The Tel el-Amarna period has had more nonsense written about it than any other period in Egyptian history.
Margaret Murray (1949)1
More than 3,000 years ago an Egyptian sculptor created an artistic masterpiece. This book focuses on the conception, creation, replication and dissemination of that masterpiece: a plastered and colourfully painted bust of Queen Nefertiti, which is currently on display in the Neues Museum, home of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection.2 However, no artefact should be studied in isolation. This brief section provides the background information necessary to view the bust, its creator(s) and its subject in their proper context.3 If it seems to focus on Akhenaten rather than on the bust, its creator, or Nefertiti herself, this is unavoidable. Akhenaten was the king of Egypt and, as such, had no living equal. His word was law, and his decision to worship one particular god had a major impact on everything and everyone – queen, art and artists included – around him. It is only by understanding this that we can start to gain an understanding of Amarna life and art.
Nefertiti was the consort of the king, or pharaoh, Akhenaten, who came to the throne as Amenhotep IV. Akhenaten ruled Late Bronze Age Egypt towards the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The kings of the later Eighteenth Dynasty, and their reign lengths, are conventionally listed as follows:
Tuthmosis IV 1400–1390 BCE
Amenhotep III 1390–1352 BCE
Amenhotep IV, who subsequently changed his name to Akhenaten, 1352–1336 BCE
Smenkhkare 1338–1336 BCE
Tutankhaten, who subsequently changed his name to Tutankhamen, 1336–1327 BCE
Ay 1327–1323 BCE
Horemheb 1323–1295 BCE.4
All these dates are approximate. Although the Egyptians maintained long chronological lists of their kings, they did not use a linear calendar to date events. They saw time as an endlessly repeating cycle of reigns and so, when a king died, time began again with a new king – the continuation of all kings who had gone before – and a new year 1. This system has been adopted by Egyptologists because, although it is by no means perfect, it is the most accurate means that we have of dating specific events. When we state that Nefertiti’s husband swore an oath of dedication to establish the limits of a new royal city in his regnal year 6, we know exactly what we mean. We struggle, however, to tie this dedication to a specific calendar year. Unfortunately this traditional Egyptocentric dating method can appear baffling to non-Egyptologists and, as it isolates Egypt from the rest of the ancient world, has added to the air of mystery that is so often, and so unnecessarily, associated with the dynastic age.
Nefertiti’s own timeline is best documented with reference to her husband’s regnal years as follows:
Year 1: Nefertiti becomes Akhenaten’s consort. The date of their marriage is unknown. Nefertiti’s parentage is unexplained. Daughter Meritaten is born by the end of year 1.
Year 2: New building works at Thebes include the Benben Temple (Hwt bnbn), a temple that features Nefertiti in the role of priest. Nefertiti receives an extended name, becoming Neferneferuaten – Nefertiti ‘Exquisite Beauty of the Aten. A Beautiful Woman has Come’.
Year 3: Akhenaten’s heb-sed jubilee is celebrated at Thebes. Nefertiti plays an obvious role in the celebrations.
Year 4: Daughter Meketaten probably born this year.
Year 5: Building works start at Amarna.
Year 7: Daughter Ankhesenpaaten born before or during this year.
Year 8: Daughter Neferneferuaten-the-Younger born before or during this year.
Year 9: The royal family has made a permanent move to Amarna. Daughters Neferneferure and Setepenre are born before the end of this year.
Year 12: Nefertiti’s bust is carved this year or later, in Thutmose’s workshop. Nefertiti, Akhenaten and all six daughters attend an international festival at Amarna.
Year 13(?): A scene in the royal tomb depicts Nefertiti mourning the death of Meketaten.
Year 16: A graffito in a quarry near Amarna refers to Nefertiti as Akhenaten’s consort. Our last contemporary sighting of the queen.
Nefertiti was not her husband’s only wife. Like all of Egypt’s kings, Akhenaten maintained a harem of secondary queens of varying status. Traditionally the royal wives might include the daughters of Egyptian kings and the daughters of brother-kings and foreign vessels sent to Egypt to participate in the diplomatic marriages which linked the Egyptian empire together. Living alongside his wives, although not necessarily permanent harem residents, were Akhenaten’s unmarried female dependants, his widowed mother, sisters, aunts, and the wives inherited from his dead father, plus their children, servants and attendants. Together they formed a strong, economically independent, female-based community.
