Nefertiti

Nefertiti

I finished my painting of Nefertiti this weekend. (Akhenaton was looking a little lonely on the wall by himself so I decided last week to paint a portrait of his famous wife.)

I find it amazing that a woman could be famous for over 3000 years. They say that Egyptian women were as strong and independent as American women are today. They could have their own business, their own home and even become pharaoh of their own empire. Nefertiti strikes me as one of those women who was strong and bold.

It's not that Egyptian women didn't have their gender struggles. After all, what is Nefertiti know for today more than anything else: her beauty. It's truly a shame that women are judged first by the way they look and then (if we're lucky) by our accomplishments.

Nefertiti is a good example of this double standard. She was loved by all Egyptians, (some historians say much more than Akhenaton yet they are using artistic representations of her as their evidence.) and yet we know very little about her past, her upbringing or her parents. We know nothing about how she died. In fact, this remains a mystery to this day. How can someone with so many recordings and artistic representations just disappear from the texts? One day she her history is recorded and the artists are trying to capture her likeness and the next...it's as if she never existed. What happened to Nefertiti?

There are many theories about this and Egyptian history has many gaps so it's not that peculiar to Egyptologists to not know the fate of a famous ruler. It took us decades of study and research to figure out that her stepson Tutankhamen died of something as simple as gangrene from a broken leg.

Where there's smoke, however, there's usually fire when it comes to ancient dramas. I'm backing the new theory of her involvement in a conspiracy. I believe Nefertiti was a feminist by today's standards and perhaps she wasn't happy with her stepson becoming the next pharaoh. Nefertiti had 6 daughters and no son. Hatshepsut had already proven that a woman could rule Egypt very competitively. Hatshepsut became a pharaoh and not just a queen, proving that even women could be 'part god.' Nefertiti time wasn't much later than Hatsheput's reign. Did Nefertiti try to murder her stepson and place one of her own daughters on the throne? Was she caught in this conspiracy and then banished from Egyptian history or even worse, Egypt. This would explain why she has been recorded so much in history only to stop short of her later years and death.

Nonetheless, Akhenaton and Nefertiti are together again...at least on my wall: