When we consider the stupendous monuments of their labours, we can scarcely doubt, that they felt and aspired to the Sublime; but of the Beautiful, they seem to have had scarcely an idea. In Painting and in Sculpture, their taste seems at all times to have been very low and imperfect. The forms which they represented are often deficient, rude and unfinished. There is, indeed, almost universally, a kind of stiffness by which we recognise the productions of the Egyptian artists, who appear never to have remarked the beauty of the waving outline, nor the graces of its elegant and endless varieties.1
Edinburgh Review (1811)
As Amenhotep III fades away – his death, like almost all royal deaths, unrecorded – we start to look for signs of his successor. Just one small, seated statue seems to offer a glimpse of Akhenaten immediately after his coronation.2 This statue was once part of a pair, but the queen who sat to the left of her husband is today represented only by a supportive arm around his back, and elements of the statue have been restored. The surviving king is perhaps plumper than we might expect, his stomach a little more prominent and his breasts a little more obvious, but he remains instantly recognisable as a later Eighteenth Dynasty Egyptian pharaoh. Unfortunately, there is nothing to confirm who he is, and although it is often assumed that he is Akhenaten he could equally well be Amenhotep III, Smenkhkare or even Tutankhamen. This piece therefore cannot be cited as evidence of Akhenaten’s appearance at the start of his reign. Putting this statue to one side, some of Akhenaten’s earliest images, displayed on walls in the Karnak Temple complex, resemble those of Amenhotep III. Here Akhenaten has almond-shaped eyes, a thick neck, double chin and upturned nose, and he wears the blue crown favoured by his father.3 Before we use these images as evidence that Akhenaten started his reign with an entirely conventional appearance, however, we have to consider that these may be repurposed images of Amenhotep III.
However he may have appeared at the start of his reign, we can see that by the end of regnal year 5, immediately before the move to Amarna, Akhenaten had developed a unique style which, although he retained the regalia (crown and/or headdress, ceremonial beard, crook and flail) and clothing (kilt) which identified him as an Egyptian king, caused him to look very different from all the kings who had gone before. The colossal freestanding sandstone statues created for the Theban Gempaaten temple – created by Bak’s workshop, perhaps – show Akhenaten standing straight with legs close together and arms crossing the chest to hold the crook and flail. This is a pose that should remind us of the mummified king of the dead, Osiris. But Akhenaten’s features leave us with no confusion over who is being represented. He has a long, narrow head balanced on a long, thin neck, the length of his face being emphasised by his tall headdresses, his long nose, ears and chin, and his false beard. Like his father he has angled, almond-shaped eyes, but while Amenhotep’s eyelids are convex, Akhenaten has sunken lids, so that he seems to peer downwards at those looking up at his face. Akhenaten also has hollow cheeks, sharp cheekbones and sensuous, plump lips with the lower lip thicker than the upper. His chin is prominent, and has variously been described as ‘determined’ or even ‘aristocratic’. Often, two smile lines run down from the corners of his nose to his lips, and there may be wrinkles on his neck. Akhenaten’s body shape is emphasised by the tight, knee-length pleated kilt that runs underneath his sagging stomach, exposing his navel. He has under-developed lower legs, strong thighs, wide hips, a well-defined waist and narrow shoulders and arms that end in long, bony fingers. His breasts, partially hidden by his crossed arms, are prominent and placed high on his chest. This same change is observable in his two-dimensional art, where it can appear even more extreme.
One Gempaaten sculpture has generated a huge amount of speculation.4 At first glance the figure resembles the other colossal statues; it stands, lower legs and crown missing, holding the crook and flail in crossed arms. The remains of a false beard are obvious on the neck and chin. However, the statue is naked and without any obvious genitalia. Are we looking at a form of Akhenaten, who is making a bizarre attempt to combine male and female attributes in imitation of his male/female god? Or are we looking at Nefertiti, who is being allowed to assume the pose and regalia of a king?
At Thebes, the colossal Akhenatens wore a range of crowns and headdresses, including the four-feathered crown identified with the god of air, Shu. The divine triad of Shu, his sister-wife Tefnut and their father, the sun god Atum, were Egypt’s first living beings. Their story is an instructive one for anyone interested in Akhenaten’s beliefs.5 It tells how, at the beginning of time, nothing existed but the waters of Nun. Deep within the waters of Nun there was an egg, which suddenly cracked open, releasing life. With a surge of energy, a mound rose out of the waters. Seated on that mound was the sun god, Atum. Atum had created himself; he now set about creating others. He grasped his penis, sneezed and spat and generated two children; Shu the god of the dry air and Tefnut the goddess of moisture. Their asexual birth is reflected the twins’ names. ‘Shu’, derived from the Egyptian word meaning ‘emptiness’, sounds like the word for sneeze while the ‘Tef’ in Tefnut’s obscure name means ‘spit’. Tefnut was to give birth to two children: Geb the god of the earth and Nut the goddess of the sky, who would become the father and mother of Egypt’s other deities.
Atum, the ‘lord of totality’, was an ancient and immensely powerful being with the ability to create and simultaneously end everything. Although his cult and mythology were to be absorbed by the cult and mythology of Re, Atum remained a potent being until the end of the dynastic age, becoming associated with the old and dying evening sun and, through this, with the dead and the afterlife. Shu and Tefnut are Egypt’s first sexually differentiated beings. Shu is a life force associated with dry air, mist and sunlight who is present at all births, and he has a great capacity to heal. As the son of Atum, Egypt’s first king, he is also heir to the throne. Tefnut is his queen and complement: a shadowy life force associated with moisture who might appear as a woman, a lioness or a lion-headed woman. As the daughter of the sun god she could be equated with the goddess Maat; like all solar goddesses she was fiercely loyal to her king. As Akhenaten directly equated himself with Shu, we may speculate that he also equated Nefertiti with Tefnut and his father with Atum. This means that when we see, as we often do at Amarna, a scene of Akhenaten and Nefertiti beneath the rays of the Aten, we can interpret it three ways: the royal couple worshipping their god; Shu and Tefnut standing beneath the rays of their father Atum; or maybe Akhenaten and Nefertiti worshipping Amenhotep III.
In 1858 Karl Richard Lepsius published a folio of images copied from the Amarna elite tombs and boundary stelae, and the two-dimensional version of Akhenaten’s world was exposed to Western eyes.6 Baffled by the blatant rule breaking, scholars sought practical but far-fetched explanations for what they saw. While Auguste Mariette suggested that Akhenaten (whom he knew as Khuenaten) may have been captured and castrated while leading a military campaign in Nubia, Eugène Lefèbvre favoured the theory that Akhenaten had been a ‘disguised’ female king, as Hatshepsut had been before him.7 Observing the prominent and active nature of the queen and the royal daughters in the tomb scenes, many believed that Akhenaten’s reign was subjected to an abnormal and unhealthy female influence. Akhenaten was a doubly unfortunate man: effeminate and under his wife’s thumb. John Gardner Wilkinson, who had inspected the elite tombs first hand, suggested that the royal family must have been foreigners:
From their features it is evident that they were not Egyptians; their omission in the list of kings, the erasure of their names, the destruction of their monuments, and the abject submission they required, prove them to have been looked on with hatred in the country; and the peculiar mode of worshipping and representing the Sun argues that their religion differed from the Egyptian.8
Flinders Petrie, who had gazed into the eyes of Akhenaten’s ‘death mask’, believed that Akhenaten took after his father:
Children are often observed to resemble one parent, and yet to grow up more like the other. To suppose that Akhenaten was like his father when a boy, and that the likeness was exaggerated as being the fashionable face – yet that as his mind and body took shape between twelve and sixteen, under the vigorous and determined tutelage of his imperious mother, Thyi, he should have grown into a nearer resemblance of her … seems not at all an unlikely state of the case. Moreover, the cast of his head is of an expression betwixt that of two portraits … and links them together.9
