The Discovery of Amarna

No Other Site Like It

Succeeding dynasties may have tried to bury all trace of the controversial period in Egyptian history centered around the ephemeral capital city of el-Amarna. But the desert was not so cruel – only a thin layer of rubble and sand covered the site in the centuries after its swift abandonment in the late 14th century BC. The excellent preservative qualities of the dry desert soil ensured that what remained beneath survived remarkably intact.

Today, according to the Amarna Project – the University of Cambridge body officially in charge of ongoing archaeological work at the site – it represents “a fundamental source of reference for the architecture and layout of cities in ancient Egypt and a source of evidence for aspects of the life of the times.” There is, they add, “no other site like it.”

Rediscovery

The shallow nature of its burial means that Amarna has been a fairly open secret for centuries – or at least its location, spread widely along the east bank of the Nile in the province of el-Minia, roughly midway between Cairo and Luxor (and thus, in ancient times, between Memphis and Thebes).

Claude Sicard, a French Jesuit priest who was travelling through the Nile Valley in 1714 was the first westerner to make recorded mention of the city. Napoleon’s corps de savants visited the site too – as they did much of Egypt – in 1798-1799, and prepared the first detailed map of Amarna, published in Description de l'Égypte between 1821 and 1830. More European explorations over the following century further expanded knowledge of the site, before archaeological digging began in 1892.

In 1892 Alessandro Barsanti “discovered” and cleared the King’s Tomb (although it was probably known to the local population from about 1880). Around the same time, the famous British Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie worked for one season at Amarna, excavating widely.

Digs continued on and off until 1936. By then, most of the royal buildings and about half of the residential area had been cleared. The current work of excavation, survey and preservation, under the auspices of the Egypt Exploration Society, began in 1977.

What Has Been Revealed?

The most striking thing about Amarna is the fantastically preserved details of its internal plan. Because the city was built quickly and practically from scratch, at the behest of the ‘Heretic Pharaoh’ Akhenaten, then abandoned after less than 40 years of occupation, it’s possible to accurately make out the walls of houses, temples, streets, squares, tombs, outlying villages and whole city blocks.

In 1999, the firm of architectural model-makers Tetra in London was even able to build a roughly accurate scale model of the city for display in museums around the world, using sets of map sheets prepared by the Amarna Survey of the The Egypt Exploration Society. It is worth bearing in mind though that it is debatable just how representative Amarna is of Egyptian cities of the time, due to its rapid construction and hasty demise.

Beyond dispute is the value and significance of the wealth of artefacts discovered in the city’s ruins. Many examples of the unique art style of the period have been found, among which the bust of the Queen Nefertiti is by far the most famous. Unearthed in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose between 1907 and 1914 by the Deutsche Orientgesellschaft expedition, led by Ludwig Borchardt, the beautiful hand carved and painted representation of the wife of Akhetaten is one of the most iconic images of ancient Egypt, and can today be seen at the Altes Museum in Berlin.

Another of Amara’s archaeological treasures was unearthed rather more accidentally. In 1887 a peasant woman digging for sebakh (agricultural fertilizer) found a cache of 300 cuneiform tablets, from which it has been possible to partly reconstruct the foreign affairs of the Egyptian empire in the late 18th dynasty. They remain crucial documents of the history and chronology of the period.

Amarna Today

New discoveries continue to be unearthed at the ancient site by the Amarna Project. Recent major finds since 2005 include graveyards in the desert hinterland, and in 2007, a cemetery of private individuals close to the southern tombs of the nobles.

Previously, human remains had proven almost completely elusive at Amarna for the duration of investigation there. These burial areas, bearing a grisly array of bones washed to the surface by floods, were therefore of huge importance. They gave a chilling insight into the terrible price that ordinary workers – many of whom died young from starvation, injury and disease – paid to help fulfill their Pharaoh’s vision.

Image of bust of Nefertiti (top) by Carlo Struglia. Image of Akhenaten (bottom) by Ed Fladung. All rights reserved.

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About The Author

Malcolm Jack

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Malcolm Jack is a freelance arts and entertainment journalist based in Glasgow, Scotland. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2004 with an MA Honours Degree in History.