Nefertiti: The Greatest Ancient Egyptian Queen?

Summary

Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society

Episode: Nefertiti: The Greatest Ancient Egyptian Queen?

Release Date: October 17, 2024

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Introduction

In this enthralling episode of Betwixt The Sheets, host Kate Lister delves deep into the enigmatic life of Queen Nefertiti, one of ancient Egypt's most captivating figures. Joined by esteemed Egyptologists Joyce Tyldesley and Monica Hannah, the conversation navigates through Nefertiti's background, her monumental bust, and the tumultuous journey that led this iconic artifact to Berlin.

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Understanding Nefertiti: Who Was She?

The episode opens with a poetic description of the famed bust of Queen Nefertiti, setting the stage for a conversation that seeks to unravel the mysteries surrounding her life and legacy.

Kate Lister [02:07]: "Imagine you're on a date... What we are looking at here is a bust of Queen Nefertiti."

Joyce Tyldesley [05:56]: "Yes. Well, actually, nobody knows much about her. It's one of the mysterious things about her that we think we actually know a lot about her, but actually we don't, so we don't." [06:04]

Despite her prominence in art, Joyce emphasizes the scarcity of concrete information about Nefertiti's personal life and origins.

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The Role of the Pharaoh's Wives in Ancient Egypt

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the societal and political roles of the pharaoh's wives during the 18th Dynasty of Egypt.

Joyce Tyldesley [12:23]: "Yes, yes, more than you'd think. But first of all, he doesn't just have one wife, he has lots of wives, he has a harem." [12:23]

She elaborates on the hierarchical structure within the harem, distinguishing between the queen consort and other wives, and highlights the considerable influence these women wielded, especially in matters of succession and religious practices.

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Nefertiti’s Marriage and Family

The dynamics of Nefertiti's marriage to Pharaoh Akhenaten are explored, shedding light on their political alliance and familial ties.

Joyce Tyldesley [11:11]: "But she's probably very closely related to the royal family, because we know that her husband, Akhenaten, his mother, wasn't born royal either." [11:11]

The discussion touches upon the complexities of royal marriages, including potential cousin relationships, and the expectations placed upon queens to produce heirs.

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The Mysteries of Nefertiti’s Children and Succession

A pivotal aspect of the episode is the speculation surrounding Nefertiti's possible children, particularly her relationship to Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

Joyce Tyldesley [20:40]: "But the likely explanation is that he is the son of Akhenaten. I think it is, anyway." [20:40]

Joyce delves into theories about Tutankhamun's parentage, considering both Nefertiti and other harem queens as potential mothers, while addressing the challenges of confirming these relationships through available evidence.

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The Legacy of Nefertiti in Art and Modern Symbolism

Beyond historical accounts, the episode examines how Nefertiti has transcended time to become a modern symbol of beauty and female empowerment.

Joyce Tyldesley [37:57]: "I think we've been seduced by her beauty in the art that we see her." [37:57]

She cautions against idealizing historical figures based solely on their appearance, urging a more nuanced appreciation of their actual roles and contributions.

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The Bust of Nefertiti: From Ancient Egypt to Berlin

Monica Hannah takes the spotlight to narrate the controversial journey of Nefertiti's bust from its origins in Egypt to its current home in Berlin, touching upon themes of colonialism, cultural appropriation, and wartime plundering.

Monica Hannah [47:17]: "It's a very long story that starts actually with Napoleon Bonaparte." [47:17]

She outlines the series of events involving French and German archaeologists, deceitful practices during excavations, and the political maneuvers that ultimately led to the bust's acquisition by the Berlin Museum. Monica highlights the ethical breaches and the persistent reluctance of institutions to repatriate such significant artifacts.

Monica Hannah [61:58]: "I think because also for Egyptian women, there is this idea of feminism where Nefertiti is one of the chief patrons." [61:58]

This sentiment underscores the bust's importance not just as an artifact, but as a symbol of national and gender identity for modern Egypt.

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Conclusion

Kate Lister wraps up the discussion by reflecting on the multifaceted legacy of Nefertiti, emphasizing the importance of recognizing the broader familial and political context in which she existed.

Joyce Tyldesley [43:59]: "I think the legacy is not to just pick out individuals from history and focus on them and ignore everyone else." [43:59]

The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to engage with ongoing efforts to repatriate Nefertiti's bust, highlighting the need for ethical stewardship of cultural heritage.

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Key Takeaways

• Historical Significance: Nefertiti was more than a beautiful queen; she was a central figure in a powerful royal family during a transformative period in ancient Egypt.

• Cultural Impact: The bust of Nefertiti serves as a potent symbol in both historical scholarship and modern Egyptian identity, representing both beauty and female empowerment.

• Ethical Considerations: The journey of the Nefertiti bust raises important questions about colonialism, cultural appropriation, and the responsibilities of modern museums in preserving and repatriating artifacts.

• Legacy Beyond Beauty: While art has immortalized Nefertiti's visage, understanding her true legacy requires looking beyond aesthetics to her political and familial roles.

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Notable Quotes

• Kate Lister [02:07]: "This is an adult podcast booked by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects."

• Joyce Tyldesley [06:04]: "She might not had a beautiful neck. She might have had a completely average neck."

• Monica Hannah [34:00]: "The new Boost Mobile network is offering unlimited talk, text and data for just $25 a month for life." (Note: While this is an advertisement, it's included here for context but would typically be excluded based on summarization guidelines.)

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Further Engagement

Listeners intrigued by the tale of Nefertiti's bust and its fraught history are encouraged to participate in initiatives aimed at its repatriation. Monica Hannah directs interested parties to bringnefretiti.com to learn more and sign petitions supporting the return of the bust to Egypt.

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This episode of Betwixt The Sheets masterfully intertwines the allure of ancient history with the pressing ethical debates surrounding cultural heritage, offering listeners both educational insights and contemplative reflections on the legacy of one of Egypt's most iconic queens.

Transcript

[Kate Lister]

Hi, I'm your host Kate Lister. If you would like Betwixt the Sheets ad free and get early access. Sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every single week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe. Thanks for listening to Betwixt the Sheets. To get all History Hit Podcasts ad free early access and bonus episodes, head over to historyhit.com subscribe. Or you can sign up on Apple Podcasts with just one click.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

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[Kate Lister]

Hello my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I'm so glad that you're here again. But before we can go any further, I have to keep you safe because I care about you. I do.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

That's true.

[Kate Lister]

I would like to tuck you up in bed, wrap you in cotton wool and kiss you goodnight on the forehead. And the way we're going to do that is with a fair dues warning. So this is an adult podcast booked by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects. And you should be an adult. 2 right? I feel safer. Do you feel safer? Good. On with the show. Imagine you're on a date, maybe at a quiet wine bar. Her long neck glows in the warm light, the shadows of the dimly lit room accentuating the fine features of her jaw and high cheekbones. Her eyebrows are immaculate. They must have taken some concentration. Eyebrows aren't easy, you know. And her makeup too Looks professionally done. Flicks of eyeliner reaching to the edge of her eye socket. It's so difficult to tear our eyes away from hers. She is so alluring. But then there are her lips, vermilion red, upturned in an amused smile. Honestly, we could stare at her for hours. This is a face loved by many. I actually think I might be falling a bit in love myself. I mean, for goodness sake, even her nose is perfect. And she's so serene. She looks so put together, so unflappable. I need to know more about this woman, where she comes from and who she loves. Shame that she's not actually real. Shame that what we're looking at here is a statue. Shame about the glass box holding her in in a high ceilinged museum in Berlin. What we are looking at here is a bust of Queen Nefertiti. So she can't actually tell us very much about herself or how she got here. To learn that, we're going to have to go to the experts.

