Who ruled Amarna?

Amarna is the modern name for the ruins of Akhetaten, "the horizon of the Aten", the short-lived capital built by the pharaoh Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BCE. It lies on the east bank of the Nile in Minya province, central Egypt, roughly midway between the old capitals of Thebes and Memphis. Founded on empty ground around 1346 BCE and deserted within a generation, it offers an unusually complete picture of the layout of an ancient Egyptian city.

Akhenaten, a king of the New Kingdom, broke with the traditional cults of Egypt, above all that of Amun at Thebes, and promoted the worship of the Aten, the disc of the sun. Around the fifth year of his reign he chose an unoccupied stretch of the east bank as the site of a new capital dedicated to his god. It has been suggested that the shape of a valley in the eastern cliffs, which resembles the hieroglyph for "horizon", guided the choice.

The king marked the limits of the city's territory with boundary stelae cut into the cliffs flanking the river on either side. The earliest dated one, Stela K, records his foundation of the city and his wishes for temples to the Aten and for tombs in the eastern hills for himself, his chief wife Nefertiti and their eldest daughter, Meritaten. He also commanded that after his death he should be brought back to Akhetaten for burial. To finish the work quickly, most buildings were made of whitewashed mud brick, with stone reserved for the most important structures; the city was probably complete within about four years.

The city stretched along the river for several kilometres beside a main thoroughfare now called the Royal Road, while fields on the west bank fed its people. Palaces for the royal family stood in the north. The central city held the Great and Small Temples of the Aten, the Great Royal Palace linked by a bridge or ramp to the king's residence, and a records office where diplomatic correspondence was kept. To the south lay suburbs of large estates belonging to officials such as the high priest Panehesy and the chief minister Nakhtpaaten, as well as the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose. Nobles cut their tombs in the cliffs, and a royal tomb was begun in a remote valley to the east.

Although official religion centred on the Aten, excavations have found many household images of traditional protective deities such as Bes and Taweret, suggesting that ordinary residents kept their older beliefs. The art of the period also broke with convention, showing the royal family in informal, affectionate scenes in a more naturalistic and sometimes exaggerated style.

After Akhenaten's death, around 1332 BCE according to the dating used for the site, his religious reforms were reversed. The court of Tutankhamun left the city and the old cults were restored, and later Egyptians came to regard the Aten worship as heresy. Akhetaten seems to have stayed in use for a decade or so, and a shrine of Horemheb shows that it was at least partly occupied early in his reign, perhaps only as a source of building stone. Afterwards the site stood empty until a Roman-era settlement grew up along the riverbank. Its modern name derives from the Beni Amran, Arab tribespeople who had made their home there before the eighteenth century.

The Jesuit traveller Claude Sicard described the ruins in 1714, and Napoleon's scholars mapped them in 1798 and 1799. In 1887 a local woman digging among the ruins found more than 300 clay tablets in Akkadian cuneiform, the Amarna Letters, which preserve the pharaoh's correspondence with other rulers of the Near East. Flinders Petrie excavated in the central city in 1891 and 1892. A German expedition under Ludwig Borchardt worked from 1907 to 1914 and in 1912 found the celebrated bust of Nefertiti in Thutmose's workshop; it is now in Berlin. British excavations followed in the 1920s and 1930s, and from 1977 Barry Kemp led long-running survey and excavation work, which continues under the Amarna Project.