The Search for Nefertiti

The True Story of an Amazing Discovery

Joann Fletcher

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780060585563
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062106360
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

Her power was rivaled only by her beauty. Her face has become one of the most recognizable images in the world. She was an independent woman and thinker centuries before her time. But who was Egypt's Queen Nefertiti?

After years of intense research, Dr. Joann Fletcher has answered the questions countless researchers before her could not. While studying Egyptian royal wigs, she read a brief mention of an unidentified and mummified body, discovered long ago and believed to belong to an Egyptian of little importance. This body happened to have a wig, which Dr. Fletcher knew was a clear sign of power. After examining the hairpiece and the woman to which it belonged, to the astonishment of her colleagues she identified this body as the missing remains of Queen Nefertiti.

The search for Nefertiti had ended. She had been found. But the questions were just beginning.

Nefertiti first rose to prominence in Egyptology in 1912, when a three-thousand-year-old bust of the queen was unearthed and quickly became a recognizable artifact around the world. But pieces of Nefertiti's life remained missing. The world had seen what she looked like, but few knew about her place in history.

Virtually nothing is recorded about Nefertiti's early years. What is known about her life starts with her rise to power, her breaking through the sex barrier to rule as a virtual co-Pharaoh alongside her husband, Akhenaten. Upon his death she took full control of his kingdom. The Egyptian people loved her and celebrated her beauty in art, but the priests did not feel the same way. They believed Nefertiti's power over her husband was so great that she would instill her monotheistic beliefs upon him, rendering their own power obsolete. Egyptologists concur that it was these priests who, upon Nefertiti's death, had her name erased from public record and any likeness of her defaced. This ultimately led to her being left out of history for three thousand years.

In  The Search for Nefertiti Dr. Fletcher, an esteemed Egyptologist, traces not only her thirteen-year search for this woman, whose beauty was as great as her power, but also brings to the forefront the way Egypt's royal dead have been treated over time by people as varied as Agatha Christie and Adolf Hitler. She also explores how modern technology and forensics are quickly changing the field of archaeology and, in turn, what we know about history.

Chapter 1
The First Glimpse

As the early morning mist began to rise slowly from the silent waters, our boat crossed over to the Land of the Dead. It was here on the west bank of the Nile that the pharaohs had been buried some four thousand years ago, and we were on our way to the most famous cemetery in the world, the Valley of the Kings. With little more than three hours’ sleep, I felt unprepared for what was to come. It was the stuff of dreams, the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition and an opportunity given to very few. I hardly dared think of what we were about to do, let alone who we were about to see, having waited twelve long years for an audience with perhaps the most familiar figure in the history of ancient Egypt.

Lost in a world of my own, I made my way down the narrow gangplank to where the water lapped the shore. As the sun made its first appearance of the day, I stepped into the bus. I’d made this journey so many times before, but now it was very different, and nerves began to play with my mind. What if the tomb was empty? What if there was nothing there? And what if the official permissions we’d worked so hard to obtain from the Egyptian authorities had been withdrawn at the very last minute? It did happen.

I comforted myself with the knowledge that the perceived identity of the one we were about to meet was to all intents and purposes ‘unknown’, and, together with the two other bodies which had been laid to rest close by, protected by anonymity. When mentioned at all, they tended to be passed over as minor members of a royal house who’d played little part in ancient Egypt’s story, so my request to see them was not particularly controversial.

As the ancient landscape whizzed past my window and the two colossal stone figures of Amenhotep III loomed up in front of us, I could almost hear the blood pumping through my head. I had to stay calm, I kept telling myself. I was about to meet Egypt’s Head of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, who was at this very moment flying in from Cairo to meet me inside the tomb. It was important at least to try to maintain an appearance of professionalism – not that I’d ever been much good at playing that game. The word ‘nervous’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.

We passed lush green fields fringed with palm trees, farmers off to work and overburdened donkeys trotting along beneath great bales of sugarcane, all of them reassuringly familiar on this otherwise emotionally fraught morning. Even the bleary-eyed children getting ready for school still managed a smile or a wave at the funny-looking hawajaya (foreigner) with her big orange hair and little black glasses looking at them from the bus.

The hillside of Qurna stretched up before us, a fabulous backdrop of colourful houses built alongside the ancient tombs. Turning right, the bus sped on past the temple of Ramses II, Shelley’s Ozymandias, and then to Deir el-Bahari, built by one of Egypt’s great female pharaohs, the mighty Hatshepsut. Today, however, my mind was firmly fixed on one who came after her, and who wielded no less power.

In case I needed any reminding why the Valley of the Kings was a place familiar to everyone, we turned left at ‘Castle Carter’, home of the twentieth century’s most famous archaeologist. Howard Carter, the man who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922, has always been something of a hero for me, a working-class lad made good who stuck two fingers up at the sneering establishment by making the greatest archaeological discovery of all time. Carter and Tutankhamen are very much part of this story, both of them closely linked to the three who now awaited us in the valley whose barren, limestone sides loomed on either side. As the bus rattled on and the summer temperature began to rise steadily towards its 40°C June average, I spared a thought for Carter and his trusty donkey.

Slowing down, the bus stopped at the first of numerous security checks, the legacy of the terrible events of 1997 when Islamic extremists had murdered foreigners and Egyptians alike in their attempt to destabilise Egypt’s secular government. And in today’s political climate another attack can never completely be ruled out. But thanks to a stack of official paperwork and security clearances, we were waved through the barrier where vehicles normally have to stop to offload their passengers, and drove right up to the entrance gates of the Valley itself. Carrying nothing more dangerous than a camera, torch and my trusty umbrella, I began the final walk up to the tomb.

I had first come here as a dumbstruck teenager, unable to take it all in as tomb after tomb revealed some of the most beautiful images I had ever seen. Their hidden chambers and sealed doorways only fired my long-held determination to become an Egyptologist, and by the time of my second visit I was an Egyptology student at last, able to start making sense of the complex blend of wall scenes, passageways, corridors and side chambers unique to each tomb. Many more visits followed, initially for postgraduate research, then accompanying groups of tourists, students and television researchers, and most recently as part of a team excavating KV.39, quite probably the first royal tomb to have been built here. Yet today was something else, a visit to a very different royal tomb. Unlikely to be repeated, it was surely my one and only chance to confirm what I had believed for so long.

Approaching the small group of officials and police who clustered around the tomb’s entrance, I was greeted by the local antiquities inspector and his staff, smiling nervously and chain smoking as they awaited their new boss. Several local workmen with their tools and baskets were also waiting, beside a temporary sign announcing that the tomb was ‘Closed for Restoration’. We had in fact been given permission to remove a wall and enter the tomb’s remaining sealed chamber – the ultimate archaeological cliché, perhaps, but an amazing prospect nevertheless.

As walkie-talkies beeped and crackled into life, a voice announced that Dr Hawass was on his way from Luxor airport and would be here within the hour. With official permission to proceed, I took a deep breath, stepped through the entrance and began the descent into the depths of the rock-cut tomb.

As I made my way down the endless steps of the corridor which penetrated deep into the cliff face, I could feel both temperature and humidity rising steadily. The ground levelled off momentarily to pass through the first chamber and a modern bridge took me safely over the deep well shaft, designed to trap the floodwaters which periodically hurtle down the valley and the tomb robbers whose ancient ropes have been found at its bottom. I went on through the first pillared hall, down the final flight of steps and out into the vast burial chamber, its walls covered in row upon row of animated little black stick figures acting out scenes from the Book of Amduat. This is the guide book to the Afterlife, in which the dead are confidently assured safe passage with the sun god on his eternal journey through the Underworld.

