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Chapter 1: Who was Nefertiti and why is she iconic?
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Chapter 2: What do we know about Nefertiti's family background?
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You've seen her face on tea towels. You've seen her face on posters, on Beyonce's homecoming album cover. Nefertiti, one of the most recognized figures of ancient Egypt. But what is the real history of the woman herself?
This is the story of Nefertiti.
And this is Empire with me, Anita Arnon.
And me, William Durimple. Now, we are now at episode four of our Amarna series. We have met the world of Amarna with the wonderful Amarna letters that Eric Klein so wonderfully took us through. We have dived deep into Akhnaten and his revolution and its downfall. And now we come to Nefertiti. the wife who we now know was also a pharaoh of Egypt.
And it's our great pleasure to have back to the show the wonderful Aidan Dodson. Thank you for having me back.
It's very good to have you because honestly, I'm obsessed like many women, particularly with the eye makeup that goes on in ancient Egypt. But this face, this inescapable face. Let's begin with what sounds like a stupid question.
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Chapter 3: How did Nefertiti become a pharaoh?
But You know, what do we actually know about her? Because what surprises me is that, you know, we don't know very much considering how much we recognise her face.
And we should say that your wonderful new book adds clarity to the answer to this question that I have never come across in any other account.
So, Aidan, tell us what we do know for sure about her.
Right. We know for a fact that she was a woman married to Akhenaten and had six daughters. end that is all we know for absolutely certain everything else which we think we know about her is got to be inferred or implied from others from indirect sources and part of that comes from what who her parents were it's like there is no no text which tells us who her parents were
We can be sure who her parents weren't. They weren't a king and queen, because nowhere does she ever hold the title of king's daughter or king's sister, which would have been the case had she been potentially a sibling spouse of Akhenaten.
Because we get lists of her titles, don't they? And that would indicate that she was the daughter of a king.
And she has probably the most extensive set of titles we've got of queen of this kind of era. So if she were indeed a king's daughter or king's sister, one would find it somewhere. So we can rule that out as a possibility.
But you have a very strong theory, Aidan. Tell us about it.
The probably dominant theory has been that she is actually a maternal cousin of Akhenaten. Because we have a man at court at this period called I, who has the title of God's father. And we know that that title can imply king's father-in-law. Indeed, Queen T, who is the mother of Akhenaten, her father is called God's father as well. So that tends to suggest that I may well be that.
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Chapter 4: What was Nefertiti's role in Akhenaten's religious revolution?
Yeah. The very, very earliest records of him... He turns out with his mum in inscriptions, doesn't he?
Yeah.
But then we have, it looks as though they probably marry within the first year or so of the reign. And they have their first daughter by year two of the reign. So it looks as though fairly soon after his accession, that is when the two of them get married. There's a good question here about what that might have looked like, because we don't know anything about marriage in ancient Egypt per se.
Right.
Where we have got records of marriage, and it tends to be in the private sphere, there's no indication of any kind of religious or anything out of ceremonies. It all seems to have been a contractual link, because the word to marry, in fact, is to get to move in with.
And then what you might well then get is some kind of agreement over money, almost a prenup, almost, is what we sort of find there. In the royal sphere, we have absolutely nothing whatsoever. The only reason we know that the kings and various queens are marrying each other is because there they are in the text with the title of king's wife or king's great wife.
So quite what that would all entail remains completely obscure.
Aidan, there's a lot of debate over whether she was foreign or not. This idea that she was a princess from a far land who comes in and almost corrupts Akhenaten's mind and makes him break with all tradition and found his own religion. This bloody Lady Macbeth type creature. What do we know about whether she was foreign, whether she was Egyptian? What do you know or what do you feel is fact here?
Okay, she was certainly not... An Egyptian princess. She never has the title of king's sister or king's daughter, which would be de rigueur in this kind of situation. And we have a long, long list of her titles, and those certainly aren't amongst them. And there's no way that they would have slipped off of the record.
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Chapter 5: What evidence exists about Nefertiti's disappearance from history?
Yeah. Again, we have nothing to do... We have no information about these kind of dynamics. We've not got any sort of peeps' diaries or anything like that about what the gossip is going on at court. All we know is that some of these people turn up And that's sort of about it.
But we know when she turns up, she turns up with a big bang. I mean, she is the great royal wife almost immediately. And you can see that, Aidan, can't you, in sort of epic form. She's depicted in large scale. I mean, just talk about the way in which the Egyptian people would have first met their great queen.
Yeah.
Nefertiti first appears on temple walls about a year or so after Akhenaten comes to the throne. And when she does appear on temple walls, she appears on a very, very large scale. Indeed, there is one section of one of the temples, which is built very early in the reign, where she is the sole officiant. There's no sign of her husband whatsoever.
It's her and her elder daughter are the only ones who are on these particular bits of temple walls, which is really quite something.
It reminds me very much of the situation in Mughal India when we get Noor Jahan. And Noor Jahan is unique among the wives of the Mughals in that she's on coins, she's on inscriptions. She has a much bigger role than any other wife from the period. And you get this impression with Nefertiti. She's there from the beginning of Atenaten, and she stays with him for life.
And she's more powerful than almost any other queen of her age.
I think, though, equally powerful and prominent is her mother-in-law, Queen T. And I think there's something that tea in many ways provides the prototype for Nefertiti in the sense that the idea of the queen being shown the same size as the king and appearing with all things, that's something which tea probably kicks off at this point.
Although if we can go back in time, go back earlier in the 18th dynasty, we've got Hatshepsut who later becomes a female pharaoh but is prominent as queen.
