First, however, the festival buildings had to be prepared. There was a flurry of construction work and the opening of a new sandstone quarry at Gebel el-Silsila, where a tall stela cut high on the cliff shows the new king wearing the crown of Upper Egypt and offering to Amen beneath the winged sun disc, and an inscription records the cutting of stone for the ‘Great Benben of Harakhty’ at Thebes. Heliopolis, Memphis and Nubia received new sun temples, but Amenhotep’s attention was focused on Thebes, the religious capital of Egypt, where Amen’s supremacy was threatened by a disjointed series of temples and cult buildings, all dedicated in various ways to the worship of the sun disc or Aten who was to play a prominent role in the sed celebrations. These included a magnificent open temple named Gempaaten (‘The Sun Disc is found’) and its subsidiary, Hwt-Benben (‘Mansion of the Benben-Stone’), which were situated to the east of the existing Karnak complex.
Unfortunately the archaeological evidence for this period is severely limited and none of these buildings still stands. This is due not to the ravages of time, which have not been particularly severe at Thebes, but to the deliberate actions of Amenhotep’s successors who made a determined effort to wipe out all trace of their unconventional forebear. Amenhotep’s name and image were ruthlessly erased and defaced wherever they were found. His monuments were torn down and his buildings were dismantled, the valuable stone being re-used in other constructions. A similar fate was to befall Amarna, Egypt’s short-lived capital city. Here the stone blocks from Amenhotep’s temples were salvaged and taken across the river to be incorporated in the building work of Ramesses II at Hermopolis (modern Ashmunein). In 1939 a German expedition to Hermopolis recovered over 1,000 limestone blocks which, originally from Amarna, had been re-used in the foundations of the temple pylon. Unfortunately the advent of war interrupted their work. The Germans hastily reburied their precious finds, only to have them re-excavated by enterprising locals who sawed the decorated blocks into slabs, ‘improved’ them with modern plaster and paint, and then sold them to eager collectors.
Not one of Amenhotep’s Theban monuments has survived the harsh treatment meted out by his successors, and instead of a series of impressive temples we have been left with a vast number of inscribed and painted sandstone blocks of standard dimensions (52 × 26 × 24cm) which are today known as talatat blocks.20 These relatively small blocks, Amenhotep’s building bricks, were easy for his workmen to quarry and transport and very light for his builders to handle, allowing the king to embark on a rapid building programme which transformed the Karnak complex within three or four years. Ultimately, it was their size which saved the talatat blocks. They were preserved because they could be usefully employed as the filling inside later monuments; the cores of the second and ninth pylons at Karnak, for example, have been found to include thousands of blocks. Over 35,000 disjointed inscribed blocks have so far been collected from within the walls and gateways of the Karnak Temple, making a 3D jigsaw puzzle of such size, weight and complexity that many scholars believed the lost scenes would never be restored. Fortunately archaeologists cannot resist a challenge, and since the mid 1960s the Akhenaten Temple Project has been dedicated to the recovery of the lost images. By employing a combination of photography and ‘space-age’ computer graphics, it has so far been possible to reconstruct over 2,000 individual scenes of Amenhotep’s early reign, although the buildings themselves remain a series of disjointed blocks.21
The indexing of the talatat blocks has made one thing very clear: Nefertiti enjoyed a far greater prominence in Theban state ritual than had ever been imagined. A brief analysis of the images of the recovered blocks makes fascinating reading.22 By 1976 there had been 329 confirmed occurrences of the name or figure of Amenhotep IV and 564 occurrences of Nefertiti’s name or image. When broken down these figures seem even more startling: for example, Nefertiti’s name appeared sixty-seven times on offering tables, Nefertiti and Amenhotep appeared together thirteen times, and only three tables bore Amenhotep’s name alone. This imbalance is likely to be at least in part a reflection of the fact that the recovered blocks – by no means a complete or randomly selected sample – include a disproportionate number of images from Hwt-Benben, a building which was particularly associated with Nefertiti. Nevertheless, Nefertiti’s prominence in what until now had been a king-dominated sphere, is beyond dispute.
