In less than five years Akhenaten and Nefertiti had completely upset the long-established balance of power between crown and clergy, and with massive unemployment resulting from the dissolution of the traditional temples public unrest would understandably have been on the increase. So some time around 1347 BC , probably more for reasons of self-preservation than anything else, it was felt best to relocate the royal capital to a different part of the country.
With recent events still fresh in his mind, Akhenaten decided to find a completely new site to which no one had prior claim. As he said himself, he wanted a site which ‘did not belong to a god nor to a goddess, nor to a male ruler nor to a female ruler nor to any other people’. Although some have seen the choice of Amarna’s windswept plain as a little eccentric, cut off as it is in the middle of nowhere, it was in some ways quite a strategic location. Set almost exactly midway between the northern administrative capital, Memphis, and the southern religious centre, Thebes, it was far enough away from either to avoid any direct conflict, though still being central enough to enable its inhabitants to reach any part of the country by river relatively swiftly.
The royal couple must have first noticed the site as they sailed past between Thebes and Memphis on matters of state, and the spectacular landscape obviously appealed. Witnessing the sun rising up from a gap in its eastern cliffs, they named it Akhet Aten, meaning ‘The Horizon of the Aten’– the perfect backdrop for their dream city. The city itself was envisaged as female, and ‘the Aten will rise within her, filling her with his rays’. Akhenaten also announced that he would build the city as a memorial to the Aten, himself and Nefertiti – the divine triad. So impressed was he with the site’s potential that he raised his hand up to heaven and then and there made a solemn oath ‘to the Aten that made him’, publicly announcing that this was the perfect spot. He also declared that he would not found his new city anywhere else and no one would persuade him otherwise, ‘not even the great royal wife’ Nefertiti – a comment perhaps on her considerable powers of persuasion.
Now that the royal treasury was being filled to overflowing with the wealth of Egypt’s former temples, the king was accurately described as ‘Lord of Wealth and Rich in Goods’. With an almost unlimited budget, the couple put their plans into effect with no expense spared. Taking up temporary residence on site in a lavishly appointed tent described as ‘a pavilion of woven stuff’, the couple worked out exactly what they would require. Having toured the vast site by chariot, they instructed their architects to draw up plans for a series of grand palaces with apartments for both the king and the queen, and at least four temples for the Aten, together with a ‘Sunshade’ Temple to be built expressly for Nefertiti.
Having abandoned the Valley of the Kings and the tomb he had begun in the West Valley close to that of his father Amenhotep III, the king ordered a completely new royal burial ground to be established at Amarna. But he wanted it on the East Bank, where the sun rose, abandoning the traditional practice of burying the dead on the West Bank where it set. In a brilliant piece of political theatre the king’s tomb would be built in the very valley from which the sun appeared to rise at dawn, and where he decreed that he, Nefertiti and their daughter Meritaten would all be buried together. It was also publicly stated that if any of them were to die in any other place they should be brought back to Amarna for burial in the family vault.
Akhenaten also ordered a tomb be built for the sun god’s sacred bull, whose predecessors had previously been buried in Heliopolis, together with tombs for the priests of the Aten and all the other royal officials, many of which were again modelled on the earlier Theban tombs of his father’s officials. And in the same way that his father, Amenhotep III, had described his own buildings on a great stela set up near the Colossi of Memnon, Akhenaten listed on a series of great boundary stelae all the buildings he and Nefertiti had planned for their new city. Carved into the semicircle of cliffs surrounding the site, these stelae defined their city limits, with the first two set at the most northerly and southerly points.
In ‘regnal year 5, Month 4, Day 13’– some time in the summer of 1347 BC – Akhenaten and Nefertiti officially founded their city amidst great rejoicing. The decree itself began with the usual list of the king’s titles, followed by a fulsome description of Nefertiti as
Heiress, Great One of the palace, fair of face, adorned in the double plumes, lady of joy, at the sound of whose voice the king rejoices, possessor of grace, great of love, whose arrangements please the king, leader of Aten’s encourage, who satisfies him as he rises at dawn. Everything she says is done, the Great Royal Wife, his beloved, the Lady of Egypt, Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, may she live forever.
Quite an impressive resumé.
Exactly one year later, in regnal year 6, the couple revisited their city and its limits and ordered more stelae to be set up in the surrounding hills to further delineate the city’s boundaries. Akhenaten was also anxious that each stela should be kept in optimum condition, and ordered that they ‘shall not be obliterated, washed out, hacked out, or plastered over’ – the very damage his agents were inflicting on Amen’s name all over Egypt. The stelae were adorned with figures of the king and queen praying to the Aten disc (see Fig. 1), followed by evidence of their growing family when the toddler Meritaten was joined by a sister, Meketaten, meaning ‘She Whom the Aten Protects’, some time around her father’s fifth or sixth regnal year. As both girls play their small sistrum rattles in the course of worship, Akhenaten states, ‘My heart is joyous over Nefertiti and over her children, the king’s daughter Meritaten and the king’s daughter Meketaten, her children being under the hand of the royal wife their mother, forever and ever.’ Nefertiti was soon pregnant again, giving birth to her third child, probably in regnal year 6 or 7. The new baby was named Ankhesenpaaten, or ‘May She Live for the Aten’, and her tiny figure was squeezed into the available space on the monuments (see Fig. 10).
The representations of the couple with increasing numbers of children have generally been regarded as little more than endearing scenes of family life. But having removed Egypt’s complex network of traditional deities, particularly the Theban divine family of Amen, Mut and their son Khonsu, Akhenaten and Nefertiti were simply setting themselves up as the new gods with their own divine children, the replacements for centuries of tradition. Her frequent pregnancies also seem to have reinforced Nefertiti’s role as the life-giving creator goddess, her status as a mother being an important part of her ritualised role. She is generally portrayed with huge hips and thighs, and her gowns are often shown open at the front to accommodate her regular pregnancies (Fig. 10), their design fully emphasising maternal attributes admired as early as the Pyramid Age when royal mothers were admired as ‘splendid and rounded’.
There are also representations which have been interpreted as Nefertiti breast-feeding her daughters in the same way that female divinities were shown breast-feeding kings. Divine milk was believed to be imbued with all the necessary qualities to strengthen them from birth to death and beyond, and even human milk was regarded as highly potent stuff which featured regularly in medical recipes and magic spells.
On the small stelae set up in the homes of royal officials, the king and queen are shown lifting up their daughters to kiss them in idealised scenes of royal family life. The three girls clamber over their parents’ laps, trying to attract their attention by touching their faces, playing with the cobra on their mother’s crown or jumping up to reach one of the large beaded earrings their father holds out. In similarly intimate scenes between Akhenaten and Nefertiti, he turns to touch her chin in the same way her daughters do. The couple are even shown nose to nose, sharing the same breath as she leans forward to tie a jewelled collar around his neck, even as they drive together in one of the royal chariots. Although usually interpreted as no more than a romantic interlude in which the couple are described as kissing, it is the same pose found in representations of goddesses giving kings the sustaining breath of life.
Despite all this heavy breathing, symbolic or otherwise, sex was still perceived as too uncontrollable to be shown in official art, although its powers were acknowledged as a means to overcome death through the creation of the next generation. The Egyptians also drew on the powers of sexual orgasm as a means of sparking the beginnings of eternal life with coffin inscriptions describing the moment when ‘your contentment is mine whilst I form seed and receive breath’. With the wish that ‘you conceive me in the night and give birth to me each morning like the sun god every day’, the sky goddess Nut gave birth to the sun amidst the blood-red glow of dawn.
For all the high-flown symbolic imagery childbirth was the most hazardous moment in a woman’s life, and whilst it was a trial that Nefertiti successfully underwent six times, at least one of Akhenaten’s minor wives was not so lucky and appears to have died in childbirth. Numerous precautions were taken before and after delivery in an attempt to ensure the health of both mother and child – presumably no more so than when that woman was a living goddess and queen of Egypt. A whole array of deities could be invoked to help women during birth, and images of Hathor, Bes and Heket the frog goddess associated with birth were all found on items from royal tombs at both Amarna and Thebes. It seems likely, therefore, that Nefertiti may well have cried out to these traditional powers for assistance during her frequent labours. Hathor was invoked to bring the cooling north wind, whilst amulets of the protective household god Bes were sometimes tied around the woman’s head and spells recited over them to ‘bring down the placenta’. Some women even chose to be tattooed with protective Bes figures on the top of each thigh, and women attending the birth may well have worn masks to play the role of the gods invoked.
Like all expectant mothers, Nefertiti would almost certainly have been confined within a room specially decorated with papyrus, lotus and convolvulus flowers, symbols of fertility and motherhood. When the time of delivery approached, gravity was allowed to do much of the work, as the woman squatted on birth bricks covered in magical figures to protect both mother and child from the dangers lurking in the darkness. And on a practical level, the bricks raised the woman up to allow her attendants and midwives to take hold of the emerging child, the moment graphically portrayed in the hieroglyph symbol for birth. And it even seems as if men appreciated the degree of pain involved – one claimed his illness was so painful that he ‘sat upon bricks like a woman in labour’.
Details of the life-threatening process itself were rarely given, but an early tale of royal birth describes how the sun god Ra sent down four goddesses to act as midwives to a woman about to give birth to three future pharaohs. As they arrived, they were met by her husband who was so distracted that he was wearing his loincloth upside down. ‘Oh my ladies,’ he cried, ‘look, the woman’s in pain and her labour is difficult,’ to which they replied, ‘Let us see her, for we understand childbirth.’ Locking themselves in her room, one goddess stood behind to support her and, as the other two provided encouragement, Isis waited as the first child slid into her arms. After washing him and cutting his umbilical cord, they placed him on a soft pillow and went on to deliver his two brothers.
