It surpassed the boundaries of archaeology and fired the imagination of people all over the world, profoundly influencing high, as well as popular, culture and made millions of people aware of ancient Egyptian civilization. Jaromir Malek1 The bout of Egyptomania which had greeted the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen was exacerbated, in 1923, by the unveiling of a beautiful, and now world-famous, head of Nefertiti in Berlin. The plastered and painted stone head had been discovered at Amarna by Ludwig Borchardt in December 1912, but had never before been on public display. It would perhaps be unduly cynical to speculate that this timing was deliberate: that Nefertiti was a German ‘spoiler’, intended to direct attention away from the British Tutankhamen. If that was indeed the intention, it failed spectacularly. Nefertiti, who up to now had been regarded as a minor and relatively insignificant Amarna figure, immediately took her place alongside Akhenaten and Tutankhamen as an ancient world celebrity; Tiy, who until this point had been the senior queen, was somewhat unfairly relegated to a background role.
