The City of Akhetaten

The blog post for this week is written by Nick Mascall, an Egypt Centre volunteer with a keen interest in the Amarna Period.

In year 5 of his reign, Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten and commissioned many boundary stelae to mark out the formal borders of Akhetaten, his new capital city dedicated to the Aten. These stelae define a rough square with sides of about 20 km (about 12.5 miles) straddling the Nile halfway between Luxor to the south (the traditional religious capital) and Memphis to the north (the traditional administrative capital). Akhenaten claimed that the Aten itself selected the site, which had never held a temple to any other god, or been part of a temple estate, or owned by anyone except, ultimately, the king himself. Many suspect that the deciding factor was the way the mouth of the largest wadi (valley) in the eastern cliffs behind the site framed the rising sun, and reproduced the hieroglyph akhet—the horizon, or portal, and a symbol of rebirth. This wadi would become the site of the royal tombs.

Fig. 1: Painted plaster from the North Riverside Palace (W797)

Royal tombs were one of many things Akhenaten announced that he was going to build here, including two royal residences; one for the Pharaoh, one for the “Great Royal Consort”—which raises interesting questions about the domestic arrangements of the royal family. Other buildings are given portentous but (to our eyes) ambiguous titles, and seem to include what we now call the Great and Small Aten Temples, several others which have not to date been excavated or conclusively identified, and a “Sunshade” for the Great Royal Consort Nefertiti. “Sunshades”, their nature, identity and locations, are among the most contentious topics of Amarna scholarship (which is saying a lot). Apart from the boundary stelae, all the known remains of the city and its many outlying sites are in the desert bay on the eastern bank, surrounded by a wall of cliffs and steep slopes pierced in places by wadi mouths. The known tombs (less than 30) of the city’s elite are cut into this natural barrier in two groups, north and south, and the scenes on their walls are one of the richest resources we have regarding the appearance of the city and its buildings, and the daily lives of its inhabitants.

Fig. 2: Painted plaster from the North Riverside Palace (W801)

The city itself and its major outliers are arranged in a north-south strip along or not far from the river bank, connected by the broad and mainly straight “Royal Road” (a modern name), along which the royal family and the city’s elite rode in two-horse chariots, accompanied by running escorts (fig. 3). The “Central City” contained the gigantic Great Palace (about 200 x 580 metres), the “King’s House”, the two Aten Temples, and offices, storehouses, workplaces and barracks—all government buildings, including the “House of Life” and the so-called Records Office where the tablets known as the Amarna Letters were found. It also had streets of small and medium sized houses for clerks, mid-level government officials and perhaps junior priests and temple servants. Amazingly, almost all of this housing was built, occupied and then demolished and rebuilt on a slightly different alignment. You might be forgiven for thinking that Akhenaten’s builders had too much time on their hands, but there is a small mountain of evidence to show that this was definitely not the case.

Fig. 3: Chariot scene from the tomb of Meryre

The rest of the city consists mainly of housing—many small, closely clustered houses for poor people, and some large houses in large compounds for the elite. Interestingly, if you plot house size against frequency the result is a fairly smooth slope, rather than the stairstep pattern you might expect from a rigidly hierarchical social organisation. Social mobility of a sort seems to have existed at Amarna, and several of the tomb-wall texts praise the king for being willing to promote ‘from the lowest ranks’ on the basis of ability. On the other hand, those texts are also the most concentrated outpouring of extravagant and largely formal flattery which I have ever read.

Fig. 4: Painted plaster from the North Riverside Palace (W808)

Houses also appear to be loosely organised in quasi-feudal clusters, with a large house in a large compound bordered by smaller but still prestigious houses (for upper servants and estate officials?), and then by many smaller houses for the family workforce. All are built of sun-dried mudbricks conforming more or less closely to a standard size, with some stone fittings—more in the higher-status houses. Though it may seem primitive and impermanent, mudbrick works well in the Egyptian climate to this day, is easy and cheap to make, and lends itself to very fast construction. In ancient Egypt, it was used to construct almost every kind of building, excepting high-status tombs and temples, which were built from stone because they were intended to last for all eternity. Curiously and unusually, the main ceremonial parts of the Great Palace were also built of stone, whereas the other two identified palaces at Amarna were built in mudbrick, as usual.

Fig. 5: Painted plaster from the North Riverside Palace, depicting the elbow of the Pharaoh (W02)

Regarding these two other palaces, the North Riverside Palace, lying near the northern extremity of the site, is widely thought to have been where the royal family lived day-to-day, though very little of it survived to be excavated. We have in the Egypt Centre collection a fair selection of painted plaster fragments from its decoration, some of which were brought out for the handling session (figs. 1–2, 4–5). It was a revelation to see these under better lighting, even though I’ve been looking at some of them every week for years now since they are on display in the Amarna case in the House of Life. The other known palace is the North Palace, lying between the North Riverside Palace and the city’s North Suburb (fig. 6). This modest structure (a mere 112 x 142 metres) was clearly intended for the use of a single member of the royal family, perhaps Kiya (a subsidiary royal wife) and then Meritaten, the eldest princess and future queen. As a whole, it is one of the most complete and easily readable plans we have for a New Kingdom palace.

Fig. 6: Reconstruction of the chapel T36.11 at Amarna (by Nick Mascall) 

This unavoidably brief account cannot begin to do justice to the scope, variety and richness of the site. It is not just the most complete and accessible ancient Egyptian city that survives, but because it was built, occupied, and abandoned within 15 to 20 years it is an archaeological snapshot of a New Kingdom city, far easier to interpret than most other such sites that have been overbuilt again and again over millennia. That it was also the centre of one of the most remarkable episodes in Egyptian and world history is just the icing on the cake.

Readers to this blog may be interested in supporting the Amarna Project by donating to their gofundme page, which includes the opportunity to have your name written on a block within the Great Aten Temple!

Bibliography:

Bomann, A. H. (1991) The private chapel in ancient Egypt: a study of the chapels in the Workmen’s Village at El Amarna with special reference to Deir el Medina and other sites. Studies in Egyptology. London; New York: Kegan Paul International Ltd.

Frankfort, H. and J. D. S. Pendlebury (1933) The city of Akhenaten. Part II: The north suburb and the desert altars. The excavations at Tell el Amarna during the seasons 1926–1932. MEES 40. London: Egypt Exploration Society.

Kemp, B. J. (2013) The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People. London: Thames & Hudson.

Pendlebury, J. D. S. (1951) The City of Akhenaten. Part III: The Central City and the Official Quarters. The Excavations at Tell el-Amarna during the Season 1926–1927 and 1931–1936. 2 vols. ExcMem 44. London: Egypt Exploration Society.

Wegner, J. (2017) The Sunshade Chapel of Meritaten from the House-of-Waenre of Akhenaten. University Museum monograph 144. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Williamson, J. (2016). Nefertiti’s sun temple: a new cult complex at Tell el-Amarna, 2 vols. Harvard Egyptological Studies 2. Leiden; Boston: Brill.