The benben-stone was an ancient pyramid or cone-shaped cult object which had been linked with the solar cult of Re at Heliopolis from the very beginning of the dynastic age. Amenhotep adopted and adapted this ancient symbolism, and his Hwt-Benben was a colonnaded temple associated with the vast Aten temple Gempaaten and focused not upon a true benben-stone, but upon the single Karnak obelisk set up by his grandfather Tuthmosis IV. Women had always been permitted to serve in temples as priestesses, musicians and dancers, and many queens had held honorary positions in the cult of Hathor. Some queens had enjoyed a more intimate relationship with the gods. It was recognized that the queen could stimulate or arouse susceptible male deities, and the king’s grandmother Mutemwia had even conceived a child with Amen. Centuries of tradition, however, decreed that the king, and only the king, as chief priest of all cults, should offer to the gods. Within the precincts of Hwt-Benben it was Nefertiti and not Amenhotep who took the king’s role of priest.
Each reconstructed square pillar of the Hwt-Benben colonnade has four sides, three of which show near identical full-length images of Nefertiti and Meritaten shaking their sistra beneath the sun disc while the fourth, the so-called ‘special’ side which is presumed to have faced the temple courtyard, is divided into four scenes showing Nefertiti offering to the Aten. On all the ‘long’ sides Nefertiti wears a long, heavy blue wig and a diaphanous pleated robe open to the waist and tied under the bust. She has a uraeus on her head and sandals on her feet, and holds out two large sistra. Behind her Meritaten – invariably described as the ‘King’s bodily Daughter whom he loves, Meritaten, born of the Great King’s Wife whom he loves, Mistress of the Two Lands, Nefertiti, may she live’ – appears as a perfect miniature adult, dressed in a similar flimsy robe and shaking a single small-scale sistrum. Directly above mother and daughter the sun’s disc appears in the sky and the sun’s rays reach down to extend their blessing. The scenes on the special sides vary slightly, but each register shows two Nefertitis in mirror-image, their open arms raised in worship, standing before an offering table under the Aten’s loving rays. Her stance is that of a king offering to a god. Again Nefertiti wears her flimsy robe, and again Meritaten accompanies her mother, shaking a miniature sistrum. Inside the temple the story is repeated. The queen, accompanied by one or occasionally two daughters, offers to the god, while the king is nowhere to be seen. Indeed, no males, neither human nor animal, are depicted on any of the Hwt-Benben blocks.
Fig. 2.4 Nefertiti and Meritaten in the Hwt-Benben
Hwt-Benben was dismantled during the reign of King Horemheb, when many of the blocks from the Nefertiti pillars were incorporated in the Second Pylon at Karnak. The blocks were not, however, used in a random or thoughtless manner. Henri Chevrier, the French archaeologist who worked on the Second Pylon during the late 1940s, discovered that within it the Nefertiti blocks had been carefully reassembled so as to make up partial scenes, but that curiously at least two of the scenes had been deliberately reconstructed upside-down. Many of the images of Nefertiti had been defaced within the pylon, and many of the hands on the end of the Aten’s rays had been slashed across the fingertips. We do not know why Horemheb’s workmen should have taken the trouble to match up scenes which were to be hidden from view behind the pylon facing, nor why some of the scenes should have been reassembled in reverse order; the assumption that this may have been a symbolic act of revenge against a heretic regime by the orthodox Horemheb is probably correct. As Ray Winfield Smith has noted:
It is certain that the queen was held in contempt by those responsible for this undignified treatment. To turn a beautiful female upside-down,
to slash her viciously, and to place her where she would be symbolically crushed by the enormous weight of massive, soaring walls, can hardly be explained otherwise.23
The mutilation of the Aten’s fingertips may have been intended to suggest that the god would no longer be able to extend his love and protection to the disgraced queen. It is not clear, however, whether Nefertiti was singled out for this attack for political reasons, either because she was usurping the role of a king or because she was worshipping a proscribed god, or whether Horemheb held a more personal grudge against Nefertiti.
Nefertiti’s prominence in the Mansion of the Benben-Stone could perhaps be explained as an unprecedented aberration, ‘the Mansion being merely a minor temple dedicated to exclusively female worship of the Aten as a subsidiary of the more powerful male temple Gempaaten. However, other Karnak talatat confirm that at some point during the first five years of her husband’s reign, probably soon after the birth of her first child, Nefertiti was able to abandon the traditional queen’s role of passive observer which we saw in the tomb of Ramose. In the presence of her husband Nefertiti remains a supportive wife, appearing at a smaller scale to shake a queenly sistrum, but she is now a woman of action who may be shown riding in a chariot, travelling in a palanquin, or even enjoying a feast. In an echo of the scene in the tomb of Kheruef where Queen Tiy takes the form of a sphinx to trample two female enemies, alternating southern and northern female hostages now pay homage before Nefertiti’s throne.
The most compelling evidence for Nefertiti’s changed role comes from a disparate group of blocks which indicate her involvement in
Fig. 2.5 Nefertiti smiting a female enemy, scene on the royal boat
what are now known as ‘smiting scenes’. Talatat blocks recovered from both Karnak and Hermopolis show Amenhotep’s boat decorated with traditional images of the king slaying the foes of Egypt. Amenhotep stands beneath the rays of the sun disc, his right arm raised to deliver a fatal blow to an enemy who grovels at his feet, while Nefertiti, emulating the goddess Maat, stands impassively behind him and watches. These images are paralleled by unprecedented tableaux showing Nefertiti herself as a triumphal queen wielding either a mace or a sword in order to execute an enemy. The clearest of these scenes, recovered from Hermopolis, shows a fleet of at least three royal boats, although Nefertiti’s is the only one which is substantially intact. Royal boats may be distinguished by the carved heads on the end of the steering poles, and here Nefertiti’s poles show her wearing her trademark blue head-dress topped with a disc and two tall plumes, whose streamers flutter merrily in the breeze. On the deck, behind the central cabin, stands a small kiosk or canopy which possibly served as an audience chamber. The relief which decorates the back wall of this structure shows Nefertiti, again wearing her blue crown and dressed in a long skirt, raising her right arm to dispatch a female enemy who kneels in submission with her face turned towards the queen.24
These smiting scenes may well be representations of a disturbing ritual – we should not assume that they are merely symbolic. The image of the pharaoh as a victorious warrior subduing a representative of the enemies of Egypt was an ancient one, first seen on the ceremonial Narmer palette dating to the very dawn of the dynastic age. By the 18th Dynasty it had evolved into a visual metaphor used to depict the concept of the pharaoh triumphant rather than a specific event. Neither Amenhotep III nor Amenhotep IV was ever called upon to lead troops into battle, but both chose to be shown in this aggressive pose and both may well have been called upon to execute a token enemy. The message behind the scene is one of generalized victory – the enemy is always subdued and does not struggle to escape – and of sacrifice, and the action of the right arm raised to kill or sacrifice by a person of authority may be found in a scaled-down version in the tombs of the nobles, where the tomb owner, attended by his wife and children, holds decoy birds in his left hand and raises his right arm to throw a stick in the air.25 However, the role of smiter had until now been exclusively a king’s role, and by implication a man’s role. The fact that Nefertiti was allowed to play the part of the king in this ritual must be read as an indication of her increased ritual and/or political importance.
It should not, however, be read as a sign that Nefertiti was now of equal importance to the king. The Egyptian love of symmetry dictated that Nefertiti’s boat should as far as possible match Amenhotep’s boat. In Amenhotep’s scene, however, he is supported by the presence of the queen, his immediate inferior, while Nefertiti is supported by her eldest daughter, who we must assume to be her immediate inferior. The message seems clear. Just as Tiy had been separated by her marriage from the rest of humanity, so the gulf between Nefertiti and the common people has widened. The gap between Amenhotep and Nefertiti may have closed slightly, but it is still there. Nefertiti is indeed a powerful woman, and she has been allotted some of the privileges and duties of the crown. Amenhotep is happy for everyone to understand this. However, the basic chain of authority remains unaltered. Amenhotep is responsible to the Aten. Nefertiti falls under the authority of the king, and the little princesses remain under the control of their mother. Later, at Amarna, we occasionally see Nefertiti offering alongside her husband apparently as an equal. It is in these scenes that we may realize the true extent of her religious power.