After a successful delivery, a whole series of protective rituals were performed for both mother and child whilst the woman ‘cleansed herself’ for fourteen days, the traditional two-week period of purification and seclusion following every birth prior to resuming her place in society. If sufficiently wealthy the woman would be pampered and groomed, her attendants bringing her make-up, perfume and a mirror – a vital part of the process in Nefertiti’s case, where a pristine, goddess-like appearance was all-important in maintaining the façade of divinity.
It was a cycle of events Nefertiti would be all too familiar with, as Meritaten, Meketaten and Ankhesenpaaten were joined by Neferneferuaten Tasherit, ‘Junior’, around regnal year 8 or 9. Neferneferura, or ‘Perfect One of Ra’s Perfection’, and the youngest girl, Setepenra, ‘She Whom Ra Has Chosen’, followed over the next three years. And with all six daughters born by their father’s twelfth regnal year, Akhenaten’s official, all-female household was complete.
Diplomatic correspondence, however, also asks after his ‘wives and sons’, and clearly he had wives other than Nefertiti. These included foreign princesses from Mitanni and Babylonia and the enigmatic Kiya, ‘the other woman’. Kiya’s unique title, ‘Greatly Loved Wife of the King’, perhaps reflects the feelings she may have inspired in him in contrast to his chief wife, the powerful, intimidating and perhaps none too lovable Nefertiti.
Although nothing is known of her background, some believe Kiya was the Egyptian name given to the Mitannian princess Tadukhepa, sent to Egypt to marry Amenhotep III and then inherited by Akhenaten. In keeping with the way in which women were sometimes named after the animals they resembled, such as Miuwt, ‘Cat’, written with the determinative sign placed at the end of the word to clarify its meaning or the less flattering Debet ‘Hippopotamus’, the name Kiya seems to be derived from ‘Monkey’, hopefully more of a reference to a playful temperament than to physical appearance!
Wherever she came from, Kiya is known to have lived at Amarna, where she had estates and her own sunshade temple. She also had a taste for rather large round earrings, and although she seems to have adopted Nefertiti’s favourite coiffure, the Nubian wig, she is never shown with the royal uraeus cobra at her brow. Yet since she is shown side by side with Akhenaten Kiya must have been held in high esteem, possibly linked to the fact that she was the mother of one or perhaps two daughters and, it seems, at least one son, Tutankhaten, later Tutankhamen, described as ‘king’s son, from his body’. Whilst Kiya’s production of a male heir would have greatly endeared her to Akhenaten, Nefertiti’s feelings for a woman who had been able to do what she had not would presumably have been rather less enthusiastic.
Although Kiya seems to have been Nefertiti’s only real rival, she wasn’t Akhenaten’s only other woman. As well as his foreign wives, there were beautiful Egyptian courtiers such as ‘Royal Ornament’ Ipy, ‘true favourite’ of the king, not to mention the hundreds of women sent as tribute from abroad. It is therefore highly likely that Akhenaten would also have had children by such women, even if details, like so much else at Amarna, have not survived.
As the number of royal children continued to grow steadily, so too did the dimensions of the royal city built to accommodate them all. The huge settlement spread out quickly along some eight miles of open plain in only a few years. The Nile ran along the western edge of the city, bringing constant riverborne traffic carrying goods and communications from around the empire. As endless numbers of people and quantities of materials arrived and departed in all manner of vessels, the great golden barge Dazzling Aten inherited from Amenhotep III would presumably have moored here when transporting the royal couple between Thebes, Memphis and Amarna, attended by May, Royal Attendant on the August Barge. In the same way that Tuthmosis IV had travelled ‘in his golden ship with sails of bright red and green linen’, his grandson Akhenaten made a stately progress, with his wife, in their own golden vessel, ‘making Egypt gleam with its beauty’.
River traffic was, however, not the only means of transport, for Amarna also had its own road system. Amarna was the only Egyptian city to be built around a processional chariot way, a 130-foot-wide central route dubbed ‘Kingsway’ and described by Akhenaten as ‘a goodly road’. It ran from the Northern Palace down to the southern end of the Great Official Palace and beyond following the line of the river to the west, with all the great state buildings laid out around it and footbridges allowing the royal family to rise above the hustle and bustle beneath.
The route also allowed the couple to travel at speed around their city. Chariots were always the preferred modes of transport, and their vehicles were covered in gold and electrum. Not only did this show off their wealth and status but it reinforced their solar connections, with Akhenaten described as ‘mounting his great chariot of electrum like the Aten as he rises’. Although Nefertiti often travelled with Akhenaten she also drove her own golden vehicle, its highly polished bodywork gleaming in the sun and quite possibly one of six well-preserved examples buried with Tutankhamen.
Since fragments of chariot equipment have been found in every king’s tomb from Amenhotep II to Tutankhamen, the royal family must have had a high regard for horses. The young Amenhotep II had loved his horses and was skilled in training them and understanding their ways, whilst his son Tuthmosis IV had sped around between Memphis and Giza ‘in his chariot whose horses were swifter than the wind’. At Malkata, Amenhotep III had taken the family’s love of horse racing to new heights by building a chariot stadium with a long, straight course which enabled the king and his family to practise their driving skills. The pharaoh was regularly shown driving his own chariot, and a whip handle inscribed with the name of Tuthmosis, quite likely the heir apparent Prince Tuthmosis, suggests that he too may have been something of a horseman. Yuya and Ay were both in charge of the royal horses, and on a large seal stone found at Amarna Queen Tiy is described as ‘rich in horses’. It has been suggested that this seal was perhaps used to secure the bolts on her stables, and excavations at the estate of Master of the Royal Horses Ranefer had even revealed the cereal chaff fed to horses, together with traces of the houseflies known to thrive in horse manure.
As high-maintenance creatures, horses were really only an option for royalty and their favoured elite, and, generally imported from abroad, they often appear in diplomatic correspondence. Kings began their letters with polite enquiries after the health of their fellow monarchs, followed by that of their family and their horses and chariots, and foreign kings often sent Egypt’s pharaohs such exotic gifts as ‘fine horses which run swiftly’ and ‘chariots all of gold’. They even sent the necessary accessories, including ‘a set of bridles, blinkers of ivory and a set of reins whose base and straps are overlaid in silver’. This description sounds quite similar to the fancy leather harness of dyed calfskin adorned with large metal studs that was found in Amenhotep III’s tomb. Most horses shown in art of the time, often with feathery plumes attached to their headpieces, are a red-brown colour, although the diplomatic correspondence also reveals that white horses were especially prized, the king of Assyria sending two chariots and two white horses to the Amarna court.
It is clear that Nefertiti took advantage of such generous gifts, and as a skilled horsewoman was regularly shown driving her own chariot through the Amarna landscape, wielding her whip to make the creatures go faster (see Fig. 6). For more stately occasions, however, she was borne aloft in a carrying chair as royal women had been since the beginning of Egyptian history. At Karnak she is borne in an elaborate, sedan chair-like creation with lions carved on the sides, whilst at Amarna she relaxes in an open-topped version, ‘The Great Royal Wife Neferneferuaten Nefertiti on the great carrying chair of electrum’.
The royal couple used both carrying chairs and chariots to travel from their various palaces to the temples, where they would officiate on a day-to-day basis as well as in important rituals on state occasions. Prior to their arrival, temple staff would have assembled the masses of fresh offerings on hundreds of individual altars within the open solar courts of the Great Aten Temple, adorned with numerous statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. As they performed many of the rituals together the couple are shown side by side, often dressed in the same clothes, holding the same regalia, standing on top of the great ramp before the high altar and pouring out wine over incense-topped offerings. In a text describing the similar dawn rituals undertaken for the sun god at Heliopolis,
great offerings were made before the face of the sun at his rising, white oxen, milk, myrrh, incense and every kind of sweet-smelling flowers. Going in procession to the temple of the sun god, one enters the temple with the prayers of the chief lector priest praising the god, removing all harm from the king. The king climbs the steps to see the sun god in the House of the Benben, where the king is alone.
And after further secret rites, the worshippers ‘stretch out on their bellies before the god’, a position Akhenaten and Nefertiti both adopt before the Aten with their noses to the ground in the same way that their subjects lie down before them in turn.
Although such rituals were undertaken every morning as the sun rose and every evening as the sun set, the extent to which Akhenaten and Nefertiti were actually expected to attend in person isn’t known. And since they employed a high priest whose traditional function was to stand in for the monarch, it seems likely that this must also have happened at Amarna, particularly when the royal couple were not in residence.
Yet, just as at Karnak, Nefertiti would have led her own female clergy in worship. They were presumably hand-picked acolytes, including her nurse, Ty, the high priest’s wife, Tenra, and of course her own family, from her sister Mutnodjmet to a growing number of daughters, often shown playing their own small sistrum rattles as they follow their mother. In some cases the three youngest girls are shown with their nurses following, presumably to enable their mother to continue with the complex rites and rituals undisturbed by maternal duties.
Only temple personnel were allowed within the sacred precincts, and all had to bathe in the sacred waters of the Nile. Cleansing her skin with natron salt, Nefertiti is described as ‘pure of hands’ to indicate the high level of ritual cleanliness needed for handling the Aten’s offerings. She would also presumably have chewed natron pellets, which were used to purify the breath before reciting the hymns of praise. With her closely shaven head and robes of finest linen another requirement of ritual purity, she would have ‘put on the sacred garments in the robing room, purifying with incense and cold water, taking up the floral garlands from the House of the Benben and receiving the amulets’. The later description of priestesses as ‘beautiful in their finely adorned appearance, anointed with myrrh and perfumed with lotus, their heads crowned with flowers’ is an equally apt description of Nefertiti and her retinue.
