This series is published with the authorization of Professor Jin Shoufu. This is an AI-assisted contemporary editorial adaptation by Clio Walker based on Jin Shoufu’s Ancient Egyptian Civilization. It is neither a newly written eyewitness travel account by the professor nor a chapter-by-chapter reproduction of his book.

On the afternoon of 6 December 1912, at the excavation at Amarna, a face more than three thousand years old came out of the rubble.

First came a skin-coloured neck painted with red ribbons. Above it appeared the lower part of a bust; below it, the back of a queen’s wig.

The excavation director, Ludwig Borchardt, left a line in his diary that year that is still quoted: “Description is useless, must be seen.”

This is the painted bust of Nefertiti now in Berlin’s Neues Museum. Yet the man who held it in his arms in front of the camera that day was not Borchardt.

I. A face that did not come from a tomb

Almost everything we know about the daily life of ancient Egyptians comes from tombs: the burial chambers, the furnishings placed in them, and the images and texts carved and painted on them.

Jin Shoufu points out what that means. The “ancient Egyptians” we describe are, in fact, the upper class. Ordinary people could not afford to build a tomb, let alone furnish one. Because of Egypt’s rigid hierarchy, ordinary people found it very hard to leave any trace of themselves.

The head of Nefertiti is an exception. It was not found in a tomb.

It comes from Amarna, the new capital built by King Akhenaten. According to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the city, anciently called Akhetaten, was founded around 1350 BCE, and the bust dates to Akhenaten’s reign, about 1351–1334 BCE. It was found in a workshop compound designated P 47.2, which held a large deposit of plaster models and two royal busts; an inscription later led scholars to attribute the workshop to the sculptor Thutmose.

A queen’s most famous likeness survived in a craftsman’s workshop.

II. The most beautiful woman in Berlin

Berliners, and many Germans, call the bust “the most beautiful woman in Berlin.”

Jin asks us to look closely. The eyebrows, eye-lines and lips are painted in different colours with great care. The long neck and straight nose are clearly Amarna-period ideals of beauty. On the forehead and earlobes are marks for a crown and for earrings.

Whether this was her real face no one can say. But it puts before us what people of her time thought beautiful, and how hard they worked for it. Even by today’s standards, the face has something moving about it.

Her later fame came half from that face and half from a dispute. Egypt and Germany have negotiated over the bust’s ownership for more than a century. It is said that in the 1930s German circles agreed to return it, and the Egyptian government was willing to offer several Egyptian treasures in exchange, but Hitler vetoed the deal and years of effort came to nothing.

Add her still-uncertain origins and her marriage to the enigmatic Akhenaten, and the queen became a household name.

III. A transparent dress

In a standing statue of Nefertiti, she wears an almost transparent long dress of fine linen.

Ancient Egyptian clothing was, on the whole, simple. That reflected the level of production and living standards, and also Egypt’s hot, dry climate. Women usually wore a straight sheath dress, or one with two shoulder straps. With little room to vary the cut, women varied the straps: sometimes plain strips of cloth, sometimes two fine cords braided together; usually parallel, occasionally crossed. Dresses and straps were usually white, now and then red, yellow or green.

The dresses were tight and sheer, emphasizing the parts of the body linked to childbirth. Some meticulous Egyptologists made replicas to test whether women could actually live in them.

Here Jin pauses. Most of these paintings, reliefs and statues belong to the world of burial. Where the tomb owner was a man, women in effect served his rebirth. That is why the female body, full of life and especially in its reproductive parts, was given such weight.

The “fashion” we see is first of all a requirement of the afterlife.

IV. Hair of lapis lazuli

In Egyptian ideas of health and long life, thick black hair was the most important sign, and a goal for upper-class men and women alike.

The flesh of the gods, they said, was made of gold, and their hair of lapis lazuli.

But long hair in that heat was no comfort. Those who could afford it found a compromise: they cut their hair short and wore wigs suited to their sex and rank.

In private they took the wigs off. In public, and especially on formal occasions, they put on wigs that matched custom and met the afterlife’s demand for a healthy appearance. Women’s wigs curled at the ends and fell below the shoulders, sometimes crowned with a diadem set with gold or gems that glittered in the sun.

V. What was in the cosmetic box

Earrings, rings and necklaces were indispensable to women of the upper class. Women in tomb paintings wear them, and burial goods include real jewellery and many kinds of cosmetics.

Brushes for the eyebrows and combs for the hair were standard. More surprising is a tool that combined the functions of scissors and a razor; scholars believe women used it to cut or remove body hair.

Jars for ointment and spatulas to apply it mattered too. Surrounded by desert, people had to endure dryness and blowing sand, and skin ointments were a necessity.

How should a good husband treat his wife? The Instruction of Ptahhotep puts it neatly (rendered here from Jin’s Chinese translation):

“If you have property and have founded a household, you should be a worthy husband. Love your wife, keep her well fed and clothed; ointment is the remedy for her limbs. Make her content as long as you live; she is a field that never runs out.”

The first line is a threshold: first you must have property and a household. The ointment, the wigs and the jewellery all lie on the far side of it.

VI. Living apart, buried apart

On hierarchy and social stratification, Jin borrows a conclusion from the Canadian scholar Bruce Trigger’s comparison of early civilizations.

Trigger argued that, compared with strongly urban civilizations such as ancient Greece and Mesopotamia, territorial states such as Egypt, the Inca and Shang China were politically more stable, and women held correspondingly higher status.

Egypt was indeed not very urban. A number of quasi-cities with administrative functions were scattered across the country. Elite residences were usually separate from those of other classes, with cult places, cemeteries, and the settlements of craftsmen, retainers and farmers dispersed around them.

That separation probably reflects the social exclusivity of the upper class: they avoided living close to their subjects.

After death the exclusivity continued. In the Old Kingdom a king usually had one pyramid, or even several, to himself. In the New Kingdom dead kings were buried in what is now called the Valley of the Kings, in the company of the gods, while queens, royal wives and other members of the royal family were buried in another valley, the Valley of the Queens.

VII. Workers inside the tomb

So where were ordinary people?

Settlements lay in the Nile valley; tombs lay in the cliffs on either side. With the annual flood and thousands of years of change, the settlements of pharaonic times have almost all vanished.

What we know of ordinary people’s lives comes mostly, once again, from officials’ tombs. Labourers appear in elite tombs because they had to supply the tomb owner’s afterlife.

In those scenes their clothes barely cover them and they look unkempt, in sharp contrast to the upper class in white linen and wigs. The picture broadly matches the description of manual workers in the Satire of the Trades, quoted in story 008 of this series.

Even the image of ordinary people survived on the back of someone else’s eternity.

VIII. The sketches at Deir el-Medina

In one place, workers’ likenesses survived on a different kind of stone.

Deir el-Medina is the name of a village on the west bank of the Nile at present-day Luxor. Nearby once lived the craftsmen who built the royal tombs of the New Kingdom. Archaeologists found many stones there bearing sketches.

Some show the leisurely, comfortable life of the upper class. Others show labourers gasping for breath, mouths open, from exhaustion and dust.

Where men and women appear together, the women are relatively neatly dressed and wear necklaces. But working women are usually bare above the waist, with sturdy arms and legs, in sharp contrast to the slender figures and elegant dress of noblewomen.

On one side, painted eyebrows; on the other, open mouths.

Epilogue

Back to Amarna on 6 December 1912.

That day Borchardt left the excavation in the care of his colleague Hermann Ranke and hurried to the river to meet visitors from Saxony. According to the Berlin museums, settlement digs like this were carried out at several spots at once by a large number of workers under the supervision of a few scholars.

Prince Johann Georg of Saxony was a keen amateur photographer. Three of the photographs he took that day show the newly found bust in the arms of the foreman, Mohammed es-Senussi. The museum’s caption lists three names: Ranke, Hollander, es-Senussi. Borchardt’s diary also notes that es-Senussi reported feeling three more plaster heads and a granite foot.

The many workers who cleared the rubble left no names.

More than three thousand years on, the queen’s face was once again carried out of the dust by other people’s hands.

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Authorized base: Jin Shoufu, Ancient Egyptian Civilization (authorized electronic text), Lecture 4, section 4.1, “A Rigid Hierarchy,” read in full on 22 October 2026. The points that tomb evidence reflects the elite and that ordinary people left few traces; the Amarna workshop origin of a Nefertiti head, the “most beautiful woman in Berlin,” the painted features and Amarna ideals, the ownership dispute and the reported Hitler veto (marked “it is said” in the base text and kept so); dress, straps and colours, replica tests, and the role of women in male burial contexts; gold flesh and lapis hair of the gods, short hair and wigs; jewellery, cosmetics, the scissor-razor tool, ointments; the six lines of the Instruction of Ptahhotep (translated from Jin’s Chinese); Trigger on territorial states, elite separation, separate royal burial and the Valleys of the Kings and Queens; lost settlements, labourers in officials’ tombs and their clothing; and the Deir el-Medina sketch stones are all paraphrased from this section. The Satire of the Trades is only cross-referenced to story 008. No page numbers are invented. 2. Institutional source: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, “The Bust of Nefertiti” overview and “The Find” page (read 22 October 2026), for the find date, Borchardt’s direction, Akhetaten’s founding and Akhenaten’s regnal dates, workshop P 47.2 and its attribution to Thutmose, Ranke’s supervision, the many workers, the prince’s photographs and caption, es-Senussi’s report, Borchardt’s later published description of the find, and the diary line. Diary and report wording follow the museum’s English translation; the German originals were not checked. https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/aegyptisches-museum-und-papyrussammlung/collection-research/bust-of-nefertiti/ and https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/aegyptisches-museum-und-papyrussammlung/collection-research/bust-of-nefertiti/discovery-and-partage/ 3. Map aids only: the use dates of the Deir el-Medina village (18th–20th Dynasties, c. 1550–1080 BCE) come from a general reference (Wikipedia, “Deir el-Medina”) and are used only for map time fields; the text keeps the base’s “New Kingdom.” Coordinates are from GeoNames and mark regions only. 4. Boundaries: the head illustrated in the base text and the Berlin bust are not conflated; the 1912 find narrative refers to the Berlin painted bust. The base’s remark on cancer DNA in mummies is not used. No dialogue, psychology, weather or sensory detail has been invented; the sketches are described only as the base describes them.