[Monika Hannah]

What do you look for in a man?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Oh, money, of course.

[Kate Lister]

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing a button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Goodness, my beautiful dance. Goodness has nothing to do with it.

[Kate Lister]

Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kit Lister. Whether it's the pyramids, the pharaohs or the riddle of the Sphinx, the ancient Egyptians and their culture have truly transcended time and space. Artifacts uncovered by archaeologists in the sand, soil and rocks of North Africa have made their way across the globe. One of the most famous of these artifacts is the bust of Nefertiti. The head and shoulders of a woman who was once queen of Egypt. And that really is about as much as we know for sure. Today we are joined on Betwixt the Sheets by Egyptologists Monika Hannah and Joyce Tildesley. Monica will be telling us the story of the bust of Nefertiti and its journey to Berlin, which involves some sneaky deals, lies and Nazis. It's all sounding very Indiana Jones. But first let's find out about the woman the bust was modeled after. Who was she? How much power did she have? How much incest was there in her family? And just how many women did she share her husband with? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Joyce Tyldesley. How are you doing?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

I'm fine, thank you. How are you?

[Kate Lister]

Thrilled to be talking to you about a really mysterious woman who I know very little about, apart from the fact she apparently had a beautiful neck. Yes, Queen Nefertiti.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yes. Well, actually, nobody knows much about her. It's one of the mysterious things about her that we think we actually know a lot about her, but actually we don't, so we don't.

[Kate Lister]

She might not had a beautiful neck. She might have had a completely average neck.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Absolutely, yes. I mean, we're basing this on some of the art that survived, and we're assuming that it's a portrait, but royal art isn't necessarily a portrait. It might just be how she wanted to be portrayed. So, no, we can't even assume that we know what she looked like.

[Kate Lister]

Wow. So someone who studies ancient Egypt, an Egyptologist. How do you study someone like Nefertiti when all the sources are so I don't want to say unstable, but you've got to double check and take them all with a pinch. How do you try and get to who this woman was?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

All you can do. And I think it's great. I love it. But then I like reading detective stories and doing jigsaws, so it's the same sort of thing.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, I love a jigsaw.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Take every little tiny bit of evidence that you have, examine it, and then try and piece it together in the way that makes the most sense. It's why, though, if you've got like a room full of Egyptologists together, we would never tell the same story because we all believe slightly different versions of the past and they're all kind of okay, you know, they're all backed up by evidence. We don't have the vast amount of information, particularly about Nefertiti's period, that people imagine we have. But I love that. I love the idea that we can all read through the evidence and slightly make up our own minds. It's great.

[Kate Lister]

So what are some of the things that we do know, or at least we've got some kind of consensus on, like what time period are we talking about here?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Well, it's the Bronze Age. In Egypt, we call it the 18th Dynasty, but that's a bit baffling for people who aren't Egyptologists. It doesn't mean a great deal. We have a date for her husband's reign. He seems to have come to the throne in approximately 1352 BCE, and he reigned for approximately 17 years. And throughout his reign, we date it by his regnal year length. So we'll say year one, year two, year three, because that's actually Easier than trying to guess when the real dates are. So that is when we're talking about. It's a long time ago.

[Kate Lister]

Sorry, this just occurred to me now, but how did the ancient Egypt, or at least at this time, how did they quantify time? So if we're saying he ruled for 17 years, if he'd been here, how long would he have said he'd ruled for?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

It's exactly the same thing that he did. They had a really good calendar. The only problem, they didn't have a leap year. So it slightly went out of sync every four years. But apart from that, they had a really good calendar. But they did date all the king's reigns to their regnal length so that when the king died, they would start counting. So time stopped almost and started again. Each new reign was a new beginning, which obviously would be really difficult for us to do that. But it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it, in a way? Particularly if you think that the king is like semi divine and so on and connected to the gods and things. It does make sense.

[Kate Lister]

And they did think that, didn't they? Did they believe that it's a divine right of kings, or did they believe that the pharaoh is a God?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

A bit of both. Basically. You seem to be sort of human until the point you have your coronation. And at that point you change and you become like the one person who stands between the gods and the people. You're technically the one person who can speak to the gods and they will speak to you and you do services for the gods. And that's why if you go to Egyptian temples on holiday or see pictures of them, it's always the king who's doing the offerings because technically he's the only person he can. God.

[Kate Lister]

It's a lot of pressure.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

It's a lot of pressure. And actually you can't do it because if there's temples all over the place and they have services or ceremonies, you know, every hourly, you just couldn't do it. One person. So he has deputies who are priests who work for him, but in theory it's him. He takes the rap if it goes wrong. So he has to maintain a really good relationship with the gods. And he's sort of semi divine himself because he's really close to the gods. And then when he dies, he will become completely divine.

[Kate Lister]

They became gods after death?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yes. He would become one with the gods of the underworld. Osiris or some thought that they would sail in the solar boat that was piloted by the sun God, Re. I love that some thought they might become a star. Yeah. There were different options, and you could also combine them. It's a very fluid religion. This is another thing. They don't have anything resembling a Bible or a set book of rules. It's very fluid. You could say that it's not really religion so much as loads and loads of cults all functioning at the same time. It's very forgiving. You don't have to believe the same thing as the next person. You can have your own interpretation.

[Kate Lister]

That's incredible.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yeah, it's good, isn't it?

[Kate Lister]

It's very good. I like that. You can be a star and in a moonboat and at one with the God of death. That's incredible.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

A sunboat rather than a moon boat.

[Kate Lister]

Sorry.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yeah. But no, you could probably go in a moonboat as well, couldn't I?

[Kate Lister]

So who was Nefertiti, then? So she marries into royalty. Is she royalty already?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Well, we don't know because she doesn't tell us. The only clue that we have, really, is that if you are what we would call a princess, that would be. They called it a king's daughter. And if you have that title, if you're born with it, you keep it all your life. So if you then marry a king, you would become a king's daughter, a king's wife. And if you, in the fullness of time, you become the mother of a king, you would be a king's daughter, a king's wife, a king's mother, and you would sort of put them all together. She doesn't do that. She's only a king's wife. And that suggests to us that she isn't born royal.

[Kate Lister]

Oh.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

But she's probably very closely related to the royal family, because we know that her husband, Akhenaten, his mother, wasn't born royal either. And we do know who her parents were. And she's obviously quite close to the royal family. So we feel that probably Nefertiti is maybe a cousin on that side of it. So it's, you know, she's not royal, but she's certainly not a commoner. Wow. She's not like you and me, you know, she's someone really special to start with.

[Kate Lister]

So she's not a royal. And Akhenaten, the guy she marries.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yeah, he's very royal.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, he's very royal.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

He's very royal. He is the son of the previous king.

[Kate Lister]

Right. So she's done well then, hasn't she?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

She has. We don't have. They pick the husbands and wives in the royal family. Maybe she was always destined to do this. It would make sense if she'd been brought up to it, because then she could be trained for her role when he was trained for his. But we really don't know.

[Kate Lister]

Do we know much at all about the role of the wife with the pharaoh? Because in my head, unfortunately, I was raised on the 1998 blockbuster The Mummy, and that's what I think ancient Egypt was like.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Well, it's a great film, it's a great film, it's a fun film, but.

[Kate Lister]

You shouldn't base your historical facts on that. But I suppose the image of the pharaoh's wife is. Well, now, what does a pharaoh's wife do? Did they hold a lot of power?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yes, yes, more than you'd think. But first of all, he doesn't just have one wife, he has lots of wives, he has a harem. But the harem wives are kept slightly separate because there are loads of them and they can't be at court all the time. So you have harem palaces dotted about and he will visit them, but he has favourites with him and he has the consort. And Nefertiti is a queen consort. And there's a massive gap between the queen consort and all the other queens, because the queen consort, she will be the mother of the heir to the throne. She is the one that appears in all the royal art, she is the one who is mentioned in diplomatic correspondence, if anybody's mentioned. So it's as if there are just two of them, but actually there are others. And it takes a lot of pressure off her because it means that if she can't produce an heir.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

There's still a chance that other wives can do so. Actually, producing babies is. Yes, it's good if you can do it, because ideally your child would go on to inherit the throne. But if you can't do it, it's not the end of the world because probably another wife will and that will help you there. But we can see they have a lot of power. Nefertiti's mother in law, who's called Queen T, she is very powerful. We see her performing in religious contexts. We see, mentioned in diplomatic correspondence, Nefertiti, again. Yes. Far more than we thought. And it's always been a tradition in ancient Egypt that if the king dies and the next king is a baby, the widowed queen will rule on behalf of the infant king until he's old enough to rule himself. So we can see that there's a lot of power in this Role. Yeah. So I think we underestimated it for ages. We just sort of imagined that they were there to be pretty and be baby machines, but actually there's a lot more to it than that.

[Kate Lister]

It sounds like we've also underestimated the harem because I was quite surprised there when you said that they were his wives in the harem. Not just concubines, courtesans, just randos that they've grabbed off the street is their wives.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

I mean, there might have been an element to them. We don't know where they came from. We know some of them were actual diplomatic marriages and that kings in sort of neighboring states would send daughters to Egypt to marry the Egyptian king. The Egyptians didn't send daughters to marry anyone else. They thought they were the top of the pyramids, so they got daughters in from abroad. And those were obviously high ranking harem queens. But really they're all wives. We shouldn't distinguish between them. There's no. The idea that some are concubines and some are wives, I think is a bit old fashioned and we tend to now class them all as harem queens or harem wives. But obviously within the harem itself there would be massive distinctions. I mean, some of the foreign wives who came in at about this time came with hundreds of attendants who would also presumably have gone into the harem palace. So. And they would have spent their lives there. I don't know, I can't. It might have been quite good because I was thinking about it, you're probably not going to have too many babies, which would have probably been horrific in the Bronze Age. You might not see the king very often. Now that could be good or bad, depending on your views of the king. But this is someone who you've been made to marry, it's not someone who you've chosen to marry. It might be a very nice life. We don't know.

[Kate Lister]

I've always thought that, you know, of like sort of the best of a bad job. I think as long as you got in there and you didn't have grand aspirations of ruling, if you were someone that went in there and went, I've got a nice setup here, I don't have to see him that often. I think that could actually work out quite nicely.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Absolutely. And also, if you're lucky enough that you meet the king and you have a son, boom, you've also got a chance that your child will go on the throne. It's not going to happen to the foreign queens because they don't like the idea of a part foreign born king being on the throne of Egypt. But if you are a high ranking Egyptian woman who's in the harem and has a son, you've always got a possibility as well that you will actually become the next king's mother. So it's got possibilities for an ambitious woman.

[Kate Lister]

It's a career ladder.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

It's a career ladder, but also for women who, you know, it might be easier than having the normal, quite hard home life that you would have had. I don't know. I mean, I've obviously, I don't know. But it's not necessarily the bad institution that we imagine it as. And it's not like a sort of Turkish harem that we imagine. When we think about it, it's much more organized. The women of the harem, for example, they spin flax and they have, they're in the linen trade, they own property.

[Kate Lister]

Wow.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yeah, they work. Obviously not the high ranking ones, but the lower down ones and the low ones presumably act as servants for the higher ranking ones and so on. It's a female sort of, It's a higher ranking, yes, yes. With trade involved, with sewing involved.

[Kate Lister]

So imagine, imagine if you got signed up to the harem and you're like, actually you're in the sewing pool, you'd be like, fuck, yes. But how did Nefertiti get to be the top? We don't know for sure. But how would you distinguish yourself from all these other queens?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Well, she was his consort from the very beginning of his reign. So presumably they married either before he came to the throne, Akhenaten, or immediately the point that he was crowned, he also got married. You don't really find Egyptian kings without wives because it's a sort of, you need a wife to help you run the country. She is distinguished, she has regalia. So she wears a crown. And in her case it's quite obvious because quite often she wears a very typical crown which is quite tall and it's got a sort a flat top and no other queen wears that. So it's good and it's bad because every time we see that crown, we know it's Nefertiti, even if she's not labeled. The bad thing is of course, that if she ever lent it to somebody else, we wouldn't know. I mean, it's unlikely that someone else would be depicted wearing it. But we do sometimes base it on the crowns and maybe we should just sometimes think about it a little bit before doing that. Even the famous image of Nefertiti, she's wearing that crown.

[Kate Lister]

That's the crown. That's the queen crown. That's the I'm the queen bee crown.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

But she's not labeled.

[Kate Lister]

Right. Oh, I see. And how old would she have been when she got married? And how old would he have been?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Again, really difficult to know. We're guessing, but we imagine that girls got married at about 13, 14.

[Kate Lister]

Okay.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Boys, we don't know. We just don't know.

[Kate Lister]

And was that normal for regular ancient Egyptians, or was that a royal thing, that it was that kind of an age?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

No, it's normal. But the interesting thing is that the Egyptians don't tell us much about marriage at all. You just know who's together. And we know that where you are with someone and you are married, people are expected to respect that. But you can split up and then go with other people. That is fine too. And if you're single, you can be with other people. But it's frowned on for, say, a man to go out with a married woman, because that's not right. But the actual ceremony itself, we know nothing about it. So it could be something as simple just moving in together and having a party. We don't think. We don't know that there's any written records in the temple or the state that records this. We just don't know. But it used to confuse Egyptologists because they were very accustomed to, you know, a sort of Christian sort of marriage ceremony. But actually, it's a lot more like today when you know who's together, don't you? And you know who's not together.

[Kate Lister]

Yes, that's a good point. Yeah.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

There might not be a piece of paper to say it, but you don't need that, you know?

