Nefertiti

by Joyce Tyldesley

  This would almost certainly be too simplistic a conclusion. We have already noted how Akhenaten was happy to change the message of the old religion without necessarily changing its form, continuing to employ mummification, shabtis, canopic jars and scarabs even though their original meaning had gone. The idea of a woman to protect his body may have seemed appealing, but the traditional goddesses were now barred to him. What could be more natural than to replace them with a secular, and highly comforting, image of the wife who had supported him in life? Only if it could be proved that others, not intimately connected with the royal family, also included Nefertiti on their sarcophagus, could we start to assume that she was herself possessed of divine powers. Unfortunately, there is only one contemporary sarcophagus available for us to examine. The quartzite sarcophagus recovered from the tomb of Tutankhamen, Akhenaten’s almost immediate successor, currently shows the four now-traditional goddesses with outstretched wings. However, it is clear that the sarcophagus has undergone extensive alteration, and that although the goddesses were carved according to the traditional proportions used in the pre- and post-Amarna era, they were provided originally with outstretched arms rather than wings. This strongly suggests that the figures were conceived as humans and converted to the divine following the change in official religious beliefs, an assumption which is reinforced by the observation that the goddess figures on Tutankhamen’s canopic canopy also seem to have been made as Amarna queens, and later converted into goddesses. If it could be proved that these protective figures were intended to represent Nefertiti, we might by extension be able to prove that Nefertiti was herself a goddess. However, it is not possible to identify the lady or ladies, who may well have been Tutankhamen’s wife, mother, sister or even a generalized female form.7

  Although scholars have argued long and hard over the question of Nefertiti’s divine status, it may well be that such arguments are essentially meaningless.8 There is, to the modern western reader accustomed to the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition, a strong distinction between the divine and the mortal: the idea that one could be semi-divine seems very similar to the old joke of a naive girl claiming to be just a little bit pregnant. We should therefore be able to find a precise definition of Nefertiti’s status. The Egyptians, however, did not draw such fine distinctions, and were capable of understanding a wide spectrum of divinity. Nefertiti was certainly presented in a way that associated her with the Aten cult and more specifically with fertility within the Aten cult. But her exact role was never made explicit, and it may be that many of those who worshipped before her image were themselves unsure of a distinction that even in our so-called sophisticated society many find hard to understand. Is the person who worships before a statue of the Virgin Mary worshipping the statue itself, or Mary herself, or God through the intervention of Mary? Presumably the answers to this question are as varied as the people who pray before the statue, although in ancient Egypt we do gain the impression that most of the people are in fact praying to the statue.

  So, if the available evidence for Nefertiti as Akhenaten’s consort ranges from the scanty to the non-existent depending on viewpoint, why has anyone suggested that Nefertiti advanced from co-regent to become sole king of Egypt? To understand the complexities of the Nefertiti-as-king argument, we need to understand the chain of events that saw the ending of the Amarna idyll.

  7

  Sunset

  Why should messengers be made to stay constantly out in the sun and so die in the sun?… They are made to die in the sun.1

  Year 12 saw tremendous celebrations at Amarna, recorded in the tombs of Huya and Meryre II, Steward of Nefertiti. The king, accompanied by his queen and all six daughters (although only four appear in the tomb of Huya), presents himself before a host of ambassadors and vassals summoned from Nubia, Libya, the Mediterranean islands and the Near East. There is feasting, merriment, and a great deal of standing about in the hot Egyptian sun, a tedious feature of Amarna life for all except the royal family who are prudently provided with sunshades. Best of all is the reception of a huge amount of tribute including horses, chariots, women and gold. No reason is given for the fantasia, but its purpose seems clear. Akhenaten is celebrating his role as the head of a vast empire, perhaps even as its living god, in his wonderful new city.

  Meryre II (Fig. 7.1) shows us Akhenaten sitting on a throne with Nefertiti beside him, although Nefertiti is represented only as an outline drawn around the figure of her husband, a method of drawing which may simply be a means of overcoming a lack of space, but which also confirms the queen’s unity with the king. Six small-scale daughters stand in groups of three behind their parents. This is the last time that we see the royal family together.

  Suddenly the seemingly perfect life of the royal family was shattered as Meketaten, who can have been no more than twelve years old, died. The date of this tragedy goes unrecorded although, as we have seen Meketaten participating in the Year 12 celebrations, we can tentatively suggest that she passed away in Year 13 or 14. Akhenaten had already started to carve a splendid royal tomb into the Amarna cliffs. This work would never be completed, although the main corridors, principal burial

  Fig. 7.1 Nefertiti, Akhenaten and family at the Year 12 celebrations

  chamber and two subsidiary suites, one of which was intended for Nefertiti, had by now been cut. Meketaten was laid to rest within her father’s tomb and it is here (Room Gamma, wall A), in some of the most simple and poignant illustrations of the entire dynastic period, that we see Nefertiti and Akhenaten grieving over their dead daughter.

  The Amarna letters confirm that Meketaten died at a time when plague was rampant in the Near East. Perhaps, following the international festivities of Year 12, plague had arrived to threaten the security of life at Amarna. It may be no coincidence that other members of the royal family disappear at this time, and Kiya, Tiy and the three younger sisters Neferneferuaten-the-Younger, Neferneferure and baby Setepenre all fade out of view. Indeed, the fact that Neferneferuaten was plastered out of a family group within the royal tomb suggests that she, and her youngest sister Setepenre who was never included in the scene, may already have died. Both Neferneferure and Setepenre are excluded from a scene of mourning for Meketaten, although the other three princesses are present. The discovery of an amphora handle stamped with a reference to the ‘robing room of Neferneferure’ found within a dump outside an unfinished tomb close to the royal tomb provides us with a clue to her final resting place, but there is no trace of the tombs of the others.2

  This series of deaths, or perhaps the plague which accompanied them, signalled the beginning of the end of the Amarna idyll, and it may be no coincidence that Akhenaten now intensified his campaign against the old gods. Meanwhile, work on the non-royal Amarna tombs ground to a halt.

  The royal sculptors set to work chiselling out the image and titles of the deceased Kiya, removing her name from the sunshade temple Maru-Aten and replacing it with the name of Meritaten. The ease with which the king was prepared to substitute one beloved woman’s name for another is slightly shocking to over-sentimental modern eyes. It may have been a practical response to a crisis – an immediate replacement may have been necessary for the continuation of a female-orientated cult at Maru-Aten – but the impression given, fairly or not, is that that to Akhenaten, one royal woman was very much the same as another.

  Nefertiti vanishes from the political scene soon after the death of her daughter. The obvious inference is that she too is dead, possibly another victim of the plague. If so, we might reasonably expect to find traces of her interment within the royal tomb. Akhenaten’s grief over the death of his daughter had been expressed on the tomb walls with a sincere dignity. How much more would he commemorate the loss of his beloved wife, and how much more splendid would have been her funeral? And yet, the royal tomb gives no evidence of any such burial and there is no official pronouncement of the queen’s passing. The only evidence to suggest that she was interred at Amarna is provided by a
broken shabti figure whose separate pieces are now housed in the Louvre and Brooklyn Museums, and whose inscription has been reconstructed by Christian Loeben:

  The Heiress, high and mighty in the palace, one trusted of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Neferkheperure Waenre, the Son of Re [Akhenaten], Great in his lifetime, The Chief Wife of the King, Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, Living for ever and ever.3

  As the Egyptian royal family spent many years preparing their tomb equipment, there is no means of telling whether this figure was inscribed during Nefertiti’s lifetime or after her death. Nor, of course, do we know that it was actually used in her burial.

  Earlier twentieth-century historians noted the sudden, unexplained, disappearance of the queen. They linked this to the abrupt change of name at Maru-Aten but, erroneously, they believed that the obliterated name was that of Nefertiti rather than Kiya. This was a crucial mistake that led to a dramatic conclusion. Nefertiti had committed some heinous crime and had been banished. John Pendlebury envisaged a terrible family quarrel over Akhenaten’s foreign policy which left Nefertiti, still the Aten’s most faithful disciple, disgraced, divorced and confined to a northern palace named Hwt Aten, or the Mansion of the Aten.4 Not everyone was convinced. It made little political sense that Nefertiti, now Akhenaten’s implacable enemy, should have been allowed to establish a rival court at Amarna where she could cultivate her own pro-Aten supporters. Norman de Garis Davies, again basing his reasoning on the misinterpreted Maru-Aten inscriptions, proposed an alternative scenario where Nefertiti was not the defender of the new faith, but its first and greatest traitor:

  One might even venture into the dangerous field of pure, or almost pure, conjecture and suppose that, when to shrewd sight the coming victory of Amun [sic] cast its shadow before it, the faithless Nefertiti allowed herself to be proclaimed by the faction as rival monarch at Thebes…5

  He tentatively suggested that the underlying cause of Nefertiti’s banishment was the fact that Akhenaten, anxious for a son and heir, had actually married his own daughter Meritaten. Davies was reluctant, however, to believe his own theory, and he added a footnote to his text that ‘this would be a double blow to the idyll of El-Amarnah, and we may hope that evidence for it will fail’.

  Davies was not the only egyptologist reluctant to abandon the ideal of the loving royal family. Many found it simply impossible to reconcile what they saw as Akhenaten’s obvious affection for Nefertiti with such harsh treatment, and Baikie again spoke for many:

  The Egypt Exploration Society’s excavators have most unkindly and ungraciously tried to insinuate a serpent into this little Eden in the shape of a suggestion that the absence of the name of Queen Nefertiti from the fragmentary inscriptions which have been recovered from Maru-Aten points to domestic trouble in the royal family, and to the breaking up of that idyllic love and unity of which so may pictures have survived. Surely such a suggestion is an entirely unnecessary outrage upon our feelings, and upon the memory of a couple whose mutual affection must have been the only stay of their hearts in sore trouble. Akhenaten has had to bear enough blame, living and dead, without saddling him, almost gratuitously, with that of having quarrelled with his beautiful wife.6

  Baikie may have been basing his argument on intuition rather than scientific evidence, and his blaming of the unfortunate excavators for their message is perhaps slightly unfair, but it would appear that he was substantially correct in his instincts. We now know that it was Kiya’s name, not Nefertiti’s, which was originally carved at Maru-Aten. If anyone was disgraced – and there is no need to assume that anyone was – that person was Kiya.

  So what had happened to Nefertiti? In the 1970s John Harris used philology to develop an ingenious theory. Nefertiti had not died. She had remained at Amarna where, using an evolving succession of names, she had ruled as king first alongside and then as successor to Akhenaten.7 Egyptologists already knew of one or maybe two potential co-regents/successors to Akhenaten. The names Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten and Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare had been discovered in sound archaeological contexts, but the names could refer to one individual or two. Harris convincingly demonstrated that it is possible to trace Nefertiti’s name as it evolves from the simple Nefertiti to Neferneferuaten Nefertiti, then through the use of the double cartouche and the use of an enhanced form of the title King’s Great Wife which occurred towards the end of Akhenaten’s reign. Far more speculative is his proposed subsequent evolution, even later in the reign, to the use of a prenomen and nomen, until finally Nefertiti emerges as Akhenaten’s co-ruler using the name Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten. Following the death of Akhenaten, the theory holds, Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten (Nefertiti) ruled alone as Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare, before handing over the reins of power to the young Tutankhamen.

  Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare, more usually known as Smenkhkare, was a real but shadowy figure, little more than a carved name. Like Beketaten before him, Smenkhkare seemed to spring from nowhere, exist for a short period as heir of Akhenaten, and then vanish. He had no known relationship to the royal family, no tomb, and no body. The attraction of the Nefertiti as Smenkhkare theory is obvious. By linking the sudden appearance of Smenkhkare with the sudden disappearance of Nefertiti, two archaeological mysteries could be cleared up with one elegant solution. However, recent research on human remains recovered from a small rock-cut tomb in the Valley of the Kings has highlighted a seemingly insurmountable flaw in this argument.

  The modest entrance to Tomb KV 55 was discovered during the 1906–7 season of Theodore M. Davis’s expedition to the Valley of the Kings, which was led by the English archaeologist Edward Ayrton.8 The recording of the excavation and tomb clearance was lamentable. As Cyril Aldred has remarked, without exaggeration:

  The evidence is all too clear that instead of proceeding with caution and skill, these men, two of them at least with specialist training and experience, somehow managed to carry out one of the worst pieces of excavation on record in the Valley [of the Kings].9

  Hindsight and superior modern techniques of excavation make it all too easy to criticize the excavators of the past. But in this case Aldred is absolutely right to be critical. KV 55, definitely one of the most complex and potentially one of the most informative tombs in the Valley of the Kings, was swiftly stripped of its contents without any proper photographic or written record, and with no real attempt at conservation. This failure to keep proper records has caused modern archaeologists to revisit the burial time and time again in an attempt to reconstruct its contents and make sense of its meaning.

  The tomb itself was deceptively simple. The outer door, reached by a flight of steps, opened into a sloping rubble-filled corridor that led in turn to the single burial chamber. This was a high, undecorated room that was, when discovered, in a state of total disarray. Wooden panels, boxes, mud bricks, stone chips, fallen plaster and tools dropped by the ancient labourers were jumbled on the floor, and all were dusted with a thin film of gold leaf which had flaked off the more fragile pieces. Mrs Emma B. Andrews, who entered the tomb soon after its opening as the guest of Mr Davis, made a note of her visit in her diary:

  1907, Jan 19. At the Valley. Dr Wiedemann and wife and Mr Sayce were over and lunched with us in the lunch tomb. I went down to the burial chamber and it is now almost easy of access; and saw the poor Queen as she lies now just a bit outside her magnificent coffin, with the vulture crown on her head. All the woodwork of the shrine, doors &c. is heavily overlaid with gold foil and I seemed to be walking on gold, and even the Arab working inside had some of it sticking in his woolly hair.10

  The vulture crown observed by Mrs Andrews was in fact a displaced pectoral. There was no stone sarcophagus, perhaps a sign that the tomb had been filled in a hurry, but four human-headed canopic jars stood in a recess cut into the right-hand wall and there were magical bricks intended to protect the deceased.

  The elaborate inlaid anthropoid coffin had originally been placed on a low wooden bed. But a narrow crack in the
ceiling had proved disastrous, allowing floodwater to drip into the tomb and rot the wood beneath. When the bed collapsed the coffin was thrown to the ground where it lay with its lid dislodged and the head of the mummy exposed. The mummy, now lying in a pool of water, started to decompose. Further damage to both mummy and coffin was caused when a rock fell from the roof and split the coffin in two. By the time it was removed from the tomb the coffin had disintegrated into hundreds of pieces; it was later re-assembled in Cairo Museum where it is displayed today.

  The coffin was made of wood, covered with gold leaf and decorated with semi-precious stones. Its head was dressed with a wig rather than a royal crown, but some time after its manufacture it had been fitted with the beard and uraeus that would have made it suitable for the burial of a royal male. Following the burial both the uraeus and the gold mask that covered the face had been torn off, leaving the underlying wood exposed.11 A uraeus recovered by the excavators bore the name of the Aten, but it is by no means certain that this is the original uraeus from the coffin, as at least one other uraeus was recovered from the tomb.

  The measurements and design of the reconstructed coffin show that it had originally been made for a woman. The twelve lines of text on the foot-end and the five bands of hieroglyphs that decorated the coffin agreed with this; they were words intended to be spoken by a woman, someone who could be described as the beloved of Waenre (Akhenaten). However, some time after the coffin had been completed, the inscriptions had been altered from feminine to masculine while the name of the original owner had been replaced by a royal name in a cartouche, which was itself later erased.