The Bust of Nefertiti: Remembering Ancient Egypt’s Famous Queen
On a sunny afternoon on Dec. 6, 1912, an Egyptian worker at a dig
along the banks of the Nile came across what may be the most striking
find in the history of Egyptology. Ludwig Borchardt, the German
archaeologist in charge of the excavation, scribbled excitedly in his
diary a century ago: “The tools were put aside, and the hands were now
used … It took a considerable amount of time until the whole piece was
completely freed from all the dirt and rubble.” What emerged was a
3,300-year-old limestone bust of an ancient queen, colored with a gypsum
lacquer. A flat-topped crown perched above a finely defined brow. Her
cheekbones were high, nose distinguished. A thin, elegant neck — some
now describe it “swanlike” — rose from the bust’s base. “We held the
most lively piece of Egyptian art in our hands,” wrote Borchardt.
The bust is of Nefertiti, queen of Egypt
and wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten, who reigned in the 14th century B.C. A
hundred years after Nefertiti’s bust was lifted out of the ground at
Amarna, some 480 km south of Cairo, it remains one of the most iconic
figures of Egyptian antiquity, far smaller than the pyramids or the
Sphinx, but no less globally resonant. The bust adorns souvenir schlock
throughout Egypt and history schoolbooks worldwide. When it went on
display at a museum in Berlin in the 1920s, it was almost immediately
held up as a symbol of universal, timeless beauty. That’s not
surprising. Nefertiti’s name means “the beautiful one has come.”
But she’s much more than a pretty face. The queen and the bust that
made her famous in our time are both fascinating stories — with endings
that are still shrouded in uncertainty. Little is known of Nefertiti’s
origins save that she was born outside the royal family, the daughter of
the pharaoh’s vizier. She married Amenhotep IV, who inherited a vast,
rich empire from his father Amenhotep III that stretched from the Nubian
wastes to the river lands of Syria. Theirs was a moment of relative stability, with trade, not conquest, filling Egypt’s coffers.
Yet Nefertiti and her husband were for centuries virtually wiped off
the historical record; it’s only once archaeologists in the early 20th
century started excavations of their capital complex at Amarna that they
loomed out of the dark of the past. The reason, it seems, was a move
taken by Nefertiti’s husband to abandon the cults of certain gods — and
the bloated, powerful priesthoods that surrounded them — in favor of
worship of just one abstracted figure: Aten, a god represented as a sun
disk. Amenhotep IV assumed the name Akhenaten, or “one devoted to Aten,”
and he and Nefertiti arguably became the world’s first monotheists.
There are other moments in history when a royal takes such a daring
ideological turn — Byzantine Emperor Julian forsook Christianity for
Greek polytheism and philosophy; Mogul Emperor Akbar embraced the din-e-ilahi,
a cosmological religion that melded Hinduism and Islam — but Akhenaten
stands out for seeming so uncharacteristically modern in such an ancient
moment. That modernity is reinforced by the outsize role played by
Nefertiti. Friezes, steles and inscriptions all make clear that she was
firmly at Akhenaten’s side, and sometimes even standing before him. In
one image found on blocks at the site of Hermopolis, Nefertiti is cast
in the classic role of a male conqueror, grabbing her enemies and
captives by the hair while smiting them with a mace.
Historians and archaeologists now puzzle over whether she ruled on in
the wake of her husband’s death. But evidence is spotty. Much of the
artwork and symbolism of their rule was erased by reactionary successors
who restored polytheistic worship to the court. Unlike many ancient
Egyptian royals, archaeologists have yet to identify their mummies,
though speculation has been rife in recent years.
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