Nefertiti

Nefertiti

Author: BBC Radio 4 February 15, 2024 Duration: 49:50

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the woman who inspired one of the best known artefacts from ancient Egypt. The Bust of Nefertiti is multicoloured and symmetrical, about 49cm/18" high and, despite the missing left eye, still holds the gaze of onlookers below its tall, blue, flat topped headdress. Its discovery in 1912 in Amarna was kept quiet at first but its display in Berlin in the 1920s caused a sensation, with replicas sent out across the world. Ever since, as with Tutankhamun perhaps, the concrete facts about Nefertiti herself have barely kept up with the theories, the legends and the speculation, reinvigorated with each new discovery.

With

Aidan Dodson Honorary Professor of Egyptology at the University of Bristol

Joyce Tyldesley Professor of Egyptology at the University of Manchester

And

Kate Spence Senior Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Dorothea Arnold (ed.), The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty from Ancient Egypt (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996) Norman de Garis Davies, The Rock Tombs of el-Amarna (6 vols. Egypt Exploration Society, 1903-1908) Aidan Dodson, Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb and the Egyptian Counter-reformation. (American University in Cairo Press, 2009 Aidan Dodson, Nefertiti, Queen and Pharaoh of Egypt: her life and afterlife (American University in Cairo Press, 2020)

Aidan Dodson, Tutankhamun: King of Egypt: his life and afterlife (American University in Cairo Press, 2022)

Barry Kemp, The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People (Thames and Hudson, 2012)

Dominic Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (Routledge, 2002)

Friederike Seyfried (ed.), In the Light of Amarna: 100 Years of the Nefertiti Discovery (Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussamlung Staatlich Museen zu Berlin/ Michael Imhof Verlag, 2013)

Joyce Tyldesley, Tutankhamun: Pharaoh, Icon, Enigma (Headline, 2022)

Joyce Tyldesley, Nefertiti’s Face: The Creation of an Icon (Profile Books, 2018)

Joyce Tyldesley, Nefertiti: Egypt’s Sun Queen (Viking, 1998)


For anyone with a restless mind, the weekly In Our Time podcast from BBC Radio 4 offers a deep and engaging conversation across the vast terrain of human thought and experience. Host Misha Glenny guides a panel of distinguished academics, not in lecture format, but through a lively, accessible discussion where ideas genuinely collide and unfold. You might find yourself immersed in the complex legacy of a figure like Napoleon one week, and the next be untangling the scientific principles of photosynthesis or the philosophical arguments of the Enlightenment. The scope is deliberately broad, covering history, religion, culture, science, and philosophy, because understanding one often requires context from another. What you hear is the genuine process of exploration-the questions, the debates, and the connections made in real time by leading experts. It’s the kind of podcast that doesn’t just recount the Sack of Rome or the intricacies of Russian court politics, but examines why these moments mattered and how their echoes are still felt. The result is a consistently stimulating hour that treats listeners as curious equals, offering the intellectual satisfaction of following a great conversation to its illuminating conclusion.
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