Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today we are opening
up a file on a subject that I think most people
feel like they already know. You close your eyes,
you say the name, and boom, an image is right
there. Instantly. The blue crown, the long, elegant
neck, the symmetry. It is probably the most famous
piece of limestone in human history. The bust
in Berlin. It's iconic. Exactly. We are talking
about Nefertiti. She is, you know, arguably the
most famous woman of the ancient world, maybe
neck and neck with Cleopatra. I'd say so, yeah.
But here's the thing, and this is why I was just
glued to this stack of research you sent over.
The image we have of the beautiful, serene face
in the museum, it sort of acts like a mask. That
is the perfect way to put it. The beauty of the
Thutmose bust is so overwhelming, so technically
perfect, that it almost blinds us to the political
reality. of the woman herself. Right. It freezes
her as a beauty icon when in reality she was
a political titan. A total titan. Because when
you actually dig into the inscriptions, the archaeology,
and all the weird forensic evidence we have now,
you don't find a passive booty queen. Not at
all. You find a revolutionary. You find someone
who was depicted. Well. Depicted smashing the
skulls of her enemies. And according to the latest
scholarship in the stack, someone who likely
ruled the entire Egyptian empire as a pharaoh
in her own right. That is the part we really
need to unpack today. So the mission for this
deep dive is to kind of shatter that limestone
mask. I like that. We want to find the biological
and political Nefertiti, the religious zealot,
the mother, the ruler. We need to look at the
evidence of her supposed disappearance, which,
you know. fooled historians for decades. For
a very long time, yeah. And we need to get into
the sort of CSI -style forensic twists regarding
her mummy. To do that, we have to set the scene
properly. We are dropping into the 18th dynasty
of ancient Egypt. Specifically, that window around
1353 to 1336 BC. The Amarna period. Yeah. Which
for anyone who thinks ancient Egypt was just
3 ,000 years of stasis and people, you know,
walking like Egyptians, this was a time of absolute
chaos. It was probably the most Two decades in
Egyptian history until the collapse of the Bronze
Age. Oh, absolutely. On one hand, you have immense
wealth. This is the absolute peak of the empire's
gold reserves. But on the other, you have a total
ideological reboot. We see a shift from traditional
polytheism to the exclusive worship of the sun
disk, the Aten. And right at the center of the
storm, driving the bus alongside the pharaoh,
is Nefertiti. She's not just a passenger. She's
co -piloting. So let's start at the very beginning,
origins, because even her name has been a source
of confusion for a long time. Nefertiti translates
to the beautiful one has come. nfrt -jy .tj Yeah.
And I know we usually just say Nefertiti because
it's easier, but based on the linguistic reconstruction
in the Knights, that wasn't really how her husband
would have addressed her. No, the vocalization
would have been quite different. Based on the
cuneiform correspondence from the diplomatic
letters from other kings trying to write her
name phonetically, it was likely pronounced something
like Naftita. Naftita. It sounds sharper, less
flowery. It does. But that meaning the beautiful
one has come. That caused a massive headache
for historians for about a century, didn't it?
Oh, it did. It's that verb, has come. Early Egyptologists
looked at that and thought, well, if she has
come, she must have come from somewhere else.
Right, not from here. Exactly. It launched this
persistent theory that she was a foreign princess,
possibly from the Mitanni Empire, which was in
modern -day Syria. The theory was that she was
the princess Tadokipa, right? Correct. Tadokipa
was a Mitanni princess sent to marry Amenhotep
III, who was Akhenaten's father. The theory went
that when the old king died, she just married
the son, changed her name to Nefertiti, and started
a new life. But the source material in our stack
puts a pin in that balloon pretty quickly. It
really does. The timeline is the killer here.
Tarukipa was already married to Amenhotep III.
There is absolutely no record anywhere of her
changing her name. And it wasn't common for foreign
wives to get the top job, was it? Not at all.
In Egyptian royal tradition, foreign wives didn't
usually become the great royal wife. They were
diplomatic assets. They were housed in the harem.
Nefertiti's rise was just too meteoric and her
cultural integration too seamless for her to
be a foreigner. Okay, so if she wasn't a foreign
princess, she had to be local. And the research
points to a very specific, very powerful family
circle. The prevailing theory, and it is a very
strong one, is that she was the daughter of a
man named I. I is a name that just keeps coming
up in this era. He's like the little finger of
the 18th dynasty. He's always there lurking in
the background of power. That is a very apt comparison.
I held the title God's father. Now that title
is a bit tricky, but it is often used for a man
who is the father -in -law to the king. So it
implies a direct family link to the throne through
marriage. Precisely. But here is where the family
tree gets a little twisted. I had a wife named
Tay. But in the inscriptions, Tay isn't called
Nefertiti's mother. Correct. Tay is given the
title nurse of the great royal wife. She's never
called mutt or mother. Nurse. That's a very,
very specific distinction. It is. It suggests
that Tay was Nefertiti's stepmother. The implication
is that A's first wife, Nefertiti's biological
mother, died maybe in childbirth or shortly after.
So Teh raised her. Which actually strengthens
the idea that Nefertiti was Egyptian nobility.
It does. She was raised in the absolute inner
circle of the court, likely growing up alongside
the future king, Akhenaten. And we have another
piece of evidence for this local origin, her
sister. Yes, a woman named Mutbenret. She appears
in the tombs at Amarna, and the hieroglyphs explicitly
identify her as the sister of the queen. But
Benret was married to a general, right? A general
who would later become King Horemheb. So you
see this really tight -knit group of Egyptian
military and bureaucratic elite families all
intermarrying. Nefertiti wasn't an outsider.
She was the ultimate insider. Before we move
to her reign, I want to clear up one thing because
I feel like pop culture gets this wrong constantly.
Nefertiti and King Tut. The most common misconception
in the book. Everyone assumes she's his mother
because they are the two most famous people from
the era. But the DNA evidence from the mummies,
it tells a very different story. It does. We
now have genetic profiles for the 18th Dynasty
royals. And we know that Nefertiti had six daughters
with Akhenaten. We have their names. We have
their pictures. But she never produced a male
heir. Okay. So who was Tut's mom? Tutankhamun's
biological mother is a woman found in tomb KV35,
known to us as the Younger Lady. DNA proves the
younger lady was a full sister of Akhenaten.
And Nefertiti wasn't Akhenaten's sister. Exactly.
Nefertiti was not royal by blood she married
in. So biologically, she cannot be Tutankhamun's
mother. She was his stepmother. And probably
his mother -in -law too, right? Since Tut eventually
married one of her daughters. That's right. He
married Ankhesenpaten. It's a very circular family
tree. The family wreath, as we like to call it.
It's less of a tree and more of a tangle. So
she marries Amenhotep IV, who is about to become
Akhenaten. They have these six daughters, Meretaten,
Meketaten, Ankhesenpaten. Neferneferweten, Teshret,
Neferneferor, and Setepen. You nailed the pronunciations.
It takes practice. But what strikes me about
the art... from this period is the domesticity.
You look at the steles and the tomb paintings
and you see the king and queen kissing. You see
them bouncing the kids on their knees. You even
see them crying when their daughter, Mekataton,
dies. It's incredibly modern and intimate. It
feels that way, yeah. But you're saying we have
to be careful not to mistake intimacy for weakness
or just being nice. This art was propaganda.
It was. How so? By showing the royal family as
this tight, loving unit, they were actually making
a powerful theological statement. They were replacing
the traditional gods. Okay, this brings us to
the religious revolution, the Aten. Right. To
understand Nefertiti's power, you have to understand
what she and her husband did to the state religion.
For centuries, the priesthood of Amun had been
gathering power. Incredible power. They owned
land. They owned mines. They controlled the bureaucracy.