[Kate Lister]

You know. Yeah, that's true, actually. So do we know anything about them? Gonna guess. But there's no way of knowing if it was a happy marriage, if they got along. But did they have children?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Well, yeah. The propaganda is that it's always a happy marriage, particularly royal propaganda. So when you have the king and the queen consort, they're always happy together, she's always beautiful. They hold hands together and so on.

[Kate Lister]

Sounds very familiar, but.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yes, but we can't tell what's going on behind the scenes. We know that she has six living daughters because we know their names and we see them in the art, and they start appearing. The first one appears in the first year. So you can sort off. It's not infallible, but you can sort of date artwork by the number of daughters there are. There's no evidence that she had sons. But that doesn't mean that she didn't have sons, because at this time, you wouldn't necessarily put sons into a royal family grouping because the daughters would be seen as part of that family. They weren't going to leave it ever, really. Whereas the sons were potentially kings in their own right, were potentially slightly different, so might not feature in a scene like that. So just because there is no prince there doesn't mean that that prince doesn't exist.

[Kate Lister]

Has anyone suggested an artwork, an inscription, a hieroglyph, might be Nefertiti's son? Has anyone put forward that as evidence?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Well, yeah, quite a few people, I mean, me included, have wondered whether Tutankhamun is Nefertiti's son or not. Yeah, I mean, he could be.

[Kate Lister]

Joyce, why? Why, why do you think that I'm completely invested now?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Well, because after Akhenaten dies, there's a very short period where we have absolutely no idea what happens. And then we find Tutankhamun on the throne. Tutankhamun is about 8 years old when he comes to the throne. We didn't really know this until they found his tomb. It was assumed that Tutankhamun was some sort of rich noble, maybe a prince or something, that came in and took the throne because there was no one around to take it. But when Howard Carter found the body of Tutankhamun, he could see that he was only about 18 years old. And we knew that he reigned for 10 years, so we could work it backwards and see that he must have come to the throne when he was 8. So he's a child, so he's not conquered Egypt or married into the royal family. He's actually born, we assume, royal or part royal. So the likely explanation is that he is a son of Akhenaten. I think it is, anyway. Lots of other people have other possible explanations as well, but to me, it seems likely that he's the son of Akhenaten. The question is, who is his mother? And lots of people have different theories on this and use different amounts of evidence. There's some DNA evidence that people use to suggest that maybe he's born to a sister of Akhenaten. But the DNA evidence can be flawed in mummies because of the conditions, the heat and the chemicals and so on that the bodies have undergone over the years. People who think that Tutankhamun's mother is a harem queen, a lady called Kia, because we know she's a prominent person. But there's also the Possibility. It's possibly the simplest explanation that his mother is Nefertiti. A more complicated explanation is that his mother is Nefertiti's firstborn daughter, which would make Nefertiti's grandma, which is interesting.

[Kate Lister]

They did like to mess with the family trees, didn't they?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yes, yes. And you can spend many a happy hour working out scenarios and counting years and trying to work out whether this person is likely to be old enough to have had a child at this time and so on.

[Kate Lister]

Didn't they do. They've obviously done a lot of research on Tutankhamun's remains, but they did a reconstruction and found that he had a lot of health problems of sort of a prominent overbite in a clubfoot. And I'm sure it was suggested I might be completely wrong, that he might have been the product of incest as a result. Or is that just a naff documentary that I've watched?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Well, there's two things. He could well have been the product of incest because incestuous marriages within the royal family were absolutely fine. Well, brother, sister, or brother, half sister, not parent, child.

[Kate Lister]

Right.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

People used to think they did that, but that there's no real evidence for that at this time at all. So, yes, he could well have been the product of an incestuous marriage. But again, some of the evidence from the body, again, it can be interpreted different ways depending on how you look at it. For example, the club foot, this certainly is twisting to his foot, but there's also the possibility that if you tightly wrap a body.

[Kate Lister]

Yes.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

You can actually twist the foot. So again, you'll get experts arguing that he hasn't got a clubfoot at all. And he's not that disabled at all. He's not shown as particularly having problems with mobility. We see him riding chariots, we see him fighting quite large animals. And so. But that's art, of course.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

We don't know what the truth is there, but again, we have to be very careful. Again, it's another one of those things where there are different aspects to the story.

[Kate Lister]

Was Nefertiti related to Akhenaten, the pharaoh she married?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

I think that she might have been the niece of his mother's mother.

[Kate Lister]

Okay. Cousin. Okay. By ancient Egyptian standards, that's not so bad. That's. That's.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

No, no, no, it's not. It's not. It's a bit odd, actually. It seems to be a family thing that you don't marry your sister at this point in the family, because Akhenaten's parents also weren't brother and sister, but it is in fact, completely normal. They could well have been. Yeah, yeah, he could have. And he had sisters, but he didn't marry one of them. Unless, and I'll just put this out there just to confuse everybody even more, unless one of his sisters changed her name to Nefertiti. And we don't know about it, but that, that's, that seems unlikely, but it's a possibility, I guess. I don't think that did happen. I think that there's some enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that she is the daughter of a man named AI.

[Kate Lister]

Right.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

And he is a prominent courtier, which you would expect at the court of Akhenaten and Akhenaten's father, Amenhotep ii. But there's also evidence to suggest that he might have been the brother of the wife of Amenhotep iii. So he might have been the queen's brother, which would again mean that they were cousins and that would work well. But the interesting thing is that after Tutankhamun dies, Ay, who is possibly Nefertiti's father, then becomes Pharaoh of Egypt.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, that suggests something, doesn't it?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yeah. He's very close to the royal family, isn't he?

[Monika Hannah]

Yeah.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Very well connected. Yes.

[Kate Lister]

Suddenly leap in there and go, I'm Farah now.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yeah. I mean, he's also been hanging around for ages because he's been through all these reigns. He's quite an old man, but he manages to take the throne as well. You need a piece of paper and a pencil if you're studying this. You need to draw it out and look at the possibilities.

[Kate Lister]

A spreadsheet or two.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yes. And remember that brother sister marriages are okay. So you can't do it on one of the commercial packages. They'll let you do family trees because they won't let you do that.

[Kate Lister]

That's amazing.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Every year I set it as a task for my students to do a banditry, and they can't do it online.

[Kate Lister]

Just writing into Ancestry.com of like, please let us include incest in this. So did Nefertiti ever rule as Queen Regent then? Possibly.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

For Tutankhamun, possibly depends when you think she died.

[Kate Lister]

Right.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Because we know she married, we know she has these daughters. Two of her daughters will go on to be queens of Egypt. We used to think that she vanished round about year 12 of her husband's reign. And there was a lot of discussion as to could she really have vanished? Because she's obviously such an important person, which she is. Would she really, truly have vanished? I mean, the answer is yes, because queens vanish all the time, and kings sometimes vanish, too. We just don't. They don't necessarily tell you that their consort has died, but if you take it that he was so in love with her that he wouldn't have just let her go without mentioning it, there are various possibilities. And one possibility that was suggested was that she actually ruled Egypt, but changed her name and the two of them ruled together. But we now know that that is wrong because we have a piece of graffiti discovered in a quarry not far from his city, Amarna, where they both lived, and that mentions that she is still the queen consort in year 16 of his reign, and he will die in year 17. So it looks like right up to the point he died. She was the queen consort, she wasn't ruling Egypt. So we've had to abandon any idea that she might have been ruling during his reign, either with him, or maybe he was ill and she did it instead of him. That's gone because of this piece of graffiti. But I mentioned that we're very confused as to what happens immediately after her husband's death. So there is a possibility, because we do know from the diplomatic correspondence and from various archaeological evidence that there is an important woman around at this time. The truth is, we don't know who she is.

