John Darnell

Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth John Darnell

Two celebrated Egyptologists bring to vivid life the intriguing and controversial reign of King Tut's parents

Akhenaten has been the subject of radically different, often contradictory, biographies. He has been the inspiration for an opera by Philip Glass, an academy-award nominated movie, and the face of his wife Nefertiti in her famous bust has been replaced by that of Beyoncé on t-shirts. Akhenaten has achieved fame as the world's first individual, as the world's first monotheist, and as the father of Tutankhamun, the king "who gave his life for tourism" in the witty lyrics of Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live. But who is Akhenaten, really? And what can we actually say about someone who lived three thousand three hundred and fifty years ago?

Ancient Egypt has remained uniquely popular from antiquity to the present, and "Egyptomania" shows no signs of abating in the twenty-first century. Egypt's Golden Couple takes the reader on a journey through excavations and museums, reading hieroglyphic texts, and interpreting art. How we know what we know is the real key to understanding Akhenaten and Nefertiti, or indeed any topic in ancient Egyptian history. How is often every bit as intruiging as what, and renowned Egyptologists, John and Colleen Darnell, interweave stories from their exciting careers to lead readers from clue to clue as they reconstruct an otherwise untold story. Egypt's Golden Couple combines cutting edge scholarship with the suspense of a detective story and the thrill of an adventure tale.

November 2022 will mark the centennial of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Although "King Tut" is a household name, his nine-year rule pales in historical significance to that of his father, Akhenaten. Together with Tutankhamun's gold and jeweled funerary mask, the painted bust of Nefertiti is the most recognizable artifact from all of ancient Egypt. Egypt's Golden Couple provides the ultimate backstory to those famous works as well as the continuous stream of headline-catching stories of archaeological discoveries in Egypt.