They were, for all intents and purposes, a shadow
government. So when Akhenaten and Nefertiti pivot
to the At and the Sun disc, it's not just a spiritual
awakening. It's a corporate restructuring. It's
a hostile takeover. That's the best way to think
about it. Imagine a CEO deciding that all the
middle management, the thousands of priests and
minor gods, are fired. Go on. The CEO, the Atenin,
is now the only source of power. But the Aten
is abstract. It's just the sun in the sky. It
doesn't talk. So you need an intermediary, a
go -between. Exactly. And that is where the royal
couple comes in. In the old system, you had a
triad of gods like Osiris, Isis, and Horus. In
Amarna, the new triad became the Aten, Akhenaten,
and Nefertiti. So they became the gods on earth.
They did. You didn't pray to the Aten directly.
You prayed to Nefertiti and Akhenaten, and they
forwarded the message. Which explains why she
changed her name in year five. She didn't just
stay Nefertiti. She added a prefix. Yes. She
became Neferneferut Nefertiti. Beautiful is the
beauty of Aten. She literally branded herself
with the god's name. It was a statement of intent.
And when you look at the archaeology, specifically
the Talatat blocks, the scale of her presence
is just mind -blowing. Can you explain what the
Talatat blocks are for the listeners? Sure. So
Akhenaten was building these massive new temples
at a breakneck speed. To do that, they used smaller,
standardized stone blocks, Talatat, that were
easier for one person to carry and stack. It
was like building with Legos instead of massive
monoliths. A perfect analogy. Tens of thousands
of these blocks have been found, reused in later
monuments by kings who wanted to erase the Amarna
period. And when scholars started piecing these
Legos back together to see what was originally
painted on them, what did they find? They found
Nefertiti. Everywhere. In the early years at
Karnak, in a structure called the Mansion of
the Benben, she completely dominates the scene.
How much is dominates? In fact, on the preserved
blocks from the first five years, she appears
almost twice as frequently as a king. Twice as
frequently. That is just statistically wild.
Usually the queen is the plus one. She stands
behind the pharaoh, maybe shaking a rattle, looking
supportive. Precisely. But here, she is the main
event. And it's not just the frequency, it's
the action. Okay, this is where it gets really
interesting. We have scenes of her doing things
that traditionally only a man, only the pharaoh
could do. Specifically, the smiting of the enemy
motif. You know the image? The pharaoh holds
a group of captive enemies by the hair with one
hand and raises a mace to smash their skulls
with the other. It's the ultimate symbol of the
king establishing matte order over chaos. It's
a masculine, violent, executive role. And yet...
We have Nefertiti depicted in this exact pose.
We see her on the prow of the royal barge, smiting
foreign enemies. We see captive enemies decorating
her throne. And she's also shown worshipping.
Yes, worshipping the Aedan in the high priest
manner, offering incense directly to the god
without the king present. This was unheard of
for a queen. So she is smiting enemies. Doesn't
that technically make her a king in terms of
religious function? That is exactly the argument.
By taking on the role of the smiter, she is signaling
that she possesses the divine authority to maintain
cosmic order. She isn't just a consort. She is
a co -regent. She is the female aspect of kingship
itself. So she is at the absolute pinnacle of
power. She has her own temple. She's smashing
heads. She's the face of the new religion. And
then the history books say she vanished. For
a very long time, that was the story. Around
year 12 of Akhenaten's reign, Nefertiti just
seemed to drop off the map. She stopped appearing
in certain reliefs. And historians, being historians,
came up with all the dramatic reasons why. Oh,
the theories were rampant. She died of the plague
that swept through the Near East. She fell out
of favor. There was a very, very popular theory
that she was replaced by a secondary wife named
Kia and was banished to a separate palace in
disgrace. The disgrace theory was huge. I remember
reading that in old textbooks. Her name was erased
from monuments. But archaeology is a self -correcting
process, and later analysis showed that the erasures
were actually removing Kia's name, not Nefertiti's.