As a key ritual ingredient, huge clouds of perfumed incense were used to purify both the worshipped and the worshippers, its swirling, fragrant smoke adding to the magical and mystical aura surrounding the proceedings, and its sweetness conveniently driving away evil spirits. At Amarna the pale yellow pistacia resin seems to have been most frequently used, imported and stored in the large pottery jars called amphorae and burnt as incense in the city’s temples as it had been at Karnak. Crushed frankincense and myrrh mixed with honey, wax or wine were compressed into small cakes and burnt whilst reciting the ‘spell for putting incense on the flames’, using finely made bronze tongs ending in human hands. Several pairs of these were found at Amarna, together with limestone offering tables containing four small depressions for incense and perfumes. Large bronze incense burners were found inside the Great Aten Temple sanctuary itself – a bowl from the site was still holding its original incense and charcoal when discovered. Nefertiti is shown holding up pairs of such incense-filled bowls in both hands, whilst Akhenaten throws pellets of incense into an arm-shaped incense burner.
Water, wine and milk were offered up in gold, bronze or blue-glazed situlae, bucket-like objects inscribed with the names of Nefertiti, Akhenaten and the Aten, which have also been found at the Great Aten Temple site. Fresh produce was another essential ingredient in daily offerings, and the tomb scenes of the Aten high priest Meryra show the temple store rooms filled to bursting ‘with every good thing, much corn and southern grain’. Even the gardens beyond were filled with lush date palms, pomegranate trees and vines; and flowers – lotus, lilies, corn-flowers, safflowers and poppies – were essential for making up the thousands of bouquets piled high on altars and offered up by the royal couple.
Described as ‘the one who satisfies the Aten with her sweet voice’, Nefertiti herself would have sung praises to the god, although the ancient texts reveal that the adoration was not all one-way, since ‘the Aten rises to give Nefertiti praise and then sets to repeat her love’. Hymns describe ‘the singers and musicians shouting for joy in the court of the benben and in all the temples of Akhetaten’, and the women’s song would have risen to a crescendo as the Aten’s rays reached them.
Temple performers also included groups of elderly blind men who sat in rows on the ground as they clapped their hands and sang, and scenes in Akhenaten’s Royal Tomb show a group of trumpeters tootling away as the sun rises. On certain occasions worship also included guest slots by Syrian musicians in their distinctive layered robes, playing lyres, lutes, drums and a harp so large that it had two men playing it from either side. Accompanied by male and female Egyptian performers in a blend of Egyptian and Syrian music, Nefertiti is shown enthroned as she presides over this recital for the Aten.
She herself seems to have been something of a musician, playing a pair of sistrum rattles using a two-handed technique. Since her instruments are generally shown on a much larger scale than those played by other women, it is tempting to see the two larger-than-average, well-worn sistrums found amongst Tutankhamen’s tomb equipment as perhaps having once belonged to Nefertiti herself.
Dance was another form of worship, performed by the temple’s musical troupe, that even the royals themselves are known to have engaged in. Later male pharaohs were encouraged to dance and sing for Hathor, and a queen of the 19th dynasty is herself described as a ‘dancer of the god’, her performance suggested by the lively hieroglyph symbol. It seems entirely possible, therefore, that Nefertiti too may have danced before the Aten.
We have no real idea of the kinds of movements she may have performed, but her temple duties have been described somewhat delicately as ‘maintaining the god in a state of perpetual arousal’. And despite the highly secretive nature of the rites able to achieve the impressive results seen on figures of some of the more aroused male deities, royal women are known to have held the priestly title ‘God’s Hand’. This is a graphic reference to the creation of the world when the primordial deity, all alone in the darkness, ‘took his phallus in his fist and ejaculated, giving birth to the twin gods Shu and Tefnut’.
Nefertiti is frequently represented as Tefnut, the daughter of the creator sun god who at Amarna was the Aten. This father-daughter relationship is also found in an ancient story describing how ‘the great god spent a day lying on his back in his pavilion, his heart very sore and he was alone. After a long while, [the goddess] came and stood before her father the All Lord. She uncovered her nakedness before him; thereupon the great god laughed’, her behaviour having revitalised him and given him the energy he needed. Similarly graphic behaviour was also witnessed by the Greek traveller Herodotus amongst female devotees of the cat goddess Bastet as they sailed to her cult centre. Making music and singing, ‘whenever they pass a town on the riverbank, they bring the barge close in shore, some of the women . . . start dancing, or stand up and hitch up their skirts’. A little-known scene from Karnak shows Nefertiti submitting her naked torso to warm caresses from the many-handed Aten disc, so it seems quite likely that she ignited the divine spark through a provocative performance involving the removal of at least some of her clothing.
Judging from numerous portrayals, she clearly used her appearance to great effect and regularly changed her image to suit the occasion, using a huge range of crowns, wigs and jewel-lery. Among her large retinue of female attendants was her sister, Mutnodjmet, who acted as her lady-in-waiting. Mutnodjmet’s own pair of dwarf attendants may well have helped her sister in her choice of costume, dwarves having been associated with the royal wardrobe since the Pyramid Age.
A piece of pottery found near the Royal Tomb, inscribed the ‘robing room [or ‘inner chamber’] of Neferneferura’, Nefertiti’s fifth daughter, suggests that each member of the royal family may have had his or her own kind of walk-in wardrobe, rather like the robing room with en suite facilities used at Malkata. ‘Bathrooms with mirrors’ appear to have been a standard feature of royal palaces for the previous five hundred years at least. Their mudbrick walls were sensibly lined with slabs of fine limestone, and water poured down on to the bather from gold and silver bowls would then drain away down stone drainage channels. Natron and oil were used as cleansing agents before the invention of soap, and both body and head would be regularly shaved by the royal barber using a range of lethal-looking razors. These were generally made of bronze, and a box from Tutankhamen’s tomb was labelled ‘copper-handled razors, knife-razors, ewers and linen’. A similar range of equipment was no doubt used to shave Nefertiti’s scalp and body.
The skin was dried off using incredibly modern-looking towels with looped threads for absorbency, after which the royal person would be anointed with a variety of moisturising oils including sesame or olive. In scenes dating back to the Pyramid Age, royalty are anointed by courtiers holding oil pots; some of them even massage the royal feet.
Various perfumes were added to the oils, and different fragrances were used on different occasions, with myrrh oil favoured for ritual events and lotus employed for its protective and restorative qualities. Although Nefertiti offered generously filled perfume vessels to the Aten’s rays, she would have worn such scented oils herself for both ritual and practical purposes. And as the ultimate sun worshipper, spending much of her time performing open-air rituals in full sun, she presumably went through huge quantities of moisturising oils to keep her skin in good condition.
Although Egyptian perfumes were exported, the Amarna royals were often sent foreign perfumes as diplomatic gifts. Queen Puduheba of Ugarit wrote to the queen of Egypt, quite possibly Nefertiti, addressing her as ‘my Mistress, I fall at your feet! For my mistress may all go well, and I sent to you a jar of fragrant suurwa balsam’.
Perfumed oils and unguents were made by those named as ‘oil boilers’ or ‘the superintendent of unguents’, some of whom worked on palace premises for the various members of the royal family. Nefertiti’s eldest daughter even had her own perfume production line headed by one Ramose, ‘unguent manufacturer in the house of Princess Meritaten’. Perfumes were stored in exquisite pots made of gold, semi-precious stones and brilliantly coloured glazed ware; glass containers, predominantly blue and yellow, were also popular during the Amarna period. Along with straightforward jars and tubes were novelty examples such as a wonderful blue and yellow glass fish wearing a startled expression, whose wide-open mouth was the means of pouring out the scented contents. A list of gifts that Akhenaten sent to Babylon includes a gold perfume container with a lapis lazuli stopper, coloured ivory pots decorated with ibex or fruit and ‘a stone servant figurine with a jar in his hands’, exactly like one found at Amarna inscribed with his name and that of Nefertiti.
Having been bathed, depilated, perfumed and moisturised by a retinue of attendants, Nefertiti would have been dressed in robes of the very finest quality. The textile fragments recovered from the re-examination of the Royal Tomb were of a high-quality, fine linen when compared to those worn by the general public elsewhere in the city.
Amongst huge numbers of Egyptian garments sent to the king of Babylon were mantles, shawls, cloaks and pieces of linen including ‘a double-sized piece of finest linen to make into a festive garment’, presumably so that the Babylonians could make up their own fashions using Egypt’s famous linen. Colour and decoration were also appreciated by the Amarna royals. There are descriptions of ‘linen garments for the front of the body with fancy borders’ and robes of contrasting shades of red. Attempts to recreate these ancient reds have involved a lengthy process blending a plant-based dye with sheep droppings and rancid olive oil in order to attain the desired shade.
Some of the garments buried with Tutankhamen are known to have belonged to his Amarna predecessors, including a garment found draped around the large Anubis jackal statue in his tomb which bore the name of Akhenaten and ‘regnal year 7’ written discreetly up the lower left side. Made of a single length of linen folded over and sewn up the side, it has fine bands of red and blue vertical stripes and a fringe along the bottom hem. And since Akhenaten and Nefertiti often dressed identically, it is more than likely that she too wore such robes. Another length of linen from the tomb was labelled ‘Ankhkheperura’, the name of Akhenaten’s co-regent and quite possibly Nefertiti herself.
Further tunics from the tomb feature embroidered and woven panels with falcon’s wings around the neckline, red and blue rosettes, tapestry-woven ankh and nefer hieroglyphs, and hunting scenes. Basing their assertion on the cut, the type of sewing and the nature of the embroidery on one of the tunics, textile experts believe it was made in Syria and came to Egypt possibly as a diplomatic gift. Female musicians living in Amarna’s palaces also wore what have been described as ‘flounced Syrian skirts’, indicating that ethnic minorities living in the city appear to have kept their own customs and costumes, which no doubt influenced Egyptian fashions of the day.
Heavily beaded and sequinned garments were also worn on state occasions, their glittering surfaces designed to catch the sunlight and dazzle onlookers. Those encrusted with gold and beading on both front and back were worn when the monarchs needed to stand, so it has been suggested that those decorated only on the front were meant for the long drawn-out ceremonies when they could be seated – no doubt a relief, given the weight of such sumptuous garments. A heavily decorated shawl from the tomb, decorated with forty-seven small gold discs, again featured the name ‘Ankhkheperura, beloved of the Aten’; this glittering, golden garment may therefore once have graced the shoulders of Nefertiti herself at some grand occasion.
Her robes are usually shown worn almost sari-like and knotted beneath the right breast, and sometimes the linen is so fine that only the addition of pleats and fringes show that Nefertiti is wearing any garment at all. In her great Karnak statuary, her plain gown fits so closely that she appears to be naked, whilst other statues show her in pleated robes which leave her breasts and the front of her body exposed. One minimalist garment covers little more than her back (Fig. 10).
During some of her ritual duties she also wore male attire, a male-style kilt with its high back leaving her torso completely naked as she worships the Aten. She is also shown sensibly stripped to the waist to perform the bloody duties of executing prisoners with her scimitar (see Fig. 4), her choice of kingly costume corresponding with an act performed only by a king. Although such kilts could be made of fine pleated linen, one made of coloured beads was found in the tomb of Tutankhamen. Further colour and shape were added with long sashes, worn either just below the breasts or closely around the waist, knotted at the front and the ends hanging down at the front and flaring out. Gorgeous sashes were worn by Akhenaten and Nefertiti as they sped along in their chariots, streaming out behind them in a rich display of reds, blues and greens, whilst long red versions known as ‘Amarna sashes’ were worn only by Akhenaten and Nefertiti, their daughter Ankhesenamen and Tutankhamen, whose tomb contained five of them.
Akhenaten and Nefertiti are shown presenting a pair of red gloves to Ay, and ‘a pair of gloves trimmed with red wool’ was sent to them from Mitanni. On a more practical level, skilfully made riding gauntlets as found in several royal tombs would have been worn to protect the royal hands when holding the reigns of their chariots. Equally, the royal feet would have needed finely crafted footwear, with flip-flop type sandals the commonest and most practical option in the heat. Made of palm leaf, grass, papyrus or leather, those worn by royalty usually had extra decoration in the form of gold leaf, embroidery and bead work, and their soles were decorated with figures of bound enemies, to be crushed at every step.
By the Amarna Period, shoes described as ‘enveloping sandals’ had just reached Egypt from Syria; highly ornate examples including ‘leather shoes studded with gold decoration and lapis lazuli buttons’ were sent to the Egyptian court. Such a pair were buried with Tutankhamen along with more than forty others, some of which must surely have been inherited from his predecessors. One pair of leather sandals are particularly fine, and, with thongs of delicate filigree gold, the straps are adorned with small gold daisies, large lotus flowers with lapis lazuli, carnelian and feldspar petals, and tiny ducks’ heads which project out and peer around. Etiquette required that sandals be removed in the presence of superiors, and Nefertiti, who of course had no earthly superiors, is usually shown wearing hers, although the royal sandal bearer would be on hand to carry them should she decide to slip them off.
And if the evenings grew chilly she could slip on a pair of linen socks, a gap between the big toe and the rest allowing them to be worn beneath her sandals. Clearly comfort was on the agenda, and an intriguing pair of footwear made of ‘purple wood decorated with gold, buttons and lapis lazuli’ that were described in diplomatic correspondence sound very much like an ornate pair of carpet slippers.
A markedly relaxed atmosphere can be found in the informal scenes of palace life at Amarna in which groups of women are shown at leisure. Sitting on large floor cushions, they play music, eat, chat and do each other’s hair in an all-female environment not unlike that of a modern hair salon. Hairstyles were of tremendous importance to an individual’s complete ‘look’, and were achieved with a wide range of hairdressing equipment. Decorative hairpins found at Amarna feature tiny pomegranates on the top, whilst fine-toothed combs of bone and ivory stained a variety of colours have handles decorated with kneeling ibex or grazing horses, and there is even reference to an inlaid gold comb sent from Mitanni.
Listed amongst gifts sent to Babylonia are ‘twenty-nine implements of silver with boxwood and ebony handles with which to curl the hair’, upmarket versions of the small bronze scissor-like implements used to create a variety of small curls on hair and wig styles. Again decorated with animal motifs such as galloping horses or pouncing leopards, such curling tongs often include a sharpened razor-like section which was used to trim the hair.
Apart from guaranteeing her the ritual purity needed to officiate in the temples, Nefertiti’s shaven head allowed her to wear close-fitting crowns and a range of beautifully fashioned wigs of human hair. Judging from the wide range of styles she is shown wearing, her clearly impressive wig collection would have been stored in specially constructed wig boxes with internal mushroom-shaped mounts.
In the long style known as the ‘tripartite’, long straight hair hung down in two sections over the shoulders, whilst a third section hung down at the back. Usually shown as plain black, or in some cases a startling shade of blue to signify her divine nature, Nefertiti’s long wig was also sometimes set in rows of tiny, tile-like curls (see Fig. 5), perhaps created with the small bronze curling tongs described above. She sometimes wore the long style when making offerings to the Aten, but is also occasionally shown in a short, rounded-style wig, again set in small curls like the fragments of the wig found in Tutankhamen’s tomb.
Yet it is the Nubian wig which became her trademark coiffure, and, although worn by other royal women of the Amarna Period, it was a style that Nefertiti made her own. It was named after the hairstyle of Nubian mercenaries and associated with the military, and Amenhotep II was the first king to wear this pointed shape which was cut high at the back of the neck to fall in points towards the front. Amenhotep III later added more intricate styling to his favourite short round style, adding three overlapping layers of hair to frame his face. This adaptation was enthusiastically adopted by Nefertiti, who added four, five or even six layers of hair to the geometric shape. Wearing it in her earliest-known portrait as a new queen at Thebes (see Fig. 7), she only seems to have worn it at Karnak when Akhenaten wasn’t there – although she certainly wore it in his presence at Amarna, where it was her most frequently portrayed hairstyle. Otherwise Nefertiti is shown with her head covered by various crowns and head covers, including the squashy-looking bag-like ‘khat’ headscarf usually worn by royal men. The numerous linen headscarves from Tutankhamen’s burial were made of plain linen apart from a single example dyed a rich blue colour.
Although Nefertiti is also shown with that most manly of attributes, the false beard, its use by this iconic ‘beautiful woman’ is rarely mentioned, whereas Hatshepsut is almost mocked as some sort of freak-show ‘bearded lady’ when she is portrayed with this piece of kingly regalia. The fact that Nefertiti often chose to wear crowns and headgear more usually worn by male pharaohs has of course caused much confusion, leading, in the absence of convenient inscriptions, to the assumption that the female-looking figure wearing a pharaoh’s crown must be a mysterious young prince. Instead, it is simply Nefertiti wearing kingly regalia, from the khat headscarf and unwieldy atef crown with all manner of additional ritual devices and emblems hanging from it, to the blue khepresh crown and the very neat, helmet-like cap crown. She is also shown with the four-feather head-dress of the creator god Shu, as well as the more common headgear associated with Shu’s sister-wife, the goddess Tefnut, whom she often represented.
Although Tefnut wears a tall, flat-topped crown in her guise as a lion-like sphinx, similar forms of headgear were worn by Minoan women as early as 1500 BC. Egypt was known to have trading links with the Aegean world at this time, and Queen Tiy appeared in such a crown, as did Nefertiti’s sister Mutnodjmet when she herself eventually became queen. But it was Nefertiti who very much made this tall crown her own, and, accentuating as it does her long, graceful neck, it has become her most recognised form of headwear courtesy of the famous bust now in Berlin. This sculpture clearly shows the way it was worn, over a tight-fitting gold brow band and with a colourful striped ribbon tied around the crown’s centre.
First adopted by Nefertiti just before she moved from Thebes, this imposing crown was clearly a comfortable piece of headgear because she wore it to all manner of events, from making offerings to the Aten and handing out honours to courtiers to executing prisoners and mourning the dead, and even when relaxing at home. Although usually represented with a smooth surface perhaps suggesting dyed stretched leather, the crown is also shown in the Royal Tomb with an elaborate bead-like surface. With its height extended even further on occasion by a pair of ram’s horns, or the cow horns of Hathor, the addition of a central polished gold disc to represent the sun demonstrated Nefertiti’s goddess-like relationship with her divine father the sun god, and must have looked amazing when it caught and reflected the bright Egyptian sunlight. And as if all that wasn’t enough embellishment, her headgear also featured two tall ostrich feathers. Described as ‘adorned in the double plumes’, her feather crown makes her taller than the king, although its height must have proved problematic when manoeuvring through standard-height doorways.
Her crowns and wigs were kept in place with a tight-fitting gold brow band as a sign of her regal status, and the rearing cobra fixed over her forehead coiled up in wait to spit its fiery venom into the eyes of her enemies. Yet Nefertiti sometimes sought extra protection by increasing the number of cobras over her brow to two and even adding a further pair at each side of her face in the form of two snakes rearing up from the ends of ribbons hanging down from her gold diadem and giving her baby daughters something else to play with.
Another key element in the royal regalia were sceptres, with the drooping lily sceptre the first piece of royal equipment that Nefertiti carried in her left hand when still a young queen (Fig. 7). Yet within a couple of years her image on the colossal statuary at Karnak was firmly grasping the blue and gold crook and flail with both hands – the crook in the left and the flail in the right was the traditional way. She also holds the two sceptres like this in the small fragment of a funerary figurine found at Amarna, although sceptres could officially be held in the right hand only. Kings such as Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III are shown holding only the crook in their right hand (Fig. 9), whereas Akhenaten holds both crook and flail together in that hand. A wooden figurine of an unnamed, somewhat feminine-looking Amarna pharaoh likewise has the right arm only bent up to hold a sceptre.
For the finishing touches, the Amarna royals’ jewellery meant lots and lots of gold. Clearly associated with the sun, gold and its silver-mixed variant electrum were loved for their ability to reflect and mimic the solar glow. Amenhotep III had set the standard, and, wearing increasing amounts of gold as his reign progressed, his eventual merger with the Aten in his thirtieth regnal year meant that he spent the rest of his life tottering around under all manner of gold adornments attached to just about every bit of his body. With the ‘gold of honour’ dished out to deserving courtiers, making them ‘people of gold’, Akhenaten and Nefertiti rewarded their high priest by ordering their attendants to ‘put gold at his neck and on his body and on his legs’.
Nefertiti herself is regularly shown wearing numerous Aten cartouches suspended from necklaces and bracelets so fine that the cartouches appear to be attached directly to her body. Several pendant cartouches naming Nefertiti herself have also been found at Amarna, and an idea of the kind of jewellery that the city’s workshops produced is found in diplomatic correspondence. Amongst the hundreds of costly items sent to Babylon were ‘gold necklace plaques’, in response to which the king of Babylon sent Akhenaten ten great lumps of lapis lazuli and Nefertiti ‘20 crickets of lapis lazuli’, which she possibly had made up into a necklace.
A similarly elaborate piece of jewellery connected with Nefertiti is an opulent pectoral ornament from Tutankhamen’s burial, originally inscribed with Nefertiti’s second name, Neferneferuaten. This gorgeous object features the great sky goddess Nut, raising her arms to extend her protective wings of blue glass and carnelian against a gold background. Although such pieces were usually worn suspended over the chest, small attachments at the sides of this Nut pendant have suggested that it may well have been worn as a belt or girdle, perhaps around the queen’s narrow waist.
One of her favourite forms of adornment was the broad collar. Made up of multiple rows of amulets and beadwork, the famous example she wears on the Berlin bust features colourful layers of petals and small fruit, and similar examples were found in both the Royal Tomb at Amarna and tomb KV.55 in the Valley of the Kings. In a small fragmentary scene Nefertiti is even shown tying one of these collars around Akhenaten’s neck with her nimble fingers.
With both members of the royal couple clearly fond of armlets, bangles and bracelets, Nefertiti is shown with dozens of jangling golden bracelets on her wrists, elbows and upper arms; bangles naming Akhenaten and Neferneferuaten were also found in Tutankhamen’s tomb. The diplomatic correspondence refers to ‘very wide gold hand bracelets strung with stones’, and matching pairs of gold ‘foot bracelets’. Large gold, silver and bronze signet-type rings were made both for domestic consumption and for export as far afield as Cyprus, and amongst several gold examples from the Royal Tomb was a large gold knuckleduster naming Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, her enthroned figure also engraved on a chunky ring of electrum.
Earrings had become incredibly fashionable by the Amarna Period. Some of the royal women had not one but two holes pierced through each lobe, a feature found on the mummy of Tiy’s mother Tuya, and in sculpted portraits of Nefertiti and one of her daughters. Nefertiti herself tended to wear large plain gold disc earrings, and a gold example decorated with tiny gold granules, from the Amarna Royal Tomb, is thought to be a Mitannian import. Some truly amazing earrings were also found in Tutankhamen’s tomb, their pendant beads closely resembling those worn by his half-sisters, the royal princesses. Mushroom-shaped ear plugs were also popular, and were generally made of brightly coloured glass or glazed ware. The earliest examples are a pair of gold marguerites, again found in the Royal Tomb, and their relatively small size suggests they were made for one of Nefertiti’s young daughters.
A clue to how important such adornments were to the Amarna royals can be found in a scene from the Royal Tomb which showed some of the original burial equipment. Although badly damaged, enough remains to make out earrings, necklaces, large storage jars likely to contain perfume, and what looks like an eye paint container and applicator stick, together with the all-important mirror.
Cosmetics were part of the daily life of men and women throughout society, and both Akhenaten and Nefertiti used generous quantities of make-up, particularly black eye paint. Nefertiti herself used black eye paint around the rims of her eyes and, by extending the line only slightly at the outer corners, achieved a very modern look as opposed to the more exaggerated eye line favoured by her contemporaries. And with her eyebrows neatly plucked into shape using small bronze tweezers, eye paint was again used on the brows to give more emphasis to her expression, which she no doubt used to great effect.
Kohl was made from the dark lead ore galena, and green copper carbonate, known as malachite, was also available. Although no longer the height of fashion as it had been in the Pyramid Age, green eye paint was still required for ritual purposes, its vivid green hue linked to renewal and new life. Jar sealings from Amarna refer to ‘green malachite of the house of the Aten’, and it may have been worn by Nefertiti when undertaking her religious duties. Eye paint was stored in small pots or tubes bearing royal names, and clues that Nefertiti was not Akhenaten’s only wife first came from humble cosmetics pots and eye paint tubes which named Kiya as ‘greatly loved wife of the king’.
The Berlin bust also demonstrates Nefertiti’s deft use of lip colour, specifically her trademark siren red shade possibly made from ground-up red ochre. Although she may well have used the services of a professional make-up artist, known in ancient times as ‘Painter of the Mouth’, Nefertiti is likely to have spent much of her time checking her own appearance and may well have applied her own cosmetics using a hand mirror.
Hundreds of bronze mirrors were sent as diplomatic gifts abroad, but there were also more upmarket models: one was described as ‘a silver mirror set with stones’, and others were made of silver and gold, just like the stunning examples with discs of highly polished silver and gold known to have survived from the burials of royal women. The mirrors placed in Tutankhamen’s tomb were stored in their own ankh-shaped cases to protect them from scratches, and mirrors were also stored in specially made compartments of cosmetics chests, amongst the most common type of furniture used inside ancient Egyptian homes and palaces.
Although by modern standards these were sparsely furnished, the lavish use of brightly coloured inlays of stone, faience and glass in the wealthier homes would more than make up for somewhat minimalist interiors, with gilding de rigueur for palatial decoration. A rare glimpse behind palace doors is found in a description of a ‘prince’s house’ from around 1900 BC, containing ‘luxuries, a bathroom and mirrors, riches from the royal treasury and clothes of royal linen, myrrh and the favourite perfumes of the king and his favoured courtiers in every room’. Amarna’s palace interiors are also portrayed in tomb scenes at the site, their tall columned rooms provided with high grilled windows and roof-top vents for ancient air-conditioning.
What furniture there was would have been superbly crafted, comparable and perhaps even identical to that buried with Tutankhamen. His famous gold throne was recently reidentified as most likely having belonged to his predecessors Akhenaten and Nefertiti; she is certainly shown sitting on a similar-looking seat decorated with the same heraldic plant designs and lions’ paw feet. Sometimes fitted with seat covers – described by one disapproving scholar as ‘irritating drapery’ – such chairs were usually well cushioned for royal posteriors, whilst Nefertiti and her daughters are also shown relaxing on large red patterned floor cushions. There were also cross-legged stools made in ebony and ivory to replicate black-and-white animal hide, and footstools decorated with repeated images of bound captives, recalling the way Nefertiti’s throne dais at Karnak was adorned with a long line of kneeling captives.
In a country where most people slept on mats on the floor, and in places still do, beds were clearly a status item for wealthy homes. The six beds buried with Tutankhamen were mostly of gilded ebony, and, like that from the tomb of Yuya and Tuya, some were decorated with protective figures of the household god Bes to keep the sleeping occupant safe from demons in the night. Although surviving examples have the same lions’ paw feet, Akhenaten describes an unusual variation, ‘a bed overlaid with gold with female figures for its feet’, which he sent to one of his fellow monarchs overseas. He also sent along matching gilded headrests. Royal examples were also made of tinted ivory and turquoise glass with smart gold trim, and these unlikely-looking objects, once well padded with linen, supported the neck in place of a pillow and are apparently still used in the Far East.
Clearly comfort was a top priority. Surviving royal beds were sprung with webbed mattresses to ensure a good night’s sleep, and the beds in Amarna’s royal palaces were shown as particularly soft and well padded. Cocooned in the finest linen sheets covered with bedspreads described as ‘large cloaks for the royal bed’, Nefertiti would have passed her nights in sumptuous comfort.
Small bedside table-stands held the queen’s cosmetics pots and jewellery, with larger jewel caskets, wig boxes and cosmetics chests stored on built-in wooden shelving or on the floor. Nefertiti’s rooms would also have featured decorative vessels of alabaster, glass and brightly glazed pottery, many of them in a combination of white with cobalt blue which one leading scholar has suggested was her favourite colour scheme.
Generously filled vases of flowers would have filled the rooms with their scent, and cinnamon oil, a favourite Egyptian fragrance was recommended for sprinkling around the bedroom. And as darkness fell, servants would have lit the linen wicks of exquisitely fine alabaster oil lamps, and placed candles in ankh-shaped candlesticks on tall lamp stands in order to illuminate the shadows. If the heat became too oppressive and the royal fan-bearers were temporarily off duty, a personal hand-held fan would be used. Some long-handled ceremonial examples were placed in Tutankhamen’s tomb, one of them still inscribed with Akhenaten’s name, but in the same place a much smaller, hand-held fan of ivory and ostrich feathers was found in a wooden box labelled ‘the procession of the bedchamber’. It was almost certainly used by a member of the royal family to keep cool within their private quarters.
When trying to work out where the royals actually lived at Amarna, it seems that Nefertiti, like Akhenaten, divided her time between the four main palaces – the Great Palace, the King’s House, the North Palace and the Riverside Palace – all built along the Kingsway royal road to allow easy access. At the city’s heart lay the Great Palace, a massive part-stone structure covering over fifteen thousand square metres on the west side of Kingsway and extending down to the river. With its combination of royal and administrative buildings this seems to have been the royals’ official residence, set around a great open-air court lined with statues of the king and queen and resembling a parade ground.
Although in public the royal family were attended by their fan-bearers and even the royal parasol-bearer, and are generally shown enthroned beneath canopied awnings of the sort found in Tutankhamen’s tomb, it appears that visiting ambassadors were sometimes kept waiting in the blazing sun within such courtyards. Any benefits derived from the Aten’s solar powers appear to have been lost on them, and an Assyrian delegation grew so fed up that they complained to their king who then wrote to Akhenaten to object: ‘Why should my messengers always be kept outside in the sun where they will die? If staying in the sun is so profitable for the king, then let his messenger stand out in the sun and die.’
