Lately attention has turned to the second ‘Lady’, originally identified by Loret as a man of somewhat unusual appearance:
The last corpse nearest the wall seemed to be that of a man. His head was shaved but a wig lay on the ground not far from him. The face of this person displayed something horrible and something droll at the same time. The mouth, running obliquely from one side nearly to the middle of the cheek, bit a pad of linen whose two ends hung from the corner of the lips. The half-closed eyes had a strange expression; he could have died choking on a gag but he looked like a young, playful cat with a piece of cloth. Death, which had respected the severe beauty of the woman and the impish grace of the boy, had turned in derision and amused itself with the countenance of the man.40
Marianne Luban was the first to propose, on the grounds of skull shape, bone structure, the shaven head and evidence of ear-piercing, that this mummy may be Nefertiti.41 Such identification is hard to sustain, however, without any positive proof. Certainly superficial appearance can be no guide to the identity of a mummy. Leaving aside the tendency for all female mummies to look pretty much the same, and Nefertiti’s tendency to have a startlingly different appearance from year to year, styles in hairstyles, wigs and ear-piercings lingered for decades, and we might reasonably expect Nefertiti, Kiya and her daughters to have adopted the same fashions.
More recently a team from York University, led by Dr Joann Fletcher, has had the opportunity of carrying out a non-invasive examination of the mummy, and they too have suggested that she might be Nefertiti – a suggestion that the Sunday Times took to extremes by proclaiming on its cover ‘This is Nefertiti, the fabled queen of Egypt. Before Cleopatra, the Queen of Sheba and even Helen of Troy she was the most powerful and famous woman in the world. The Sunday Times Magazine was there when she was discovered.’42 Unfortunately the situation is not as clear-cut as the Sunday Times would suggest, and the age of the mummy indicates that she may simply be too young to be Nefertiti. If she has to be an Amarna mummy, she is more likely to be one of the royal daughters. But there is no real reason to assume that she is an Amarna mummy; the fact that she was found without a coffin suggests that she, and her two companions, may be original occupants of the tomb, perhaps relations of Amenhotep II whose coffins had been destroyed long ago by thieves. How else would the Third Intermediate Period restorers have transferred three coffinless mummies to their last resting place?
The final word – for the moment – on the identification of the mummy must rest with the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, headed by Dr Zahi Hawass, who have recently released a report indicating that DNA testing shows the ‘Younger Lady’ to be male.
Chief amongst the prominent converts to the restored religion was God’s Father Ay, who served as vizier under the young Tutankhamen. Throughout this tale of Amarna Nefertiti’s putative father has been a constant background figure, his career stretching from the end of the reign of Amenhotep III through that of Akhenaten, Smenkhkare and now Tutankhamen. A tiny piece of gold foil, recovered from tomb KV 58, gives an indication of Ay’s exalted status during his step-grandson’s reign. Here we see Tutankhamen slaying an enemy, with Ankhesenamen standing in the approved wifely position behind him. To the left of the royal couple, dressed as a fan-bearer, stands Ay. Traditionally, such smiting scenes were performed in the presence of the god, not the vizier. The inclusion of a private individual in such a ritual is unprecedented, and surely indicates that Ay, Tutankhamen’s mentor, has become a force to be reckoned with. In fact, Ay is described as the ‘eldest king’s son’, an obviously honorary title which nevertheless implies that the elderly Ay is recognized as the young Tutankhamen’s heir. The adoption of a successor, no matter how elderly, must have seemed a prudent measure. Already two still-born daughters had been born to Ankhesenpaaten; their tiny bodies, carefully mummified and each encased in a double anthropoid coffin, were found stored in a box within Tutankhamen’s tomb. Professor Douglas Derry conducted an autopsy on the babies in 1932, finding that one had been born after approximately five months gestation, the other after seven or eight. More recent re-examination led by Professor Harrison has suggested that the older child may have suffered from a condition known as Sprengel’s deformity, which would have led to spina bifida and scoliosis.43
It fell to Ay to inter Tutankhamen in a private tomb hastily adapted to accommodate its royal occupant. This tomb (KV 62), possibly the tomb which Ay was preparing for himself, is now perhaps the best-known tomb in the world. Tutankhamen’s own tomb was unfinished at his premature death; its completion may well have been handicapped by the need to re-establish the Deir el-Medina workmen’s village following the return from Amarna. Ay’s burial of Tutankhamen was a highly significant act, as it was by burying his predecessor that the king of Egypt confirmed his right to rule. However, there is no evidence to prove that Ay killed Tutankhamen in order to seize the throne.