As consort, or ‘King’s Great Wife’, Nefertiti enjoyed a very different life from her co-wives. She lived in the palace, not the harem, where she was recognised as the mother in the nuclear royal family. She was the queen who, bearing the appropriate titles, crowns and regalia, was represented in all official writings and artwork. If all went to plan her son would eventually inherit his father’s crown, allowing Nefertiti to progress to the highly respected role of King’s Mother. The consort was, however, far more than a baby machine. She was an essential element in the monarchy and, like any good Egyptian wife, she was expected to support her husband in all his endeavours. Her political role is fairly clear to us; she was effectively the king’s deputy. In a time of crisis – a dead husband, for example – she would rule Egypt until the next king was able to take his rightful place on the throne. Her religious role is less easy for us to define, but we know that her responsibilities went far beyond observing routine rituals. The queen consort represented all of Egypt’s women before the gods, while representing either all or one of the goddesses before the people. A consort married to a king who considered himself to be partially or wholly divine would herself, through proximity, become tinged with divinity.
Akhenaten was the head of Egypt’s many cults, yet he chose to dedicate his life to just one god: an ancient but hitherto unimportant solar deity known simply as the Disc, or the Aten. Akhenaten’s god represented the power of the sun, or the light of the sun, rather than the sun itself and, because the Aten was also associated with ideas of divine kingship, Akhenaten’s god also admitted the possibility that the king and his immediate family might be living gods. This was a major break with tradition. Previously it had been understood that kings, although able to communicate with the gods and, in some cases, able to claim a god as a father, could become fully divine only after death. Many Egyptologists have wondered about Akhenaten’s ‘conversion’: was it a true religious experience, or a cynical attempt to strip the existing priesthoods of their wealth and power by channelling all worship through the throne? We have no way of knowing, but this author believes it to have been entirely genuine.
Inspired by the Aten, Akhenaten built a new city. Here his god could be worshipped properly, without interference from any other state cult. Akhetaten (literally ‘Horizon of the Aten’) is today better known as Amarna. Taking its name from Akhenaten’s new city, the Amarna Age (or Period) is the modern term applied to the time when Egypt was ruled from Amarna, and when its kings were devoted to the Aten. This includes most of the reign of Akhenaten, the entire reign of his mysterious co-regent and/or successor Smenkhkare, and the start of the reign of Tutankhaten, whose change of name to Tutankhamen signalled the end of the era.
Amarna was built on a virgin site on the east bank of the Nile and, isolated from the established administrative centres and their associated elite cemeteries, lay almost equidistant between Thebes to the south and Memphis to the north. A series of boundary markers, or stelae, defined the city limits; these extended across the river to include ‘mountains, deserts, meadows, water, villages, embankments, men, beasts, groves and all things which the Aten shall bring into existence’. Several miles to the north-west of Amarna city, yet within the area defined by the boundary stelae, lay Hermopolis Magna (ancient Khmun; modern Ashmunein), a long-established town whose temple was dedicated to the god of wisdom, Thoth.
The massive stone pyramids of the Old Kingdom – each, through necessity, designed, built and substantially completed during a single reign – confirm that the Egyptians were no strangers to rapid building projects. The pharaohs had access to almost unlimited resources and their civil servants had honed the logistical skills needed to employ these resources effectively. Sun-dried mud-brick, the principal building material traditionally used in all domestic architecture and now, at Amarna, used in temple architecture too, was cheap and plentiful: mud could simply be scooped from the banks of the Nile, and several thousand bricks could easily be made in a day. Limestone, the ‘soft’ or sedimentary stone used in temple and royal architecture, was locally available and could be cut into small blocks in the quarry, for ease of transport and erection. This all contributed towards an almost unimaginably fast build. Construction started during year 5, and by year 9 Amarna was effectively complete, with temples, palaces, private housing, wells and, considered of utmost importance, statues in place. Superficially all looked splendid, but under the tiled and painted exteriors all was not well, and repairs would continue throughout the life of the city as the shoddy first-phase structures were improved or replaced.
Akhenaten moved eagerly to his new life in his new city, taking his family with him. Others – the civil servants who ran the empire, the craftsmen and artists who decorated the city, the labourers who built it, the servants who supported their masters and, of course, the priests who ensured that the Aten was worshipped effectively – sensed an exciting opportunity, and followed their king. At a conservative estimate, some 20,000 embarked on Akhenaten’s great adventure, most of them relatively young men.5 Parennefer, the royal butler, is the only official known to have followed Akhenaten from Thebes.
While his people seem to have been free to come and go as they pleased, Akhenaten took a personal vow never to leave his city. As far as we can see, he was true to his word. The days when the king travelled the length of the Nile to remind his subjects of his existence had ended; those who had royal business were now forced to travel to Amarna. Not even death would be allowed to separate Akhenaten from his beloved city and its god. As Amarna rose beside the river, a specialist group of workers started to create a royal tomb in a wadi, or dry river bed, in the eastern cliffs. To the north and south of the royal wadi, a series of rock-cut tombs would provide the Amarna elite with a suitable final resting place, and the deceased Akhenaten and his consort Nefertiti with an eternal court.
