Nefertiti, Queen and Pharaoh of Egypt
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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.
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.
Aidan Dodson is Honorary Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol, UK, and was Simpson Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo in 2013, and Chair of the Egypt Exploration Society during 2011–16. Awarded his PhD by the University of Cambridge, UK, in 1995, he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2003. He is the author of over twenty books, most recently a new edition of Afterglow of Empire (AUC Press, 2019) and Rameses III, King of Egypt (AUC Press, 2019).