Tell el-Amarna

Tell el-Amarna, site of the ruins and tombs of the city of Akhetaton (“Horizon of the Aton”) in Upper Egypt, 44 miles (71 km) north of modern Asyūṭ. On a virgin site on the east bank of the Nile River, Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) built the city about 1348 bce as the new capital of his kingdom when he abandoned the worship of Amon and devoted himself to worship of the Aton. About four years after Akhenaten’s death (c. 1332), the court returned to Thebes, and the city was abandoned.

Though it had only a brief existence, Akhetaton is one of the few ancient Egyptian cities that has been carefully excavated. Because Akhenaten chose a new, unused site for his capital and because of the relatively short duration of its occupancy, the excavators could reconstruct an unusually accurate picture of the layout of the city.

The principal buildings of Akhetaton lay on either side of the Royal Road, the largest of them being the Great Temple of the Aton, primarily a series of walled courts leading to the completely open-air main sanctuary. Near the Great Temple were the palace and the commodious residence of the royal family. The dwellings at Tell el-Amarna were made of baked mud brick, and the walls, floors, and ceilings of many of the rooms were painted in a lively naturalistic style; each large house had a shrine with a stela depicting Akhenaten in the affectionate embrace of his family.

Among other major archaeological finds were portrait busts of Queen Nefertiti in the house of the sculptor Thutmose, as well as 300 cuneiform tablets accidentally discovered in 1887 by a peasant woman. From these it was possible to partly reconstruct the foreign affairs of the Egyptian empire in the late 18th dynasty.

Unlike those of Thebes, the nobles’ villas at Akhetaton had only one floor; the roof of the central living room, however, was usually higher than the rest of the house, thus permitting clerestory lighting and ventilation. The workers lived in simple row houses.

Officials’ tombs, resembling those at Thebes, were hewn into the desert hills to the east. Although the painted reliefs in the tomb chapels often appear to have been hastily carried out, they have been a major source of information on the daily life and religion of Akhenaten. Also, the drawings on the tomb walls depicting various religious and royal buildings of the city helped the excavators to interpret the often meagre architectural remains.

The tomb of Akhenaten and his family, situated in the side of a dry watercourse east of the city, contained an unprecedented scene of the royal family in mourning over the death of the princess Meketaton, who was buried there. Excavations in the 1890s and late 1970s yielded fragments of Akhenaten’s deliberately smashed sarcophagus and numerous broken ushabti from his interment.

After Akhetaton’s abandonment, its temples were disassembled for new construction projects; Ramses II is known to have reused many stone blocks from the Aton temples for his work at nearby Hermopolis.