Despite the scholarly reasoning outlined above, the identification of the figure as Nefertiti is not entirely convincing to those who have seen the statue. ‘Gut feeling’ is certainly not a scientific means of analysing and interpreting ancient art, but in some cases it is all we have to go on. The long, thin neck and the gaunt face with its knowing smile seem so clearly to be those of Akhenaten, and the entire silhouette of the statue so closely resembles the other, kilted, colossal figures recovered from Gempaaten, that it seems almost perverse to argue that it could be anyone other than the king. So far, only one larger-than-life head recovered from Karnak has been identified as Nefertiti, an identification which has been made purely on the basis of the double uraeus worn on the brow and which, in consequence, is not itself as certain as we might hope. This head, now housed in Cairo Museum, has been severely damaged and most of the mouth and all of the chin are missing. It too is carved from sandstone and what remains of the face is strikingly similar to the Gempaaten representations of Akhenaten. The hairstyle is, however, decidedly different, and this head wears a curled wig with a deep fringe.
In spite of the number of paragraphs already devoted to the Gempaaten figure, it would probably be a mistake to worry overmuch about the precise meaning behind a single piece which is merely one of a series of colossal statues created at a time when artistic experimentation was the rule and departure from realism the norm. Given the disjointed state of the archaeological evidence recovered from Karnak, the figure is probably best interpreted as a non-literal portrayal of Akhenaten, a visual metaphor depicting the king in his most divine aspect as a genderless entity, denuded of all primary sexual organs in order to represent the sexless nature of the Aten himself. There is a tendency for archaeologists to assume that what they have unearthed is exactly the image that the sculptor intended to produce, with no allowance made for mistakes or a ‘one off’. It would seem that in this case, while the artist (Bak?) set out to create a sculpture that depicted Akhenaten as both male and female, what was actually produced was an image which showed him as female rather than male and therefore lacking all the procreative powers of the Aten. This is the only representation of the king that we have in this form; presumably it is an image that proved unsuccessful and was abandoned soon after its conception.
Wherever the king led the court soon followed. While the ordinary people continued to be depicted very much as they always had been, we now find all high-ranking Egyptians from Nefertiti downwards developing flabby stomachs, breasts and languid poses. Even Bak felt it appropriate, or politically expedient, to be portrayed with a bulging pot-belly which gives him an unfortunate, almost pregnant, appearance. Nefertiti keeps her well-defined waist but develops a rounded abdomen, large hips, jodhpur-like thighs and pronounced buttocks which remind us of the fact that she has borne at least six children. Her stomach is often highlighted by a single curved line at the base of the abdomen just above the pubic mound, while Queen Tiy, perhaps because of her greater age, is endowed with two such lines to emphasize her sagging stomach plus a double line under each breast. Nefertiti’s breasts receive little attention; they were not considered her most important attribute and, as we have seen, obvious breasts were not an exclusively female trait. Nefertiti’s usual garment, a transparent, pleated linen robe tied with a sash worn either under the bust or around the waist, allows us a clear view of her body. Indeed, the dress is frequently shown with the front completely open so that the queen’s body is displayed without any obvious form of undergarment. Alternatively Nefertiti dons a dress so fine and so close-fitting that her entire form can be seen through the folds.
It is highly unlikely that Nefertiti habitually wore such revealing and uncomfortable garments. Artistic convention had always required that the female form should be well defined although men, who frequently appeared topless and occasionally wore semi-transparent kilts, almost invariably had their genitalia concealed behind a belt or a thickness of cloth. We find élite Old and Middle Kingdom ladies dressed in sheath dresses so tight that they would have been unable to walk or sit down, the curves of their breasts, stomach, hips and pubic mound clearly visible to all. Linen, the material used for upper-class garments throughout the dynastic period, cannot be persuaded to hug the figure in this way without the addition of Lycra, and the garments are in fact an artistic ideal. During the New Kingdom goddesses continued to favour the tight sheath dress but there was change in human fashion towards more voluminous pleated and fringed garments, and Akhenaten’s artists emphasized the female body beneath by making the robes appear so fine as to be transparent. Again this must be an exaggeration. Although Egyptian linen was the best in the world, it could never have been so fine. Actual garments recovered from tombs indicate that women wore a rather baggy linen dress with sleeves, often covered by a shawl, a practical response to Egypt’s hot days and much colder evenings and nights.
Throughout the dynastic period it was widely agreed that a woman’s fertility contributed to her sexual attractions. Nefertiti’s role as a devoted wife and mother did not prevent her from being portrayed as a beautiful, even desirable, woman and-the fact that she was known to have borne many children may even have added to her considerable charms. Nor did Nefertiti’s religious duties conflict with her presentation as a sexually attractive or even sexually active woman. Sex, or more specifically reproduction, was acknowledged to be a fundamental aspect of human and divine life and no attempt was made to separate sex from religion. The gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt were in no way celibate beings and their varied and active couplings were well known to all. The gods’ sexual needs were treated with a down-to-earth practicality which can occasionally appear shocking to those of us accustomed to more cerebral deities; under the traditional religion, for example, the queen assumed the role of ‘God’s Wife of Amen’ in order to sexually arouse the god and ensure the continued re-creation of the world. The rituals associated with this are not now known. The more explicit title of ‘God’s Hand of Amen’, also linked with the role of the queen, is an obvious reference to the masturbation which allowed the creator god Atum to produce Shu and Tefnut. The hand, which in the Egyptian language is feminine, is often associated with Hathor, a goddess who in turn is associated with the queens of Egypt.12 The hands which terminate the Aten’s rays may thus be interpreted as symbols of both femininity and queenship.
Although Nefertiti’s new body-shape essentially mirrors that of her husband, raising the question of who is copying whom, there seems little doubt that she is being deliberately presented as a desirable superwoman, a living symbol of fertility.13 On the strength of these images she has frequently been identified as a ‘venus figure’, a reference to the European ice-age figurines which, with their emphasized breasts and buttocks and rudimentary faces, are generally understood to be female fertility icons. A better parallel may perhaps be drawn with the ‘mother goddess’ figures recovered from the predynastic period, which place a heavy emphasis on the lower body, and with the naked female fertility figurines which, wearing long wigs and jewellery and often accompanied by a miniature child, started to appear in 18th Dynasty Egypt. These were originally interpreted as concubine figures placed in the grave for the enjoyment of deceased males. However, they are now known to come from both funerary and domestic contexts, and are often associated with model beds, snakes and convolvulus, suggesting a link with childbirth and all aspects of human reproduction. Approximately sixty of these figures have been recovered from Amarna. As the new images of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their children at leisure are being held out to the people as an ideal semi-divine family worthy of adoration, it is perhaps not surprising to find Nefertiti assuming the role of mother-goddess or fertility symbol within the perfect family. What we cannot know is whether this role of goddess was attached to Nefertiti personally, or whether it was associated with her role as queen.
Fig. 4.2 Nefertiti, early Amarna style, in Nubian wig
Nefertiti’s features quickly start to res
emble those of her husband as his body becomes more like hers until she becomes as ugly and idiosyncratic as he. Following the move to Amarna, although she remains strikingly similar to Akhenaten, Nefertiti loses some of her angularity, with her face becoming slightly rounder and her body more feminine. As Nefertiti and Akhenaten were most probably cousins a certain facial likeness is perhaps to be expected, but at its most extreme, at Thebes, their resemblance goes far beyond realism. If Akhenaten and Nefertiti are to be interpreted as the earthly representatives of the divine twins Shu and Tefnut this resemblance might perhaps be understandable. However, it would seem more likely that Nefertiti and her daughters were being deliberately depicted in the image of the king as a means of associating themselves with his divinity while differentiating the royal family from the rest of humanity. This would explain why the placing of Nefertiti’s feet so often copies that of the king’s, and indeed why women of the Amarna royal family are often shown as red-brown in colour, a deliberate reversal of the tradition which decreed that all women should be a pale contrast to their tanned menfolk. The mirroring of features and postures was a well-established tradition used as a means of stressing the link between the king and the gods and Akhenaten’s version of Re-Harakhty shown on the wall of the Karnak temple had already displayed a sagging stomach highly reminiscent of the king himself. Queen Tiy, who might also have been expected to resemble her son but who played a less prominent role in the worship of the Aten, was allowed to retain her own characteristic features, although the wooden head recovered from Gurob, which was almost certainly carved during her son’s reign, is clearly influenced by the Amarna art-style, displaying a more triangular face and a more obvious bone structure than is usual in depictions of this lady.
As we have already seen in our consideration of the Gempaaten colossi, this deliberate similarity of facial features can make it very difficult to distinguish between damaged or unlabelled representations of the king and queen. To add to the confusion, Akhenaten and Nefertiti now frequently appear in the same type of clothing, although there are subtle differences if we know where to look. The hem of Akhenaten’s long pleated dress, for example, always clears the ground, while Nefertiti’s dress drops straight down. Similarly, while the folds of Nefertiti’s dress hang vertically over her hips, the folds of Akhenaten’s linen kilt mostly lie horizontally or diagonally. The back of Nefertiti’s neck tends to be concave, while Akhenaten has a slightly convex neck – unfortunately, the back of the neck is all too often hidden from view. The so-called Amarna navel, a flattened oval rather than a circle, is usually but unfortunately not always placed higher on Nefertiti than on Akhenaten, while the Nubian-style wig worn by Nefertiti is tapered into the back of the neck in contrast to male wigs which tend to be cut straight across the neck. More subjective are the differences to the face, although it is generally agreed that Nefertiti’s nose is smaller than Akhenaten’s, her chin more pointed and her cheek-bones more pronounced.