Copies of a cuneiform text dating to this period have survived to tell a remarkable tale. A widowed queen of Egypt, without a son, took the highly unusual step of writing to Suppiluliumas, king of the Hittites, asking that a prince be sent as a husband and future pharaoh:
My husband has died. I do not have a son. But, they say, many are your sons. If you would give me one of your sons he would become my husband. I shall never pick out a servant of mine and make him my husband.44
Suppiluliumas was both surprised and suspicious. Everyone knew that the Egyptian princesses did not marry foreigners, while a promise of inheriting the throne of Egypt seemed too good to be true. An ambassador was sent to investigate, and eventually a prince, Zannanza, was dispatched. The unfortunate bridegroom was ambushed and killed on his way to meet his bride, and relations between Egypt and the Hittites plunged to a new low.
The name of the letter-writer has not been preserved in a recognizable form; she is referred to as Dahamunzu, a phonetic version of the queen’s standard title ta hemet nesu or ‘king’s wife’. However, there are only three queens who could possibly have written such a letter and as two of these, Nefertiti and Meritaten, were, if not already dead, certainly one step removed from the problem as dowagers rather than queens, Ankhesenamen is generally accepted as the author. If the whole letter-writing episode is not itself to be regarded as a cunning diplomatic trick, we must assume that Tutankhamen’s successor did not take kindly to the queen’s actions. We do not see Ankhesenamen again and her ultimate fate, like that of her sisters, is unknown.
Ay, adopted heir to Tutankhamen, took the throne as ‘God’s Father Ay, Divine ruler of Thebes, beloved of Amen’ with his wife Tey as queen.45 He could never have been anything other than a stop-gap king as, by the time he became pharaoh, he would have been an old man even by modern standards. After a reign of only four years Ay too died and was buried in a relatively simple unfinished tomb in the Western Valley (WV 23), close by the tomb of Amenhotep III and possibly the tomb which Tutankhamen had intended for himself. The excavation of this tomb has yielded fragments of coffin, statues, and pieces of uraeus but no mummy. However scattered fragments of human skeletal material recovered from the vicinity of the tomb and believed by the excavator to be female, may well represent the last remains of Nefertiti’s nurse Tey.46
Ay was followed on the throne by General Horemheb, a soldier of obscure origins who had served under both Tutankhamen and Ay. Horemheb was not himself of royal birth, but his second wife was a lady with close links to the royal family. Queen Mutnodjmet, ‘God’s Wife of Amen’, is now widely recognized as the younger sister of Nefertiti whom we last saw in the Amarna tomb of Ay and Tey. She is therefore the last known surviving member of Nefertiti’s family.47 Like her sister before her, Mutnodjmet proved to be a strong queen; we see her seated beside her husband, at equal scale, on his coronation statue, and scene on the side of the royal throne shows her in the guise of a winged sphinx wearing the flat-topped crown associated with Tefnut. Mutnodjmet died aged thirty-five to forty during Year 14 or 15 of her husband’s
rule, and was buried in the tomb that Horemheb had prepared for himself at Memphis. Included in her grave was the tiny skeleton of a baby or foetus, suggesting that Mutnodjmet had died in childbirth.
Horemheb developed into a solid, old-fashioned Egyptian pharaoh, ruling Egypt for over twenty years. He did not share Tutankhamen’s devotion to Amen. As an experienced politician he may, with good reason, have been wary of allowing the re-established priesthood too much power too soon and so we find, throughout his reign, the other major gods of the pantheon allowed an increased prominence. Traditionally the persecution of the memory of Akhenaten and Nefertiti has been assigned to the personal spite and excessive religious zeal of Horemheb. While Horemheb was certainly responsible for the closing, demolition and re-use of much of Akhenaten’s Karnak temples, there is increasing evidence to show that some buildings had already been dismantled during the reign of Tutankhamen and, indeed the persecution of Akhenaten’s memory lasted well into the reign of Ramesses II when much of the stone was taken from Amarna for re-use in the pylons of Hermopolis.
The removal of the name and image of a dead person, occasionally called a damnatio memoriae, served two distinct purposes. Firstly, it permitted a valid re-writing of history, allowing Akhenaten’s successors to convince themselves that his reign had never occured. Secondly, it provided a means of attacking the spirit of the deceased. Traditional theology dictated that, in order for the spirit or soul to live for ever, the body, the image or at least the name of the deceased must survive; it was this need to preserve the dead body which led to the development of mummification, a practice which Akhenaten continued even if he did not subscribe to all its theological implications. If all memory of a dead person was lost or destroyed the spirit too would perish, and then would come the dreaded ‘Second Death’; total obliteration from which there could be no return. We have already seen how Tutankhamen, as his reign progressed, stressed his role as a traditional New Kingdom monarch, preferring to be associated with Amenhotep III rather than Akhenaten. It is therefore unfortunate that, as far as Egypt’s official historians were concerned, Akhenaten and his descendants were all tarred with the same heretical brush. Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamen and Ay were all omitted from the official King Lists, which jumped from Amenhotep III to Horemheb. Nefertiti’s name was rapidly lost in the mists of time while Akhenaten himself was dismissed as the ‘criminal of Akhetaten’.
1. Statue of Amenhotep III with the god Sobek
2. The Colossi of Memnon at Thebes
3. Wooden head of Queen Tiy
4. Stela depicting Amenhotep III in old age, with Tiy
5. Gold mummy mask of Yuya, father of Tiy
6. Head of the mummy of Yuya
7. Gold mummy mask of Thuyu, mother of Tiy
8. Head of the mummy of Thuyu
9. A colossal statue of Akhenaten
10. An asexual colossus of Akhenaten/Nefertiti
11. Relief depicting Akhenaten
12. Sandstone portrait of Nefertiti
13. Relief depicting the family of Akhenaten offering to the Aten
14. Quartzite head of Nefertiti
15. Relief showing Ay and Tey receiving royal gold
16. Stela showing Akhenaten and Nefertiti with their family
17. Statuette of Nefertiti in old age
18. Painted relief depicting Smenkhkare and Meritaten
19. The most widely recognized image of Nefertiti
Epilogue
The Beautiful Woman Returns
Tell el-Amarna is not usually included in the itinerary of a visitor to Egypt. This is partially due to the not undeserved reputation for wickedness on the part of the inhabitants.1
Amarna, once proud capital of a mighty empire, rapidly deteriorated into a ghost town, surviving only as a useful quarry for the stone which was needed in the extensive building works at nearby Hermopolis. Once the supply was exhausted the city was quickly forgotten and, over the centuries, the mud-brick walls gradually collapsed to be buried beneath a blanket of wind-borne sand, leaving a low, bumpy landscape punctuated by occasional mud-brick ruins. Amarna remained an obvious archaeological site, but one of little interest to anyone. Its geographical limitations ensured the preservation of its secrets. No other pharaoh was tempted to establish a city on the Amarna plain and no substantial modern town ever developed, although the site is sprinkled-with evidence of late Roman/Christian occupation and a handful of modern villages have caused the riverside sections of the Great Palace to disappear under cultivated fields. As the desert sands blew over their city, and the temple scribes adjusted their country’s official history to exclude the heretic kings, the names of Akhenaten and Nefertiti vanished from Egypt.2
Our first modern reference to the as yet unnamed archaeological site comes from the writings of Edme Jomard, a Frenchman who visited Amarna during the 1798–9 Napoleonic invasion and who made a plan of his discovery, noting ‘a great mass of ruins… [which] does not feature on any map’.3 Twenty-five years later John Gardner Wilkinson, under the mistaken impression that he was exploring Alabastronopolis, became the first egyptologist to visit the tombs of the Amarna nobles. Sketches of some of the scenes within Meryre’s tomb, together with a hastily drawn map of the city, were later to appear in his great work Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians.4 Other antiquarians followed over the years but, although the tombs were recorded by Robert Hay, Nestor L’Hote and A. Prisse d’Avennes, their work remained unpublished and the city site generally unknown. It was only in 1842 with the arrival of Richard Lepsius, leader of the Prussian epigraphic expedition, that a thorough record was made of the then known monuments and tomb scenes.
