Tyldesley - Nefertitis Face : The Creation of an Icon

Joyce Tyldesley is a Senior Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Manchester, and an Honorary Research Associate of the Manchester Museum. She is the author of many books on ancient Egypt, including Cleopatra, Last Queen of Egypt, which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and Tutankhamen's Curse: The Developing History of an Egyptian King, which won the 2014 Felicia A. Holton Book Award given by the Archaeological Institute of America.

ALSO BY JOYCE TYLDESLEY

For Adults

Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt

Hatchepsut: the Female Pharaoh

Nefertiti: Egypts Sun Queen

The Mummy

Ramesses: Egypts Greatest Pharaoh

Judgement of the Pharaoh: Crime and Punishment in Ancient Egypt

The Private Lives of the Pharaohs

Egypts Golden Empire

Pyramids: The Real Story Behind Egypts Most Ancient Monuments

Tales from Ancient Egypt

Egypt: How a Lost Civilization was Rediscovered

Chronicle of the Queens of Egypt

Egyptian Games and Sports

Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt

The Pharaohs

Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt

Tutankhamens Curse

For Children

Mummy Mysteries: The Secret World of Tutankhamun and the Pharaohs

Egypt (Insiders)

Stories from Ancient Egypt

Stories from Ancient Greece and Rome

The Lost Scroll: A Play for children

JOYCE TYLDESLEY

For all my students, past, present and future.

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London WC1X 9HD

www.profilebooks.com

Copyright Joyce Tyldesley, 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 84765 890 6

I always worry when I start a new book. Is my subject of interest to a wide readership or horrible thought is it simply my own, self-indulgent obsession? With this book, all worries soon evaporated. The Berlin bust which is believed to depict Queen Nefertiti is clearly a subject of interest to many people, and from the outset I have been overwhelmed by the support that I have received from friends, colleagues, students and complete strangers too numerous to mention individually. Thank you all.

The themes developed in this book were first presented in a lecture given to the Egypt Exploration Society in 2010, and refined for a lecture given for the Showcase Seminar series in the Manchester Museum in 2011. I would like to thank both organisations for their support. The delay in writing was caused by an unfortunate series of personal circumstances. I would like to thank all my editors at Profile Books the late Peter Carson, Daniel Crewe, Penny Daniel and Cecily Gayford as well as my copy-editor, Trevor Horwood, for their patience with what must, at times, have seemed like a never-ending project.

Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, never allowed me to give up on Nefertiti. Carolyn Rout-ledge and Angela Thomas, both former Curators of Egyptology and Archaeology at Bolton Museum, each provided helpful information about the Bolton Nefertiti replica. George Rothschild has generously taken the time to discuss his great uncle, Ludwig Borchardt, with me. Michelle, of Southern Artists, Forgers and Hackers, has discussed the creation of the Landis replica bust and Cosmo Wenman has shared his work on the Nefertiti 3D scan heist/hoax. Pauline Norris explained the importance of Thutmoses horse blinker. Amanda Turnbull shared both her art and her library; Joseph Thimes shared his knowledge of DNA; and Dominique Leroux shared the fortuitous finding of a replica Nefertiti in Paris. Robin Snell explained the importance of her Nefertiti tattoo, while Kerry Webb provided random but important support, from thoughts on bald Disney villainesses to links to articles and television programmes, and encouraged me with a series of cheerful postcards when I was on the verge of giving up. My family have gone to extraordinary lengths to support my growing obsession with the Nefertiti bust. In particular my brother, Frank Tyldesley, volunteered (or was volunteered) to make a life-sized limestone replica, just so that I could get some idea of how the original might have been made. My husband, Steven Snape, supported me through my writing and accompanied me to many museums and art galleries on my quest to look at as many different forms of Nefertiti as possible. I am grateful to them all.

One of the most interesting features of modern historical work is the attempt of the historian, not only to construct a complete and reliable skeleton of fact about particular peoples and periods, but also, when that has been done, to clothe the dry bones with flesh and blood, and to inspire them with life and movement. The dry catalogues of events and dynasties which served as histories in the past no longer satisfy us. We wish to know how people lived, acted, thought, in ancient days, to see them as they wrought their days work, to follow them into the intimacies of their homes, to know what they believed in and hoped for, even what amused them in their hours of relaxation. Perhaps even more keenly do we desire to realise individual personality, where such a thing is possible, and to be able to form in our own minds an actual conception of the men who made history in the past.

James Baikie (1929)

As a child, I loved the gloomy Egyptian gallery in Bolton Museum. Here, hidden amongst the countless dusty pots, could be found a whole treasury of wonders: the Rosetta Stone, a partially unwrapped female mummy lying in a decorated coffin, a squat Peruvian mummy sewn into what looked like a sack, and the sculpted head of a beautiful woman named Nefertiti. I dont know how old I was when I realised that not everything on display was quite what it seemed. The Rosetta Stone was much to my indignation a reproduction of the original, which has long been a key piece in the British Museums collection. The Egyptian mummy was genuinely ancient, but would later be reclassified as a man while its decorated coffin remained that of a woman; a useful reminder that not every dead Egyptian made the long journey to Lancashire with his or her own accessories. Nefertitis head was less than a century old; a plaster copy of a bust then on display in West Berlin, and just one of a host of identical plaster Nefertitis confusing children and their parents in museums throughout the Western world. Only the Peruvian mummy the inexplicable and, to me, sinister intruder in the Egyptian gallery was exactly what it appeared to be.