Hands of Aten, inspired by a limestone fragment in the Neues Museum, Berlin

I recently spent a long time staring at a very small fragment of history — not a temple façade or a monumental statue or an imposing sarcophagus, but simply two pairs of hands, resting quietly together. For most of my life, my understanding of ancient Egypt was shaped by the heroic scale of everything: the pyramids, the colossi, the guardians carved out of mountainsides. But one of the greatest revolutions in art happened on a much smaller scale — in the way a king and queen touched.

The hands in the original sculpture belong to Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Pharaoh and Great Royal Wife of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty. Around 1350 BCE they changed the world — not only politically, not only religiously, but artistically, in a way the world is still trying to fully understand. Before their time, Egyptian pharaohs were shown as eternal and unchanging. They were symbols, not people — stiff, serene, perfect in profile and proportion and forever young, even when they had lived long lives.

Then came Akhenaten.

Akhenaten believed that the gods were far more personal than stone could show. Under his reign, the art of Egypt evolved overnight from the formal to the intimate. His sculptors began to show the royal family laughing with their children, holding each other, reclining, kissing, touching cheeks, and resting hands gently on one another with the ease of shared life. Nefertiti, whose name means “The Beautiful One Has Come,” wasn’t just shown beside him — she was shown with him, participating in the same divine sunlight of Aten, the disk of the sun whose rays end in human hands offering life.

These sculpted hands are a perfect symbol of that shift.

They are relaxed, natural, intertwined not as a political gesture but as one of adoration and partnership. Akhenaten didn’t hide Nefertiti; he elevated her to the highest rank in the kingdom, presenting her as equal in ritual and presence. In reliefs she stands his height. In ceremonies, she wears his crown. The world has spent millennia wondering whether he saw divinity in himself, or whether he saw divinity in the unity between them.

The fragment I painted is now in Berlin, in the Neues Museum. It’s no bigger than a human torso, carved out of limestone — just a quiet piece of what was once a great relief, probably showing the royal couple seated side-by-side. Time erased almost everything above and around those hands. The throne is gone. The crowns are gone. The faces, the hieroglyphs, the sun-disks — all the iconography that told the world they were king and queen … vanished.

And yet what remains, remains enough.

Two thousand years from now, we may not remember the proclamations of any modern ruler, but we will recognize the sight of one person placing their hand gently over another’s. It turns out the language of power fades faster than the language of love.

So I painted them — not to copy the stone, but to try to listen to it. Watercolor felt right, because watercolor bleeds when you let it. The colors drift into each other the same way Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s hands do — soft edges, soft intentions. The Amarna period is often called a religious revolution, but it was also a revolution of empathy. These hands are proof.

Akhenaten and Nefertiti ruled an Egypt that was briefly strange and radiant, full of sun and devotion and artistic courage. Their legacy has been debated for centuries — her power, his motivations, their politics, their worship. But when all the arguments fall away, I’m left with this small limestone memory: a king and queen, united by touch, trying to tell the world that the divine is not above us, but between us.

And that — thousands of years later — still feels very relevant.

(This piece is dedicated to Dr. Hana Abbass from the University of Alexandria, for reminding me that these were human beings in love and not just Gods and Pharaohs.)

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