Such ambassadors must also have been struck, indeed been alarmed, by the great expanses of floor painted with repeated images of their bound countrymen, enemies whom the royal couple would then symbolically trample as they finally arrived to grant audiences within their imposing throne room. At the southern end was a great hall with over five hundred brick columns, its palm leaf capitals inlaid with red-and blue-glazed chevrons set between ribs of gilded stone. Built for Akhenaten’s successor, Smenkhkara, its walls and floors embellished with sumptuous glazed tiles depicting daisy-like flowers, fish and wild-fowl, it may well reveal something of Nefertiti’s tastes once she became sole ruler. The more private suites of rooms set around columned halls and open courts were decorated with gentle scenes of the river bank, whose floral motifs were echoed in the palace’s extensive walled gardens filled with mud-lined tree pits and raised flowerbeds built around a stone-lined pool.
Connected to the Great Palace via a thirty-foot-wide footbridge crossing Kingsway was the King’s House, where the couple could rest in more relaxed surroundings between formal engagements. With a courtyard for chariot parking at the side, a separate wing of servants’ quarters and extensive store rooms for the refreshments handed out at official events, this relatively small palace seems to have been built on two levels. The royal couple would presumably meet their key officials here, a large Window of Appearances framed by images of foreign captives allowing them to appear Buckingham Palace-style before their subjects, making proclamations and rewarding officials with gifts from the adjoining store rooms. The rubbish dumps near by reveal something of the types of gifts handed out, from brightly coloured glazed rings naming members of the royal family to small bottles of coloured glass and imported Aegean pottery.
Beyond lay private suites, including bedrooms for the occasional night’s stay, dressing room and en suite bathrooms complete with limestone shower trays and matching toilet seats set over sand-filled containers. A seat from Amarna currently hangs in the Cairo Museum and reveals the high standard of living available to the city’s richest inhabitants.
Brightly painted walls featured heraldic lotus and papyrus plant borders and intimate scenes of family life, with Nefertiti lounging on a large red cushion opposite Akhenaten while two of their baby daughters play beside her and the three eldest girls stand close by with their arms around each other. It also seems that a room in the King’s House functioned as the princesses’ day nursery: traces of yellow, red, blue and green paints were found daubed across the lower sections of the walls. Small paint-brushes were also found nearby, and rectangular ivory plant palettes belonging to both Meritaten and Meketaten found elsewhere still contained their original oval blocks of coloured paints.
Right next door stood the Small Aten Temple, a scaled-down version of the Great Temple which, being about half a mile long from front to back, would have involved something of a hard slog if used on a daily basis. So it seems likely that this small, user-friendly version acted as the couple’s ‘chapel royal’, its ritual purpose emphasised by its alignment to the great valley in which the Royal Tomb was built and where at certain times of the year the sun was seen to rise.
A number of other, smaller temples were dotted about the city; they housed statues of the royal family together with a number of desert altars and shrines known as ‘maru’ or ‘viewing temples’ which were dedicated to the royal women. Based on one built at Malkata, they included a large stone-built temple at Kom el-Nana in the south of the city believed to have been dedicated to Nefertiti, with another built for Queen Tiy being completed around regnal year 9, c.1343 BC. Scenes of its consecration show Akhenaten leading his mother Tiy by the hand, captioned ‘Taking the great royal wife and queen mother Tiy to let her see her sun shade’. The temple’s open-air courtyards were thoughtfully adorned with statues of herself and her late husband, Amenhotep III.
A third such temple at Maru-Aten in the south was originally built for Akhenaten’s ‘greatly loved wife’ Kiya, then later rededicated to Princess Meritaten. Painted with the standard naturalistic scenes, these temples were surrounded by lush water gardens and tree-lined avenues, and were in some ways the ancient equivalent of a New Age health spa. The discovery of large numbers of food and drink containers also suggests that they were summerhouse-type structures where meals could be enjoyed in beautiful surroundings – places very much designed for ‘getting away from it all’.
The North Palace, again something of a country retreat, was set behind large gateways and windows bordered by shutters. It had formal reception halls, quite possibly another Window of Appearances, large royal statuary and a throne room, and the bedroom and bathroom facilities were connected to a sophisticated drainage system. The usual palatial interiors were decorated with richly gilded walls and exquisite murals, the so-called Green Room especially attractive with its black-and-white king-fishers darting in and out of the river beside plump doves alighting on papyrus stalks. These particular scenes incorporated recessed nesting boxes in which the actual birds are thought to have lived side by side with their painted counterparts in a kind of living tableau. The zoological gardens beyond were filled with wild and domesticated species including cattle, gazelle and ibex which fed from large carved limestone feeding troughs.
Providing a living backdrop for some of the royal couple’s ritual activities around an open, solar court and central altar – complete, perhaps, with a ready supply of sacrificial animals – it was also a place where the family could relax within their own self-made version of creation. The young princesses are shown holding their pet gazelles, and the entire palace was given to the eldest daughter and heiress, Meritaten, when she came of age.
Yet it is the Northern Riverside Palace complex, set far away from the bustle of city life, which is thought by the current excavators to have been Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s main residence. Their only neighbours here, where they lived and slept in splendid isolation, were the royal inhabitants of the large, well-appointed villas over a footbridge on the other side of the royal road. Queen Tiy is known to have had a house at Amarna and her own staff, and her name was found on one of the villas’ door jambs and in one of the alabaster quarries in the eastern hills, which may have supplied the stone used for her buildings.
Following an ambitious ground plan comparable to that used at Malkata, the Riverside Palace was surrounded by double-thickness security walls and a huge fortified gateway; wellmanned barracks housed the royal bodyguard. This complex was accurately described as having the most remote, most secure and most beautiful setting for a royal palace, and the overhanging cliffs just to the north provided a sharp contrast with the vast expanse of well-manicured palace gardens sloping down to the Nile.
When ‘in residence’ Akhenaten and Nefertiti travelled down Kingsway by chariot, flanked by their usual large armed escort in an impressive display of royal power which has vividly been compared to the presidential limousine of today with its motorcycle outriders. Sweeping down to the city centre temples to perform their regular ritual duties, the royal couple would then travel on to the Great Palace to deal with matters of state concerning Egypt and its empire. Yet when trying to find out what Nefertiti may have done in her leisure time, it is possible to suggest at least a few things which didn’t involve making offerings, appearances or babies.
Although music played a key role in temple worship, it was also enjoyed for its own sake; Egyptian and Syrian women performed within the palace for one another’s amusement. Some of them played large harps, lyres and lutes, whilst others jumped up to dance in the relaxed environment. Since musical instruments hung on the walls in adjoining chambers, it appears that there were rooms within the palaces set aside for such informal musical performances. Crowds of women usually described as ‘street musicians’ are also shown in various parts of the city playing tambourines and throwing up their arms as they make merry, giving a real feeling of joy to their impromptu performances and suggesting that Amarna was quite a lively place. Nefertiti is known to have played sistrums herself, and a fragmentary scene shows an unnamed royal woman, perhaps one of the princesses, playing the lute in a riverside setting. Music was played by the palace band at mealtimes, and since it was so closely associated with love women are shown playing musical instruments when sitting beside their husbands in the confines of their bedrooms. A number of sketches show women vainly trying to hold on to their instruments during love-making, the erotic power of their music apparently making it impossible for the poor men to hold out any longer!
Men and women, including kings and queens, are also shown enjoying rather more sedate board games including the great favourite, senet, a game for two in which players would move their pieces (‘dancers’) after throwing a knucklebone, dice or marked stick. Senet’s popularity amongst the Amarna royals is reflected in the four senet boards buried with Tutankhamen, the largest a de luxe model in ebony, ivory and gold mounted on lions’ paw feet with a secret pull-out drawer for the gaming pieces. The three smaller boards are more like travel-size versions. A later queen plays senet on the walls of her tomb in the Valley of the Queens, and the pharaoh Ramses III plays the game with one of his minor wives while embracing another, his exasperated opponent appearing to wave her hand to make him concentrate on the game.
As a similarly sedate form of relaxation, reading seems to have been a popular pastime for both royalty and a small educated minority, with private citizens known to have owned collections of popular stories, poems and self-help texts. Bookplates found at Malkata suggest that the palace had its own library, and it seems likely that Akhenaten and Nefertiti would have incorporated such a feature into their own palaces at Amarna. Certainly some of the cuneiform tablets once believed to be diplomatic letters are actually stories sent to Egypt from abroad, revealing a taste for foreign literature. Two are part of an epic tale about King Sargon of Akkad, and another recounts the adventures of a Mesopotamian superhero in the myth of Adapa and the South Wind: red dots have been added throughout the text, perhaps helping to give emphasis to the right words when reading the story aloud to an audience. Even part of a phrase book was recovered from one house in the city, giving the cuneiform and Egyptian words for ‘house’, ‘chair’, ‘bed’ and so forth, and highlighting the cosmopolitan nature of city living.
Taking an interest in their own ancestry, Egyptian royalty are known to have collected antiques and passed items down through the generations. An alabaster jar naming Hatshepsut, with the name of Amen removed, was found in the store rooms of the King’s House, and the lapis lazuli bases of a couple of Tuthmosis I’s sceptres were discovered in the city’s government offices. Small seal stones naming such kings were found around the city. Ancient heirlooms were also part of the burial equipment placed in the Royal Tomb, for example a steatite and gold scarab seal ring and a diorite bowl both naming Akhenaten’s great-great-grandfather Tuthmosis III and describing him as ‘beloved of Ra and Hathor’. There was even a bowl naming Khafra, builder of the second great pyramid at Giza and the model for the face of the Sphinx. Since it was already more than 1200 years old, its presence there was rather like a piece of Anglo-Saxon or Viking art appearing in someone’s antiquities collection today.
