Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the woman who inspired one of the best known artefacts from ancient Egypt. The Bust of Nefertiti is multicoloured and symmetrical, about 49cm/18" high and, despite the missing left eye, still holds the gaze of onlookers below its tall, blue, flat topped headdress. Its discovery in 1912 in Amarna was kept quiet at first but its display in Berlin in the 1920s caused a sensation, with replicas sent out across the world. Ever since, as with Tutankhamun perhaps, the concrete facts about Nefertiti herself have barely kept up with the theories, the legends and the speculation, reinvigorated with each new discovery. With Aidan Dodson Honorary Professor of Egyptology at the University of Bristol Joyce Tyldesley Professor of Egyptology at the University of Manchester And Kate Spence Senior Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Dorothea Arnold (ed.), The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty from Ancient Egypt (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996) Norman de Garis Davies, The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna (6 vols. Egypt Exploration Society, 1903-1908) Aidan Dodson, Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb and the Egyptian Counter-reformation. (American University in Cairo Press, 2009 Aidan Dodson, Nefertiti, Queen and Pharaoh of Egypt: her life and afterlife (American University in Cairo Press, 2020) Aidan Dodson, Tutankhamun: King of Egypt: his life and afterlife (American University in Cairo Press, 2022) Barry Kemp, The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People (Thames and Hudson, 2012) Dominic Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (Routledge, 2002) Friederike Seyfried (ed.), In the Light of Amarna: 100 Years of the Nefertiti Discovery (Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussamlung Staatlich Museen zu Berlin/ Michael Imhof Verlag, 2013) Joyce Tyldesley, Tutankhamun: Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma (Headline, 2022) Joyce Tyldesley, Nefertiti’s Face: The Creation of an Icon (Profile Books, 2018) Joyce Tyldesley, Nefertiti: Egypt’s Sun Queen (Viking, 1998)
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The Bostum Nefertiti is one of the best known artifacts from ancient Egypt, multicolored and symmetrical, and despite the missing left eye, still holding the gaze of posterity below her tall blue headdresse.
Its discovery in 1912 in Amana was kept quiet at first, but its display in Berlin in the 1920s caused a sensation, with replicas sent out all across the world.
And ever since, as with Tutankhamen, the concrete facts about Nefertiti herself have badly kept up with the theories, the legends, the speculation reinvigorated with each new discovery.
With me to discuss Nefertiti are Aidan Dodson, honorary professor of Egyptology at the University of Bristol, Joyce Tilsley, professor of Egyptology at the University of Manchester, and Kate Spence, senior lecturer in egyptian archaeology at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Emmanuel College.
Kate Spence.
We mentioned Amarna.
Where was it?
And what was it?
Amarna was a settlement built in just after 1350 BC by the pharaoh Akhenaten as the centre for the worship of his new sun cult, the worship of the Aten.
And it has palaces, temples of the paraphernalia you would expect with the royal city and also suburbs and housing that go with it.
It's on the east bank of the Nile, in a site that's really largely desert, and it was about halfway between Cairo and Luxor.
The name Amarna is also given to the whole period of Akhenaten's rule and its immediate aftermath, which has this very distinctive art and literature and architecture associated with it, and is associated with this new form of worship of the solar cult.
The facts about her, if we can use that word, and I'm not particularly here, there are very few facts about her.
There are very few of this really happened at that time, and she was really like and so on and so forth, aren't there?
So can you give us an idea of how few facts and what they are?