Egypt had always been a polytheistic land, happy to absorb new members into the pantheon. By the later Eighteenth Dynasty there were least 1,000 deities whose ability to change name, appearance and even character makes them impossible to count. These gods both controlled the living Egypt and offered the true-in-heart the chance of continued life beyond death. All were important, though some, the great state gods, were significantly more important than others. When Akhenaten came to the throne, the most powerful god of all was Amen, the ‘hidden one’ of Thebes. Amen was an ancient Theban deity, recently elevated to the position of state god by the Eighteenth Dynasty kings who credited him with their rise to power. Akhenaten’s ancestors had vied with each other to make increasingly splendid improvements to Amen’s Karnak Temple, which developed in complexity with every successive reign. The decision to create a royal cemetery in the Valley of the Kings, on the west bank of the Nile opposite the east bank Karnak Temple, was largely inspired by the desire to link the Eighteenth Dynasty kings forever with Amen.
While certain kings had favoured certain gods at certain times, none had obviously neglected their duty to all members of the pantheon. There was a sound practical reason for this. As the king was, in theory, the only Egyptian who could serve as a link between the people and their gods, he had the awesome responsibility of ensuring that the correct offerings were made in the state temples at the correct times. These offerings would reassure the gods that all was right within Egypt, and the gods would in turn allow Egypt to flourish. The concept of all being right within Egypt was known as maat, a word that denotes a combination of truth, ‘rightness’, justice and status quo. Isfet, or chaos, the opposite of maat, is easier for us to understand. Who knew what would happen if the offerings were not made, and the gods grew angry? Until now, no one had dared to find out. Akhenaten’s decision to devote himself – and, as far as he could, his people – to just one god was a worrying development that threatened the security of the whole land.
Akhenaten was not a monotheist. He never denied the existence of Egypt’s other gods and he remained comfortable with references to a range of solar deities, including Re and his daughter Maat, the personification of the concept maat. But if Re and his family were acceptable, Amen of Thebes was not. Akhenaten, it seems, hated Amen with a vengeance. In a very literal way, he set about erasing Amen from memory by closing his temples and attacking his name and image wherever he found them in official contexts. This persecution was so extreme that, during his reign, prominent individuals unlucky enough to bear names compounded with Amen (as indeed Amenhotep IV himself did) found it wise to adopt a new identity.
Our unavoidable focus on Amarna and the royal family throughout Akhenaten’s reign makes it difficult to see what was happening in the wider Egypt at this time. But it seems that many of the traditional state temples were hastily converted into sun temples, with their priests quickly transferring their loyalty to the Aten. The extent to which this public purge affected private individuals is unclear. Certainly the Amarna elite had to be seen to follow their king’s theology in life and in death. This is made clear both in their homes, where officially sanctioned images encouraged them to worship the Aten via the royal family, and in their tombs, where images of the Aten shining over the royal family replaced scenes of the old, comforting, funerary gods. With Osiris king of the dead banished, all possibility of entry to his afterlife kingdom had vanished, and Akhenaten’s courtiers faced an eternity trapped in their rock-cut tombs. But in the walled village occupied by the specialist tomb builders, the situation was very different. Here the private chapels that the workmen built to honour their ancestors incorporated references to the traditional gods and included prayers addressed to Amen. Akhenaten’s obsession may have forced the tomb builders to relocate to Amarna, but it did not cause them to abandon their fundamental beliefs.
The Amarna Age ended early in the reign of Tutankhaten, when Akhenaten’s experiment was officially and unequivocally rejected. Amarna was abandoned, the Aten demoted (but not banned), the traditional pantheon restored and the new king rebranded as Tutankhamen. Despite his very public change of image, Tutankhamen could never escape the fact that he had been born a member of the Amarna royal family while his short-lived successor, Ay, was known to have been a prominent member of the Amarna elite. Both were indelibly tainted with the ‘Amarna heresy’, and this did not endear them to their more orthodox successors. The Ramesside kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty (c.1295–1186 BCE) regarded Tutankhamen and Ay as inappropriate role models. Seeking to link their own arriviste family to Egypt’s more ancient dynasties, the Ramessides recorded the names of all of Egypt’s kings, providing one continuous line of ‘ancestors’ stretching from the mythical unifier of their land, Menes, to themselves. Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamen and Ay were omitted from their list so that Egypt’s official history now moved seamlessly from Amenhotep III to Horemheb. Such was the magical power of the hieroglyphic word, the Amarna Period had never happened.
Akhenaten and his immediate successors were omitted from the works of the classical historians who preserved the greatly romanticised memories of many of Egypt’s kings. Nor were they mentioned in the Bible, the only other reference available to early Egyptologists. Occasional tantalising tales – