The famous painted limestone bust depicts Nefertiti, the Great Royal Wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten.
Created around 1345 BC, the 48-centimetre sculpture was found in 1912 in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose at Amarna, Akhenaten’s capital. Its limestone core is covered with painted stucco, and the queen wears the tall blue “Nefertiti cap crown” associated with her portraits.
The bust is unusually naturalistic for Egyptian royal art: its face is carefully modelled, its right eye contains an inset quartz iris, and its left eye was never completed or has lost its inlay. A 2006 CT scan also revealed an older, more wrinkled face beneath the finished stucco surface.
Nefertiti is sometimes confused with Cleopatra or Hatshepsut because all were powerful Egyptian queens, but they lived in different periods. Cleopatra ruled more than 1,200 years later, while Hatshepsut belonged to an earlier dynasty.