So the disgrace theory collapsed. But the silence
in the record was still there. For a while. Until
2012. This is one of my favorite moments in the
research. One rock in a dusty quarry completely
rewrites the timeline. Tell us about the Dada
Bado Enes discovery. It's a great example. of
how much is still out there waiting to be found.
A mission led by Athena Vanderpeer was surveying
a limestone quarry north of Amarna, a place called
Quarry 320 at Deribah Bolanus. This is where
the workers would have been cutting stone for
the temples, right? So it's like their work site.
Exactly. And the workers would often doodle or
leave notes in red ochre on the walls, sort of
ancient graffiti. Right. High up on a wall, they
found a five -line inscription. It was just a
simple administrative note, nothing poetic, but
it had a date. Year 16, month 3 of Akhet, day
15. Year 16. Now remember, Akhenaten died in
year 17, so this is right at the very, very end
of the regime. And who does the inscription mention?
It mentions Akhenaten, and right beside him,
the great royal wife, his beloved, Mistress of
the Two Lands. Neferneferwaten Nefertiti. Mistress
of the Two Lands. That is a title of immense
power. And it proves definitively that she was
alive, she was still the great royal wife, and
she was at the king's side just months before
his death. So she didn't vanish in year 12. She
didn't die. She didn't get divorced. She was
there until the bitter end. Which forces us to
ask a much more interesting question. What happened
when Akhenaten died a few months later? And this
leads us to the biggest twist in the deep dive,
the theory of the female pharaoh. This is where
the detective work gets really intense. We know
Akhenaten dies in year 17. We know his successor,
eventually, is the boy Tutankhaten who becomes...
Tutankhamun. But Tut is a child, maybe eight
or nine years old. He's too young to rule. Far
too young. And there's a gap in the timeline.
A power vacuum. Exactly. Between Akhenaten and
Tutankhamun, we have evidence of a ruler named
Neferneferwaden. Wait, Neferneferwaden is the
name Nefertiti took back in year five? It is.
For a long time, scholars debated this. Was it
a man? Was it a mysterious figure named Smecher?
But the consensus has shifted dramatically in
the last decade. Towards Nefertiti. Yes. Leading
Egyptologists like Aidan Dodson, Karakouni, Nicholas
Reeves, they all argue that this ruler was Nefertiti
herself. So the theory is the king dies, the
heir is a child, the empire is crumbling because
the new religion is unpopular and the economy
is shaky. So mom steps up. She steps up not just
as a regent, but as king. She adopts the full
pharaonic titles. And we have a crucial piece
of evidence in the epithets used by this female
ruler. She calls herself... Effective for her
husband. Effective for her husband? That sounds
oddly specific. It's not... in memory of her
husband or loving her husband. It's a very active
phrase. It mirrors the way Akhenaten described
himself as being effective for the Aten. It positions
her as the legitimate successor carrying on his
legacy, his work. But if she was the pharaoh,
she wasn't just continuing the revolution blindly,
was she? Because by the time Tut takes the throne,
the move back to the old religion has already
started. That is the fascinating nuance here.
We tend to think of her as a fanatic because
of the early years. But if she was the ruler
Nevin of Ferraten, the archaeology suggests she
was actually quite... pragmatic. She was doing
damage control. That's the theory. There are
signs that during this brief soul reign, maybe
two or three years, she began reconciling with
the Amun priesthood. She started the process
of moving the court back to Thebes or Memphis.
So she realized the Amarna experiment was failing.
She realized it was unsustainable and she tried
to pivot to save the dynasty for her stepson.
That completely changes her character arc. She
goes from the heretic queen to the savvy politician
trying to keep the ship from sinking. She was
the bridge. She took the heat, began the restoration,
and tried to hand over a stabilized throne to
Tutankhamun. There were sharks in the water,
and this brings us to the moment that I think
is the most cinematic in the whole timeline.
The Hittite letter. This is the smoking gun for
just how much chaos there was after the death
of the king. Set the scene for us. Where does
this letter come from? We have to look at the
Hittite archives, which were found in their capital,
Hattusa, in modern Turkey. The Hittites were
the arch enemies of Egypt at this time. Their
king, Sepululium I, was besieging Egyptian vassal
states in Syria, and he was winning. And suddenly,
a messenger arrives from Egypt. With a letter!
And the message is absolutely shocking. It is
a letter from the Egyptian queen, whom the Hittites
call Takamunzu. Which isn't a name. No, it's
just a phonetic translation of the Egyptian title,
Kahemet Nisu, the king's wife. And what does
she say? I have the translation right here. She
writes, my husband has died and I have no son.
Simple enough. Clear. But then she drops the
bombshell. They say about you that you have many
sons. You might give me one of your sons to become
my husband. Whoa, which is, it's... basically
treason it is unprecedented egyptian royal women
never married foreigners they viewed foreigners
as chaotic and inferior for the queen of egypt
to ask an enemy king for a prince to put on the
throne of egypt it just reeks of desperation
and she admits it she writes i would not wish
to take one of my subjects as a husband i am
afraid i am afraid that phrase is the key to
the whole mystery what is she afraid of so who
wrote it For a long time, people thought it was
Ankasanamun, Tut's widow. That was the standard
theory. But the timeline is a bit messy there.
Ankasanamun was young, and while she had no son,
she faced a different political landscape. But
Nefertiti. If she is ruling as a female pharaoh
after Akhenaten's death, she is in an incredibly
precarious position. She has no son. She has
powerful generals breathing down her neck. Exactly.
When she says, I would not wish to take one of
my subjects as a husband. Most historians think
she's talking about I or Hormeb. The old guard.
The deep state. They likely wanted to marry her
to legitimize their own claim to the throne.
So she is trying to outmaneuver them. She brings
in a Hittite prince, marries him, and suddenly
she has a husband who outranks her generals but
owes his position entirely to her. It's a brilliant,
desperate gambit. Nicholas Reeves is a big proponent
of this theory. It fits the psychology of a ruler
trying to hold on to independent power against
an imminent coup. But it failed. Spectacularly.
Sebuliuma was suspicious at first. He literally
said, nothing like this has happened to me in
my whole life. But eventually, he sent his son,
Prince Zananza. Zananza never made it to Thebes.
He was intercepted and killed en route. Murdered.
Almost certainly. And you have to ask, who benefits?
The Egyptian generals. I and Hormheb, who didn't
want a foreigner on the throne. It seems very
likely. So the alliance dies, the prince dies,
and presumably shortly after, Nefertiti, or the
female pharaoh, disappears for good. Yes. The
record goes silent again. Tutankhamun takes the
throne. Ai becomes his advisor and eventual successor.
And Nefertiti vanishes into the sands of history.
Which brings us to the final piece of the puzzle.
The body. We have the mummies of almost all the
great new kingdom pharaohs. We have Ramesses.
We have Seti. We have Thutmose. Where is Nefertiti?
That is the holy grail of modern Egyptology.
The billion dollar question. We know where she
was supposed to be buried, right? She had a suite
of rooms prepared in the royal tomb at Amarna.
There's even another unfinished tomb, number
29, that might have been for her. But because
the court abandoned Amarna and moved back to
Thebes, she was never buried there. So her body,
if it was preserved, would have been moved to
the Valley of the Kings. Correct. There have
been so many false alarms over the years. In
1898, Victor Lareve found tomb KV35. And inside,
he found two women lying next to each other,
now known as the elder lady and the younger lady.
And in the early 2000s, the Egyptologist Joanne
Fletcher made global headlines claiming that
the younger lady was Nefertiti. It was a huge
documentary, very persuasive. I remember the
wig theory. That was a big part of it. Yes, a
Nubian -style wig was found nearby that seemed
to match Nefertiti's style from her portraits.
