Nefertiti: Queen of Egypt and the Famous Berlin Bust

Nefertiti was the chief queen of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, who reigned in about 1353–1336 BC during the Eighteenth Dynasty. She stood at the centre of his religious revolution in favour of the sun disc, the Aten, and is shown in art with a prominence few Egyptian queens ever received. Today she is known worldwide through a painted limestone bust found at Amarna in 1912 and displayed in Berlin, while her final years and burial remain among Egyptology’s most debated puzzles.

Origins and marriage

Almost nothing certain is known about Nefertiti’s birth. No surviving text names her parents, and she never carries the title “king’s daughter”, which suggests she was not of royal blood. Her name, meaning “the beautiful one has come”, is Egyptian, so the old theory that she was a foreign princess from the kingdom of Mitanni has largely been abandoned.

A popular hypothesis makes her a daughter of Ay, a powerful courtier who later became king. Ay’s wife Tey carried the title “nurse” of the queen, and a woman named Mutbenret (or Mutnodjmet) is described as Nefertiti’s sister. The link to Ay is plausible but unproven, and historians present it as a possibility rather than a fact.

Nefertiti was already queen when her husband came to the throne as Amenhotep IV, son of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye, in about 1353 BC. She appears in his earliest monuments at Thebes, especially in a temple called the Hwt-benben at Karnak, where she is shown leading offerings to the Aten, sometimes without the king present at all.

Queen of the Aten

Around the fifth year of the reign, about 1349 BC, the king changed his name to Akhenaten, “effective for the Aten”, and Nefertiti added the epithet Neferneferuaten to her own name. The royal couple then founded a new capital, Akhetaten, at the site now called Amarna, dedicated to the sun disc alone. The movement is described in more detail in Akhenaten and the Amarna Revolution.

In the art of this period Nefertiti is everywhere. She appears beside the king under the rays of the Aten, which end in small hands offering the sign of life. Unusually, she is also shown in poses normally reserved for kings, such as striking down foreign enemies with a mace on carved blocks from Karnak, and she wore a distinctive tall, flat-topped crown that was hers alone.

Scenes of family life were another novelty. Reliefs and stelae show the king and queen kissing their daughters, holding them on their laps and playing with them. Egyptologists read these images as a religious statement: the royal family were the only direct intermediaries between the Aten and humanity, so the household itself became an object of devotion.

Her daughters

Nefertiti and Akhenaten had six daughters, all born within roughly the first decade of the reign: Meritaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Neferneferuaten Tasherit, Neferneferure and Setepenre. No son of Nefertiti is attested.

The second daughter, Meketaten, died around the thirteenth or fourteenth year of the reign. A scene in the royal tomb at Amarna shows the king and queen grieving over her body. Ankhesenpaaten later married Tutankhaten, the future Tutankhamun, and became Queen Ankhesenamun.

Disappearance and the question of rule

For many years scholars believed that Nefertiti vanished from the record around year 12 or 14, perhaps through death or disgrace. That view changed in 2012, when a team from the University of Leuven published a short building inscription at the limestone quarry of Deir Abu Hinnis. Dated to year 16 of Akhenaten, it names “the great royal wife … Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti”, showing she was still queen near the very end of the reign.

What followed is uncertain. A female ruler named Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten held power briefly around the end of Akhenaten’s reign or soon after, and many Egyptologists identify her with Nefertiti. Others argue that the ruler was her eldest daughter Meritaten. A further shadowy king, Smenkhkare, adds to the confusion; some scholars once thought he was Nefertiti under another name, a view now less widely held.

If Nefertiti did rule, it was only for a short time, and the throne then passed to the boy Tutankhaten, whose parents were probably Akhenaten and a sister of Akhenaten rather than Nefertiti herself.

The Berlin bust

On 6 December 1912 a German excavation at Amarna, funded by the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft) and led by Ludwig Borchardt, was clearing a house in the southern part of the city. An ivory horse-blinker found there named the sculptor Thutmose, and the building turned out to be his workshop. In one room the team found a painted bust of a queen wearing the flat-topped crown: Nefertiti.

The bust is about 47 cm high and made of a limestone core covered in layers of painted gypsum plaster. The right eye has a quartz inlay with black pigment, while the left eye socket is empty; no inlay was ever found, and the bust was probably a workshop model that was never meant to be finished. A CT scan carried out in 2006, with results published in 2009, showed that the stone core beneath the plaster has slightly different features, including fine lines around the mouth.

Under the system of the time, finds were divided between the Egyptian antiquities service and the excavators. In January 1913 the bust was assigned to the German side and shipped to Berlin, where it entered the private collection of the sponsor James Simon before he gave it to the state museums. It went on public display in 1924. Since 2009 it has stood in the Neues Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island.

Egypt has repeatedly asked for the bust’s return, arguing that its importance was not fairly presented at the division. Germany maintains that the division was carried out lawfully. The debate continues and has become a leading example in wider discussions about museum collections and archaeological heritage.

Myths and facts

Myth: Nefertiti was a foreign princess. There is no evidence for this. Her name is Egyptian, and most scholars now think she came from an elite Egyptian family, possibly related to Ay.

Myth: Nefertiti’s mummy has been found. Several identifications have been proposed, most famously the “Younger Lady” from tomb KV35 in 2003. DNA research published in 2010 identified that woman as a daughter of Amenhotep III and the mother of Tutankhamun, which most specialists consider incompatible with Nefertiti.

Myth: A hidden chamber in Tutankhamun’s tomb holds her burial. In 2015 the Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves suggested that Nefertiti might lie behind the painted walls of tomb KV62 in the Valley of the Kings. Radar surveys produced conflicting results, and an Italian-led survey published in 2018 found no evidence of hidden rooms. The idea remains unconfirmed.

Fact: The bust shows an ideal, not a photograph. Like all royal portraits, it presents an idealised image shaped by the conventions of the late Amarna workshop, so it cannot tell us exactly what the queen looked like.

Legacy

After the Amarna period ended, later kings tried to erase its memory. Akhenaten’s temples were dismantled, their decorated blocks were reused as fill in new buildings, and the names of the Amarna rulers were left out of official king lists. Nefertiti’s images suffered with the rest, and for more than three thousand years she was almost forgotten.

Her rediscovery came gradually. Travellers and scholars of the nineteenth century copied her figure in the rock tombs of Amarna’s officials, but it was the 1912 bust that made her famous. Its calm, symmetrical face and long neck became a modern standard of elegance, reproduced on posters, stamps and countless souvenirs.

For historians, Nefertiti is equally important as evidence of how far a queen could share in royal power. Her depiction as a smiting ruler, her separate cult role and her possible reign as Neferneferuaten make her a key figure in studies of women and kingship in ancient Egypt.

Key people

• Nefertiti – great royal wife of Akhenaten and possibly a ruler in her own right.
• Akhenaten – her husband, the pharaoh who promoted the exclusive worship of the Aten.
• Ay – senior courtier and later king, often suggested as her father.
• Thutmose – royal sculptor in whose Amarna workshop the bust was found.
• Ludwig Borchardt – German archaeologist who led the 1912 excavation.

Timeline

• c. 1353 BC: Amenhotep IV becomes king with Nefertiti as his great royal wife.
• c. 1349 BC: The king takes the name Akhenaten; Nefertiti adds the name Neferneferuaten.
• c. 1346 BC: Boundary stelae mark out the new capital, Akhetaten (Amarna).
• c. 1342 BC: A great reception of foreign tribute in year 12 shows the royal family together.
• c. 1338 BC: A quarry inscription dated to year 16 still calls Nefertiti great royal wife.
• 1912, 6 December: Borchardt’s team finds the painted bust in the workshop of Thutmose.
• 1913, January: The bust is assigned to the German excavators and taken to Berlin.
• 1924: The bust goes on public display in Berlin.
• 2009: The bust is installed in the restored Neues Museum.
• 2012: Publication of the year 16 inscription from Deir Abu Hinnis.

Why it matters

Nefertiti was one of the most visible queens in Egyptian history, a partner in a religious experiment that reshaped art and kingship for nearly two decades. Her bust has turned her into a modern icon of beauty and of ancient Egypt itself, while her disappearance, possible reign and missing tomb keep her at the heart of research into the Amarna age.