Nefertiti

Nefertiti was the principal wife of Akhenaten and may have ruled Egypt in her own right. She appears around 1350 BC as queen of a pharaoh who abolished the Egyptian pantheon. Akhenaten suppressed the cult of Amun, closed the temples, moved the capital to a virgin site at Amarna, and declared the Aten — the visible disc of the sun — the sole god, reachable only through himself and his family. Nefertiti's prominence in that revolution is without parallel. She appears in art at nearly the same scale as the king, driving a chariot, offering to the Aten alongside him, and, in at least one relief, striking a bound captive in the smiting pose reserved for pharaohs. Her name means the beautiful one has come, and she may not have been Egyptian at all, though the evidence for a foreign origin is thin. She bore six daughters and no recorded son. Tutankhamun was probably Akhenaten's son by another wife. She disappears from the record around the twelfth year of the reign. The explanations offered are death, disgrace, or elevation — a co-regent named Neferneferuaten and a short-reigning pharaoh named Smenkhkare both appear at about that point, and a serious body of scholarship identifies one or both with her. The painted limestone bust found by Ludwig Borchardt at Amarna in 1912 in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose, and taken to Berlin under a disputed division of finds, made her one of the most recognisable faces of the ancient world. Egypt has requested its return repeatedly.

• Lived: 1370 BCE – 1330 BCE
• Nationality: Egyptian
• Roles: ruler