[Kate Lister]

They've had no consideration for future historians at all, do they, these people?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

It might be that she outlives him and yes, that she might guide the young Tutankhamun. We don't know. Personally, I don't think she does because I don't think she's royal enough. I think this is going to be her problem. I think when her husband dies, because she's not born royal, she's not going to do this, but her daughter, her eldest daughter, might well do it. So I would say that this very important female about this time is her daughter, not her.

[Kate Lister]

Right, okay.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

But again, probably not even most people would agree with me. There's a lot of Egyptology discussion about this one, but it certainly is true that there is a very prominent female here. I mean, I wonder if she died before her husband after year 16, but before he died. We don't know.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

And we don't have a body. Well, some people think we have her body. I don't think we have her body. People have constantly tried to identify mummies as her body, but it's never been proven. There's always been some sort of Thing that makes you think, is this really right? And as I've said, DNA evidence is very useful, but it's not as useful in mummies as you'd hope it would be. It can be inaccurate.

[Kate Lister]

Are there any mummies that have sort of come close that you might be wavering on a little bit of, like. Well, I see your point, but I don't think so. Nothing with like, I am Nefertiti written on or.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

No, because I think, being realistic, she's not going to be a teenager, is she? She's had six daughters and she's been queen for 17 years. So I think she's going to be in her 30s or her 40s or even older. I mean, she might outlast Eye and carry on even further. We don't know. She might retire to a harem palace, which some queens did. But so I think quite a few of the ones that have been suggested are too young to be Nefertiti. And I don't think we've found her, but we're still looking.

[Kate Lister]

Would she have had a big tumor of her own? Would she have been important enough for that?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

It would depend. If she ruled Egypt by herself, then possibly. But a standard queen, no. But it's all very confused. Again, you probably don't need. You don't want to hear this, but because Akhenaten built a special city that he and Nefertiti lived in. He called it Amarna. He went there and he did this because he dedicated himself to a new cult, the cult of a God named as the Aten, which is the light of the sun. Right. And he only wanted to worship this God. And this is really bad news because as I started off saying, the king is actually responsible for all the cults in Egypt and all the gods.

[Kate Lister]

Yes.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

So this was quite actually a frightening time for Egypt because the king is refusing to interact with most of the gods and only dealing with one of them. So that could have been really dangerous. So he retreats to his city with Nefertiti and they live there and then kind of overthrow all tradition that has been before. So, for example, we start to see more art of the royal family and Nefertiti is prominent. And we're asking ourselves, well, is this because she really is more prominent, or is this because he's got rid of all the old gods? So where you would have old gods in the art, she and here appearing, they're taking the place of the gods right at this point. So it's very difficult to know what would have happened with the burial, if she died before him. But he did intend, he had built a tomb at Amana for the royal family, and he did intend her to be buried there, because he did actually write this down for us. So maybe the simplest explanation is to say she died at Amana and was buried there. He died at Amana, was buried there, and then when Tutankham came to the throne after a couple of years, he actually abandoned the old religion that his father had brought him up in and went back to the traditional religion of ancient Egypt, started to worship all the gods, and abandoned the city that Akhenaten and Nefertiti had ruled from. He transported the bodies from Amarna back to the Valley of the Kings, because if he'd left them at Amarna, anyone who died and was in a tomb there, if he'd left them there, they would have been robbed, right? So he transported them back. He seems to have denuded them of all their property as well. Obviously, that's quite a good way of acquiring your own grave goods. And then he'd place them in different tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Joyce after this short break.

[Monika Hannah]

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[Monika Hannah]

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[Kate Lister]

No, no, no, no, no, don't.

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[Joyce Tyldesley]

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[Kate Lister]

Have we ever found Akhenaten? I say we. Like I've ever looked. But have archaeologists ever found Akhenaten?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Some people think that we have. There's a body that we call KV55.

[Kate Lister]

We wouldn't like that, would we?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

No. It was found in a tomb that had been used as a workshop. So when Tutankhamun brought all the Amarna royal family that had died back from Amana to the Valley of the Kings, he put them in a workshop, stripped them off, re bandaged them, and then send them out to different places. But one body was left in this tomb. The tomb is also coincidentally called KV55. So this body is a male body. Now some people think that it's like an Aten, Right? Some people think it's Tutankhamun's half brother or full brother, a man named Smenkar Ray, who possibly ruled in that tiny little period between Tutankhamun and Akhenaten. I think it's Menkaure because I think it's too young to be Akhenaten. Right. The body seems too young. It seems to be in early 20s. But other people have put the age much older. So again, it's a thing that people might want to read up on because it's absolutely fascinating.

[Kate Lister]

That is, isn't it?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yeah.

[Kate Lister]

And I have heard it suggested that maybe Nefertiti's body was in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Is that just a complete no go for you?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

I can't see how it would happen because I don't think she ruled Egypt. So if she didn't rule Egypt, she died as a queen consort. She wouldn't expect to be in a prime tomb in the Valley of the Kings. But then some people think she did rule Egypt, or at least helped Tutankhamun, even if she didn't step forward herself. And what happened is that they were scanning the walls in Tutankhamun's burial chamber because they were going to make a replica tomb so that tourists could visit a replica tomb, a really good replica tomb, rather than visiting the original tomb, because it's damaging the walls of the original tomb for too many people to go in it. And there's what looked like a bump of the wall. And an academic came up with the idea that maybe there would be a door through there and maybe that Nefertiti is buried beyond that door. Dr. Nicholas Reeves and maybe it is, but I think it's very difficult to.

[Kate Lister]

Tell if we never checked. Are we not allowed?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Well, we'd have to take the tomb apart, basically. We take the paintings off the wall and, you know, it's not going to happen. I don't think it happened because I can't see the scenario that it would happen. And it would be odd for Tutankhamun to effectively be buried in someone else's antechamber. But Tutankhamun's burial is odd anyway. It's almost certainly not the tomb he was intended to be buried in. He looks like one of another workshop tomb, because we think that the tomb that Tutankhamun was building for himself in the Valley of the Kings, when he'd left Amarna and gone back to the old religion after he died, I said that I took the tomb. The idea is that I booted Tutankhamun out of his really grand tomb and put him into the small tomb that I had been using for himself or reserving for himself so that they swapped. But, yeah, it's really interesting, but there's no aspect of this story that's simple, is there?