But science moves forward. In 2010, Dr. Zaki
Hawass and his team conducted massive DNA sequencing
on these royal mummies. And the results ruled
her out. Definitively. The DNA showed that the
younger lady was the biological mother of Tupin
Kamen. And crucially, she was the full sister
of Akhenaten. Both were children of Amenhotep
III and Queen Tai. And since we know Nefertiti
wasn't Akhenaten's sister. She cannot be the
younger lady. The younger lady is likely a minor
wife or sister wife whose name we aren't sure
of. Maybe Nebetta or Beketaten. But it's not
Nefertiti. Okay, so strike one. What about KV21?
This is a tomb containing two female mummies,
KV21A and KV21B. KV21B is interesting. She is
headless, unfortunately, but her posture is key.
Her left arm is bent over her chest, as if holding
a fly whisk or scepter. A royal pose. A pose
reserved for queens. And who was she buried with?
KV21A. The DNA suggests KV21A might be the mother
of the two fetuses found in Tutankhamen's tomb.
That would make KV21A Ankhesenamon Nefertiti's
daughter. So we have a potential daughter buried
with an older royal woman. It mirrors the KV35
burial where Queen Tai was found buried with
her daughter, the younger lady. So it is very
possible that KV21B is Nefertiti, but the DNA
was too degraded to give 100 % match. It's suggestive,
but not conclusive. We just don't know for sure.
Yeah. And we have to mention the theory that
broke the internet in 2015, the hidden chamber.
Nicholas Reeves again. He looked at the high
-resolution scans of the walls of Tutinkham's
burial chamber. and noticed what looked like
ghosts of doorways beneath the plaster and paint.
The theory being that Tut died so suddenly, they
just buried him in the antechamber of a much
larger, grander tomb Nefertiti's tomb. That's
a beautiful theory. It explained why Tut's tomb
is so small and cramped for a pharaoh. The world
held its breath. They brought in ground -penetrating
radar. The first scans were promising. They seemed
to show voids. But the second and third rounds?
Negative. No voids, no hidden rooms, just solid
bedrock. That is heartbreaking. It is. It means
she is still out there. Maybe in a royal cache
we haven't found yet. Maybe she's one of the
dozens of unidentified mummies sitting on a shelf
in the Cairo Museum basement just labeled Unknown
Woman D. It is crazy to think that the woman
who ruled the world, who reshaped an entire empire,
is just lost. But in a way, she isn't lost at
all. Because we have the bust. We have the bust.
But hopefully after this deep dive, when you
look at that bust, you don't just see a pretty
face. No, I see the woman who walked into the
Temple of Karnak and told the most powerful priesthood
in the world, you're fired. You see the mother
who lost at least one. maybe three daughters
to plague, and still held the throne together.
You see the mistress of the two lands in year
16 defying the odds while the empire collapsed
around her. And you see the desperate ruler writing
to her enemy, I'm afraid, trying to save her
dynasty from the men who wanted to take it from
her. It really changes the experience. She wasn't
a model, she was a player. Maybe the biggest
player of the entire 18th dynasty. Absolutely.
She reigned during the wealthiest, most artistic,
and most dangerous moment in ancient Egyptian
history. Her legacy is the revolution itself.
And she is still with us. She's in movies. She's
in books. She's in video games. We are still
obsessed with her. Because she represents a paradox.
The perfect, static, serene beauty on the outside
and the ruthless, dynamic, tragic reality on
the inside. So here's a final thought for you
to chew on. We spend millions of dollars trying
to find her mummy. We want the physical proof.
But ask yourself, if we found her, if we found
a dried, wrapped body in a glass case, would
it actually add to her legend? Or has the idea
of Nefertiti, that immortal face in Berlin, become
more powerful than the human being ever was?
That's the power of art. It eclipses history.
Thanks for diving deep with us. We'll catch you
on the next one.