Nefertiti
Page 17
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Queen, King or Goddess?
I breathe the sweet breath that comes forth from your mouth and shall behold your beauty daily. My prayer is that I may hear your sweet voices of the north wind, that my flesh may grow young with life through your love, that you may give me your hands bearing your spirit and I receive it and live by it, and that you may call upon my name eternally, and it shall not fail…1
A private devotional stela of unknown provenance (Plate 16) allows us to catch a glimpse of the royal family at the time of their arrival at Amarna. The family relax in a stylized tent whose walls are denoted by slender papyrus pillars. The tent has a floor of reed matting but no roof – it is open to the sky, allowing the rays of the sun to offer the ankh, symbol of life, to the royal couple and their children.
Akhenaten sits on a simple padded stool with his feet raised on a hassock. He is dressed in his favourite pleated kilt and sandals, and wears a blue crown ornamented with multiple uraei, a decorated band and two streamers. He is holding his eldest daughter somewhat awkwardly in his arms and is slightly bending forward, apparently about to kiss her. Meritaten twists to stroke her father’s chin with her right hand while pointing towards her mother and sisters with her left. Akhenaten’s long but not unduly grotesque face is emphasized by his tall crown. His neck, too, is long and sinuous, while his upper arms, shoulders and lower legs are strikingly underdeveloped. His kilt does nothing to hide his paunch. Behind the king is a stand holding four pairs of wine jars.
Facing her husband Nefertiti sits on a more regal looking but slightly lower stool decorated with the sma-tawy, the bound papyrus and lily symbol of the Unity of the Two Lands. Her sandalled feet rest on a footstool. Nefertiti’s face has the plain features of the early Amarna period and her slightly slumped body mirrors that of the king. She wears a long, delicately pleated gown casually tied with a sash under the bust. The pleated sash hangs downwards, partially obscuring the sma-tawy. While her upper arms are covered, her rounded stomach, oval navel and inner right calf are exposed. She wears no jewellery, but her trademark blue crown is embellished with a decorated fillet and banded streamers that, with artistic licence, flutter in the breeze in the opposite direction to the streamers on the king’s crown.
Nefertiti has Meketaten on her knee, and the child is looking over her shoulder at her mother while gesturing towards her father and sister with her right hand; this overlapping of bodies gives the scene a feeling of depth not usually found in Egyptian art. Meanwhile baby Ankhesenpaaten, a miniature adult, is clambering over her mother’s left shoulder and reaching for a tempting ornament suspended from Nefertiti’s crown. All three daughters are naked and have elongated bald heads, although the eldest two wear ear-ornaments and we may assume that all three sport a side-lock which, in the cases of Meritaten and Ankhesenpaaten who have their heads turned towards the left, cannot be seen.
At first sight this stela offers the simple image of a perfect family in an ideal world far beyond the experiences of most Egyptians. A second glance, however, reveals a curious mixed message. Akhenaten, as we might expect, appears the taller and more dominant figure. He is associated with the eldest and most important princess while Nefertiti, a typical wife, cares for the babies. Yet he is allocated the plain stool while his wife occupies the seat decorated with an unmistakable regal motif. Under normal circumstances we would expect the more important person to sit on this stool. What are we to read into this? Is it a simple, irrelevant mistake in a private stela that was never intended to be an accurate portrait, and certainly never intended for public display? Or is it a deliberate message from the artist? Who exactly is the dominant partner here?
This stela has fuelled heated debate over the precise nature of Nefertiti’s role at Amarna. Everyone accepts that Nefertiti was Akhenaten’s consort – the evidence for this is overwhelming. But some historians have gone much further, suggesting that she acted as Akhenaten’s co-regent and, maybe, ultimately as sole ruler of Egypt. This theory, first proposed by Gaston Maspero, is perhaps best expressed in the work of Julia Samson who, in writing about the earlier Theban images of Nefertiti, comments:
Here was not a goddess but a Regnant Queen. The determined and powerful purpose is obvious behind the numerous carvings, and they spell aloud that Akhenaten wanted no mistake made! He was writing and displaying in the various carved scenes the new social and religious development as well as showing to his people his wife’s equality at his side. In Thebes this policy was pictured many years before their co-rule was actually recorded at Amarna…2
One could, of course, argue that the best way for Akhenaten to ensure that ‘no mistakes were made’ with regard to his wife’s unusual status would be to publicly proclaim his wife’s co-regency and carve it in stone throughout his land. But perhaps he did, and it has been lost or deliberately destroyed along with much else of Akhenaten’s world?
