Now You Know The Truth, Nefer Say I'm Nefertiti Again
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday June 14, 2003
Dear mummy: some beauty tips from 3500 years ago.
America's Discovery Channel announced on Monday that a team from the University of York had found a 3500-year-old mummy near Luxor, Egypt, that matched the physical characteristics of Queen Nefertiti, the second-most-famous female pharoah (after Cleopatra).
Nefertiti was the aunt of Tutankhamen and the wife of Akhenaten, the most controversial of the pharoahs.
If we cloned a person from the DNA in that corpse, we would ask her these questions . . .
Who are you?
I was first known as Nefertiti, but my husband changed my name to Nefer-Nefru-Aten when he changed his name from Amenhotep to Akhenaten. I ruled Egypt with him till the bastard lost interest in me and took up with one of our six daughters.
Why the name change?
In your language my new name means ``Beautiful is the beauty of Aten" and his name means ``Servant of the Aten".
We were promoting this deity we invented. We were trying to tell people that there was only one god, the Aten, and we represented him with a drawing of the sun.
We had a lot of aggro from the priests, who were pushing those old gods with the cat heads and the ibis heads and so on, because they thought that they would lose their jobs.
We didn't have much success in our time Akhy had to use the army to enforce the Aten-worship. But I gather the idea of one god took off later.
What is the secret of your swanlike neck?
That's really a trick of the sculptor. The court artists were going through this fad for making everything long and thin they thought it was more regal.
If you look at Akhy's bust you find he's like a stretched version of the man you call Jerry Seinfeld. His face wasn't really that long, and my neck was only slightly longer than normal, but the statues got a lot of compliments.
Now, if you want a beauty tip: pierce your ear lobe in two places. The guys will go wild.
You don't talk like a queen of Egypt.
All right, you've got me. I'm actually a 16-year-old maid who worked for Nefertiti.
The priests told me I was going to be buried with her family, so I could continue to serve her. After Akhy died, they forced that poor kid Tutankhamen to change everything back to the old ways, and they dumped Nef 's body in a side chamber.
They didn't want her body identified because they didn't want people to remember her weird religion. But she had been a pharoah after all, so they made sure she had someone to do her hair in the afterlife.
You'll have to keep searching if you want her mummy.
I did mean it about the twice-pierced ears, though.
© 2003 Sydney Morning Herald