1338 Nefertiti Erased: The Queen History Tried to Bury

**Monica O'Reilly** (0:00)
In times of Nefertiti, she was kind of against the tradition because she proclaimed herself as a pharaoh, as a female pharaoh, which she was against tradition. And they try along history kind of to erase as much as they can the family and especially her. But since now, there is a little bit of a kind of concern and wonder who is really Nefertiti and where she would be, or maybe they destroy her altogether. So there is a lot of questions around that.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:33)
Richard Syrett's Strange Planet. Following the truth wherever it leads. Exposing evil and corruption and the secret machinations of powerful elites. Revealing the highest strangeness beneath the surface of our supposed reality. Coming to you from the great white north, and his studio beneath the stairs. Here's Richard.

**Richard Syrett** (0:59)
Welcome to Strange Planet. One of the most powerful women in history didn't simply vanish, but was deliberately erased. Tonight, we journey back more than 3,300 years to ancient Egypt, to a world of sun worship, palace intrigue, dynastic paranoia, and a royal family at the center of a revolution. At the heart of it is Nefertiti, not just a legendary beauty cast in stone, but a woman who may have wielded extraordinary power at one of the most dangerous turning points in Egyptian history. She stood beside Akhenaten during a radical religious upheaval that tried to sweep away the old gods and reorder the kingdom itself. And then, she disappears. No tomb, no clear death, no definitive ending. So, what happened to Nefertiti? Was she buried by time or buried on purpose? Monica O'Reilly writes historical fiction drawn to the fractures in the official record, to the missing names, vanished rulers, and buried stories that refuse to stay buried. Her novel, Nefertiti's Crown, revisits the strange and unstable world of ancient Egypt's Amarna period, where a radical religious revolution shook an empire, and one of history's most famous women disappeared into silence, with a novelist's instinct for character in a researcher's eye for hidden detail, Monica reconstructs a world of palace intrigue, tenastic tension, and historical erasure, offering a vivid, unsettling portrait of Nefertiti, as she may really have been not merely beautiful, but powerful, consequential, and perhaps too dangerous to remember. Monica, welcome to Strange Planet. How are you?

**Monica O'Reilly** (2:45)
Thank you so much, Richard. I'm keeping very well. And thanks a million for having me in your program. I'm a fan of yours.

**Richard Syrett** (2:53)
Thank you. So for listeners who know the name Nefertiti, but not the story, who was she and why does she still loom so large over ancient history?

**Monica O'Reilly** (3:03)
Yeah, okay. Most of people, when you ask about, do you know Nefertiti or you ever heard, everybody, most of everybody thinks of Nefertiti as a mysterious beauty and elusive, usually, because we don't know much about her history. And even nowadays, there is a lot of research and it contradicts itself sometimes, and everybody is trying to reconstruct her life. So what we know about her is that she appears in the court of Amenhotep III, which is the father of Akenaton, and at an early age. And there is some research that they believe that she was the daughter of Amenhotep III Vizier. So, and he was named Ai, and he was the brother of Amenhotep III, sorry, Amenhotep III was married to Queen Tia, and Ai, the vizier of Queen Tia, were brother and sister. So therefore, Nefertiti was the niece of Amenhotep III John Quintilla. So when we think, sorry, sorry, sorry, Richard.

**Richard Syrett** (4:28)
Right. So that gives us some historical background.

**Monica O'Reilly** (4:30)
OK.

**Richard Syrett** (4:31)
When we think of her, we think of her as a beautiful bust in a museum, a statue. What do we miss about her when we reduce her to an artifact instead of seeing her as a real historical force? What do we miss?

**Monica O'Reilly** (4:50)
I think basically is because all the family was erased from history. That's the bottom line. So there was like a total disappearance of this family, totally penalized by history.
And I believe not only they were erased but the following pharaohs that they were giving an account exactly of every single pharaoh that was ruling Egypt and is missing a Kenatun in all of the accounts. So not only the pharaohs, but I think history as well along the history since ancient Egypt to nowadays, this family particularly was castracized. So there's hardly no information and nowadays it start a little bit resurfing bits and pieces of information, especially after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922

**Richard Syrett** (5:52)
So to understand Nefertiti, I think we first need to understand the world that she stepped into. What kind of civilization was Egypt at that moment, politically, spiritually and culturally?