Here, straightaway, we come to the heart of the Nefertiti-as-co-regent problem. A complete and utter lack of any positive evidence. Nowhere is the precise nature of Nefertiti’s role spelt out to us. Those who would argue that she did rule Egypt alongside her husband are compelled to rely on inferences and deductions and, at the end of the day, can offer no real proof to support their theory. Those who would argue that she did not rule must rely on an absence of evidence; the fact that there is no record of Nefertiti ever using a full king’s titulary, no record of her coronation, no writing which unequivocally refers to her acting in a kingly capacity. It can be hard to disprove a popular theory without appearing negative and stick-in-the-mud. And certainly for many readers (and publishers), the image of Nefertiti as king of Egypt makes a far more satisfying end to her story.
Could Nefertiti have acted as king? In theory, yes. The ideal king of Egypt was the son of the previous king, the Horus to his dead father’s Osiris, but the father-son chain occasionally snapped. Tuthmosis I, great-great-great-great grandfather to Akhenaten and head of his dynastic bloodline, had himself been adopted into the royal family when the elderly Amenhotep I found himself in need of an heir. Nor did the king have to be a man, although again that was considered the ideal. Sobeknofru, the one queen known to have inherited the throne in the absence of a male king, had been accepted by her people.
If it was rare for a woman to rule alone, it was relatively common for a widowed queen to rule on behalf of her infant son. Egyptian history is littered with competent queens whose successful rule was destined to be absorbed into their sons’ reigns. Ahhotep and Ahmose Nefertari, the mother and daughter who were the last queen of the 17th Dynasty and the first queen of the 18th respectively, fall into this category as they ruled Egypt temporarily on behalf of their sons Ahmose and Amenhotep I. Hatchepsut, the best known of Egypt’s female kings, can also be included in the group of queens who ruled through their link with a young king, although Hatchepsut’s case is complicated by her refusal to give up the throne when Tuthmosis III came of age.
So, there are precedents for female kings inheriting the throne, and precedents for queens ruling Egypt on a temporary (and in Hatchepsut’s case not so temporary) basis on behalf of a young son or stepson. There are also precedents for kings taking co-rulers as a means of introducing the heir apparent to his future subjects and his future work. But, although many queens must have influenced the pattern of their husband’s reigns, there is no precedent for a queen consort formally ruling alongside her husband as an equal. Nor is this a situation that will ever occur in later dynastic history. Akhenaten was not a man to be bound by pointless tradition, but there was always a purpose to his deviation from convention, and his innovative reforms were actually rooted in long-standing tradition. Why would he appoint Nefertiti as co-regent? There could be only one possible reason: he intended her to rule after him. This might, perhaps, make some sense if Akhenaten had no children. But the king had at least six daughters by the queen, plus an unspecified number of children, sons as well as daughters, by the other women in the royal harem
. Any one of these would have made a more acceptable heir to the throne.
