The earliest representations of Amenhotep IV show him in a traditional style closely resembling the one used to portray both Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, but not long after his accession Amenhotep IV had himself depicted with a thin, drawn-out face with pointed chin and thick lips, an elongated neck, almost feminine breasts, a round protruding belly, wide hips, fat thighs, and thin, spindly legs. At first the new style was still fairly restrained, but on most of the Theban monuments and during the early years at Amarna the king’s features were depicted in such an exaggerated way as to make him look like a caricature; later in the reign a more balanced style developed. It was not only Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and their daughters who were depicted in this style, but all other human beings as well, albeit in a less exaggerated form. This is not surprising, since representations of private individuals had always followed the artistic model of the king of their time, and Akhenaten in particular put much emphasis on the fact that he was the ‘mother who gives birth to everything’ who had ‘created his subjects with his ka’. He was the creator-god upon earth who fashioned mankind after his own image.
There can be little doubt that the extraordinary manner in which Akhenaten portrayed himself, his family (and, to a lesser extent, all
Other human beings) on his monuments somehow reflects the king’s actual physical appearance, albeit in an exaggerated style that has been termed ‘expressionist’ or even ‘surrealist’. Inscriptions tell us that it was the king himself who instructed his artists in the new style. Not
Plan of the site of Amarna, showing the main city and the outlying temples, shrines, and settlements
Only the human figure is affected by it, but also the way they interact. Scenes of the royal family display an intimacy such as had never before been shown in Egyptian art even among private individuals, let alone among royalty. They kiss and embrace under the beneficent rays of the Aten, whose love pervades all of his creation. Another characteristic feature of the Amarna style is its extraordinary sense of movement and speed, a general ‘looseness’ and freedom of expression that was to have a lasting influence on Egyptian art for centuries after the Amarna Period had come to an end.
In a different way, speed is also the determining factor of a new building technique. Again, the earliest structures of Amenhotep IV employed the traditional large sandstone blocks commonly used for temple walls, but these were soon replaced in both Thebes and Amarna by very much smaller blocks, the so-called talatat, typically measuring about 6o x 25 cm. and therefore small enough for a single man to lift and carry. This made it much easier to erect a large building in a relatively short space of time. The new method was abandoned again after the Amarna Period, perhaps because it had by then become apparent that the reliefs carved on walls constructed of such small blocks, needing as they did a great deal of plaster finishing to close the gaps between individual stones, did not withstand the test of time as well as traditionally built walls. Certainly Akhenaten’s successors soon found out that it also took far less time and effort to demolish buildings constructed of talatat.
The ‘looseness’ of the Amarna art style is perhaps also matched by the city plan of Akhetaten, at least as far as the living quarters are concerned. Despite the fact that it was a newly planned city, it was not built on a rigid orthogonal grid like the Middle Kingdom town of Kahun, which had reflected the highly structured, bureaucratic society of its time. The layout of Amarna is far more like a cluster of small villages centred around loosely grouped houses both large and small, each with its own subsidiary buildings such as grain silos, animal pens, sheds, and workshops. The variety in size of these compounds matches the differences in wealth and status between their owners. Many of them have their own well, a unique feature of this city, which made its inhabitants independent of the Nile for their daily water supplies. In general Amarna looks more like a city that developed naturally over a period of time, rather than as a result of careful planning.
Needless to say, however, the temples and palaces are a different matter. Both were intimately linked with Akhenaten’s religious ideas and for this reason they must have been designed and planned by the king himself in close cooperation with architects and artists who worked under his personal ‘instruction’, as inscriptions never tire of telling us. We cannot describe these buildings in detail here, but a few significant features must be mentioned. First of all, Akhenaten and his family lived some distance away from the main city in what is now known as the North Riverside Palace. A long spacious avenue, the ‘royal road’, ran via the North Palace (the queen’s residence) in a straight line of about 3.5 km. to the Central City with its two palaces (one used among other things for ceremonial state occasions like the reception of foreign envoys, the other serving as the king’s working palace with a ‘window of appearances’, through which he rewarded loyal officials) and two major Aten temples. Of these, the Great Temple to the Aten was the Amarna equivalent of the great temple enclosure of Amun-Ra at Thebes; it contained several separate buildings, including a structure with a benben-stone, the sacred sun symbol, the archetype of which stood in the temple of Ra at Heliopolis. This is one of the indications of the influence of Heliopolitan theology on Akhenaten’s thinking, another being that the king had planned a cemetery for the sacred Mnevis bull of Ra-Atum of Heliopolis at Amarna. The other Aten temple was very much smaller and lay immediately to the south of the king’s working palace. It appears to have been dedicated to the king as well as to the Aten and may have been the equivalent of the traditional so-called temples of a million years, and, like the temples of that name on the Theban west bank, may have served as a mortuary chapel for Akhenaten that was orientated towards the entrance of the wadi in which the royal tomb was located.
The most conspicuous difference between, on the one hand, the Aten temples both at Amarna and earlier on at Karnak, and, on the other hand, the traditional temples is that the former are open to the skies. A typical temple of the traditional type began with a pylon and an open peristyle court followed by a succession of further courts and rooms, which gradually became smaller and darker as the worshipper penetrated further into the building. In the innermost sanctuary the cult image of the god was kept in a shrine that for most of the time was in total darkness. Akhenaten’s god was there for all to see, however, and no man-made cult image was, therefore, needed. The only statues to be found in Atenist temples are representations of Akhenaten and other members of the royal family. In the architecture of these temples a deliberate effort has been made to create as little shadow and darkness as possible; even the lintels above the doorways were open in the middle. These ‘broken’ lintels were an architectural innovation that continued to be used for certain temple doorways until Graeco-Roman times. The king worshipped his god in open courtyards studded with a large number of small altars on which offerings to the Aten were made. Why there are so many altars remains a mystery: perhaps the most likely explanation is that they are altars for the dead who are being fed in the temples as part of the daily cult.
Light was the most essential aspect of the Aten, who was a god of the light that emerged from the sun’s disc and kept every living being alive in continuous creation. He was the creator-god who ruled the world as the celestial king. And, just as the Aten was king of the world, so Akhenaten was the god of his subjects. His daily ‘procession’, when he drove in his chariot along the royal road from the North Riverside Palace to the Central City, replaced the traditional divine processions during which the inhabitants of a town could come into contact with the deities whose statues were normally hidden from view in the temple. Akhenaten was, as his name indicates, the ‘creative manifestation of the Aten’, through whom the Aten does his beneficial work. It was the king who ‘made’ mankind and especially his elite, whom he had chosen himself. In their inscriptions these officials denied their true background, even though some of them must surely have come from influential families; they all presented themselves as having been poor, wretched orphans, owing their whole existence to the king who had ‘created them with his ko’. The king’s work was likened to the annual inundation of the Nile, which sustained mankind and all other living beings. Personal piety was now identical wdth total loyalty towards Akhenaten personally. In their private houses the Amarna elite kept small shrines with altars and stelae representing the holy royal family, which replaced the old household shrines for local deities.
World History