As Akhenaten’s reign progresses Nefertiti’s angular face evolves until, before Year 12, she loses her drooping jaw and chin, developing instead a square jaw, obvious cheek-bones, naturally rounded cheeks and straighter lips.14 At the same time the proportions of her head and neck are adjusted to allow her a more natural appearance. The famous Berlin bust, which will be considered in more detail in the Epilogue, is one of the earliest examples of the new-style, natural-looking queen. The reasons for this change are not immediately apparent. It could be connected with a change in sculptor or workshop but, although Akhenaten’s face becomes slightly softer, there is no obvious corresponding adjustment to his features. It is certainly tempting to see Nefertiti’s changed image, and her move away from Akhenaten’s features, as in some way connected with her evolving role within the royal hierarchy.
The appearance of the disembodied Aten high in the sky above the royal family necessitated changes in artistic composition. The Egyptians loved symmetry, and so in more traditional scenes involving a king and a god the two figures had almost invariably been placed at the centre of the picture so that they balanced each other. With the elevation of the Aten the king became the most important standing figure and the queen was promoted from her usual position behind or beside her husband to stand facing him, thus providing a pleasing triangular balance and emphasizing the increased importance of the queen. The Aten now drew the eye upwards, and in order to emphasize this the proportions of the humans were adjusted. In particular, the torso above the navel was lengthened so that the legs appeared somewhat stocky in comparison with the body. The emphasized head and the hips, which at first appeared out of proportion, were soon readjusted to give a more natural effect and the fingers were lengthened, allowing the royal couple to make graceful fluttering movements with their hands, now clearly differentiated between left and right.15
Egyptian artists had never been particularly interested in portraying children who played a relatively minor role in public life. High infant-and child-mortality rates meant that children all too often led the briefest of lives. Where they were shown, they appeared either as miniature adults or as symbolic infants: naked, sporting the side-lock of youth hairstyle and with one finger permanently in the mouth. Now the royal children were to be included in family groups as symbols of their parents’ fertility, and the Amarna artists were forced to rethink their approach. This resulted in a more natural representation of childhood, with the young princesses becoming individuals, free to move and perform child-
Fig. 4.3 Nefertiti pours liquid for Akhenaten
ish actions, although their bodies remained scaled-down versions of their mother, complete with her wide hips and skinny legs. The little girls are constantly associated with Nefertiti, and Meritaten, as the eldest, is always accorded the prominent role, playing most often with her father. All six daughters look like their mother (who, of course, looks like their father) and, although they are usually shown naked, they occasionally imitate her by wearing long, diaphanous robes. They are curiously free of symbolic head-dresses, and only their changing hairstyles give an indication of their increasing age as they advance from bald babies with strange egg-shaped heads to gawky girls with the side-lock of youth and finally elegant young ladies sporting a modified version of the Nubian-style wig favoured by their mother.
Their bald heads ensure that the curious elongated skulls of the Amarna princesses, emphasized by their long, stalk-like necks, mimic the profile of the king’s head which is almost invariably elongated by his sloping crown. Again, the ‘truth’ behind these egg-shaped heads is open to doubt. If the princesses did indeed have grossly misshapen heads, was this the result of deliberate manipulation during childhood, a practice which is so far unknown in dynastic Egypt, or could they all have been born with some severe physical abnormality, perhaps inherited from their father whose head is invariably concealed beneath his crown? The fact that the adult Ankhesenpaaten displays a perfectly normal head several years after her father’s death suggests that once again the royal artists were not attempting realistic portraiture, but were deliberately choosing to exaggerate the slightly elongated heads of the princesses in order to prove a theological point. The egg was accepted by Akhenaten as a symbol of creation, and was indeed included as such in the hymn to the Aten: ‘… when the chick in the egg chirps within his shell you give him breath to live, and when his time is ready to break out from the shell he comes out of the egg to proclaim his birth…’. Dorothea Arnold has suggested that the children’s egg-heads may well have been intended to reinforce their role as embodiments of divine creation, comparing them to a unique but badly damaged alabaster sculpture recovered from Amarna which has been reconstructed to show Akhenaten in the form of a squatting child with one finger raised to his mouth.16 In this figure Akhenaten is bald, although he wears the side-lock of youth, and he too has an elongated egg-shaped head.
5
Horizon of the Aten
Behold Akhetaten which the Aten desires me to make unto him as a monument in
his name for ever. It was the Aten my father that brought me to Akhetaten. Not a noble directed me to it saying ‘it is fitting for his majesty to make Akhetaten in this place’. It was the Aten my father that directed me to it, to make it for him as Akhetaten…1
As Akhenaten tells us, the site chosen for his new capital Akhetaten or ‘Horizon of the Aten’ (now widely known as Amarna) was selected by the great god himself. Unfortunately, we are not told how the Aten made his choice known, although it is probably not too fanciful to suggest that Akhenaten was first attracted to Amarna by its topography; many modern travellers have noted how, particularly when viewed from the river, the natural shaping of the cliffs in silhouette resembles the hieroglyph for ‘horizon’.2
Nefertiti Page 13
