For over a decade, Nefertiti, wife of the heretic king Akhenaten, was the most influential woman in the Bronze Age world: a beautiful queen blessed by the sun god, adored by her family, and worshipped by her people.

Her image and her name were celebrated throughout Egypt and her future seemed golden. Suddenly Nefertiti disappeared from the royal family, vanishing so completely that it was as if she had never been. No record survives to detail her death, no monument serves to mourn her passing, and to this day her end remains an enigma—her body has never been found. Fully revising her classic biography of Egypt’s sun queen, historian Joyce Tyldesley draws on a wealth of scholarly and archeological evidence to investigate the truth behind the life, times, and mysterious disappearance of the legendary Nefertiti.