Queen Tiye

Queen Tiye (c. -1410 to -1340), also written Tiy, was an Egyptian queen in life and a Nubian goddess in death. Her male relatives ruled Egypt for most of the -1300s:

• -1390 to -1352: Amenhotep III, husband
• -1352 to -1336: Akhenaton, son
• -1336 to -1327: Tutankhamen, grandson

Note that dates that far back can be off by about 35 years.

She was also the mother-in-law, if not an aunt, of Nefertiti.

She was the Great Royal Wife, the chief queen. Given how she was shown in pictures and how foreign rulers wrote to her, she must have had considerable power, even if she never ruled in her own right. That set the stage for Nefertiti to hold even more power.

Sons: Queen Tiye had at least two sons: Thutmose and Akhenaton. Thutmose was older but died before his father. So Akhenaton became king, the Heretic King who tried to overthrow the old gods. She became one of his advisers, living till at least the 12th year of his reign (-1341).

Daughters: She also had at least four daughters: Satamun, Henuttaneb, Nebetiah, and Isis. The picture at top might be Satamun, not her. It is hard to tell them apart.

Fellow wives: at least one Babylonian princess, two Mitannian ones (from present-day Syria), and her daughter Satamun. It was common for pharaohs to marry foreign princesses to keep the peace and to marry their own sisters and daughters.

Commoner: What was uncommon was for the king to marry a commoner like her, someone not of royal blood. Not that she was a poor Cinderella figure or anything: she came from a powerful family from Akhmin, a city 250 km down the Nile from the capital Thebes. Her father, Yuya, was the Master of the Horse. He commanded the king’s chariots, the most powerful war machine of its time.

Race: Tiye may have been part Asian, but, going by US racial standards of 3,300 years later, she was almost certainly Black. The same goes for her husband and therefore their son Akhenaton. Ancient Egypt did not have Anglo-American ideas about race, but it is important to point out her Blackness given how relentlessly Egyptian history is Whitewashed and used in turn to support anti-Black racism.

Her body was discovered in 1898. It was lying on the ground in a side room of her father-in-law’s tomb, KV35, in the Valley of the Kings. She was lying next to a ten-year-old boy and a young woman whose face was bashed in (probably from murder). The bodies had no name tags, so no one knew for sure who they were till 2010 when DNA tests showed that the Elder Lady (as she was called) was Queen Tiye and the Younger Lady was King Tut’s mother. We can tell that because among King Tut’s treasures was a lock of his grandmother’s hair.

Nubian goddess: She was worshipped as the solar eye of Ra at a temple in Sedeinga, over 1,000 km upriver from Thebes in Upper Nubia (now Sudan).

– Abagond, 2018.

Update (2023): Updated to use the dating of “The Princeton Dictionary of Ancient Egypt” (2008) by Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson.

See also:

• Egypt: a brief history
• Ancient Egypt
• King Tut
• Nefertiti
• How Black was Ancient Egypt?
• Diop: What were the Egyptians?

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