Who Was Nefertiti?

It's clear she had an unusually high status during her husband's turbulent reign. The couple's renegade practice of monotheism — worshipped the sun disc god over all others, and seem to have outlawed their subjects' polytheistic devotion — threatened Egypt's priesthood and ensured they would have no shortage of powerful enemies.

Some Egyptologists think it was Nefertiti who actually instigated this new religion and catalyzed a rift between the royals and the priests.

She bore Akhenaten six daughters, two of whom may have died in a plague. She was the stepmother of Tutankhamen. Some Egyptian scholars theorize that around year 12 of Akhenaten's reign Nefertiti may well have become his co-regent, and immediately after his death became a pharaoh in her own right, ruling alone for a short time.

As Akhenaten disposed of the plethora of old gods, enraging his priests and subjects, he likely needed a strong female figure to soften the abstract austerity of the sun deity, according to British archeologist Joyce Tyldesley, who wrote a biography of Nefertiti. It's little wonder why his beautiful queen was celebrated in official art and inscriptions that focused on the idyllic domestic life of the royal family.

However, Nefertiti's husband cherished her beyond the demands of propriety or political necessity, postulates Tyldesley. Nefertiti was an elusive subject for Tyldesley because, she says, "meager shreds of evidence" can support a variety of interpretations about the sun queen.

Like Akhenaten, Nefertiti's name was erased from historical records and her many likenesses defaced after her death, as Egypt reverted to its former religion.

With so many enemies, the obvious question is whether Nefertiti died naturally, or was she murdered? We don't know, but the mummy that Joann Fletcher believes could be Nefertiti was mutilated in the years after her death. Perhaps, Fletcher says, it was done to prevent this figure from "living" even in the afterlife.