[Kate Lister]

No, nothing at all. It's fascinating, but if we think about Queen Nefertiti, so what I'm taking away from this is we don't know where she was born, we don't really know who her family was, we don't know what she was like. We don't really know when they got married or how old she was. We don't know if it was a happy marriage, we don't know when she died, where she was buried or if she ruled Egypt. So why is there this Legend and this mythology about this particular woman. Given how little we actually know about.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Her, I think we've been seduced by her beauty in the art that we see her. And we think that such a fascinating looking woman. There is one particular image that a lot of people have seen that's of a piece that is currently in Berlin Museum. And she's very striking. She's absolutely beautiful. Beautiful. And she's got no hair. She's got the tall crown on. She's got no hair. So that stops her being dated in a way. And she's very regal looking and very colorful.

[Kate Lister]

Got a picture of her up on my computer right now. And she's like, she could be walking down any catwalk in the world, couldn't she?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

She could. And she appeals to pretty much everybody, like men like her, women like her, people of all ages, all ethnicities like her. You know, she's really, really attractive. And I think we've just been seduced by this. It sounds like I'm trying to do her down and I'm not. I do think she's a really important woman, but I think what she is is a woman in a family of really important women. And that by boosting her up, we're maybe taking away from her mother in law, T, who was again very powerful woman, and her two daughters who ruled Egypt, Mary Tartan and Kasempa Aten, they're also very powerful women. This is clearly an era where women can come to the fore and can really perform.

[Kate Lister]

I had no idea that two of her daughters ruled. I mean, that seems even more impressive than a mum who's got a lovely neck. But we don't hear about them.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

One of them, Anca Saint Part and was married to Tutankhamun. And we know that for a fact.

[Kate Lister]

Okay. They kept it in the family.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yes, they started to. Brother Sister Murray, at this point that.

[Kate Lister]

Bust us in Berlin, is that the most immediate image that we have of her? Does she survive in other artwork?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Yes, we have a lot of artworks of her. Because when Akhenaten built his new city, there was nothing there. So he builds it, but he needed artwork absolutely everywhere. So he had studios set up that were churning out royal images which were going all over the city. Because these were important, because the old gods have gone. He was encouraging the elite of Amarna. The people who lived there that really mattered were encouraged to worship the new God, the Aten. But you couldn't just go in a field and worship the sun. You had to worship via the royal family. So a Lot of these images would have been to help people worship, or people would have been in the houses. And also, of course, obviously to show allegiance to the king. But everywhere needed to be decorated. So we have so many of these. But she looks different. She looks different in two dimensions when she's carved or painted on a wall. And she looks in three dimensions in sculpture. To keep some consistency. They're obviously using a model in the workshop. So there is a general similarity and you can see that they're looking the same. But as I said before, it doesn't mean necessarily that's what she looks like. It means that's the image that they've chosen for her to look like. I guess all royal art really has always been the same, hasn't it?

[Kate Lister]

Yes.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

You can kind of choose what you want to look like because not many people will actually see you. Nobody will know how accurate it is. So you probably never really saw herself very much. Because they have little tiny metal mirrors. The elite have them. But there's no big looking glass.

[Kate Lister]

When we're looking at images of her across different art forms, they are reasonably consistent. The big hat and the long neck.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

She doesn't always wear that crown. She wears other ones as well. But that's the one that she's most common on. But no, not really. I would say the two diamond dimensional ones. She's much more. Looks much more like her husband. Obviously there's two sets of artists working here. She's much more sort of haggard looking.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, you'd shoot the artist, wouldn't you?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Well, we think Akhenaten wanted himself to be depicted in quite a strange way, because yet another aspect of his reign is when he comes to the throne, he abandons the traditional art form that kings normally have. Normally Egyptian kings all look the same, and it's deliberate. So you'll recognize the king and the gods will recognize the king. And you can see them doing their traditional actions. They beat up foreigners and they worship gods and so on, and they have kilts and they look quite young and fit always, no matter what they actually look like. But Akhenaten looks completely different. He must have been telling his artist what to do, because no one would have dared to do this without his permission. But he's got a very long, thin face and he makes it look longer. He's got a long, thin beard and he quite often wears a tall crown. So he looks very long and thin. He's got almond shaped eyes. He's got a long nose which kind of emphasizes it. And his body has got very narrow shoulders and he's got what looked like feminine breasts and well developed waist and quite wide hips.

[Kate Lister]

Why do you think they made him a bit more booby than he probably was?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

Well, that's not a word we don't know. A bit curvier, presumably he proved it because otherwise something terrible would have happened. And there are enough of them. It's not just a one off and it does get gradually, slightly more normal looking as things go on. But we wondered, first of all, does he look like that? There is some evidence actually that Tutankhamun had really wide hips because he had some garments buried in his tomb. And when they've been reconstructed by archaeologists and they've tried to try them on, they have actually got quite. His kilts are quite wider in the waist. Yeah. So maybe it's a family trait to start with. Some people have suggested it might even be an illness, but other people have suggested, no, it's not what he looked like, but it's what he wanted to convey. And he's worshiping this new God, which is both a father and a mother, so he doesn't want to be necessarily gender specific. And maybe this is what he's trying to convey. But it's such a new idea to the Egyptians, it's never happened before that it's confusing everybody. But as he assumes this form, his court, particularly in two dimensional sort of art, they all start to look the same, so Nefertiti starts to mirror him and it's a flattering thing for the king. You all start to look like the king.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

And you don't get it so much Attamana in the sculpture. But at Thebes, before he goes to this new city, we've got some very striking images of Akhenate. Some people hate them and some people actually are quite attracted to him. He's got quite sort of sensuous lips, you know, he's. They sound like they should be horrible, but they're not. They're not. They're very striking and of course they're designed to be seen from below. A lot of these are colossal statues, very compelling.

[Kate Lister]

So final question then, what do you think is the legacy of Queen Nefertiti? Because I sort of get the sense from talking to you that, like, she's fascinating, she's amazing. But there are better, better queens.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

I wouldn't say better. No, better. Better is too judgmental. I think, for me, the legacy is not to just pick out individuals from history and focus on them and ignore everyone else. Around because you can miss some really interesting people if you do that. And I think we focus maybe on the wrong things. With Nefertiti, it's not really right to focus on someone because of their beauty, is it? It's a trap to fall into. You have to fight your way out of it. And we can't assume that just because someone is beautiful that they're good and kind and all that. And we sort of a bit do that with Nefertiti.

[Kate Lister]

We do.

[Joyce Tyldesley]

So I think that's the lesson to learn from it. But the whole family was an absolute family full of fascinating women.

[Kate Lister]

I can't believe that you've managed to cover it all in the short space that we've had. It's absolutely mind boggling. Your office must just have one of those boards with lots of pieces of string trying to work out who everybody is. If people want to know more about you and your work, Joyce, where can they find you?

[Joyce Tyldesley]

I'm at Manchester University, so I have written a book called Nefertiti's Face, which deals with some of the things that we've talked about here. Also, this is the whole effect of how art can influence us, how we regard the past. We can be influenced without realizing that we're being influenced. And just how clever the ancient Egyptians were, how they used symbols and how they. Everything is absolutely fascinating. I love Egyptology. You can probably tell.

