Her husband left her his throne and his One God. Her enemies murdered her and tried to wipe her out of history. But thanks to the talent and devotion of a brilliantly gifted artist, today her face is an icon of beauty, familiar to millions of people around the world. But it almost wasn't so. This is the story of the beautiful Queen Nefertiti; her husband, Pharaoh Akhenaten, history's first monotheist; and Thutmose, the gifted artist who was torn between his love for the beautiful queen and loyalty to his friend and patron, Akhenaten.

For over a decade Nefertiti, wife of the heretic king Akhenaten, was the most influential woman in the Bronze Age world; a beautiful queen blessed by the sun-god, adored by her family and worshipped by her people. Her image and her name were celebrated throughout Egypt and her future seemed golden. Suddenly Nefertiti disappeared from the royal family, vanishing so completely that it was as if she had never been. No record survives to detail her death, no monument serves to mourn her passing and to this day her end remains an enigma - her body has never been found. Joyce Tyldesley here provides a detailed discussion of the life and times of Nefertiti, Egypt's sun queen, set against the background of the ephemeral Amarna court.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “compulsively readable” (Diana Gabaldon) novel teeming with love, betrayal, and religious conflict that brings ancient Egypt to vivid life, from the author of Cleopatra’s Daughter “Meticulously researched and richly detailed . . . an engrossing tribute to one of the most powerful and alluring women in history.”—The Boston Globe Nefertiti and her younger sister, Mutnodjmet, have been raised in a powerful family that has provided wives to the rulers of Egypt for centuries. Ambitious, charismatic, and beautiful, Nefertiti is destined to marry Amunhotep, an unstable young pharaoh. It is hoped that her strong personality will temper the young ruler’s heretical desire to forsake Egypt’s ancient gods. From the moment of her arrival in Thebes, Nefertiti is beloved by the people, but she fails to see that powerful forces are plotting against her husband’s reign. The only person brave enough to warn the queen is her younger sister, yet remaining loyal to Nefertiti will force Mutnodjmet into a dangerous political game—one that could cost her everything she holds dear.

If you could live forever, would you want to? Both a fascinating look at the history of our strive for immortality and an investigation into whether living forever is really all it’s cracked up to be. A fascinating work of popular philosophy and history that both enlightens and entertains, Stephen Cave investigates whether it just might be possible to live forever and whether we should want to. He also makes a powerful argument that it’s our very preoccupation with defying mortality that drives civilization. Central to this book is the metaphor of a mountaintop where one can find the Immortals. Since the dawn of humanity, everyone – whether they know it or not—has been trying to climb that mountain. But there are only four paths up its treacherous slope, and there have only ever been four paths. Throughout history, people have wagered everything on their choice of the correct path, and fought wars against those who’ve chosen differently. In drawing back the curtain on what compels humans to “keep on keeping on,” Cave engages the reader in a number of mind-bending thought experiments. He teases out the implications of each immortality gambit, asking, for example, how long a person would live if they did manage to acquire a perfectly disease-free body. Or what would happen if a super-being tried to round up the atomic constituents of all who’ve died in order to resurrect them. Or what our loved ones would really be doing in heaven if it does exist. We’re confronted with a series of brain-rattling questions: What would happen if tomorrow humanity discovered that there is no life but this one? Would people continue to please their boss, vie for the title of Year’s Best Salesman? Would three-hundred-year projects still get started? If the four paths up the Mount of the Immortals lead nowhere—if there is no getting up to the summit—is there still reason to live? And can civilization survive? Immortality is a deeply satisfying book, as optimistic about the human condition as it is insightful about the true arc of history.

She was the last surviving member of the glorious 18th Dynasty, Queen of a golden empire that stretched from the 4th cataract of the Nile to the banks of the Euphrates: Egypt at the height of its glory and power. But Ankhsenamun and her brother-husband, Tutankhamun, the product of centuries of inbreeding, were unable to produce a living heir to the throne. Now, with word of the untimely death of her young husband, she must consider a drastic alternative means of conceiving an heir. Later still, with her aging grandfather on the throne, faced with the intolerable prospect of being forced into marriage with Egypt's strongman, General Horemheb, and the strong possibility of being murdered by his jealous and power-hungry principal wife, she contemplates yet another drastic step: applying to Egypt's arch-enemy, the King of the Hittites, for one of his sons to marry. Astonishingly, we have both sides of this remarkable correspondence in the archaeological record. Ankhsenamun wrote to Suppililiuma, King of the Hittites, asking him to send one of his sons for her to marry so that she did not have to marry her "servant". After sending a delegation to enquire into the legitimacy of this proposal, Suppililiuma sent his son, Prince Zenanza, to Egypt, but he was assassinated along the way. General Horemheb later took credit for the act. Ankhsenamun then disappears from the record. Her fate is a mystery. Did she die? Was she murdered? Or did she, just possibly, escape? If so, where did she go, and who helped her? This is the story of what may have happened. It is also the story of the birth of the Biblical Moses, and explains the real significance of his name.

Joann Fletcher, presenter of BBC2's 'Ancient Egypt: Life and Death in the Valley of the Kings' has written an enthralling account of Nefertiti, one of Egypt's most compelling and mysterious figures. Wife of the controversial pharaoh Akhenaten, she lived through perhaps the most tumultuous period in the country's long history. The so-called Amarna Period has long held a fascination - not just for the enormous changes it brought to the religion, art and administration of Egypt, but for the many mysteries which surround it. Mysteries, that is, until now. Leading Egyptologist Dr Joann Fletcher has taken a fresh eye to the evidence and arrived at one of the most dramatic discoveries in recent times. Working with a team of leading experts, she has identified a long-forgotten mummy as the body of a female pharaoh of the Amarna Period, whom she believes is Nefertiti herself. Lying for over three thousand years in an unused side chamber of Tomb KV.35 in the Valley of the Kings, it tells a story which will forever change the way in which we view Nefertiti - and indeed women throughout Egyptian history. Now at last we see the full significance of her role as co-regent and later Pharaoh of Egypt, as well as understanding the astonishing luxury and decadence of her life in Amarna - a life she led as the country around her began to disintegrate.