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Chapter 6: How did Nefertiti's daughters impact her legacy?
And it looks almost, you know, sort of, it looks really modern. It looks like, you know, the kind of... On the cover of Aidan's book. So, I'm not wrong. I just didn't realise it was the cover of the book. But, I mean, so she's a complicated character. She's not just, you know, the... military headdress and everything that's underneath it and this huge figure all on her own without her husband.
She's also a mummy. They depict that too.
Again, this kicks off quite late in Amenhotep III's reign as well. It's the centrality of the royal family to the link with the deity. In the past, King and Queen, well, King is the main thing. Some periods you get the Queen as a big thing.
But the idea of the whole family being central to cult seems to be an innovation of the latter part of the reign of Amenhotep III, which Akhenaten carries on in spades. And every time you're seeing any kind of act of worship, it's the king, queen, and at least one daughter. So that unit, the royal family, becomes a really, really important thing. In a way, it's not ever really been before that.
The family has been sort of an adjunct to the king and queen. Now the whole family becomes a focal point to it.
Do we have other pictures of royal babies dangling and fiddling with earrings, or is this a unique moment?
The one thing which is unique is about the whole Amarna art style, which is fundamentally new. Almost everything about it subverts what previous Egyptian art had done. It's most noticeable in the strange bodily proportions. but also the things which they're seen doing, or at least what principal figures are seen doing.
Scenes where you've got children playing and whatever are quite common earlier on, but as subsidiary things in private tomb chapels, where they're just trying to magically recreate the world, including things like kids playing. But the idea of a king and queen interacting in such an informal way with their daughters is completely unknown before and after this.
So it's part of that whole revolution which Akhenaten imposes on Egypt. There's the religious side of things, of course, but also this artistic one is part of it. And I've often wondered whether the artistic change is part almost of shock value, thinking almost a year zero, saying that,
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Chapter 7: What is the story behind the famous Nefertiti bust?
by depicting the king and queen is completely revolutionary, probably for many Egyptians, outrageous kind of way, is saying something about the world is starting again. This is something completely new.
Yeah. But again, it's one thing to say to Egypt, look, we have six daughters and we are proud of them and we love them. But there is a missing thing, which all of Egypt would have felt, I guess, and which will be important at some point, and that's the missing son of What do we know about the daughters? Do we know anything much about who they were and what they did?
Unfortunately, once again, we know very, very little about the individual daughters.
We have gorgeous pictures of them. We do. Wonderful busts.
One of them goes on to marry Akhenaten's first co-ruler and therefore becomes a king's great wife in her own right. That's Meritaten, the eldest. The second daughter, Mekhet Aten, dies somewhere around year 13 of the reign. And we've got scenes of her being mourned in the royal tomb.
And also in the royal tomb, there are scenes of two more princesses being mourned, who seem to be the two youngest daughters, Neferneferu Re and Setepen Re. Of the rest of them, Anchesenpa Aten goes on to become the queen of Tutankhamun. And then Neferneferu Aten Tasheret... We don't know what happens to her. We've got no burial scene for her. We've got no later records of her.
So she is somebody who remains a bit of a mystery amongst the six of them. Just to say, when you mentioned the question of the fact that there was no sun shown, it's worthwhile pointing out that it had never been tradition for royal suns ever to be shown on monuments. And this goes right the way back to the days of the pyramids.
When you look at earlier examples of the limited number of royal family scenes, it's always the daughters. When you've got in the Jubilee reliefs of Amenhotep III, for example, he's shown with Queen Tea and a load of his daughters. No sign of the two known sons of...
I had no idea about that. No, interesting. So why? Is that an evil eye thing? That if you show the prince, he might have the evil eye on him?
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Chapter 8: Why is the ownership of Nefertiti's bust controversial?
Otherwise, he wouldn't be shown at all.
But Aidan, there is a rather extraordinary thing at this period with the images of the daughters. They are focused on in a way that I don't know any other royal siblings or in any period of Egyptian art. There's one particular... utterly beautiful hard stone image of one of the girls also in Berlin, just one room away from her mother.
And she's got this amazing kind of smooth head and again, her mother's extraordinary cheekbones and almost my favorite piece of Egyptian art.
Yeah, I think the reason why we've got this sort of overload of the royal daughters, it's going back a second. One of the oddest things about the whole Aten business is although the god is visible to everybody, it's the globe of the sun in the sky, the royal family have to act as the intermediaries between that god and people.
And therefore, that unit of the royal family, it's not just the king, not just the queen, but also the daughters, are part of that almost point of nexus, if you like, between the divine and earth. And I think that's, for whatever reason, it's the whole family is recognised as being that important point, not just simply the king and queen.
But once Akhenaten has done this, it changes everything forever. Because once you get beyond the Amarna period into the time of Ramesses II and so on, it's like the royal family en masse is a thing. You have Rameses II with his hundred sons and daughters all being shown with him on temple reliefs.
So Akhenaten's promotion of the royal family through his particular reasons actually then changes Egyptian art and the protocol of who you show on temple walls forever.
I can't get it out of my head that they didn't used to depict the sons. And can I make another plea for the evil eye theory of this? Because I know in India, my mother's told me these stories of her great-grandmother who refused to name her sons. So whenever anybody asked her, how are your children?
She would go into great detail about the daughters, naming them, where they're living, what they're wearing, what they're eating. And if there was a, yeah, but what about your boys? And then the third daughter, she's really into it. And they'd ask about, you know, she's
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