[Kate Lister]

After this break, we're going to cross over to Monica Hannah to hear tales of the fraudulent papers and Nazi hordes that have kept Nefertiti's bust from her home. Thanks for listening to Betwixt the Sheets. To get all history hit podcasts, ad free early access and bonus episodes, head over to historyhit.com forward/subscribe or you can sign up on Apple Podcasts with just one click.

[Monika Hannah]

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[Kate Lister]

Monica has. Anna, how are you doing?

[F]

I'm good. Kate, how's everything?

[Kate Lister]

I'm ecstatic because I get to talk to you about the bust of Nefertiti. Obviously, I knew the bust. It's iconic, it's beautiful. I hadn't realized the troubled history behind it. I had been quite ignorant of that until I knew I was going to come and talk to you. So I suppose my first question is going to be the bust of Nefertiti. It's in Berlin. It's been in Germany for 100 years. How did an Egyptian bust of Nefertiti end up in Berlin?

[F]

It's a very long story that starts actually with Napoleon Bonaparte. So Napoleon comes to Egypt thinking of himself as a descendant of Alexander the Great. He wants to appropriate the glory of Alexander the Great.

[Kate Lister]

Okay.

[F]

He fails miserably in the military. In the campaign, Nelson, the British general, burns all his fleet in Aboukir. So Napoleon, to spin off such a hard defeat, he creates the Institute Egypt, and he writes the book, the Description de l'egypt and a lot of the savants that he brought because he had this grandiose ideas of bringing enlightenment to the Egyptians. We poor Egyptians who needed to be enlightened. Oh, dear. He came and many of the objects were stolen. The 17 famous big objects that were part of the Aboukir Treaty, they go to the British, they take them as a spoil of war, out of which there is the famous Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. The French have a terrible military defeat. They leave. Egypt withdraw. But Egyptology becomes French. The study of the ancient Egyptian past becomes a French monopoly. Especially after Francois Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone and we're able to read the Egyptian texts and so on. During the whole 19th century, Egypt becomes ransacked. There is a famous book by Brian Fagan that describes this period and he calls, he actually entitles his book, the Rape of the Narrative. So basically, the Nile is raped by all these imperialist and colonialist powers trying to snatch an obelisk from here, a stele from there, a statue from. What have you.

[Kate Lister]

Did Egypt have a government of its own? Did it have anybody going, Hang on a minute, give me a second. Nobody was doing that. Nobody was representing Egypt in any of this. There wasn't a government?

[F]

No. Egypt was under layered colonialism. First the French and the Ottomans who formed the combined army. Then by the end of the 19th century, the Ottomans and the British.

[Kate Lister]

Wow.

[F]

So we were always not just under the colonialism of one force, but we were continuously under such layered colonialism.

[Kate Lister]

So nobody's representing Egypt and all these people just come in and start stealing, basically.

[F]

Precisely. And you know, Mehmet Ali, the Turkish sovereign of Egypt, wanted all the European consuls to be happy about him, so he would give them the Antiquity is with permissions. He writes a decree that regulates the export, so no one can export unless he gives them approval. So basically it was also using this as a political tool. If you bring me arms from England, I'll give you antiquities. If you bring me arms from France, I'll give you antiquities. Then by the end of the 19th century, Egypt was under the British colonialism and the Ottoman colonialism. There was a law, a decree since 1890 that finally said that all Egyptian antiquities belong to the Egyptian state and Egypt. In return for the favors that the excavators put to dig the antiquities, Egypt can cede half of what is found to the excavator. Half that was in 1891. But articles 5 and 6 of this Kidieval decree said that Egypt had the right to buy any object from the excavator's lot and that both lots should be completely equal and no masterpieces would leave Egypt.

[Kate Lister]

So how did Nefertiti get out? Because that's a masterpiece. Even I know that.

[F]

Exactly. Everybody knows it's a masterpiece. It's a deceit. It's a proper deceit. So the Egyptians were never part of the Antiquity Service, even at that time. By that time, we had a few Egyptians who were working. But the French then took control. After Mariette battle, Russia came. French Mariette was a Louvre curator came and became the head of the Antiquity Service. And he would forbid Egyptians from going to the museum to study texts because he was afraid that if Egyptians would become very good in the study of their ancient pasts, the French and the British and the Germans would have no jobs in Egyptology and they can no longer trade in antiquities. By the end of the 19th century, we hear of Ludwig Burkhart, who is the person who later discovered Nefertiti. He was trained as an architect and he comes and works in Egypt in the German Consulate around 1898, 1899. Then he becomes part of the Egyptian Egyptological Committee, which is the committee that was managing the Antiquity Service. And it never had an Egyptian until 1952. So back then they were mostly French. Then with Lord Cromer, the British sovereign, he would put forth so that there would be more British. And then we had one German who was Ludwig Pokhard. They are the people officially protecting the Egyptian antiquities. Yes. You know, this is how you put a wolf in the den of hens. So in 1905, he becomes a member of the Egyptology Committee. He excavates in Egypt, in Abusir, in Abydos, in different places. Then he becomes the excavator of a very rich German cotton trader called James Simon, who wants to buy antiquities from all the Middle east to put in the DEGE or the Deutsch Orientalisch Gesellschaft in Berlin. So he commissions Burckhardt to go and excavate. Burckhardt, of course, knew that he was not allowed to take masterpieces. Especially that in 1912, in June 1912, the first Egyptian law was issued. You know, the first Antiquities Protection law was in Italy in 1905. Then the second was in Egypt in 1912 to protect the antiquities. And it emphatically stated that no masterpieces are allowed to leave the country, that Egypt owned all the objects, but could give some of them to the excavator. Burkhardt knew this.

[Kate Lister]

There's no way he didn't know it, of course.

[F]

I mean, he was part of the Egyptology Committee who implemented the law on other Egyptologists. So it's like a judge taking a bribe. Basically the same ethical situation.

[Kate Lister]

This is really dodgy. Who finds Nefertiti?

[F]

He found Nefertiti, I think on the 6th of December in 1912, so six months or five months from the issuance of the first antiquities law. He writes in his diary a letter that it's wonderful that you have to see it, that it's amazing that I cannot explain it in words about the finding. Okay, Then he takes all the objects from Tell El Amarna that he discovered. He takes it to Cairo for the division of findings. And of course, still no Egyptians worked at the Antiquity Service, which was monopolized by the French. And in fact, you can read in a study by Gadir that he writes that one of the French journalists said that if Egypt had fleeted us politically, Egyptology is French, so he would really. Or Ancient Egypt is French. This is the amount of cultural appropriation that you could see, even said by a journalist in a newspaper.

[Kate Lister]

Wow.

[F]

So Monsieur Lefebvre was the inspector of the Antiquity Serpent Service under Gaston Maspiro. They would check the findings. Probably wrote in the division verbal that she was ahead of an Amarna princess, although he knew very well from her crown that she was the queen. But he dubiously said it's an Amarna princess. We don't know whether he covered her with mud or whether he just did not show it. We really do not know exactly what.

[Kate Lister]

Happened happened, but there was lies being told, of course. Yeah.

[F]

Then he returns to Germany. The whole collection from Tele La Marna becomes the property of James Simon, the Jewish cotton trader who shows it and exhibits it at home for very German notables who see it. Then James Simon, by the end of the First World War, decides to give the whole collection to the Berlin Museum. But in his will of giving the whole object, he writes that if Egypt asks back for the bust of Nefertiti, the museum must return it. So this was the clause of giving Nefertiti to the Berlin Museum by James Simon.

[Kate Lister]

And did they ask for it back?

[F]

Of course, many times. So in 1919, Egypt has its first national revolution. People take the streets wanting all sorts of colonialists to be away. And there is a new found sense of an Egyptian modern identity. So 1922, Carter discovers the tomb of Tutankhamun. The news go wildfire, and because of the colonialist rivalry between the Germans and the British, they put Nefertiti on display. They have been hiding it all this time because they did not want the Egyptians to claim it back.

[Kate Lister]

Right.

[F]

But they could not tolerate the imperialist rivalry. They thought that all the collection of Tutankhamun was going to the British Museum. So they put Nefertiti on display and then Egypt finds out that such a masterpiece has left Egypt. Of course we go to very long negotiations, usually between Pierre Lacault was the French, after Maspiro was responsible for the antiquity service in Egypt, and Heinrich Schaeffer, the director of the Berlin Museum, the negotiations fail. But then Hassan Nash ad Besha, the Egyptian ambassador in Berlin, tries to pull through a deal with the Prussian government. The Prussian government is the actual owner of the bust, I think, even until today. Then it fails because Hitler, Third Reich veto the final approval to return back the bust of Nefertiti and lose that chance. But even at that time, speaking again of this idea of layered colonialism, in the Kew archive of the British National Archive, we find correspondence of the British Ambassador in Berlin writing notes to the chief curator of the British Museum, making sure that the negotiations between the Egyptians and the Germans fail. And they write that or else we'll have to restitute back the Rosetta Stone to the Egyptians and the Parthenon marbles to the Greeks.

[Kate Lister]

It's so sneaky, of course.

[F]

Wait, wait. It even gets more interesting. Then in 1946, after World War II, Nurashi Besha, the Foreign Minister, sends letters to the Quadripartite army asking back for the bust that was found in Witness. After World War II, the British and the French say that the bust was found in an American control area. The Russians say, yes, you can have the bust back, but when the letters go to Washington, the so called Monuments Men that we've seen their beautiful film and saw how brave they were in restituting the different objects, they actually object and say, we will not return objects before the war because then the museums will lose important objects as the Rosetta Stone and as the parson and marbles, even without them knowing. But it's the same colonialist rationale, even in the heads of the most progressive people that we thought were the Monuments Men.

[Kate Lister]

So to recap, Nefertiti was found, but she was basically not quite snuck out of the country. But she wasn't declared for what she was. He knew that was the Nefertiti bust and he did not declare it. She gets taken to Berlin where everyone's really excited to have this bust, but they don't want to show anybody because they know the Egyptians will get upset. Then Tutankhamun is found because they said, well, we've got Egyptian things too. They put the bust on display and then it all kicks off.

[F]

Precisely, yes.

[Kate Lister]

Wow, okay. Didn't Hitler really like Nefertiti? Didn't he get involved in this?

[F]

Yes. And he said that he was in love with her and that part of his hallucinations of this Grand Europa Museum was to have Nefertiti as the centerpiece. And I think that one of the references mentioned that he said that what belongs to the Germans, the Germans keep.

[Kate Lister]

It seems strange for Hitler to have such an attraction to an Egyptian woman. What? I mean, I know he was mad, but what was.

[F]

Because she was king and she was powerful and I think he was attracted to power and he even went along and said she might even have Aryan blood. He would have people write articles in the new German newspaper saying that Nefertiti was Aryan.

[Kate Lister]

Wow. So basically all the museums close ranks. If they have to give Nefertiti back, then they're gonna have to give a lot of other stuff back.

[F]

Yes. It will open the doors that they don't want to open.

[Kate Lister]

And is that still the state of it today? Where's Nefertiti to this day?

[F]

She's still in Berlin.

[Kate Lister]

She's still in Berlin. And what's the argument? Why? It seems really clear cut to me that she was deceptively taken out of the country and that it broke the contract at the time, which was that you can't take masterpieces. Then breaks the will of the guy Simon who said it has to be returned.

[F]

Exactly. They would even lie in the correspondence to the Egyptians and say, we're trying to reach Mr. James Simon to get his permission in 1928, although he had already said that clause in giving the whole collection. So they would even lie to the Egyptians in the negotiation. Just.

[Kate Lister]

It's so bad. Can I ask, what does Nefertiti mean to Egypt? I mean, even if obviously this is a terrible. She should never have been taken, but why is this bust so important to Egypt and Egypt's identity?

[F]

I think because also for Egyptian women, there is this idea of feminism where Nefertiti is one of the chief patrons. You see her even, you know, when women were sexually harassed in 2011 revolution, they would carry flags with the bus for them. She was this powerful woman that is a symbol of powerful Egyptian women. And I think she has to be back also, because it's part of the identity and the image of modern and contemporary Egyptian society.

[Kate Lister]

She's hugely important and it's so iconic. Have they ever changed the argument as to why they can't give them back?

[F]

They have the silliest excuses, like we have a law in Germany that what stays in Germany for 25 years cannot be returned back.

[Kate Lister]

Right, okay.

[F]

Yeah, exactly. And that what Burkhardt did was legal. And I was even once attacked by someone who supported the against argument that it's unfair to do this to Burkhart because Burkhart was Jewish. But then the argument the other way around is that James Simon was Jewish and they ignored his wish.

[Kate Lister]

Yes.

[F]

They don't want to give it back because it's producing so much money for the museum. Can you imagine the amount of merchandise that the museum is selling with Nefertiti? The amount of tickets they're selling for people just who they will only want to go and see Nefertiti. Yeah, it's money. It's the amount of money they've made in this 100 years that's making them not wanting to give it back. They would rather give aid money to Egypt, but they would not give Nefertiti because Nefertiti is this sustainable object that keeps bringing the money to their museum institution.

[Kate Lister]

Do you think we could go and steal her, Monica? We'll just bust her out.

[F]

Actually, there were two great artists, Noura El Badri and Nellis Nikolay, who did the digital heist. So they went with a scanner and they actually leaked. Because even Until, I think 2015 or 2014, the digital scanning of the Nefertiti was also kept imprisoned in the museum.

[Kate Lister]

And they snuck in and scanned her.

[F]

Yes.

[Kate Lister]

Wow.

[F]

So there was. They also did a digital heist.

[Kate Lister]

Monica, you have been fascinated to talk to and if people want to find you and learn more about your work. Are you on social media? Do you have a website?

[F]

Yes, there is a website that we've created called bringnafretiti home.com people can read about our research and they can also sign a petition.

[Kate Lister]

Thank you so much for talking to me today. And Free Nefertiti.

[F]

Free Nefertiti. Yes.

[Kate Lister]

Thanks for listening and thank you so much to Joyce and Monica for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email [e-mail] Coming soon we have the rest of our series Inside the Witch Trials where we will be journeying from Iceland to Salem and we will also be exploring the sex lives of presidents, although not at the same time. This podcast was edited by Tom Delaghi and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit this podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

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