Petrie was a believer in physiognomy: the ‘science’ of assessing personality and character from the face, which was popular with many of his contemporaries. That Akhenaten’s character had been inherited from his mother was therefore confirmed for him by finds from a sculptor’s workshop ‘near the south end of town’:
Two heads of an aged queen were found … These must evidently be of Thyi, as the face is too old and too dissimilar to be that of Nefertiti. Here the resemblance with Akhenaten is obvious … the same forehead almost in line with the nose, the same dreamy eye, the same delicate nose, the same expression of lips, the same long chin, the same slanting neck. That the boy inherited his face from his father … cannot be doubted; and that he grew up like his mother seems equally clear.10
Increasing exploration at Amarna, including Davies’s painstaking recording and subsequent publication of the scenes decorating the elite tombs (1903–8), made the perplexities of Akhenaten’s art more obvious and confirmed the view that this was a new realism, a reflection of Akhenaten’s devotion to maat which was unfortunately interpreted as a ‘desire for truth at any price’.11 Akhenaten had perhaps suffered from a feminising disease that affected his appearance. So, to take just one example, in 1922 we find Arthur Weigall, a great admirer of Akhenaten, interpreting the king as
a pale sickly youth. His head seemed too large for his body; his eyelids were heavy; his eyes were eloquent of dreams. His features were delicately moulded, and his mouth, in spite of a somewhat protruding lower jaw, is reminiscent of the best of the art of Rossetti.12
The satirical magazine Punch begged to differ: ‘One knows what modern artists can do in the way of distending and emaciating the figure, and early Egypt may have suffered under similar sorrows.’13
The vision of the sick king certainly matched the prevalent view that Akhenaten was a gentle theologian; a man more interested in religion than war, who decorated his palaces with beautiful, peaceful scenes of nature. But it did not quite fit the facts. Could such a sick man really have challenged royal tradition with such determination and vigour? Could he have fathered numerous children? As more sculptures were uncovered from both Amarna and Thebes, opinion shifted again as Egyptologists decided that the art could not be read literally. This was surely a state-sanctioned attempt to express Akhenaten’s personal religious beliefs stimulated, perhaps, by the fact that the Aten, unlike Egypt’s other gods, could not be depicted adequately in three-dimensional stone. With the traditional images of the king standing or sitting beside his god now an impossibility, a new form of representation was necessary. Dorothea Arnold, for example, has described how:
The somewhat aloof smile gives human expression to the Karnak statue’s surprising head, but the size and shape of the head and face clearly exceed natural dimensions. We are confronted less with a representation of a human face than with artistic variations of human features. The effect is awesome: pharaoh’s divinity expressed through a transfiguration of the human form.14
Dominic Monserrat ties the king’s appearance even more firmly into his religious beliefs:
The Aten subsumes into itself all the different gods who create and maintain the universe and the king is the living image of the Aten on earth. He can therefore display on earth the Aten’s multiple life-giving functions. These are represented through a set of signifiers that seem mutually contradictory to modern viewers, such as the appearance of male and female physical characteristics on the same statue, but made sense to the intended Egyptian audience. These attributes render the king literally superhuman, a divine body which goes beyond human experience.15
The Aten, although conventionally described as ‘he’, was actually a combination of male and female elements which allowed him to be the father and mother of all things. He was both asexual and androgynous, as, to a certain extent, are all of Akhenaten’s statues, which combine masculine elements with the body of a woman whose soft stomach suggests that she has given birth. That the new royal image was revealed to the world as Akhenaten prepared to celebrate an unexpected heb-sed after a mere three years on the throne is no coincidence. The heb-sed allowed kings to reflect on their own relationship with their gods, and it had heralded an increase in royal divinity during the reign of Amenhotep III. This may be the point where the Aten/Atum merged with Akhenaten’s father, while Akhenaten and Nefertiti became Shu and Tefnut.
Reality or symbolism? The truth probably lies somewhere between the two, with the artists exploiting and exaggerating Akhenaten’s natural body shape to create an image which linked him firmly with his god. We can gain support for this idea by revisiting Tutankhamen’s tomb. The garments buried with the young king were in various sizes ranging from child to adult; these were not clothes specifically made for the tomb, that the king might enjoy wearing in his afterlife, but the clothes that Tutankhamen actually wore during his ten-year reign. They allow us to calculate his vital statistics with a fair degree of accuracy. Tutankhamen’s mummy confirms that he stood approximately 167.5cm tall (5ft 6in); his chest, measured from his ‘mannequin’, was 80cm (31in); his waist, estimated by measuring his belts, sashes and the mannequin, which we have to assume was accurate, 75cm (29in); his hips, estimated from his loincloths, 110cm (43in).16 This is the same pear shape, with a narrow waist but heavy lower body and wide hips, which we see exaggerated in the Gempaaten colossi. As Tutankhamen became king while still a child he must have inherited his throne, rather than claimed it through marriage or conquest; this indicates that he was closely related to Akhenaten. It therefore seems that wide hips and strong thighs were a family trait.
For some this new image is ugly; even grotesque. Arnold has described the Theban colossi as ‘pole-like, elongated images of an extraterrestrial being’.17 Alan Gardiner, unable to disconnect the young king’s appearance from what he knew of his subsequent behaviour, saw ‘frankly hideous portraits the general fidelity of which cannot be doubted … the standing colossi from the peristyle court at Karnak have a look of fanatical determination such as his subsequent history confirmed all too fatally’.18
Others have found Akhenaten’s face sensual, or hauntingly beautiful, particularly when, as originally intended, seen from below and lit from above. However we view it, it is very different from all royal images that have gone before, yet still instantly recognisable as an Egyptian king. Akhenaten has not abandoned the conventions, he has merely exaggerated them. This was the start of a lifelong artistic experiment. As his reign progressed, as his ideas matured and, perhaps, as Bak retired at Thebes and the Thutmose workshop came to prominence at Amarna, the official style became less extreme and more realistic. Art historian Cyril Aldred identified three distinct phases; the early style which started in Thebes and lasted until approximately regnal year 8, a transitional phase that lasted until approximately regnal year 12, and a late or final phase which includes nearly all the work recovered from Thutmose’s workshop.19 This is probably an over-rigid analysis, suggesting too much conscious planning, but essentially it is correct. Certainly, the images recovered from Thutmose’s workshop demonstrate a softer and more confident realism than the images seen at Thebes. Akhenaten’s face now is less haggard and his body less feminine although still, in comparison to conventional royal images, flabby and out of condition.
As we suspected when we looked at Bak’s naos, the new artistic style was quickly extended to Akhenaten’s family and his court, who now reflected their king’s altered appearance. Egyptologists initially interpreted this as a great artistic freedom:
For the first and last time in the history of the nation, her artists were apparently left free to depict things as they saw them, instead of being obliged to force their subjects into a conventional mould. The results of this casting-off of swaddling-bands are, as was to be expected, of very unequal merit in different hands.20
This interpretation fitted well with the twentieth-century acceptance of Akhenaten as a promoter of freedom and tolerance. It is, however, entirely incorrect. We have no reason to believe that Akhenaten was a tolerant individual, and mirroring was already a common artistic conceit whereby the lesser subject flattered the more important subject by replicating his or her posture and appearance, bringing a pleasing coherence and symmetry to any scene. We should no more imagine that Akhenaten’s court suddenly developed elongated faces and prominent stomachs than we would expect the elite of early twentieth-century Paris to have displayed the oval faces depicted by Modigliani, or the cube bodies painted by Picasso. Nor should we assume, as James Baikie did, that the Amarna court were all closely related:
Feature by feature the two sets of portraits [Akhenaten and Nefertiti] not only resemble each other, but speak beyond question of the very closest blood-relationship between their originals … we must conclude that Nefertiti was full sister to her husband – a relationship which, however shocking it may seem to us, was regarded as a perfectly normal one by the Egyptians.21
To prove that we are seeing style rather than realism, we simply need to look at individuals who were depicted before or after, as well as during, the Amarna Period. Akhenaten’s mother, Tiy, is a good example. She appeared many times during her husband’s reign, displaying the face and figure appropriate to an Egyptian consort. In the Amarna tomb of her steward Huya, however, she has the same angular body and relaxed posture as her son. Tiy’s young granddaughter, Ankhesenpaaten, shares this body shape at Amarna, where she has an exaggeratedly elongated, egg-shaped head, yet when she becomes Ankhesenamen, consort of Tutankhamen, her head has a more natural shape.
