Nefertiti

A painted limestone bust excavated at Amarna in 1912 made Nefertiti (c. 1370–1336 BC) one of the most recognizable faces of antiquity; the historical queen behind the Berlin sculpture is far harder to pin down. Her parentage is unrecorded. A frequent conjecture makes her a daughter of the courtier Ay, who held the title "god's father" and later became king, but this is unproven, and her name — "the beautiful one has come" — has sometimes encouraged equally unproven ideas of foreign origin.

As Great Royal Wife of Akhenaten she occupied a position of exceptional prominence. In the reliefs of Karnak's early Aten temples and at the new capital of Akhetaten she appears almost as often as the king, officiating in the cult of the Aten in her own right and, on some blocks, smiting enemies in the classic pose of pharaoh — imagery otherwise reserved for kings. The couple's six daughters appear throughout Amarna art; the third, Ankhesenpaaten, later married Tutankhamun, who by the prevailing reading of the genetic evidence was Akhenaten's son by another wife rather than by Nefertiti.

Her later career is one of Egyptology's standing problems. She fades from the record after about year 12 of the reign, which once prompted theories of disgrace or death; a quarry inscription dated to year 16, identified in 2012, shows she was alive and still queen near the reign's end. Many scholars now identify her with the shadowy coregent and successor Neferneferuaten, perhaps ruling under that name after Akhenaten's death around 1336 BC, but the evidence is indirect and the question remains open. No mummy has been securely identified as hers; the "Younger Lady" of tomb KV35, shown by DNA to be Tutankhamun's mother and a daughter of Amenhotep III, fits Nefertiti only if she was the king's full sister, which most scholars doubt.

The bust itself, found in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose by Ludwig Borchardt's expedition, went to Berlin, where it remains a focus of repatriation requests — a second, modern afterlife for a queen whose first remains unresolved.