The Wilbour Plaque is named for the early American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833–1896), who acquired it in Egypt in 1881. This can only mean one thing: Nefertiti’s sepulcher lies elsewhere-and is probably intact. The quasi-royal design of Tomb 26C within the Communal Tomb in Amarna (TA26) provides evidence that it was built for Nefertiti, but the unfinished chambers of this suite hint she was not laid to rest in Akhetaten. Barring pieces of a votive shabti that was probably placed in her husband Akhenaten’s tomb, no funerary object from her burial has ever surfaced.

One of the greatest enigmas in all of Egyptology is the location of the final resting place of Queen Nefertiti, a powerful royal personage of the late Eighteenth Dynasty.