To disprove the suggestion that Akhenaten and Nefertiti were brother and sister, we need to consider Nefertiti’s titles. Nefertiti never names her parents but we would not expect her to. Her status at court was entirely dependent on her union with the king, and in this respect her parents were irrelevant. However, the fact that she never calls herself ‘King’s Daughter’ (the equivalent of our ‘princess’) confirms that she was commoner-born. Royal titles were cumulative, and rather than drop an earlier title on her marriage, she would have progressed to become a ‘King’s Daughter, King’s Great Wife’. Similarly her sister Mutnodjmet, who appears as a companion to the young princesses in several elite tomb scenes, fails to use any royal title.
In picking a non-royal consort, Akhenaten had followed the very successful precedent set by his father, who made no secret of the fact that he had chosen a non-royal consort: ‘Amenhotep ruler of Thebes, given life, and the king’s principal wife Tiy, may she live. The name of her father is Yuya and the name of her mother is Thuyu; she is the wife of a mighty king.’22
Circumstantial evidence would suggest that Nefertiti was born into Tiy’s birth family. In the Amarna tomb of Ay and his wife Tey, Tey is identified as the ‘favourite of the Good God, nurse of the King’s Great Wife Nefertiti, nurse of the goddess, ornament of the king’: it seems that she raised the infant Nefertiti, maybe as her foster-mother or stepmother.23 Meanwhile Ay’s many titles include the positions of ‘overseer of the king’s horses’ and ‘God’s Father’. Yuya, father of Tiy, bore the same titles. Could Ay have inherited his titles from his father, Yuya? This would mean that he was Akhenaten’s maternal uncle. Did, as Borchardt suggested, ‘God’s Father’ mean ‘king’s father-in-law’?24 Ay himself makes no mention of any connection to Nefertiti but that is not unexpected; Yuya makes no reference to his daughter Queen Tiy and, if we did not have the ‘marriage scarab’ issued by Amenhotep III, we would not properly understand their relationship.
Our first sighting of the new queen comes from the elite cemeteries on the west bank of the Nile, at Thebes. As Akhenaten came to the throne, the court official Parennefer was engaged in decorating his rock-cut tomb.25 Today his tomb is in a bad state of repair and it is very difficult to make sense of the surviving artwork. But when Norman de Garis Davis visited in 1923, he was able to identify a scene on the facade which included the image of an unnamed lady, almost certainly Nefertiti, who accompanied the king (identified as Amenhotep IV) as he worshipped the Aten. Davies describes the queen as (probably) wearing a modius or platform crown topped by two tall feathers, and carrying two sistra. An interior scene, now completely destroyed, showed the same lady sitting on a chair beside the enthroned king as he received Parennefer and rewarded him for his loyalty. This tomb, it seems, made reference to the new king and queen yet was decorated using the traditional art style.
The unfinished Theban tomb of the vizier Ramose is partially decorated in the old art style and partially in the new. It offers a much clearer view of the lady whom we can now with confidence identify as Nefertiti.26 Once again a loyal tomb owner is being recognised by his king. This time Akhenaten stands at the palace balcony known as the ‘Window of Appearances’. As he leans forward to reward the faithful Ramose with gold, Nefertiti stands passively behind him, holding a fly-whisk in her left hand. The scene is only partially carved, and both king and queen are hidden from the waist downwards by the palace wall. However, we can see that while Nefertiti has a conventionally slender upper body, she has a prominent jaw which mirrors Akhenaten’s own. She is dressed in a pleated linen robe with sleeves, and her head is covered by a short bobbed wig and the uraeus or rearing snake headdress which signifies royalty.