Akhenaten’s mother and elder brother were known to have had pet cats, and pairs of seated cats flank the goddess Hathor on an alabaster bowl again found in Amarna’s Royal Tomb, whilst amulets of cats and kittens were found throughout the city. Two of Nefertiti’s daughters kept tiny gazelles as pets, and as another popular addition to the home a small monkey is shown beneath the throne of Queen Tiy. A large number of monkey figurines found at Amarna show them caring for their young, eating and drinking, playing the harp and even riding in chariots, and it has been suggested that these images may have been made to satirise Akhenaten and Nefertiti, who made such show of travelling around the city in this way. Dogs were kept both as pets and for more serious purposes: the police chief Mahu’s dog helped him track down criminals, and the animals were also used on hunting expeditions.
Hunting was very much a sport of pharaohs, and Nefertiti is shown with all the accoutrements necessary to undertake such a pastime, her impressive personal arsenal including scimitars and the bows and arrows carried in the weapons case attached to her chariot. Judging from the drive-by shooting technique employed by an unnamed female pharaoh sketched on a piece of limestone, Nefertiti may have been able to fire arrows directly from her chariot. It is fascinating that the most impressive bow amongst the fifty or so found in Tutankhamen’s tomb was a lavishly gilded weapon described as ‘a work of almost inconceivable fineness’ which originally bore the name ‘Ankhkheperura’. The tomb also contained an impressive collection of daggers, swords, clubs and the throwsticks used to catch wildfowl by the river. Part of a model throwstick found at Amarna was inscribed ‘Neferneferuaten Nefertiti’.
These activities were obviously a means of relaxation as well as sport: the hunting lodge built by Amenhotep II close to the Great Sphinx at Giza was enjoyed by several generations of royals, whose empty wine jars suggest a convivial end to a hard day in the hunting field. A means of demonstrating royal prowess away from the battlefield, hunting also produced game and wild animals for consumption: the royals are shown hunting ibex, oryx, ostriches, ducks, geese and ostriches, and Amarna’s desert fringes teemed with gazelles and wild hare.
And it was during the Amarna Period that food is shown being eaten, rather than simply piled high on tables, tantalisingly close but never actually consumed. Nefertiti, more than any other royal female, is depicted enjoying her food, putting it away with relish (see Figs. 11 & 12). Food consumed by the royal family ranged from the bowls of food and drink placed on small tables in the palace bedrooms, presumably as breakfast or for late-night snacking, to more formal meals taken in the columned dining rooms of their palace.
Nefertiti had her mother-in-law, Tiy, as a dinner guest on occasion (Fig. 12). Perhaps acting as royal food tasters, some of the high officials were honoured with food from the royal table; the newly appointed high priest Meryra was told that ‘you shall eat the food of the king, your lord, in the house of the Aten’. Tiy’s steward, Huya, also asked if he ‘may partake of things which issue from the royal presence, may I eat loaves and pastries, jugs of beer, roast meat, hot food and cool water, wine and milk’.
To the strains of the palace musicians, the family would have been waited on hand and foot by male servants who came and went silently through sets of side doors, carrying in food prepared in kitchens whose window grilles, still coated in soot when discovered, reveal something of their unpleasant, smoke-filled interiors. Men are also shown setting tables, putting out the food and drink, serving the meals and sweeping up afterwards, sprinkling water as an effective way of keeping down the dust as is still done in modern Egypt.
The ideal mealtime experience is described as being enjoyed within a beautiful villa
where you fill your mouth with wine and beer, and with bread, meat and cakes. As the oxen are slaughtered and the wine is opened, beautiful singing surrounds you. Your servant anoints you with perfume, your farm manager brings you flower garlands, your chief hunter brings you ducks and your fisherman brings you fish. Then your ship comes in, laden with all kinds of good things from Syria.
Yet things are not always quite so relaxed, at least for Nefertiti. In one image of her eating with Akhenaten and three of their young daughters, he gets on with his dinner whilst she performs the typical maternal juggling act, balancing one of the girls on her lap as she tackles her food, in this case spare ribs ‘of formidable proportions’ (Fig. 11).
Meat was regularly enjoyed by the wealthy, and the eight guests at Tutankhamen’s funeral enjoyed a sumptuous banquet of nine ducks, four geese and choice cuts of beef and lamb. The beef often came from oxen fattened in their stalls through force-feeding, and certain priests were allowed to ‘finish off’ meat offerings each day once the gods had been sated. In fact they had such a high meat intake that it damaged their health: recent examination of one priest’s mummy revealed that furred-up arteries were something of an occupational hazard.
Although hens, described as miraculous birds which ‘give birth every day’, were newly imported from Syria, chicken hadn’t really caught on and ducks and geese were the birds of choice. They were caught down by the Nile by beaters using nets. Akhenaten is shown wringing a duck’s neck as an offering to the Aten; elsewhere he joins Nefertiti and their daughters as they tuck into whole crispy duck, which they eat with their fingers.
Yet it seems that the royals did have access to at least some form of cutlery: a set of gold knives decorated with small pomegranates on their handles was sent by Akhenaten as a gift to the king of Babylon.
Meat could also be processed into potted meat, and jar labels from Amarna refer to ‘good potted meat of Nubian cattle made in the processing house of pharaoh’. Some batches were made for special occasions, such as ‘potted meat for the Festival of Everlastingness’, and Nefertiti in particular seems to have quite a taste for it, since a number of labels also refer to ‘potted meat of the king’s wife which the butcher made’.
Often salted, or dried kipper-style, fish made an important contribution to the royal diet. Fishermen plied the Nile in canoe-like boats and landed their catch with dragnets, or caught them on the ends of rods fitted with the small bronze fish hooks found in the city.
Over the river on the West Bank were the extensive fields supplying Amarna’s grain. Granaries were situated right across the city, the one attached to the king’s house covering an area of around 20,000 square feet. Bread, the staple diet of most ancient Egyptians, was made of stone-ground emmer wheat and barley. A small amount of sand was sometimes added to ease the grinding process, although it did nothing for the teeth. The flour was blended with water and sometimes enriched with eggs, butter or milk, and variety was created by the addition of nuts, spices and seeds. Modern reconstructions of the dense loaves mass-produced in pots for manual workers have shown them to be laden with energy-giving calories, whilst the more refined bread made for the elite was referred to as ‘white’ bread. Amarna’s palaces and temples had their own bakeries to give a constant supply of fresh bread. One hundred domed baking chambers were needed to mass-produce the thousands of fresh loaves required each day in the Aten temples. They were made in a wide variety of shapes and sizes represented by different hieroglyph symbols, from the round loaf with the baker’s finger mark to the conical loaf made in moulds and regularly offered in temples. For special occasions there were spirals and human and animal shapes, not dissimilar to modern gingerbread men.
The main vegetables were onions and garlic, consumed by workers and found in tombs of the time. Much like the modern Egyptian diet, beans, chickpeas, lentils, lettuce, cucumbers and watermelons also featured heavily, with almonds a popular snack at Amarna. To jazz up the royal menu caraway, coriander, aniseed and sesame seeds would have been added to dishes. Both sesame seeds and olives were used to make oil, and olives were offered to the god when still on the branch. Jar seals from Amarna refer to ‘good fresh olive oil of the house of the Aten’, although animal fats were also part of the diet, described as ‘clarified dripping from the breast meat of cattle’.
For most people the sweet course was healthy and fruit-based. Dates, figs, pomegranates and grapes are shown tastefully arranged on small side tables for Nefertiti and her family to enjoy. Such fruit was also used dried as a sweetener, and added to dough to make fruit bread. Honey, obtained from both wild and domesticated bees, was much loved, and a key ingredient in honey cakes and other forms of sticky confectionery. Jar labels found at Amarna list honey amongst the foodstuffs and offerings, and at least two chief beekeepers were employed in different parts of the city.
Beer was the standard beverage enjoyed by rich and poor, adults and children, and even the dead, whose spirits requested ‘A thousand loaves of bread and a thousand jars of beer’ in their tomb inscriptions. Made of barley, the strength of the beer was indicated by the darkness of its colour. Somewhat soupy in consistency, it had to be filtered through a strainer before consumption or else drunk through a specially designed straw fitted with a small filter, an example of which was found in the city.
Given the Egyptian fondness for sweet things, dates and honey were added to beer to produce ‘sermet’. It was consumed in large quantities at Malkata, where much of it came from the estates of the royal women – some of the beer jars found at Amarna were inscribed ‘good sermet beer of the queen’. Shown imbibing in several images, Nefertiti appears to have been a woman who took her beer seriously and even had her own brewery in the city, where large numbers of beer jars stored a quick-fermenting brew ready to drink after only a few days. Recalling the ancient Egyptian saying ‘It is good to drink beer with happy hearts when clothed in clean robes,’ it is not difficult to imagine Nefertiti seated on a pile of cushions doing just this.
Wine, however, was the principal royal drink, both imported from Syria and made in Egypt’s western oases or in the Nile Delta; that brought down from Memphis was often stamped with the image of the northern cobra goddess Wadjet. To judge from the number of wine jars recovered from the rubbish dumps outside the Great Palace, the royals consumed large quantities. Since the wine jars are often dated with the regnal year of the king in whose reign the wine was produced, these humble artefacts provide some of the most important historical evidence for the whole Amarna Period: Akhenaten’s highest regnal year, for instance, is given as 17, with 3 for his shadowy successor.
The labels also show that they appreciated vintage wines, a thirty-year-old wine from Amenhotep III’s reign having been found in Tutankhamen’s tomb along with younger ‘sweet wines’. Pomegranate wine was placed amongst funerary goods in the Royal Tomb at Amarna, where wine is referred to as ‘nefer’, ‘good’, or ‘very good’ or even ‘the genuine thing’, with jars of ‘doubly good wine’ supplied to the royal palace. Each member of the royal family owned his or her own wine-producing estates, that from Nefertiti’s being described as ‘Wine of the house of Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti’, ‘Good wine of the store-house of Nefertiti’ and ‘Wine of the house of Neferneferuaten from the Western River’.
