Nefertiti by Joyce Tyldesley

Author:Joyce Tyldesley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141949796
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-09-03T21:00:00+00:00

Fig. 4.3 Nefertiti pours liquid for Akhenaten

ish actions, although their bodies remained scaled-down versions of their mother, complete with her wide hips and skinny legs. The little girls are constantly associated with Nefertiti, and Meritaten, as the eldest, is always accorded the prominent role, playing most often with her father. All six daughters look like their mother (who, of course, looks like their father) and, although they are usually shown naked, they occasionally imitate her by wearing long, diaphanous robes. They are curiously free of symbolic head-dresses, and only their changing hairstyles give an indication of their increasing age as they advance from bald babies with strange egg-shaped heads to gawky girls with the side-lock of youth and finally elegant young ladies sporting a modified version of the Nubian-style wig favoured by their mother.

Their bald heads ensure that the curious elongated skulls of the Amarna princesses, emphasized by their long, stalk-like necks, mimic the profile of the king’s head which is almost invariably elongated by his sloping crown. Again, the ‘truth’ behind these egg-shaped heads is open to doubt. If the princesses did indeed have grossly misshapen heads, was this the result of deliberate manipulation during childhood, a practice which is so far unknown in dynastic Egypt, or could they all have been born with some severe physical abnormality, perhaps inherited from their father whose head is invariably concealed beneath his crown? The fact that the adult Ankhesenpaaten displays a perfectly normal head several years after her father’s death suggests that once again the royal artists were not attempting realistic portraiture, but were deliberately choosing to exaggerate the slightly elongated heads of the princesses in order to prove a theological point. The egg was accepted by Akhenaten as a symbol of creation, and was indeed included as such in the hymn to the Aten: ‘… when the chick in the egg chirps within his shell you give him breath to live, and when his time is ready to break out from the shell he comes out of the egg to proclaim his birth…’. Dorothea Arnold has suggested that the children’s egg-heads may well have been intended to reinforce their role as embodiments of divine creation, comparing them to a unique but badly damaged alabaster sculpture recovered from Amarna which has been reconstructed to show Akhenaten in the form of a squatting child with one finger raised to his mouth.16 In this figure Akhenaten is bald, although he wears the side-lock of youth, and he too has an elongated egg-shaped head.

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