In the absence of any textual evidence to support the theory of Nefertiti as co-regent, hints as to her precise role have been sought in an examination of her appearance, her actions and her accessories as represented in reliefs and sculpture. The conclusions which can be drawn from such a survey are meagre and will always be open to doubt. Even though she is frequently depicted at the same scale as her husband, Nefertiti’s size does not provide us with any clue to her status. The concept of the queen shown at the same scale as her husband had already been introduced with art of Amenhotep III and Tiy, and this naturally continues into the reign of their son. In fact Nefertiti’s height differs from scene to scene; she variously appears at near-equal size to or much smaller than the king, and it seems that she was occasionally depicted at a smaller scale for artistic rather than political purposes, so that the descending line of king, queen and daughters would reflect the sloping rays of the Aten.3
Nefertiti’s clothing is almost invariably feminine, and seems designed to stress her female form. Only in the handful of scenes where she is shown slaying the enemies of Egypt does the queen adopt the traditional king’s smiting outfit of simple skirt and bare chest. As the smiting scene is very much a ritual one, it seems that Nefertiti needed to be dressed in the appropriate clothes for her task. Other images of Nefertiti, such as the Window of Appearance scene in the tomb of Ay, may well show her topless or naked, king-style, although, as Nefertiti’s garments are frequently both clinging and transparent, and as the whole scene had yet to be painted, we cannot be sure that the artist did not intend to paint a dress over her outline:
Nefertiti’s crowns and wigs tell a similarly vague story. We have already seen that during the early years at Thebes she favours the cow horns, disc and plumes introduced by her mother-in-law and associated with the cult of Hathor. By the time of the move to Amarna she is also wearing the tall, flat-topped crown that is likely to be her own version of Akhenaten’s blue war crown. This new headdress carries its own overtones of fertility and rejuvenation and links the queen with the solar goddess Tefnut. The blue crown quickly becomes Nefertiti’s favourite, worn with increasing frequency as the reign progresses, although occasionally she dons a close-fitting rounded cap which is sometimes mistaken for the true blue crown. The blue crown, which fits bonnet-style close to the head, is usually worn without a wig. Where her hair is shown, Nefertiti favours the true Nubian wig, a style originally reserved for men but which is now adopted by the most prominent of the royal women, Nefertiti and Kiya. Nefertiti also wears the khat head-cloth, a bag-like head cover usually worn by kings but also worn by Tiy, and by the female deities Isis and Nephthys.
Nefertiti never appropriates the king’s blue crown, and even in the smiting scenes where we might expect to find her donning a more masculine headdress, she retains her own feminine crown. Only the unfinished stela of the soldier Pasi, recovered from Amarna and now housed in Berlin, appears to show a regally crowned Nefertiti as she sits alongside Akhenaten beneath the rays of the Aten.4 The identification of these two figures of undetermined gender is, however, by no means certain and it is unfortunate that the cartouches that would have named the couple have been left blank. The ‘male’ figure on the right, which wears the double crown and what appears to be a pectoral, appears slightly larger that the ‘female’ figure on the left, which wears the blue crown and has more prominent breasts. The affection between the two is obvious. The left arm of the left-hand figure is placed protectively around her/his companion, while the right-hand figure turns towards his/her companion and raises his/her hand in a tender gesture. Are we looking at Akhenaten and Nefertiti? Or at Akhenaten and a young male co-regent, his son perhaps? Or are we looking at Akhenaten and his father, Amenhotep III?
Our only positive sighting of Nefertiti dressed in a kingly crown comes from the Amarna tomb of Panehesy (Fig 6.1), where we see the queen wearing a khat head-cloth topped by a highly ornate atef crown while directly in front of her stands the larger-scale Akhenaten sporting what appears to be a nemes head-cloth and an even more elaborate atef crown complete with two additional cobras and with three extra falcons perched on top.5 The atef, a highly complicated headdress which, during the New Kingdom, incorporated ostrich feathers, ram and bull horns, a solar disc and numerous uraei, was invariably associated with kings and with the cult of Osiris; the only other woman known to have worn this crown was Hatchepsut in her role as female pharaoh. As Panehesy clearly shows Nefertiti in the atef, we can assume that she did wear this crown on at least one occasion, although we again run up against the problem that this is a stereotypical scene rather than a photograph – just how true-to-life should we expect such scenes to be? As he does not accord her kingly titles, it is tempting to speculate that the artist may well have confused his crowns. However, Nefertiti’s crown is by no means identical to that worn by the king and need not signify either equality or kingship. Akhenaten’s crown is larger, has more elements, and appears far more regal. Nefertiti’s is a scaled-down, less elaborate version. We know that Nefertiti was by no means averse to appropriating ‘male’ wigs and headdresses, adapting them to her own use. The transfer of elements of kingly regalia and iconography to the queen has good precedent: the tall plumed crown, the uraeus, and even the cartouche had all originally been confined to the king.
