📍North Palace, Amarna (Akhetaten), Minya Governorate, Egypt
1346 BC – 1332 BC“I was Great Royal Wife to the pharaoh Akhenaten, and together we led one of the boldest changes Egypt had ever known. My husband turned the kingdom's worship towards a single god, the Aten, the disc of the sun, whose rays end in hands offering life. Around the fifth year of his reign we left the old capital and its powerful priests and founded a new city on an empty stretch of desert beside the Nile, Akhetaten, the Horizon of the Aten, which people today call Amarna. Akhetaten was built quickly, with temples open to the sky, broad roads, gardens and palaces. In the North Palace and the other royal residences, our life with our six daughters, Meritaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Neferneferuaten Tasherit, Neferneferure and Setepenre, was shown in a way that had never been seen before in Egyptian art. The sculptors carved us kissing our children, cradling them on our laps and sitting together as a family beneath the sun's rays. I was shown not only as a queen but as a priestess, and even striking down Egypt's enemies, as only kings had been shown before. In the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose, in the city, artists made portraits of our family, including the painted limestone bust of me that was found in his workshop in 1912 and is now in Berlin. After my husband's reign, the city was abandoned and the old gods restored, and our names were struck from many monuments. But the sand of Amarna kept our story, and the bust from Thutmose's workshop has made my face one of the best known from the ancient world.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons