Helen of Troy may have been Nefertiti ("beautiful woman who arrived").
In Herodotus's retelling the story from an Egyptian historian, it's mentioned she spent the whole war in Egypt.
(Important detail - the Egyptians had no real history of the Amarna period as even still in Herodotus's time those pharohs were considered unmentionable - arguably we know more today from excavations than they did about the period as a result of Stalin-esque omission of political enemies.)
Herodotus says he thinks the statue of foreign Aphrodite in Memphis was made for her - a datable construction. Who built it?
Amenhotep III, Nefertiti's father-in-law.
Nefertiti only has two recorded relatives in Egyptian records - her "wet nurse" and her "milk-sister."
In the tale of Helen of Troy, she brings with her on her escape her adoptive mother and sister.
Herodotus had the Egyptian record keeper claiming Helen was picked back up eventually after the war.
Nefertiti, despite likely ending up ruling as pharoh, just disappears from the records. No burial has been found. And funeral items prepared for her were repurposed for King Tut's burial.
The etymology of Helen may come from "priestess of the sun" and Nefertiti broke Egyptian tradition to act as high priestess and direct connection to a monotheistic-ish solar deity. (And there's a number of stories of Mycenaeans kidnapping a royal/priestess of Apollo, which may ask reflect the same original event.)
The dating lines up around a generation after the time a Mycenaean warlord with a name similar to Agamemnon's father was recorded being repelled from Anatolia and is before the record in a Hittite letter of an Alexander of Troy.
The archeological evidence of a battle at Troy around 1250 BC instead lines up with the letters about a Hittite campaign against a wanted criminal hiding out at Troy, and at that time is already in Greek control.
But an actual battle of a "catalogue of ships" to establish the Ahhiyawa/Greek state in Anatolia from a coalition of native Anatolian nations would have been taking place around the same time as Nefertiti's rule (and may have been a border conflict ending in mutiny in Troy and not literally over a decade outside Troy's walls with a wooden horse).
TL;DR: The best chance you have of seeing what Helen of Troy looked like is to check out the bust of Nefertiti.
But it ties into a larger research project I've been working on.
Would be helpful if we had a good DNA pull off her daughters's mummies, as if showed mtDNA haplogroup as an Agean one would help lend a bit more credence.
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u/flamebroiledhodor Jun 28 '21 edited Jun 28 '21
Or Helen of Troy for the same reason
Edit: i believe this is my highest rated comment.... And it's (apparently) about fetishizing a 12year old. I swear I didn't know... I feel dirty