornamented with lapis lazuli, but Amenhotep IV (a.k.a. Napkhururiya) had substituted cheap wooden statues plated in gold:
Say to Tiy, the mistress of Egypt from Tushratta, King of Mitanni:
With me all goes well. With you may all go well. With your household and your son, may all go well. With Tadukhepa my daughter and your daughter-in-law, may all go well… You are the one who knows that I always showed love to Nimmuaria, your husband, and that Nimmuaria, your husband, always showed love to me… You are the one that knows much better than all others the things that we said to one another. No other person knows them as well as you… I will not forget my love for Nimmuaria, your husband. More than ever, I now show this love tenfold for your son, Napkhururiya… I had asked your husband for statues of solid gold… But now Napkhururiya, your son, has sent plated statues of wood. With gold being as dirt in your son’s land, why has your son not given what I asked for?… 7
This letter makes it clear that Tiy, now queen mother, was still widely regarded as one of the most important figures at the Egyptian court. Her influence over her son seems to have been as strong as her influence over her late husband had ever been, so that when Tushratta sought help in the matter of his missing golden statues it was to Tiy rather than to the new king that he turned. Amenhotep IV probably seemed something of an unknown quantity, and Tushratta may have calculated (wrongly) that his best chance of receiving the precious statues was to beg Tiy to plead his cause with her son. However, Tushratta may have already been aware that the new king was by no means as friendly towards Mitanni as his father had been. The two rulers went on to enjoy a less than brotherly relationship and none of Tushratta’s letters to Amenhotep received the courtesy of a reply. After three abortive epistles Tushratta abandoned the correspondence. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Amenhotep was indifferent to the fate of both Tushratta and his country.
The presentation of Nefertiti as an exotic foreign princess may have an appealing neatness and a certain romantic attraction. However, it is a theory completely unsupported by historical or archaeological facts. Nefertiti’s name, although uncommon, was certainly not extraordinary. All but the shortest of Egyptian personal names had a meaning, usually reflecting either devotion to a certain deity or the particular attributes of the child; Tuthmosis, for example, is a Greek form of an Egyptian name which should more properly be written Djehuty-Mes and which translates as ‘Born of Thoth’, while Amenhotep means ‘Amen is Satisfied’. A child’s name was chosen by the mother at the birth, and it does not take too wide a leap of the imagination to envisage a proud mother choosing a name intended to reflect the beauty of her new-born baby girl. We know that other 18th Dynasty parents devised similar names for their daughters; the Theban tomb of Nakht, an official in the temple of Amen, which has been dated to the reign of Amenhotep III, includes the female names Nefert-Waty (‘The Beautiful One is Unique’) and Neferteni (‘The Beautiful One is for Me’), while one
mother named her daughter Aneksi (‘She Belongs to Me’).
There is now enough evidence to confirm that Nefertiti, far from being a foreigner, must have been born a member of Egypt’s wealthy élite.8 In their unfinished Amarna tomb the lady Tey is shown alongside her husband Ay as they both receive a reward of golden necklaces from the arms of the king and queen. The receipt of gold was a great public honour which had originally been reserved for victorious soldiers, but which at the start of the 18th Dynasty had been expanded to encompass statesmen and high-ranking male court officials. For a wife to receive gold alongside her husband was, however, unprecedented and must be read as a clear message that the woman in question was of particular importance. The fact that Tey was permitted to share the most elaborate of the private Amarna tombs on an almost equal basis with Ay is further confirmation, if any were needed, that she was a lady of the highest rank. Tey was, indeed, no simple wife, and her titles include ‘Favourite of the Good God, Nurse of the King’s Great Wife Nefertiti, Nurse of the Goddess, Ornament of the King’. Nurse, in this context, is usually translated as wet-nurse.