Fig. 6.1 Nefertiti and Akhenaten wearing the atef crown
All this visual evidence combines to confirm what we might have expected from the complete evidence of textual references to Nefertiti as co-regent. While Nefertiti was undeniably a powerful woman, we have absolutely no proof that she was ever a queen regnant, sharing power with Akhenaten. The most compelling evidence that can be cited, the handful of striking scenes, the seat decorated with the Unity of the Two Lands and the occasional wearing of a scaled-down atef crown, is far outweighed by the many more scenes which show Nefertiti as an influential but relatively conventional consort taking second place to her husband. Her regalia, her association with the sphinx, and her appearance in the smiting scenes, seem to be very much a continuation of the elevation of the queenship which was started during the reign of Amenhotep III.
In fact we have no archaeological or historical evidence to indicate that Akhenaten ever regarded Nefertiti as anything approaching his equal. She is undeniably an active participant in all aspects of state ritual; in addition to the smiting scenes the Amarna tombs show her awarding gold to the élite, parading in a royal palanquin and even driving her own chariot. However, Nefertiti’s prominence remains very much a function of her relationship to Akhenaten, and stems directly from him. She may act in parallel to the king but she never usurps his authority and wherever the two appear together Akhenaten remains the dominant figure, Nefertiti the dutiful wife.
If Nefertiti is not a king, is she a goddess? She is certainly able to function as a priestess. At Thebes we have seen Nefertiti worshipping the Aten in the role normally reserved for the king. Now, at Amarna, we see her worshipping alongside her husband and can presume that she continues to offer alone in the privacy of her sunshade. She is allowed to play a far more important, and far more public, role in state religion than her predecessors although, as both her elder daughters and Kiya are also occasionally allowed to put down their sistra and present offerings to the god, it may be prudent to interpret this as an increase in the religious status of all the Amarna royal women rather than a promotion specific to Nefertiti.
Nefertiti is now presented as the feminine element in the divine triad of Aten, Akhenaten and Nefertiti, where she plays the role of Tefnut to Akhenaten’s Shu. She is also the mother-figure in the lesser triad formed by the king, queen and their children. Her sexuality, emphasized by her exaggerated body shape and her revealing garments, and her fecundity, stressed by the constant appearance of the royal princesses, indicate that she is to be regarded as a living fertility symbol. Again we have no means of telling whether Nefertiti herself i
s now divine, or whether she merely serves as a conduit to the king and his god. It would not have been unprecedented for a queen to be deified and indeed the earlier 18th Dynasty queen Ahmose Nefertari was worshipped as ‘Mistress of the Sky’ at Deir el-Medina for many years after her death; there is, however, no evidence to suggest that Ahmose Nefertari was worshipped in this way during her lifetime. Tiy, who had a temple dedicated to her at Sedeinga in Nubia was, in the colonies at least, acknowledged as semi-divine but never worshipped as a fully fledged goddess in Egypt proper. The fact that prayers were addressed to Nefertiti at Amarna cannot be taken as proof of her divine status, as we know that within the tomb of Huya prayers were also addressed to Queen Tiy.
The debate over Nefertiti’s divinity has been fuelled by the evidence provided by Akhenaten’s sarcophagus which was recovered in fragments from the Amarna royal tomb and subsequently reconstructed.6 The sarcophagus was, as convention dictated, a carved stone-lidded box, made in this case from polished red Aswan granite. The four corners of the sarcophagus were embellished with representations of Nefertiti in raised relief, standing with her arms outstretched and palms flat along the sarcophagus sides as if to embrace and protect the dead king. The carving of the figures is somewhat clumsy, and does not bear much resemblance to other images of the queen, but she is clearly labelled and there can be little doubt over her identity. Nefertiti wears a fine pleated dress, a long curled wig, a double uraeus and a complicated and unusual crown incorporating a sun disc, cobra frieze, double uraeus and two tall feathers.
The kings of the post-Amarna period, Tutankhamen, Ay and Horemheb, also chose to embellish their sarcophagi with images of women. However, rather than their queens, they followed a precedent suggested by the canopic chest of Amenhotep II and selected the goddesses Isis, Nephthys, Neith and Selket. Under the old Osirid mythology these goddesses would protect the dead king, Isis and Nephthys being the two sisters who guarded the dead Osiris and Neith and Selket being added so that the four goddesses might complement the four sons of Horus who protected the canopic jars holding the intestines, stomach, liver and lungs of the deceased. Should we then have expected Akhenaten to employ a goddess to protect his remains? If so, is Nefertiti herself such a goddess?