Alcohol was an important element of celebrations and one of the commodities offered to the Aten: court ladies are shown drinking at Amarna, and a woman banquet guest in a tomb at Thebes says, ‘Give me eighteen cups of wine because I want to get drunk! My insides are as dry as straw.’ Another ancient text describes ‘the woman reclining with her lover, when they are drunken with pomegranate wine’, and since great quantities of alcohol were drunk in Hathor’s honour ritual drunkenness was particularly associated with women. The lyrics of a song popular a few years after the Amarna Period graphically describe a drunken woman, sitting outside her chamber ‘with tousled hair’. The more unfortunate effects of over-indulgence are shown in scenes in which both women and men are heartily sick. Sleeping it off seems to have been the thing to do, with the drunken goddess Sekhmet sleeping off her hangover in her father’s palace. A cautionary tale against the evils of drink contains these admoni-tory words: ‘You stagger about, going from street to street reeking of beer. You strike out and people run away from you. If only you knew how bad wine is you would stop drinking it.’
As if acknowledging the power of the alcohol within, the wine jars were themselves garlanded with flowers and often painted in a delicate shade of pale blue colour associated with divinity in the style of so-called Palace Ware. The wine would be decanted and filtered to remove small bits through a strainer like the one found in Tutankhamen’s tomb along with a matching goblet. A very similar lotus-form chalice, perhaps from Amarna, also names Akhenaten and Nefertiti, both of whom are shown quaffing their wine from a variety of stemmed vessels, cups and inlaid goblets of silver and gold which were also made for export. In one scene Akhenaten sits beside what looks suspiciously like a wine cooler, whilst Nefertiti is sometimes shown pouring him a drink – more of a gesture between the couple than a hint that they have too few staff. Indeed, the servants responsible for keeping the royal goblet topped up are shown hovering, with napkins draped over their arm to catch spills.
At Amarna, the royal cup-bearer Parrenefer was known as the one ‘whose hands are pure’, and each member of the royal family was served by his or her own staff, the superintendent of Nefertiti’s household named as Meryra ‘the second’ to differentiate him from his high priest namesake. They also had their trusted fan-bearers to keep them cool and composed at all times: it wouldn’t do for living gods to be seen sweating as mere mortals.
And in the same way that modern heads of state commission official photographers to document aspects of royal life and important state occasions, the Amarna royals employed their own artists and sculptors. These highly trained court servants included the sculptor Bek, apparently trained by Akhenaten himself, and the master craftsman Iuty, Overseer of Sculptors for the Great Royal Wife Tiy. Iuty is shown putting the finishing touches to a statue of Tiy’s youngest daughter, Beketaken, in his workshop, which also produced high-quality furniture. Yet it was the Overseer of Works and Sculptor Tuthmose who was single-handedly responsible for the way the Amarna royals are now seen, through a whole series of amazing portraits including Nefertiti’s famous bust discovered in his huge villa-cum-workshop complex in Amarna’s southern suburb.
Tuthmose’s neighbours included the general Ramose, the vizier Nakht and the chief priest Panehesy, all given their houses and estates in return for devoted service to the royal family. Each property was provided with both a main entrance and a tradesmen’s entrance, and after reporting to a porter’s lodge permitted visitors passed through tree-filled gardens with circular wells to reach the houses. These usually consisted of a central main room with other rooms leading off it, the number of rooms and size of house reflecting the owner’s social status.
With the homes of most of the city’s other officials located throughout the northern and southern suburbs along the minor roads, rich and poor often lived side by side. Just north of the Great Temple near the river were smaller, more crowded houses without gardens but with a large number of grain silos and store rooms. These were perhaps the merchants’ quarter, where goods could be traded on the riverside. Then of course there was the basic housing which made up the workmen’s village. Set at a good distance from the posh residential quarters, their sixty-eight small dwellings with a larger one for the boss were surrounded by a wall over which they chucked their rubbish – to modern archaeologists, discarded treasures which reveal how life was lived far away from the luxury of the palaces.
The total population of Amarna has been estimated at up to fifty thousand, and it can be assumed that they originated from various parts of Egypt and simply followed the royal family as the source of wealth rather than from any sense of religious devotion or even loyalty. Yet the recent discovery of the public cemetery in the desert south of the Northern Tombs revealed that the inhabitants who died during the twenty-year occupation hadn’t been dug up and taken home after the city was abandoned, as once thought because the only known tombs were those of the wealthy.
In the political climate of the day, and when most of the vast country’s 2–3 million population were dispersed among small rural communities, a city with such a large concentrated population would have presented all manner of potential problems. Public order was kept by a well-armed force of men under the chief of police, Mahu, with any wrongdoers apprehended and placed in handcuffs to await the appropriate punishment. The police headquarters in the central city were equipped with a well-stocked armoury, police dogs, cobbled-floor stabling for two hundred horses and a ‘flying squad’ of chariots, all essential requirements for patrolling such a huge area.
It seems as if the city and its surrounding cliffs and desert were regularly patrolled via a network of routes and pathways, with all traffic in and out of Amarna closely monitored. At the end of the line in the north, where the cliffs curved right round to the river, the Northern Administrative Buildings were cleverly built to straddle the road. Described as a kind of ornamental gatehouse, this would also have been the perfect place to extract the appropriate taxes on traded goods.
Supplied by industrial estates which included areas specialising in pottery and glass production, much of the central city was also taken up with administrative buildings and office blocks. They included the House of Life, near the Great Palace, where official inscriptions were composed and copied out by the scribal workforce within its library-like environment. Next door lay the Bureau for Royal Correspondence, Amarna’s Foreign Office, where its staff of scribes and officials worked for the Royal Chamberlain, Tutu, ‘chief mouthpiece of all the foreign lands’. Responsible for passing on their communications to the king, Tutu is keen to stress in his tomb inscriptions how well he had done his job, insisting that ‘my voice is not loud in the king’s house. I do not swagger in the palace. I do not receive the reward in order to repress [truth] falsely, but I do what is righteous to the king. I act only accordingly to what he decrees . . . I am straightforward and true in the knowledge of the king.’
One of Egypt’s main correspondents was King Burraburiyash of Babylon, who at some stage became one of Akhenaten’s fathers-in-law when his daughter was sent to Amarna along with a large dowry. Her father also supplied lapis lazuli and horses in return for gold and the coloured ivory figurines of which he seemed particularly fond. Akhenaten responded with gilded statuettes of himself, Nefertiti and one of their daughters, which at the time must have been the nearest equivalent of a family snap.
King Suppiluliumas of the Hittites sent along a selection of silver vessels, asking directly for ‘gold statues, one standing one sitting and two more silver statues of women’ after pointedly enquiring about the whereabouts of the presents he’d been promised by the last king. The Assyrians too were writing to Egypt, sending chariots, white horses and lapis lazuli jewellery and again asking for some of the gold which they had heard was as plentiful as dust in Egypt. More horses were sent by the king of Cyprus, together with perfumed oils and a cargo of valuable copper; in return he very specifically requested a gold-trimmed ebony bed with a mattress and lots of Egyptian linen.
Vassal states too corresponded with the Amarna court. Queen Puduheba of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra) wrote to Egypt’s first lady, presumably sending gifts, whilst an unnamed queen from the city of Byblos signing herself ‘your maidservant’ fell at the feet of the queen ‘seven times and seven times’ as a sign of her loyalty.
Although most of these letters are undated, making it virtually impossible to work out the exact sequence of events, Egypt’s empire was looking increasingly unstable. With so many troops needed at home to guard the royal family and keep the peace, the vassal states soon started asking for military reinforcements. And when hostilities broke out between Mitanni and its northern neighbours the Hittites things really started to disintegrate.
Soon virtual anarchy prevailed in many parts of the Egyptian Empire as the more aggressive states and cities turned on their neighbours. The mayor of Qatna (modern el-Mishrife) reported treason and Hittite-inspired attacks, and with ‘everything in flames’ pleaded for Egyptian archers to help defend the region. The mayor of Qiltu also asked for troops, the ruler of Jerusalem reported military activity, and the vassal queen Ninurmah, Lady of the Lions, wrote twice to tell pharaoh of further unrest and fighting. And as the faithful Rib-Hadda of Byblos repeatedly pleaded for Egypt’s military help his subjects, his household and even his own wife wanted him to save his own skin and go over to the enemy.
But still Akhenaten seems to have done nothing. Even when Egyptian mercenaries broke into the palace of the prince of Jerusalem and attacked him, and Egyptian governors robbed a Babylonian delegation crossing Canaan, pharaoh seems to have turned a blind eye. Many of his vassals’ pleas he seems to have answered with mail-order requests for glassware! And the mayors of Tyre, Asqaluna (biblical Askelon), the rulers of Akka (biblical Acco) and Yursa (location uncertain), all responding with the requested shipments, the mayor of Lakisa (modern Tell ed-Duweir) having promised to send ‘whatever glass I may have on hand’ despite more pressing matters. And just as Nero fiddled while Rome burnt, the Egyptian Empire seems to have been teetering on the brink of destruction while pharaoh was collecting decorative tableware.
In their frustration, the vassal rulers started to bypass pharaoh and wrote directly to the Royal Chamberlain Tutu to give him details of the increasing chaos and to warn of the growing powers of the Hittites in the north. They had already conquered Egypt’s old ally Mitanni, and without this first line of defence Egypt and its weakened empire were now prime targets. It is impossible to know to what extent Akhenaten was aware of the trouble but chose to ignore it, couldn’t deal with it, or was simply kept in the dark by Tutu and his staff. But whatever the truth, it seems he was still letting others deal with such vital communications rather than dealing directly with them as his father had done. It was clear that something had to be done. But rather than sending out the troops who were needed at home, it was decided to go down a different route. Inviting envoys from every corner of the empire to come and pay homage at a great state reception, Egypt would demonstrate its power and wealth amidst the splendours of its new royal capital, with everything directed to the greater glory of the Aten and his twin representatives on earth, Akhenaten and Nefertiti, whose own regal powers were about to be confirmed in the most public way possible.