When Women Ruled the World by Kara Cooney

Author:Kara Cooney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2018-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

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NEFERTITI’S EXPANDED POLITICAL ROLE is just now being uncovered by archaeologists and historians, and more major discoveries are on the verge of taking place. Egyptologists are engaged in an ongoing and fierce debate about her changing nature, identity, and role. She remains more contested than any other female king of Egypt. The ancient Egyptians haven’t helped the situation. When the histories were written and king lists composed generations later, Nefertiti and her heretic husband were removed from most of them, making our job of locating her that much harder. She was not mentioned in any king lists kept in monumental form, in temples, like the one put up by Seti I at Abydos a hundred years later, where perfected story lines of unassailable kingship were inscribed. Only much later administrative histories preserved any possible trace of Nefertiti as a female head of state—but her story is truncated and confused.42 Indeed, her lifetime will likely remain shrouded until archaeologists can produce a tomb—and maybe even a body. Because of recent archaeological discoveries, that day might actually be closer than we think.

Until recently, the idea that Nefertiti’s intact tomb might still be lying in wait in the Valley of the Kings seemed pure archaeological fantasy. Ridiculed and intellectually bloodied in the process of making his case, Nicholas Reeves has put together evidence for a claim that the tomb of the celebrated Tutankhamun—which we know and love so well—was nothing more than the expanded entrance hallway of a much larger and already occupied tomb. Reeves marshals evidence from texts, art history, architectural structure, thermal imaging, and ground-penetrating radar data to argue that behind the rear wall of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber lies another tomb: perhaps the tomb of his predecessor, the mysterious Smenkhkare (who could, given the similarity of throne name Ankhkheperure, be Nefertiti herself), at least partially intact. But until someone drills a tiny hole through the back wall of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber to see if a treasure trove of fantastic funerary goods or only a rubble-filled corridor lies beyond it, we can only catch a glimpse of Nefertiti as through a fog. Reeves’s new revelations have been quashed for now by complicated archaeological politics. But more Egyptologists are starting to see the potential for a find greater even than Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Plenty of Egyptologists laugh at the possibility that Nefertiti is behind Tut’s burial chamber back wall. I am not one of them.

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