Above me, the star-spangled ceiling of midnight blue and gold was supported by six great square columns, each decorated with three of ancient Egypt’s greatest gods: Osiris, lord of the underworld and resurrection; the jackal-headed Anubis, god of mummification and the guardian of the Valley; and Hathor, goddess of love, here appearing as the Lady of the West who takes the souls of the dead into her protective care. All three of them held out an

ankh sign to bestow eternal life on their son, the dead king Amenhotep II, whose twenty-six-year reign saw the building of this impressive tomb in which he had been buried around 1401 BC.

At almost six feet tall, Amenhotep was a giant of a king whose vast empire dominated the ancient world. In response to a rebellion in Syria, this ultimate warrior pharaoh executed the rebel leaders personally in gruesome fashion, strung their corpses from the prow of his ship, sailed home and hung what remained of them from the city walls of Thebes. His legendary belligerence is also reflected in claims that he could fire arrows from his chariot through copper targets three inches thick, using a bow that no one else had the strength to use. Typical pharaonic boastfulness, perhaps, but when this tomb was discovered in 1898 Amenhotep II’s flower-bedecked mummy still lay within the quartzite sarcophagus that now stood before me, his favourite longbow beside him.

According to their report, the excavators of 1898 had found themselves almost knee-deep in debris left behind by ancient looters, including fragments of linen, furniture, statues, funerary figurines, model boats, large blue amulets, glass vessels, cosmetics objects, storage jars and papyrus rolls that had all been provided at the time of the original burial to sustain Amenhotep II’s soul in the Afterlife. The most amazing discovery was the group of royal mummies hidden away in the two small side rooms leading off the burial chamber. These bodies had obviously been placed here after their own tombs in the Valley had been ransacked and their mummies ripped apart in the search for the precious amulets traditionally placed inside the wrappings, ironically to protect the bodies from harm.

As robberies increased during the eleventh century BC, priests, embalmers and tomb inspectors were all kept busy moving the mummies to places of safety where they could be tidied up and rewrapped prior to reburial. This restoration of the royal dead seems to have been carried out in a number of places. Ancient graffiti listing new supplies of linen wrappings and labels for ‘corpse oil’ have been discovered in several nearby tombs, and vast quantities of wrappings, embalming materials and implements were found during our own work at tomb KV.39.

The illustrious figures who received such attentive treatment before their reburial with Amenhotep II included his son and successor, Tuthmosis IV, and his grandson, Amenhotep III, Egypt’s very own ‘Sun King’. There were also a whole series of later pharaohs alongside them, from Ramses II’s son and successor, Merenptah, to Seti II, Siptah and Ramses IV, V and VI. All had been wrapped up neatly, carefully relabelled, placed in restored coffins and respectfully laid to rest in the first side chamber. However, since every one of them had been taken off to the Cairo Museum shortly after their discovery, this first chamber now stood empty. But the second chamber was another story altogether, and this was why I was here.

When the archaeologists of 1898 had first entered the tomb, they described how this second chamber contained the usual pile of fragmentary statuary and furniture, together with three further mummies. Because they bore no identifying inscriptions, were unwrapped and had simply been left on the floor without a coffin between them, they were assumed to be of little importance – probably some of the relatives of Amenhotep II, whose tomb this was. After making a quick sketch and taking a few photographs it was eventually decided to leave them much as they were found, anonymous and discarded.

Yet for me, the combination of their anonymity and the absence of any attempt to rewrap them in ancient times suggested something rather different, if not downright sinister. The three had clearly been singled out and kept separate from the other royal mummies in the tomb, even though there would have been enough space to house them all together in that single chamber. And one body in particular had clearly been the victim of malicious damage which could not be explained away as a side-effect of tomb robbery. Her face was bashed in and one arm had been ripped off just below the shoulder. Someone had clearly been trying to make a point. But who? And why? After years of painstaking research, I believed I was about to discover the answers to a whole series of mysteries.

With the head man, in his pristine white turban and flowing gallabaya, directing proceedings, the first workman began to chip slowly away at the plastered wall in front of us. After a few minutes the first brick was levered out of position, then the second and the third. But despite the best attempts of the large electric fans which whirred away in the background, the heat was increasing by the minute and soon the second workman had to take over from his mate. This was a far cry from the icy-cold sepulchres of legend; Egyptian tombs are hot! Even just standing still and watching, I was beginning to sweat.

