Born: 1370 BCE (circa), Egypt (assumed)
Died: 1330 BCE (circa)
Country most active: Egypt
Also known as: Nfr.t-jy.tj
This biography, written by Jack Beesley, is shared with permission from Team Queens, an educational history blog run by a collective of historical scholars. All rights reserved; this material may not be republished without the author’s consent.
Nefertiti (c.1370 – c.1330 BCE) is one of the most recognisable, yet enigmatic, queens of Ancient Egypt. As the Great Royal Wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten, Nefertiti was a queen of the 18th Dynasty, made famous by the discovery of her bust by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchard.
Nefertiti’s parentage is undetermined, as such, many theories have been proposed to clarify her ancestry.
One often cited theory suggests that Nefertiti was the daughter of Ay, a top advisor who would become Pharaoh some years after Nefertiti’s death as the successor of Tutankhamen, Nefertiti’s stepson.
Another theory proposes that Nefertiti was in fact the biological sister of her husband, Akhenaten, which was customary among Egyptian royals as it was believed to preserve the purity of the royal bloodline.
Nefertiti was the favoured consort of Akhenaten, symbolised by her continuous presence on the walls of the tombs and temples built during his reign. The frequency of Nefertiti’s image is not matched by any other Egyptian queen.
She is depicted as equal in stature to a king, striking Egypt’s enemies and worshiping in the fashion of a Pharaoh, leading to speculation among scholars that Nefertiti was elevated by her husband to co-regent.
In the fifth year of her husband’s reign, Akhenaten initiated a religious revolution – he replaced Egypt’s principal god Amon with the sun god Aton, closed the old state temples, and relocated the court to a tailor-made capital city, Akhetaton.
Nefertiti and Akhenaten had six daughters. This contributed to the celebration of Nefertiti as a fertility goddess. Despite this, Akhenaten took other wives in the hope of producing sons, including his own sister, with whom he fathered the future Tutankhamun.
Nefertiti vanishes from record circa the 12th year of Akhenaten’s reign. This suggests that she died; however, some scholars believe she became her husband’s official co-regent under the name Neferneferuaten.
If Nefertiti maintained power, it is possible she initiated the reversal of her husband’s religious revolution, which would culminate in the reign of King Tut.
Recommended Reading
Joann Fletcher, The Search for Nefertiti (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2004)
Joyce Tyldesley, Nefertiti: Egypt’s Sun Queen (London: Penguin, 2005).
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
Queen-Consort of Egypt. Nofretete is an enigma to all students of history. The problem of the Sphinx was insignificant as compared with the problem of Nofretete. We know nothing of her parentage. She appears on the stage of history as the wife of Akhnaton, the so-called “heretic” who turned his back on the old religious ideas of Egypt and set up a doctrine of natural piety toward one beneficent deity. Queen Nofretete seems to have joined her husband in the worship of his god, the Aton. Indeed she is represented as taking equal part with Ikhnaton in all temple ceremonies.
After the twelfth year of the king’s reign, however, Nofretete disappeared again into that obscurity from which she had suddenly emerged. Apparently she left the capitol. It has been suggested that she was no longer in sympathy with Ikhnaton’s foreign policy, the slackness of which was losing for him his empire.
This theory is supported to some extent by the discovery in the ruins of the royal archives of the Hittite kings of a letter supposed to have been written by Nofretete after Ikhnaton’s death.
In this letter the queen suggests that the Hittite king send one of his sons to marry her and rule Egypt. If Nofretete wrote the letter, it is very evident that she wished Egypt to maintain its world position as an empire. This strange disappearance of Nofretete from the side of her husband, after appearing for twelve years in the midst of a seemingly unusually affectionate family group, provides us with one of the as yet unsolved mysteries of history. We see what seems to be a royal romance, and get glimpses of an ideal family life, and then the beautiful heroine vanishes. She is not mentioned in any of the new inscriptions, and the attempt is made to hammer out her name in some of the old inscriptions. We turn in desperation to the most celebrated of her many portraits and study her face. Here is the true great lady. No other woman of antiquity is represented with quite the air of dignity and distinction that Nofretete has.