Nefertiti

Nefertiti — whose name means “the beautiful one has come” — was Great Royal Wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten and queen of Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty, in the fourteenth century BCE. She lived at Thebes and then at Akhenaten’s new capital of Amarna, at the center of one of the boldest upheavals of the ancient world.

With her husband she championed a religious revolution: the turn away from Egypt’s many gods toward the worship of a single divine power, the sun-disc Aten. In the art of Amarna she appears almost as often as the king himself, and at times in poses reserved for pharaohs — riding the chariot, striking down enemies — a sign of power far beyond that of an ordinary queen.

An inscription from Akhenaten’s sixteenth year shows she was still living late in his reign, and many Egyptologists believe she ruled in her own right, as the pharaoh Neferneferuaten, in the uncertain years before Tutankhamun. Much of her life remains debated; her tomb and her fate are still unknown.

The painted limestone bust carved by the sculptor Thutmose, rediscovered in the twentieth century, has made her face one of the most recognized of all antiquity. Honored among the Great Ones of every civilization; kept here so the memory is never lost.