The brief Prussian expedition, two seasons totalling a mere twelve days of what must have been extremely hard labour, was followed by a far longer French mission which again concentrated on the cliffs. The French held the concession to work at Amarna between 1883 and 1902, during which time they uncovered more of the southern tombs of the nobles and fitted protective iron gates to prevent the theft of engraved scenes which enterprising tomb robbers were eager to saw off the walls and sell to western collectors. This precaution almost certainly came too late. Amarna had already become the focus of gangs of unofficial excavators, local people employed by black-market traders to dig for treasures which could be sold on the increasingly rapacious antiquities market. Their furtive digging disrupted the stratigraphy, robbed the site of its valuables and threw up vast piles of ancient potsherds, which may still be seen on the surface today.
The ‘accidental’ discovery, in 1887, of the Amarna letters by a local woman reportedly digging for sebakh, sparked a renewed interest in the site, which was gradually establishing itself on the tourist map. Already in 1873 Amelia B. Edwards, author of the first travellers’ guide to Egypt, A Thousand Miles up the Nile, had included Amarna in her list of important Middle Egyptian sites, although due to bad weather conditions she herself was thwarted in her intention to visit the tombs.5 Miss Edwards, like many other European visitors accustomed to the westernized luxury of Cairo, was shocked by the levels of poverty and disease to be seen in Middle Egypt:
It may be that ophthalmia especially prevailed in this part of the country, or that being brought unexpectedly into the midst of a large crowd, one observed the people more narrowly, but I certainly never saw so many one-eyed human beings as that morning at Minieh… I believe it is no exaggeration to say that at least every twentieth person, down to little toddling children of three and four years of age, was blind of an eye. Not being a particularly well-favoured race, this defect added the last touch of repulsiveness to faces already sullen, ignorant and unfriendly.6
So affected was Miss Edwards by the sight of the native Egyptians that she found herself unable to visit modern towns. She was not alone in her shock. Almost half a century later Mary Chubb, who accompanied the Egypt Exploration Society’s expedition to Amarna at a time when the western archaeologists were expected to treat the illnesses of t
he local people, was similarly struck by the high level of ‘pink eye’, ‘eyelids badly swollen and red, the eye closed and discharging, and the eyeball, if you could manage to see it at all, very bloodshot’, which fortunately responded well to an application of warm boracic water.7
Amarna never ranked highly as a casual tourist attraction. Sadly deficient in spectacular temples and awe-inspiring pyramids, the nearby modern towns were not geared up to the tourist trade and, lacking the sophistication of Cairo and the romance of Thebes, had very little to offer the visitor with a limited interest in egyptological research. Access to the site could be a problem for those who did not enjoy the luxury of their own boat; in John Pendlebury’s 1930 account of Amarna he stressed how difficult it was to actually reach the antiquities. The intrepid traveller was instructed to drive out from Malawi in a hired car and cross the river by boat having first arranged for donkeys on the opposite bank. Failure to arrange for the donkeys in advance would mean ‘the complete absence of transport at the proper price of five piastres the donkey and three the boy, and also of the guards who are supposed to keep the keys of the tombs’.8 The local people enjoyed a bad reputation for theft and general unspecified wickedness, and as Norman de Garis Davies noted, ‘the evil reputation of the inhabitants of El Amarna seems to have deterred early visitors from penetrating inland’.9 This local churlishness and lack of respect for their own womenfolk was something that the western archaeologists could turn to their own advantage:
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