Our clearest view of the Theban Nefertiti comes from the walls of the Benben Temple (Hwt bnbn); a companion temple to Akhenaten’s Gempaaten. Here, reconstructed scenes show Nefertiti offering to the Aten, assisted by her eldest daughter Meritaten. Nefertiti appears as a thin and angular woman wearing an elaborate pleated gown and a Hathor-style crown perched on top of a long wig. Meritaten, depicted as a miniature Nefertiti rather than a child, carries a sistrum, the religious rattle often associated with the cult of Hathor. The Aten, as always, shines high in the sky, his rays extending their blessing over the queen and her daughter. These images are often cited as proof that Nefertiti was, even at the start of her husband’s reign, allowed to usurp the king’s priestly role. The situation is, however, less clear cut than has been supposed.
It is true that in normal circumstances we would expect to see the king making all the offerings in any state temple. In non-royal contexts too, it is rare to see a woman acting as the primary contact with a deity, because this role was traditionally reserved for a man. Only when her husband was absent, was a woman allowed to perform this function. However, if the Benben Temple was dedicated to purely female rites, it would not be a normal state temple, and the normal rules would not apply. It may well be that Akhenaten is absent because, if he were present, he would block Nefertiti’s access to the god.27 We could usefully compare Nefertiti’s work in the Benben Temple to the rituals traditionally performed by the earlier Eighteenth Dynasty God’s Wives of Amen. The role of ‘God’s Wife’ was traditionally reserved for the principal queen or queen mother. On the walls of Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel at Karnak we can see a God’s Wife, in this case Hatshepsut’s daughter, Neferure, in action.28 In one scene she is shown performing a ritual to burn and destroy the name of Egypt’s enemies, while in another she stands, arms raised, to watch Hatshepsut present the seventeen gods of Karnak with their dinner. A third scene shows the God’s Wife leading a group of priests to the temple pool to be purified, and then following Hatshepsut into the sanctuary, where the king performs rites before the statue of Amen.
Nefertiti’s face continues to evolve throughout her husband’s reign until, before his regnal year 12, she loses her drooping jaw and chin and acquires a square jaw, prominent cheekbones, rounded cheeks and straighter lips.29 At the same time the proportions of her head and neck are adjusted to give a more natural appearance. Her body changes too, so that while she maintains her well-defined waist and unremarkable breasts (obvious breasts not being an exclusively female trait at Amarna), she develops a rounded abdomen, wide hips and thighs and pronounced buttocks. Her stomach is often highlighted by a single curved line just above the pubic mound while her mother-in-law has two such lines plus a double line under each breast. Nefertiti’s dresses, either a delicate, pleated robe which is often left completely open (perhaps we are missing the painted undergarment?) or a close-fitting linen dress, make her body shape very obvious.
When Jan Assmann writes ‘The statues of Nefertiti may be regarded as love-poems in stone … there is a very refined sensuousness and an almost erotic grace and radiance in the art of this period,’ he is writing quite literally.30 The handful of surviving New Kingdom love poems betray an admiration for the same long neck, slim waist, wide hips and heavy thighs that we see in Nefertiti’s images. The queen has been given, in somewhat exaggerated form, the body of an alluring woman. This will have been important to Akhenaten. As the self-proclaimed son of the sun god he needed a mate who would stimulate his own sexual prowess just as Tefnut had stimulated Shu. It can be difficult for us to determine the extent to which the Egyptian artists used a visual code to convey this sexual message.31 We understand that the wives depicted in private male tombs always appear healthy, young and fertile because a sexually active wife will assist her husband’s own rebirth. But does every scene showing Nefertiti with her husband carry a similar hidden meaning? Is every scene of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their daughters intended to remind us of the king’s fertility?
We have more images of Nefertiti than of any other queen consort. This prominence goes unexplained in the written texts, leaving us to guess the extent to which this is the result of more of Akhenaten’s art being preserved (albeit in pieces); a reflection of Akhenaten’s need to have his consort and daughters take the place of the discredited traditional gods; an indication of Nefertiti’s atypically high personal status; or a combination of all these and more. Because we have more images, we see more of Nefertiti in action; this gives the impression that she does more than any previous consort, and this in turn suggests that she is more important. Claims that Nefertiti ‘was accorded an exalted status unparalleled for a King’s Great Wife during the history of dynastic Egypt’ are commonly made, but very difficult to confirm.32 Before we can decide that Nefertiti is indeed uniquely prominent amongst all of Egypt’s consorts, we need to give some consideration to the role played by her mother-in-law and predecessor, Tiy.
The queen consorts of the late Seventeenth and earlier Eighteenth Dynasties had been accomplished women with a strong religious and political presence. Ahhotep, the widowed mother of Ahmose I, for example, had served as regent for her young son and was subsequently celebrated as one who ‘pacified Upper Egypt and expelled her rebels’. Her daughter Ahmose-Nefertari bore a string of religious titles, helped her son Amenhotep I with his rule and was eventually deified at Deir el-Medina, where her cult flourished until the end of the New Kingdom.33 All this was entirely in line with the accepted duties of the consort, who was expected to support her husband, protect his children, perform specific female-based religious rites and, if necessary, deputise for the absent or dead king. However, following the reign of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, and perhaps as a backlash against it, subsequent consorts had semi-retired from public gaze. We know their names, but can say little about them.
Tiy reversed this trend, maintaining a high public profile throughout her marriage. She was depicted alongside Amenhotep on public monuments and in private tombs, and her name was linked with his on official inscriptions and in diplomatic correspondence, so that her reputation spread throughout the empire. A letter of condolence written by Tushratta of Mitanni following Amenhotep’s death, confirms that Tiy’s influence continued into her son’s reign:
You know that I always showed love to Nimmuaria [Amenhotep III], your husband, and that Nimmuaria your husband always showed love to me … I had asked your husband for statues of solid gold … But now Napkhururiya, your son, has sent plated statues of wood. With gold being as dirt in your son’s land, why has your son not given what I asked for?34
Tiy was closely identified with the solar deities Maat and Hathor, and she became the first queen to add Hathor’s cow horns and sun disc to her tall, feathered crown. The only prominent religious role that she did not play was that of God’s Wife of Amen, an omission that may suggest that Amen of Thebes was already out of favour with the royal family.
Mortal women who married divine kings acquired their own patina of divinity. In the Theban tomb built for Kheruef, courtier to Amenhotep III, we can see the living Queen Tiy sailing, godlike, behind her husband in the night boat of Re.35 Outside Egypt, this living divinity was made more obvious, and Tiy was worshipped as a form of Hathor-Tefnut at the Nubian temple of Sedeinga. Here we can see Tiy assuming the form of a sphinx to prowl across the temple pillars. If we return to Kheruef’s tomb, we see Tiy sitting beside her husband as they celebrate his third jubilee. The side of her throne, which is smaller but more ornate than Amenhotep’s plain seat, bears an image of Tiy as a human-headed sphinx, trampling two bound female prisoners.36 A third sphinx image, believed to be Tiy, was found on a carved carnelian bracelet plaque recovered from Thebes. Here we see a crouched, human-headed, winged female sphinx wearing Tefnut’s distinctive plant-topped headdress (a symbol of rejuvenation and fertility, perhaps) and holding Amenhotep’s cartouche.37
It is undeniable that both Tiy and Nefertiti were allocated religious and political power, with Tiy (mentioned in diplomatic correspondence; Nefertiti, as far as we know, was not) perhaps winning in the political sphere and Nefertiti (offering in temples; Tiy, as far as we know, did not) the religious one. As far as we know, neither queen ever demonstrated a power that was equal to, or higher than, the power of the king. Can we state that Nefertiti was uniquely powerful? On this evidence, no. This is a contentious subject that we will be revisiting in Chapter 8.