The elaborate crowns worn by the queens of Egypt were, during the New Kingdom, intended to convey a symbolic message to the observer. The ancient Egyptians consistently made use of symbols as a means of communicating abstract concepts; it is this that makes their art so difficult for modern observers to understand at any but the most basic of levels. It should come as no surprise to find that Nefertiti’s increased status is reflected in her choice of head-dress. For the first few years of her husband’s reign she is invariably shown wearing the single or double uraeus which, as a symbol representing the eyes of Re, is often identified as the goddesses Hathor and Maat. The uraeus, which itself often wears a solar disc with cow horns thereby emphasizing the solar link, is frequently supplemented with a traditional queen’s head-dress, and, like her mother-in-law before her, Nefertiti favours either the double feathers or the double feathers plus disc and horns which associate her with the solar cults of Re and his daughter Hathor. She consistently avoids donning the vulture head-dress which, as the vulture was primarily associated with Mut, the consort of Amen, may not have been acceptable in the new religious climate.
Now Nefertiti starts to wear her own unique head-dress, the tall, straight-edged, flat-topped blue crown familiar from the Berlin bust.26 The origins of this crown are obscure, although it seems likely that it was developed as a female version of the tall blue leather war crown, covered with protective discs, which was worn by the kings of Egypt. Akhenaten himself favoured a rather high, narrow or bonnet-like version of the blue crown, which he often augmented with stylized ringlets or multiple uraei. Nefertiti’s crown too was occasionally covered with decorative discs, which may themselves have had a symbolic meaning connecting their wearer with the cult of the Aten. The shape of Nefertiti’s crown probably owes much to the head-dress worn by Tefnut, daughter of the sun god. Tiy, when depicted in the form of a sphinx associated with Hathor-Tefnut, had worn a tall crown of similar silhouette whose top was formed by sprouting plants, which some scholars have interpreted as a symbol of rejuvenation and fertility, perhaps even linked with the dishevelled hairstyles traditionally worn by women in labour.27 Now we find Nefertiti herself associated with the form of the sphinx at Karnak.
It was during these early years, while the Hwt-Benben was under construction, that Nefertiti received a new name, Neferneferuaten or ‘Beautiful are the Beauties of the Aten’.28 From now on she was known to her contemporaries by the somewhat long-winded appellation Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti (‘Beautiful are the Beauties of the Aten. A Beautiful Woman Has Come’), although the Karnak talatat blocks suggest that her shorter name was still used in scenes where space was limited. To avoid confusion she will remain Nefertiti, the name
by which she is known today, throughout this book. Nefertiti’s name, as queen, had always been written inside a cartouche, the hieroglyphic device representing a
Fig. 2.6 The cartouche of Nefertiti
loop of rope which always encircled the throne-name and birth-name of the king. Her new name was similarly enclosed, although its length occasionally posed problems for imprudent masons who unwisely carved the cartouche first only to find themselves faced with the problem of trying to cram an unusual number of hieroglyphic signs into too small a space. Within the cartouche the writing of ‘Aten’ – an element of the name Neferneferuaten – was consistently reversed so that it faced the determinative sign which indicated Nefertiti’s queenly status; the transposition of the Aten was a great honour, likened to the inclusion of a capital letter within a modern name, which allowed the queen’s image to face the name of her god. Occasionally Nefertiti was allotted two cartouches, so that her name resembled that of a king. At Thebes the juxtaposed cartouches contained her shorter name and her longer name, while at Amarna each of the cartouches contained the longer name.
Amenhotep’s jubilee was celebrated during Year 3 with major festivities at Gempaaten. Recent excavation has shown that this was a vast temple built in the form of a rectangular open court surrounded by a roofed colonnade whose square pillars bore colossal painted statues of the king himself. Here, under the impassive gaze of his own image, Amenhotep reinterpreted the traditional heb-sed rituals celebrated by his father before him. Scenes recovered from the Gempaaten talatat blocks confirm that
Nefertiti Page 8
