Neferure

A Childhood Held in Stone

Neferure is one of the best-attested children of the ancient world and one of the least knowable people in it. From an early age she carried the weighty religious title God’s Wife of Amun, appeared in temple reliefs beside her mother, Hatshepsut, and was tutored by the powerful steward Senenmut, who had himself carved into more than one statue cradling her as a small child. She was, by every visual measure, groomed for a central role in her mother’s reign.

And then, sometime before Hatshepsut’s own death, Neferure simply vanishes from the record. No tomb securely identified as hers has ever been found; whether she died young of illness, or lived on quietly, possibly even married to her half-brother Thutmose III, is genuinely disputed among Egyptologists. What survives is a ceremonial outline — titles, statues, a few tender images of a girl on a courtier’s lap — and almost nothing of the person inside it.