During Nefertiti’s golden age, when scribes and sculptors carved wishes into stone for her to be granted eternal life, none could have imagined that 33 centuries would have to rush by before she began gaining a measure of immortality - in the new virtual realm of the Metaverse.

That Nefertiti survived across the ages to become a supernova of the digital cosmos is all the more remarkable because a turncoat in her court would seize power and launch a pogrom to erase all images and memories of her and her successor, Tutankhamun, from the face of the Earth.

Named co-ruler by Pharaoh Akhenaten, Nefertiti co-designed a new Egyptian city to spark a religious revolution. The idyll featured open-air temples and artworks that hailed - for the first time in human history - a sole God in the sky radiating life and beauty across the world.

The luminous architecture of their Great Aten Temple, the reliefs inscribed on its stone facades, and wondrous sculptures in the round were all “new to Egyptian art,” says Marsha Hill, an expert on the excavation of Amarna, their Sun-God city, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“The king and queen as a dyad with their arms raised high” worshipped this celestial deity in carvings etched across the sacred riverside cosmopolis, even as they battled to overturn the pantheon of gods that long dominated Egypt’s history. They also aimed to remake the arts.

Painters, sculptors and architects were all urged to experiment, to sprinkle sparks of life into designs for the royal dyad’s revolutionary society. “Reliefs decorated the temples, and wall, floor, and ceiling paintings adorned many of the palaces,” says the Met Egyptologist.

“The life of the royal family … their movement through the city in chariots to the temples,” animated the imagery of the new era. Colossal granite renderings of the pharaoh, frozen in space and time, gave way to mesmerising sketches in plaster by amazingly avant-garde artists.

Nefertiti discovered one of humanity’s greatest sculptors, Thutmose, and would become his supreme model for countless astounding portraits in limestone - with one carving ricocheting - miraculously - across the centuries. Their link-up would catapult both into the future.

Thutmose’s disciples and studio, in the elegant city centre, expanded as they cloned the pharaonic dyad in stone. The Chief Sculptor began racing his own aristocratic chariot along the Nile’s edge as a new dawn in the arts, like the haloed god of light, spread across the horizon.

These halcyon days for Egypt’s revolutionary aristocrats and artists were halted with Akhenaten’s untimely death, but some scholars believe Nerfertiti managed to rule on, with the full trappings of a pharaoh, and paved the way for the ten-year-old Tutankhamun to take power.