As the second workman paused for breath, I found myself unable to wait any longer and asked if I could look through into the darkness. Glad of a chance for a minute’s break, the men stepped aside and I raised my torch.

What I saw next will stay with me for the rest of my life. For there, looking right at me, were three people who had died over three thousand years ago. And yet I recognised each of them, so clear were their features as they continued to stare back, looking for all the world as if they had been expecting me. And all I could say was, ‘Oh, my God. It’s you!’

Chapter 2
The Origins of the Search

So how did I come to be in the Valley of the Kings on an early June morning looking into the faces of three people who had died over three thousand years ago? It’s a long story.

It began thirty-seven years ago in Barnsley, an industrial town in Yorkshire. Anyone born in Yorkshire will generally tell you so within the first few minutes of meeting, and although I’m no exception, my flat vowels give the game away even sooner. I’m obviously not a product of the Home Counties, and I’ve never pretended to be. Yet for all its finer points, Barnsley isn’t known as a hotbed of Egyptological research. So why did I want to become an Egyptologist and study mummies?

Much of it can be traced back to my wonderful aunt, born the year before Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered. Some of her earliest memories were of the spectacular finds that appeared in the press during the decade-long, painstaking clearance of the tomb by Howard Carter and his team, and she was one of thousands gripped by ‘Tutmania’. Remaining fascinated with ancient Egypt for the rest of her life, she inspired much of my own passion for the subject following my introduction to it via my parents’ history books. These included Tutankhamen: Life and Death of a Pharaoh by French grande dame of Egyptology Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, its colour plates a source of great fascination to me even before I was able to read.

The discovery of the tomb by Carter and his patron, the Earl of Carnarvon, was a tale regularly told to me by my aunt, with plenty of colourful touches added from her childhood memories of pictures of golden thrones, lion-headed couches and gilded statues appearing from the depths of the tomb. In 1968 the BBC screened Tutankhamen’s ‘post-mortem’, the first re-examination of the king’s remains since Carter’s day. My aunt’s descriptions of the royal mummy beneath the famous gold mask had tremendous appeal, adding to my growing interest in bodies, burials and all things relating to the graveyard which developed throughout my childhood. One of my special treasures was an Airfix model of a human skeleton, which stood in my bedroom side by side with an Egyptian doll, resplendent in golden headdress and snake bracelets, which still sits on my desk today.

In 1972 the UK braced itself for Tutankhamen’s treasures as they toured the world. As a six-year-old completely besotted with the boy-king, I watched television pictures of huge numbers of people queuing for hours in the London streets surrounding the British Museum. But I wasn’t going to be one of them. Events closer to home took precedence, for my sister was born that year and my parents were kept busy at home.

I did, however, acquire a nice collection of Tutankhamen memorabilia – books, newspaper cuttings and posters which family and friends collected for me. I spent hours reading and rereading all my books, as well as everything the local library had to offer about ancient Egypt. One of my favourite books demonstrated how the ancient Egyptians removed the brain during mummification. When I told my parents about this over dinner one day, they told me that it was actually possible to study Egyptology as a subject. Apparently it was even a career for some people, and there was nothing to stop me becoming an Egyptologist. So there I was at the age of eight, my life and career all mapped out. Everything seemed pretty straightforward, the only catch being that I would have to work hard at school before I could finally go to university and study.

School was fine most of the time, except for the occasional run-in with one or two history teachers as a result of my growing obsession. Even though ancient Egypt was not part of the curriculum, I tried every way I could to bring my favourite subject into as many lessons as possible. At O-level I concentrated on the arts, including Latin, figuring this was as close as I would get for the time being. But as I soldiered on with Romulus, Remus and those most tortuous verbal constructions, the Romans really made me suffer – and I’ve still not forgiven them.

