Those who have attended events at our London Office in Doughty Mews may well have felt the presence of Nefertiti staring from the back of the room. This is because a fine replica of the unfinished head of the Queen has become a familiar face to Society members and attends almost all of our Office events! The original was found during the EES excavations at Amarna during the 1932-33 season, under the direction of John Pendlebury and can be seen in the images below.
The EES Archive images of the replica Nefertiti head, L-R: the head photographed at Cairo Museum, the object card detailing the discovery, John Pendlebury setting the head up at the Amarna exhibition of 1934.
The replica (below) was used in an exhibition of finds from Amarna in 1934, and Pendlebury can be seen in the image above setting the replica up in pride of place. A replica had to be used as the original was left at Cairo Museum. Pendlebury even wrote a short love story based on a woman that resembled this stunning head of the Queen (Grundon 2007: 161).
As well as the replica the EES also holds the Object Card from that dig season which is now available via our Twitter and Facebook feeds as part of our #Amarnafortheday project.
For anyone visiting the EES London Office in the future, don’t forget to take a look at Nefertiti, and perhaps even say ‘hi’!
To read more about Pendlebury’s life and excavations at Amarna see:
Grundon, I. 2007. The Rash Adventurer: A Life of John Pendlebury. London.
To visit the archives and see the Amarna Object Cards for yourself please email archive@ees.ac.ukto arrange a visit. We regret that they are not on display and only viewable by appointment only.
For more information about current excavations at Amarna visit the Amarna Trust website. Many of our Object Cards relate to items currently listed in the Amarna Small Finds Database, which is freely available to browse online. Publications of work at Amarna can also be found by clicking here, including some free downloads now available here.