Nefertiti: The First Woman to Rewrite Royal Power.

Nefertiti, whose name means “the beautiful one has come,” is one of history’s most captivating mysteries: a queen who led her nation to the heights of power, only to disappear without a trace at the height of her influence.

Beyond Beauty : The Revolutionary Queen

Queen Nefertiti—whose exquisite limestone bust, found in 1912 and now located in the Museum in Berlin, has established her as one of history’s most beautiful women—is known more as a face and not for her story, a great underestimation of one of Egypt’s most influential royals. Nefertiti was more than just a decorative royal spouse. As the Great Royal Wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14th century BCE, she helped usher in one of the most sweeping religious and political revolutions in the history of ancient Egypt.

With Akhenaten, Nefertiti led a religious revolution in which Egypt's major religion was transformed to monolater (worship of a single god), whose central deity was Aten (the sun disk), by instituting a new state god, Aten. This religious revolution was not just theological; it was a deep power reorganization that threatened thousands of years of religious authority held by the priests of Amon.

What makes Nefertiti so extraordinary is her presence within this revolution. In sharp contrast to other Egyptian queens who are not often noticed behind the scenes, Nefertiti appears in royal cartouches and inscriptions. Temple reliefs depict her in postures normally assumed only by pharaohs—smiting enemies, offering to the Aten and wearing iconography reserved for kings. These unique depictions in Egyptian art serve to illustrate that Nefertiti had more power than can be attributed to a traditional consort.

The Amarna Period: A Bold but Brief Experiment

Nefertiti’s story unfolded during the period that Egyptologists refer to as the Amarna Period — after the ephemeral capital city of Akhenaten (modern Amarna) that Akhenaten made the crux of his religious revolution. Built quickly in the desert, this city has no parallel, and the religious reforms that the royal couple championed were similarly unprecedented in more than three millennia of Egyptian history.

The aesthetic form that was evolved at the time was equally radical. Traditional Egyptian art had adhered to a kind of formula for millennia, representing human figures of idealized and stylized proportions. During the reign of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, artists there produced a radically different aesthetic–more naturalistic, elongated, curved, with depictions of small family moments never before seen in royal representations.

They are artistic innovations that made insights in to the private lives of the royal family unprecedented. Reliefs depict Nefertiti and Akhenaten lovingly touching their six daughters in casual activities—sitting together, giving kisses, and partaking in family life. This humanist treatment of royal portraiture was unprecedented in a culture where pharaohs had always been portrayed as remote, godlike beings.

The Disappearing Act That Has Egyptologists Scratching Their Heads

What elevates Nefertiti from the merely interesting to the historically gripping is the way she vanishes from history around the 12th year of Akhenaten’s 17-year reign. After playing a very public role in royal inscriptions, art, and administrative documents, Nefertiti suddenly disappears from all official records—triggering one of the most enduring mysteries in Egyptology.

This vanishing has given rise to many theories. Did she fall from favour? Did she die from illness? Was she already henceforth officially co-regent though with a new royal title? And perhaps most tantalizing of all, some Egyptologists suggest that after Akhenaten’s death, Nefertiti herself actually ruled Egypt outright for a little while, or at least that she ruled under another name, Smenkhkare, the murky pharaoh about whom we know almost nothing.

This theory has been stoked by the finding of parts of a royal decree which referred to a ruler born as Nefertiti. If true, it would make Nefertiti one of very few female pharaohs in Egypt’s approximately 3,000 years of recorded pharaonic history, along with figures like Hatshepsut and Cleopatra.

The Legacy Right in Front of Us

Following the death of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, subsequent rulers, especially Tutankhamun (generally accepted as the son of Akhenaten) and after him Horemheb, evoked the period of Amarna reign from the history books. They destroyed Akhenaten, building its elements into other construction, and removed the names of Akhenaten and his followers from the official Pharaonic king lists. This calculated scrubbing explains so much about why even centuries later Nefertiti remained in relative obscurity until the discovery of Nefertiti’s bust in the 20th century.

But much more intriguing aspects of Nefertiti’s legacy are what they didn’t erase: the avant-garde Amarna Period’s still fledging artistic and cultural innovations continued to influence Egyptian art for generations, despite official efforts to get back to tradition. The more personal, naturalistic style continued in other respects, and some scholars believe the brief flirtation with a single deity arguably had long-term theological impact which would permeate subsequent religious developments in the area.

That Nefertiti’s is now one of the most familiar faces of the ancient past is itself a tremendous victory against the forces that worked to erase her from history. Her face, carved in limestone, its graceful neck, elegantly formed lips, cracked and chipped, a fragment of what was once an elaborate crown, was not preserved in a grand tomb or temple but in the workaday workshop of a sculptor named Thutmose, where it was found more than three millennia after she ruled.

Thus did Nefertiti reach a sort of immortality that even the most inflated preparations of traditional Egyptian funeral rites could not be certain of. While other royals of her day poured resources into elaborate tombs, mummies and funerary texts to stave off oblivion, Nefertiti bequeathed herself to posterity in art — in her case, not even in the survival of her own mummy (which has never been positively identified) but in the rendering of her features by a sculptor.

Indeed, the power of Nefertiti in life — powerful enough to intimidate succeeding dynasties into trying to obliterate her memory — is nothing compared to the cultural power her image in death holds. In becoming an icon of old world allure and mystery, she passed beyond the limits of her era and achieved an immortality that would have impressed even the ancient Egyptians, who were addicted to life after death.