Author’s Note: Daughter of the Sun

As I conclude the final instalment in The Amarna Age, I’ve been reflecting on how our understanding of the history of this time period has changed in the years since I started this series.

I started writing Queen of Egypt somewhere in early 2014 (I think), although I had been planning this book for at least a couple of years before that. At the time, the fact that Nefertiti died shortly after Meketaten and long before Akhenaten was widely believed among Egyptologists to be truth, as was the fact that Akhenaten was followed by a male pharaoh called Smenkhkare about whom almost nothing was known. There were people who believed Nefertiti herself was Smenkhkare, although this was considered a fringe theory and held little weight with serious scholars.

In the last couple of years, our understanding has changed radically. The discovery of an inscription dating to Akhenaten’s sixteenth regnal year references Nefertiti and shows she was still the “Great King’s Wife” and “Mistress of the Two Lands” at this time. Within the Egyptological community, the idea that Nefertiti lived until either shortly before Akhenaten’s death, or even past it, is gaining greater support. So is the idea that she may have co-ruled as Pharaoh in his final years and perhaps even ruled after him. Nefertiti could well be the elusive Pharaoh Smenkhkare who ruled between Akhenaten and Tutankhamun after all.

It is an intriguing idea, but nothing has been definitively proven at this stage. Perhaps it never will. Despite Egypt’s very long history, there is so much we don’t know and it is likely we will never fill in some of those gaps.

The possibility of history as we know it being re-written is a risk that any writer of historical fiction faces, but more so when writing about such an ancient time period where a single discovery — such as a text showing a queen lived years longer than we had believed — can change so much of what we thought we knew.

When I started writing this series, I knew it was possible our understanding of the Amarna years would change. I made an early decision that once the books were written, I would leave them as they were. That I wouldn’t re-write them as our knowledge of the history changed. If I was to do so — to re-write Nefertiti so she lived longer — it would change a fundamental part of Ankhesenamun’s character motivation and that would have implications for other parts of her story. And where does one leave off making those changes? What would I do with the next discovery that changes our understanding? And the next? Unless I want to spend the rest of my life re-writing these books to fit the latest (and possibly erroneous) understanding of the time, I have to let it go. I am, after all, writing historical fantasy rather than straight history. There are always elements of the history that I change or ignore to better serve the story I want to tell.

For the reader who doesn’t know Egyptian history in detail, this is probably largely irrelevant. For the reader who does know the time period, I hope you will forgive my decision to let the story — rather than the latest view of history — be my guide.

Kylie Quillinan, June 2022