Aidan Dodson

But anyway, what I'm saying is that often with any kind of revolution, there is the in-your-face beginning of a revolution.

But then that fairly rapidly becomes more, softens to some degree.

And I think that's what happens with the art of this period.

The first stuff is really you're in your face, but by the time you move a decade on, which is probably when the Nefertiti heads are being carved, and the Quartzsite one is unfinished, so it's probably right at the end, towards the end of the reign, is that they've reconciled beauty with revolution.

And I think that's what we should see with those Nefertiti heads.

A piece of graffiti.

A graffito, yeah, which actually mentions her in year 16, because previously the last sighting, if you like, had been sometime after year 12.

We've got a year 12 representation of her, and then we've also got a representation at the funeral of her daughter, Mechitartan, which, as Mechitartan's also in this year 12 representation, must be slightly after that.

So we had that, and there was all kinds of ideas what might have happened to her.

Yeah, and so we know that she's still around as queen in year 16 as a result of this graffito.

And that's an important thing to recognise about Egyptian history, that one discovery can literally change history.

That we have a version, but then suddenly you have to revise it.

For example, this...

discovery in 2012 meant that the book I wrote in 2009, when it was re... I did a new edition a couple of years later, I had to change 75% of the pages.

There was a ripple effect of one discovery, which is a really quite... So that's an important thing to recognise that...

Egyptian history can change overnight because so much of it is reconstructing from a tiny amount of evidence.

And sometimes that new bit of evidence comes in and suddenly changes, it literally changes history overnight.

So anyway, so we knew she's around at that point.

But the most important recognition, which is still not accepted by 100% of Egyptologists, we're an argumentative bunch and we never agree on anything.

But the vast majority are now agreed that the point was that Nefertiti didn't disappear, whatever date that last attestation as a queen is, but she then transmogrifies into a female pharaoh.