Amidst centuries of Theban preeminence, presided over by the supreme god Amun, one ruler of startling originality briefly challenged this status quo: Amenhotep IV (ruled ca. 1353—1337 BC). He became a passionate devotee of a single deity, the Aten, the life force depicted as a sun disc with radiating rays (Figure 6.10). He changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning “He who is useful to the Sun-disc” or “Glorified spirit of the Sun-disc,” and instituted a distinctive style for representing himself and his family in sculpture and painting, with exaggerated curves and elongations of the head and body. And in the fifth year of his reign he moved his capital from Thebes to the newly founded city of Akhetaten (“Horizon of the Sun-disc”), located halfway between Thebes and Memphis. Akhetaten is commonly known as Tell el-Amarna, or simply Amarna, modern names derived from two of the local villages, Et-Till and El-Amran.
Figure 6.10 Akhenaten and his family worshipping the Aten, relief sculpture, from the Royal Tomb, Amarna. Egyptian Museum, Cairo
The ruins of Amarna give us our best and fullest look at an ancient Egyptian city. The reasons are three. First, much of ancient Amarna lay just inland from the river’s flood zone; its remains were thus accessible to archaeologists, not buried beneath meters and meters of Nile silt. Second, the city had an extremely short life. Constructed on previously uninhabited land, the new capital was occupied only during the final eleven years of Akhenaten’s reign and a few years after. The site was then abandoned; apart from a small Roman fort, no building activity ever disrupted the remains. And third, we know much about the city thanks to extensive excavations conducted intermittently from the late nineteenth century until 1936, and again since 1977 by the Egypt Exploration Society under the direction of British archaeologist Barry Kemp.
With such a short life, Amarna should not be considered typical. Established cities such as Memphis must have been crowded, full of buildings arranged in haphazard city plans developed over centuries. Nonetheless, the results from Amarna are valuable for their insights into fourteenth-century BC Egyptian notions of what a planned city, and a royal capital, should look like.
Although the city proper lies on the east bank of the Nile, a larger area totaling some 18 km2 marked by fourteen boundary stelai extended across the river to the edge of the western desert. The city was not walled. It was divided into various sectors, loosely linked by a north-south “Royal Road” that paralleled the river (Figure 6.11). Temples, storehouses, police barracks, administrative buildings (including the “Records Office” that contained the invaluable “Amarna Letters,” clay copies of correspondence with foreign states in west Asia), and a huge palace occupied the central zone, laid out on a grid of streets in an orthogonal plan. Secondary residential and commercial areas were spread out to the north and south in a line that stretched over 8km parallel to the river. On the edge of the north suburb, an accretion of slum dwellings had appeared by the end of the occupation of the town, crowding the more spacious housing. To the east, an arc of desert cliffs provided the location for rock-cut tombs. Of these many informative sectors we shall examine in more detail the palace and the Great Temple, both in the Central
Figure 6.11 Overall plan, Amarna
Figure 6.12 Plan, City center, Amarna
City (Figure 6.12), and the houses, which provide good evidence for the daily life of the ancient Egyptians.
World History