My final year at school, when I was fifteen, coincided with my aunt’s retirement, and to mark the occasion she had planned a two-week trip to Egypt. As I was so determined to become an Egyptologist, my parents felt it would be the perfect opportunity to test the water. With considerable foresight, they let me accompany her. And despite the assassination of Egypt’s President, Anwar Sadat, only days before we were due to leave, we kept to our plans.

The effect of that first visit was incalculable – mind-blowing is perhaps a more apt description. Completely mind-blowing. Flying into Cairo at night, we saw the Nile sparkling below us and I was nearly sick with excitement. On that first night the sight of the famous river right outside my window made so much of an impression that I hardly slept at all, and I was ready to leave several hours before our guide, Miss Azmar, arrived to take us to the Cairo Museum on our first scheduled tour. At last I was going to see King Tut’s treasures and all the things I’d read about for so long.

The museum is an enormous building with a great domed roof. After passing through the gardens with their pool filled with papyrus and lotus, ancient Egypt’s heraldic plants, we entered the huge foyer. Right in front of us, flanked by monumental statues, was the largest object in the place, a colossal statue of Tutankhamen’s grandparents, Amenhotep III and his wife, Queen Tiy, their smiling faces distinctly recognisable from the books I knew so well. There were statues and arte-facts in every direction, just like old friends in a crowd. I could hardly wait to see all these things up close, as our guide set off at a cracking pace. We followed her from room to room, craning our necks to glimpse the things she was pointing out. ‘King Djoser, builder of the Step Pyramid at Sakkara . . . King Mycerinus with the goddess Hathor from his pyramid at Giza . . . the female pharaoh Hatshepsut with her false beard...’

With only a few minutes at each piece, soon we reached the Amarna Room with ‘the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten and his beautiful wife Nefertiti’, and some of the most extraordinary-looking figures I’d ever seen. And then we were off again, puff, pant, up the stairs. Although the Mummy Room had recently been closed after Sadat had declared it disrespectful to Egypt’s ancient kings, we headed on to King Tut’s treasure. We struggled to keep up as we passed black and gold statues and animal-headed couches, the reclining black jackal, flower bouquets from his coffin, his clothing, sandals, wig box – wig box? – and amazing jewellery, past the human-headed canopic jars for his mummified entrails, and then, with a flourish, to the golden death mask as a finale!

Desperate to do it all again, but more slowly, we were instead herded back on to the bus and carted off to Giza to see the pyramids. Now although an Egyptologist shouldn’t really say it, I can take or leave the pyramids. Of course they are very big and very impressive and very old, but I just couldn’t relate to them, especially after such an intense morning in the museum.

Looking up in awe, my aunt described how my uncle and his friends, when serving in North Africa during the Second World War, had taken part in the challenge to hit a gold ball from the top of the Great Pyramid in an attempt to clear the sides. Yet none of them was able to do so on account of its sheer size. This really brought home how big these things were, and like every visitor before and since I wondered how on earth they had been built. Then I started to think about who had built them and, ultimately, why?

The Giza Plateau was perhaps the best place to try to understand what ancient Egypt was all about, and why thousands of people would risk their lives to create something to commemorate a single individual, just because they were told to. And this is when I twigged that there must have been far more to it – that these people were motivated by something other than wage packets and cl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Chapter 1 - The First Glimpse
• Chapter 2 - The Origins of the Search
• Chapter 3 - The Creation of the Amarna Story
• Chapter 4 - Hair, Wigs and Ancient
• Chapter 5 - A Career with the Dead
• Chapter 6 - Tomb Kv.35 and its Mummies
• Chapter 7 - The Rise of the Female Pharaohs
• Chapter 8 - The Dazzling Golden Age
• Chapter 9 - Life in the Royal City
• Chapter 10 - The Setting Sun – The End of the Amarna Period
• Chapter 11 - The First Visit into the Side Chamber
• Chapter 12 - The Scientific Expedition and its Aftermath
• Bibliography
• Source References
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Dr Joann Fletcher
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher