Heretic of El Amarna

Afterword

Nefertiti is without a doubt one of the most intriguing characters in the great stage of Ancient Egypt. She had a role to play, and hers was a big one. As you have read in this book, Nefertiti helped her husband Akhenaten — formerly known as Amenhotep IV — to transform Egypt into something no one had ever known. They change the three essential pillars of Egyptian society: religion, the Pharaoh, and the army.

The reason that this story ends where it does is that I didn’t want to veer off into speculations. Up until the point of El Amarna — or Akhetaten as Akhenaten called it — things were mostly concrete with little of the most important information missing. But once Akhenaten moved the capital to El Amarna, things become much hazier.

I wanted this story to be as close to fact as possible. Obviously, some characters, such as Gyasi and his servant, were fictional, but as for the main characters — Tiye, Amenhotep (Akhenaten), Nefertiti, Kiya, Thutmose, Tutankhaten (most know him as Tutankhamen), and Amenhotep’s sisters — they all existed.

I did my best to represent the Egyptian lifestyles as it would have been back then. Some things I had to imagine or make up because research did not reveal the information I needed, but most of it is true to the information that the Egyptians left about their lives.

As for what occurred at El Amarna — insofar as we know it — and how their religion worked, I will sum that up below for those who do not know it.

In the new religion Nefertiti and Akhenaten created, only the pharaoh could talk directly to the god. Between the two of them, they formed a powerful new religion and it remained so for their reign. However, people were unhappy and wanted the old gods and goddesses back. They did not like the monotheism that Akhanaten and Nefertiti brought into Egypt.

Nefertiti herself disappears twelve years into her reign. Is she murdered? Does she simply disappear to live somewhere else when there is too much danger of being murdered by the discontent people? Does she become the next pharaoh after Akhanaten, taking on a different name and ruling as the second woman pharaoh to rule after Hatshepsut? No one really knows what happened to Nefertiti. We may never know the whole story.

Regardless, after Akhenaten’s death, the city of El Amarna began to gradually fall into disrepair and many years later, Egypt was back to its former strength and glory. Akhenaten’s son, Tutankhaten, renamed himself Tutankhamen and became the next Pharaoh. He married Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s third daughter, Ankhesenpaaten, who also changed her name, becoming Ankhesenamen.

Ankhesenamen was the last living daughter left to Nefertiti and Akhenaten at this time. Unfortunately, Tutankhamen and Ankhesenamen never managed to have children. Their first two babies were miscarried and Tutankhamen died when he was about nineteen.

After that, their line died away, and nothing was left except Akhenaten’s memories as the Heretic King of El Amarna. The temples he and Nefertiti had built were torn down, and the bricks were used as filler for other temples to the old gods — an act that, ironically, preserved much of the information we know about Akhenaten and Nefertiti as well as their reign.

So their story and time on Egypt’s stage ended, but we can still look back today and see the greatness that Akhenaten and Nefertiti really did accomplish. They revolutionized Egypt and though many tried to hide them or destroy their memory, they never fully succeeded at it.

I hope that you have enjoyed this book and learned some about the time period in which Nefertiti and Akhenaten grew up and lived in. I created a world as close as possible to the real one that they lived in and based as much as possible in fact.

In the end, though, what you take away from this book is up to you.

Sincerely,

Ariel Paiement