Nefertiti Queen And Pharaoh Of Egypt

Egypt's sun queen magnificently revealed in a new book by renowned Egyptologist, Aidan Dodson During the last half of the fourteenth century BC, Egypt was perhaps at the height of its prosperity. It was against this background that the “Amarna Revolution” occurred. Throughout, its instigator, King Akhenaten, had at his side his Great Wife, Nefertiti. When a painted bust of the queen found at Amarna in 1912 was first revealed to the public in the 1920s, it soon became one of the great artistic icons of the world. Nefertiti's name and face are perhaps the best known of any royal woman of ancient Egypt and one of the best recognized figures of antiquity, but her image has come in many ways to overshadow the woman herself. Nefertiti’s current world dominion as a cultural and artistic icon presents an interesting contrast with the way in which she was actively written out of history soon after her own death. This book explores what we can reconstruct of the life of the queen, tracing the way in which she and her image emerged in the wake of the first tentative decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs during the 1820s–1840s, and then took on the world over the next century and beyond. All indications are that her final fate was a tragic one, but although every effort was made to wipe out Nefertiti's memory after her death, modern archaeology has rescued the queen-pharaoh from obscurity and set her on the road to today’s international status.

Egypt's sun queen magnificently revealed in a new book by renowned Egyptologist, Aidan Dodson Nefertiti's name and face are perhaps the best known of any royal woman of ancient Egypt, yet for many she is little more than an icon or archetype of ancient beauty. However, recent research has fleshed out our knowledge--or at least credible hypotheses--about her life and career, pointing to her being an important political figure in her own right, rather than simply the principal spouse of the so-called "heretic king," Akhenaten, and mother-in-law (if not mother) of Tutankhamun. In Nefertiti, Queen and Pharaoh of Egypt, Aidan Dodson explores what we actually know about Nefertiti, and what we can realistically extrapolate about her from the diverse and often incomplete data that survives regarding her life from the late fourteenth century BC. In doing so, he sketches a career that saw Nefertiti begin as a scion of a royally connected provincial military family and end as a fully-fledged female pharaoh, who played a crucial role in the first stages of the return to orthodoxy from her late husband's religious revolution. All indications are that her final fate was a tragic one, but although every effort was made to wipe out Nefertiti's memory after her death, modern archaeology has rescued the queen-pharaoh from obscurity and set her on the road to the status of a modern cultural icon.

Read in "Nefertiti" about a queen renowned for her beauty during a tumultuous time in Egyptian history.

For over a decade Nefertiti, wife of the heretic king Akhenaten, was the most influential woman in the Bronze Age world; a beautiful queen blessed by the sun-god, adored by her family and worshipped by her people. Her image and her name were celebrated throughout Egypt and her future seemed golden. Suddenly Nefertiti disappeared from the royal family, vanishing so completely that it was as if she had never been. No record survives to detail her death, no monument serves to mourn her passing and to this day her end remains an enigma - her body has never been found. Joyce Tyldesley here provides a detailed discussion of the life and times of Nefertiti, Egypt's sun queen, set against the background of the ephemeral Amarna court.

Little is known about Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen whose name means “a beautiful woman has come.” She was the wife of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who ushered in the dramatic Amarna Age, and she bore him at least six children. She played a prominent role in political and religious affairs, but after Akhenaten’s death she apparently vanished and was soon forgotten. Yet Nefertiti remains one of the most famous and enigmatic women who ever lived. Her instantly recognizable face adorns a variety of modern artifacts, from expensive jewelry to cheap postcards, t-shirts, and bags, all over the world. She has appeared on page, stage, screen, and opera. In Britain, one woman has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on plastic surgery in hope of resembling the long-dead royal. This enduring obsession is the result of just one object: the lovely and mysterious Nefertiti bust, created by the sculptor Thutmose and housed in Berlin’s Neues Museum since before World War II. In Nefertiti’s Face, Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley tells the story of the bust, from its origins in a busy workshop of the late Bronze Age to its rediscovery and controversial removal to Europe in 1912 and its present status as one of the world’s most treasured artifacts. This wide-ranging history takes us from the temples and tombs of ancient Egypt to wartime Berlin and engages the latest in Pharaonic scholarship. Tyldesley sheds light on both Nefertiti’s life and her improbable afterlife, in which she became famous simply for being famous.

Celebrated in literature and Hollywood movies, the lives of the Ancient Egyptian queens have become synonymous with power, beauty, and glory. Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Nefertari and Hatchepsut are familiar names today, although the women themselves are not known as well as the mythology around them. The wives, mothers, or daughters of pharaohs, their influence on three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history is indisputable. This book offers a unique and heretofore unexplored insight into the key role they played and unveils the true nature of their political and spiritual influence, which was very different from the cliched portrayals most readers are familiar with. Some of the questions answered in this book include: What was the real status of the Egyptian queens? What was the status of second wives and concubines? What was their role in religious celebrations? What was their beauty regime?

This riveting narrative explores the lives of six remarkable female pharaohs, from Hatshepsut to Cleopatra--women who ruled with real power--and shines a piercing light on our own perceptions of women in power today. Female rulers are a rare phenomenon--but thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, women reigned supreme. Regularly, repeatedly, and with impunity, queens like Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Cleopatra controlled the totalitarian state as power-brokers and rulers. But throughout human history, women in positions of power were more often used as political pawns in a male-dominated society. What was so special about ancient Egypt that provided women this kind of access to the highest political office? What was it about these women that allowed them to transcend patriarchal obstacles? What did Egypt gain from its liberal reliance on female leadership, and could today's world learn from its example? Celebrated Egyptologist Kara Cooney delivers a fascinating tale of female power, exploring the reasons why it has seldom been allowed through the ages, and why we should care.