Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Bechard.
Nofrîtari thus reigned conjointly with Amenôthes, and even if we have no record of any act in which she was specially concerned, we know at least that her rule was a prosperous one, and that her memory was revered by her subjects. While the majority of queens were relegated after death to the crowd of shadowy ancestors to whom habitual sacrifice was offered, the worshippers not knowing even to which sex these royal personages belonged, the remembrance of Nofrîtari always remained distinct in their minds, and her cult spread till it might be said to have become a kind of popular religion. In this veneration Ahmosis was rarely associated with the queen, but Amenôthes and several of her other children shared in it—her son Sipiri, for instance, and her daughters Sîtamon,* Sîtkamosi, and Marîtamon; Nofrîtari became, in fact, an actual goddess, taking her place beside Amon, Khonsû, and Maut,** the members of the Theban Triad, or standing alone as an object of worship for her devotees.
* Sîtamon is mentioned, with her mother, on the Karnak stele
and on the coffin of Bûtehamon.
** She is worshipped with the Theban Triad by Brihor, at
Karnak, in the temple of Khonsû.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-
Bey.
She was identified with Isis, Hathor, and the mistresses of Hades, and adopted their attributes, even to the black or blue coloured skin of these funerary divinities.*
* Her statue in the Turin Museum represents her as having
black skin. She is also painted black standing before
Amenôthes (who is white) in the Deir el-Medineh tomb, now
preserved in the Berlin Museum, in that of Nibnûtîrû, and hi
that of Unnofir, at Sheikh Abd el-Qûrnah. Her face is
painted blue in the tomb of Kasa. The representations of
this queen with a black skin have caused her to be taken for
a negress, the daughter of an Ethiopian Pharaoh, or at any
rate the daughter of a chief of some Nubian tribe; it was
thought that Ahmosis must have married her to secure the
help of the negro tribes in his wars, and that it was owing
to this alliance that he succeeded in expelling the Hyksôs.
Later discoveries have not confirmed these hypotheses.
Nofrîtari was most probably an Egyptian of unmixed race, as
we have seen, and daughter of Ahhotpû I., and the black or
blue colour of her skin is merely owing to her
identification with the goddesses of the dead.