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Oxford Handbooks Online The Archaeology of Amarna Oxford Handbooks Online The Archaeology of Amarna Anna Stevens Subject: Archaeology, Archaeology of Africa, Egyptian Archaeology, Settlement and Urban Archaeology Online Publication Date: Mar DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935413.013.31 2015 Abstract and Keywords This essay assesses the body of archaeological research connected to the New Kingdom settlement site of Amarna (ancient Akhetaten), the short-lived capital of Egypt founded by king Akhenaten around 1347 BC as the cult centre for the solar god the Aten. Amarna, by far the largest exposure of pharaonic settlement to survive from Egypt, is unsurpassed as a case site for the study of ancient Egyptian urbanism and daily life. This essay provides an overview of the ancient city, evaluates past and ongoing excavations at the site, and summarizes the archaeological discourse on the city as a physical, functioning and experienced space. Keywords: settlement archaeology, Amarna, Akhetaten, Egypt, New Kingdom, Akhenaten, urbanism, daily life Introduction Amarna (or Tell el-Amarna) is an archaeological site situated about halfway between Cairo and Luxor. It is known primarily as the location of the ancient city of Akhetaten, which served briefly as the capital of Egypt in the late Eighteenth Dynasty, from around 1347–1332 BC. Amarna is the most accessible settlement to survive from pharaonic Egypt and a fundamental case site for studies of urbanism, domestic architecture, and everyday life. It is also of great historical significance. Its founder, king Akhenaten, is often labeled the world’s first “monotheist,” having promoted a single solar god, the Aten, above the traditional gods of creation and kingship, and sometimes to their exclusion. His reign is one of the most intensively researched periods of Egyptian history (with its own bibliography: Martin, 1991). Akhetaten—the Horizon of the Sun Disc—was built as the cult home for the Aten, and something of the voice of Akhenaten himself survives at the site in inscriptions on rock-cut Boundary Stelae carved into the cliffs around the perimeter of the city (Murnane and van Siclen, 1993). Here he proclaims that the site had served no god previously, a claim that excavations have largely borne out, finding few traces of earlier occupation. For scholars of ancient urbanism and daily life, the importance of Amarna lies largely in the fact that following Akhenaten’s death, Akhetaten was abandoned by the royal court and most of its population; it was never substantially occupied again. When archaeological investigations began at Amarna in the late 19th century, much of Akhenaten’s city lay easily accessible beneath a shallow cover of sand and building collapse, a situation that continues today. Amarna thus offers large tracts of a contemporaneous urban landscape, and one that can be very securely dated (Kemp, 1977). It offers essentially a full cross section of society. This is extremely rare in Egypt (and beyond), because settlements tend to be occupied for much longer periods, creating dense layers of urban build-up. Excavation can open windows onto parts of a settlement, but these often remain isolated from their broader urban setting, with contemporaneous occupation horizons difficult to isolate. Ultimately, however, Amarna presents researchers with something of a conundrum: given the unusual historical circumstances of the city’s foundation, to what extent is it representative of other Egyptian settlements in terms of its layout, organization, and the experiences of its inhabitants? Page 1 of 18 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 March 2015 The Archaeology of Amarna The City of Akhetaten Click to view larger Figure 1. Map of Amarna (Prepared by Barry Kemp, Amarna Project). Akhetaten was contained largely to a desert bay on the east bank of the Nile (Figure 1), stretching some 7 km along the river, partly linked by a north–south thoroughfare now known as the Royal Road (Kemp and Garfi, 1993; Kemp, 2012). The territory of the city also included land on the west bank of the river, probably used largely for farming and related settlement. Apart from three of the Boundary Stelae (numbers A, B, and F), no in situ Amarna period remains have been identified here. The landscape of the eastern bay is flat and fairly featureless, the low desert bordered to the east by steep limestone cliffs, which are interrupted in several places by wadis. The most prominent of these, the Great Wadi, has a distinctive indented profile that resembles the hieroglyph for “horizon” (in which the Aten was said to dwell) and may have influenced Akhenaten’s choice of the site for his new city (noted by Aldred, 1976, although he seems to misidentify the wadi as the Royal Wadi). Today, Amarna is likewise a fairly flat archaeological site, unexcavated areas of the city forming low terraces that are only slightly higher than adjacent areas of excavated remains; the attribution of the term tell to the site is a well-known misnomer. Amarna was a mud-brick city, with stone used on a large scale only for ritual architecture. Local limestone was the most prominent, cut into smaller blocks than usual (known as talatat), probably to aid the rapid construction of the city. The hub of the city, now known as the Central City, contained its two largest temples (the Great Aten Temple and Small Aten Temple) and two royal residences (the Great Palace and the King’s House). Scattered around these were administrative, military, industrial, and food-production complexes. It was at one of the former, the House of Foreign Correspondence (its name known from stamped bricks), that the Amarna Letters, an archive of cuneiform tablets documenting foreign exchange with Near Eastern and Mediterranean leaders, were discovered in 1887 (Moran, 1992; Rainey, 2015). Two further palaces were constructed at the far north of the site, the North Palace and North Riverside Palace, which have long been suggested as the main residences for the royal family, the Royal Road serving their daily commute into the Central City (Kemp, 1976: 93–99; but see also Spence, 2009). Close to the North Riverside Palace was a large mud-brick complex (the North Administrative Building), perhaps connected with the flow of goods and traffic in and out of the city; the cliffs beyond, extending some 10 km north to the site of Deir Abu Hinnis (Willems and Demarée, 2009; Van der Perre, 2014), contained the city’s main limestone quarries. The residential areas of Akhetaten extended to the north of the Central City (the North Suburb, and beyond it the North City) and likewise to its south (the Main City). Population figures for the city are difficult to estimate, in part because of uncertainty over what constituted an ancient Egyptian “household,” but a figure of around 20,000– 50,000 is likely (Kemp, 2012: 271–272). The vast majority lived in the riverside city, but there were also two small villages in the low desert to the east, the Workmen’s Village and the Stone Village, which seem to have been used Page 2 of 18 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 March 2015 The Archaeology of Amarna largely to house workers engaged in constructing tombs, especially in the Royal Wadi, and related activities (Kemp, 1987; Stevens, 2012a, b). They are among the best-investigated parts of Amarna and are noteworthy as rare examples of special-purpose settlements that still survive within their broader urban setting. In this they contrast with the remarkably text-rich New Kingdom workers’ village of Deir el-Medina in Luxor (Bruyère, 1939), an offshoot of the city of Western Thebes, of which relatively little has been uncovered. Otherwise, the low desert of Amarna was largely free of settlement, although it did contain several ceremonial or ritual complexes, some of which were dedicated to the cults of members of the royal family, and particularly royal women (Kemp, 1995: 452–461; Williamson, 2008, 2013). One group clustered in the south, namely at the sites of Kom el-Nana, the Maru Aten, and the so-called Riverside Temple, while the Desert Altars in the north have been suggested tentatively as private mortuary monuments (Frankfort and Pendlebury, 1933: 102; Kemp, 1995: 448– 452). An important focal point in the eastern cliffs was the Royal Wadi, burial ground of the royal family, which housed up to five separate tombs, some for more than one person (Martin 1974, 1989; el-Khouly and Martin, 1987; Gabolde and Dunsmore, 2004). The city’s two main public cemeteries were also located in and around the eastern cliffs. One lay in and adjacent to a long wadi toward the south of the site (the South Tombs Cemetery), and the other formed a cluster of burial grounds nearer the northern end of the bay. Each included tombs that ranged from large rock-cut chambers with painted relief decoration (Davies, 1903–1908) to simple pit graves in the sand (Kemp et al., 2013), suggesting that a broad slice of the population was buried here. The desert villages each had their own small cemetery. The low desert itself was crisscrossed by a series of roadways: areas cleared of larger stones, which were piled in ridges to define the road edges.
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