What The Fire Said: Nefertiti

What The Fire Said

What The Fire Said is the portal for my own art and writing. It is necessarily a work in progress, and you are welcome to return anytime to see what has been added here.

In my header you will see both contemporary calibration dials and centuries-old symbols used in the practice of alchemy. My art tends to operate at the interface between such extremes: between our shared distant past and an unknown far future, between the realities of history and the at-times greater realities that lie over the threshold in the world of myth. At these extremes science and magic, myth and history turn into each other, become indistinguishable from each other – as in the far future they well might. ~ Hawkwood (David Bergen)

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Hawkwood (David Bergen)

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Her name means ’The Beautiful One Approaches’. She was the wife and the queen of the heretic king Akhenaten, reigning in the new capital which had been stamped out of the virgin desert a symbolic halfway between the cities of Memphis in the north and Thebes in the south. The king named his new city Akhetaten – ‘Aten on the Horizon’, although it has become more familiar to us from the name of the nearby contemporary town of Amarna.

Nefertiti presented her husband with three daughters. But then as now it was a man’s world, and it was a lesser consort who gave the king the necessary male heir: an ineffectual ruler who died before his twentieth year. The son might have remained an obscure name on the fringes of history but for an extraordinary twist of fate – the discovery of his intact tomb in 1922. The son’s name was Tutankhaten. His change of name tells its own story. With his father’s death, the boy was an easily-manipulated puppet of the priests ready to claim back power, and his name was changed to Tutankhamen.

The glories of the royal court at Amarna collapsed back into the desert sands, its very stones rifled to rebuild the temples of the old gods. Nefertiti, now a widow with a disintegrating power base, must manoeuvre to survive. But did she? History has left no record of the queen’s fate, and we are left to wonder.

Nefertiti’s legendary beauty is wholly due to the surviving portrait bust of her in the Berlin Museum: a bust which has become so iconic that it takes an effort to think one’s way past it. But I wanted deliberately to pull the focus of attention away from the familiar tall crown back to the queen herself: a very human woman contemplating the best way to move forward in a hazardous and politically adverse world almost three and a half millennia removed from our own. And it seemed only fitting to include the queen’s personal cartouche – a cartouche that was deliberately defaced from the stones of Amarna by the reinstated priests.

You can read and see more about Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the royal court of Amarna at: http://shadowsineden.blogspot.nl/2013/10/the-amarna-heresies.html

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