Her will was strong and her intelligence frighteningly sharp, and a woman who combines malicious will with intelligence and beauty is dangerous — and more dangerous still when she can add to this the power of a great royal consort. Over the years, Nefertiti had bound herself with strong chains. For too many years she had been content merely to smile and to rule by her beauty, to find delight in jewels and wine, verses and adulation. Now, after the birth of the fifth daughter, something seemed to break within her, and she believed that she would never bear a son and laid the blame for this upon Akhenaten. It is true that this was against the natural order and could prove confusing to a woman’s mind. It must however be remembered that in her veins ran the black blood of priest Ay — the ambitious blood of lies, treachery and injustice, and it was no surprise what she came to be.
But let it be said in her defence that never earlier during all those years could an ill word have been spoken of her, and there had been no bad rumours about her, and she had been faithful and surrounded Pharaoh Akhenaten with the tenderness of a loving woman, defending his madness and believing in his visions. Therefore many were amazed at her sudden transformation and evil nature and saw in it a token of the curse that brooded like a deadly cloud over Akhetaten. So great was her decadence that she was reputed to take pleasure with servants and Sherdens and hewers of tombs, though I will not believe this. When once people find something to talk of, they love to exaggerate and make more of it than the facts will warrant, though there was nothing to exaggerate about in her evilness for it was already evil enough.
But I do not want to judge her too harshly for any woman could become agitated if she was the most beautiful woman of her times and a queen — intelligent, sophisticated and admired by all — who but lived her days tied to a man who was excited about his visions and let her, like a cow, carry a child every year, inseminating her only with girls and speaking only about Aten even in bed. Once her eyes had opened and her tenderness turned into bitterness, Nefertiti saw, being an intelligent woman, how Pharaoh Akhenaten spread only curses around him and how he undermined his own power toward unavoidable destruction. Thus her depraved frenzy for men might not have been just a late bloom of passion but she made cold calculations and wanted to win the Pharaoh’s faithful and the noble of the country to her side and
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she tried to achieve that through the most certain means available for a beautiful woman. But these thoughts are only my thoughts about her, and things may just as well have been otherwise.
In any case, Pharaoh Akhenaten shut himself away in his solitude, and his food was the bread of the poor and his drink was the Nile water, for he desired to regain clarity by the purification of his body through the belief that meat and wine had blurred his sight.
From the outside world, no joyful tidings came to Akhetaten but Aziru sent many tablets from Syria, making all kinds of complaints. His men desired to return to their homes, he wrote, to herd their sheep and to tend their cows and to till their fields and to enjoy their wives, for they were peaceful men and loved only peace. But robber bands intruded incessantly past legal border stones from the Sinai desert and raided Syria, and these robber bands were armed with Egyptian weapons and led by Egyptian officers and had Egyptians chariots at their disposal, so that they were a permanent danger to Syria, and Aziru could not allow his men to return home. The commandant in Gaza was also behaving in a highly unbecoming manner and in contravention of the letter and spirit of the peace treaty since he closed the gates of the city to peaceful merchants and caravans and admitted only those whom he thought fit to trade in Gaza according to his own mean judgment. Aziru made also many other complaints — and there was no end to his complaints — and he wrote that anyone save himself would long ago have lost all patience but that he was long-suffering because peace was all he loved. Yet unless an end was put to these incidents, he would not answer for the outcome.
Likewise, Babylon was very incensed at Egypt’s competition for the Syrian grain markets, and King Burnaburiash was far from content with the presents he had received from Pharaoh as dowry and regarded them as insufficient, and he put forward many minimum demands that Pharaoh needed to fulfil in order to keep friendship with Babylon. The permanent Babylonian ambassador in Akhetaten shrugged his shoulders, threw out his hands and pulled at his beard, saying, “My master is like a lion that rises uneasily in its lair and opens its nostrils to
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