Daughter of Tadukhipa, a princess of Mitanni, and Amenhotep the Third, king of Egypt, Queen Nefertiti was King Akhnaton's half-sister: kings of Egypt, children of the Sun, often married their sisters in order to preserve the purity of the race.
The king and queen were so much alike that when, as boy and girl, they used to wear almost the same clothes, people found it hard to distinguish them. There was the same languid charm about them, the charm of a half-opened flower drooping with the heat of the sun.
"Oh plant that never tasted running water,
Oh flower, plucked out by the roots."
Dio recalled the dirge for the dead god Tammuz when she looked at the bas-relief of the king and queen in one of the palace chambers. They were represented sitting side by side on a double throne; she had her left arm round his waist, the fingers of the right hand were intertwined with his fingers and their faces were so close together that one could hardly see her through him; he was in her and she in him. As it said in the hymn to Aton:
"When Thou didst establish the earth
Thou didst reveal thy will to me
Thy son Akhnaton Uaenra,
And to thy beloved daughter
Nefertiti, delight of the Son
Who flourishes for ever and ever!"
It was then that this brother's and sister's marriage was made.
"They cannot be loved separately, they must be loved together—two in one," Dio understood this at once.
After her dance on the day of Aton's Nativity, she received the rank of 'the chief fan-bearer on the right side of the gracious god-king' and, leaving Tuta's house, settled in the palace where a room was assigned to her in the women's quarters close to the queen's chambers. She soon made friends with the queen, but a barrier which she herself could not understand separated her from the king.
She was no longer afraid of his being 'not quite human': she had learned from the queen that he certainly was human. There was profound meaning in the flat joke about 'the god having stomach-ache.' And the horror that the king's blasphemous words about being 'the son of God' had inspired in her at the festival of the Sun had disappeared, too: all kings of Egypt called themselves 'sons of God.'
She felt no fear, but something that was perhaps worse than fear.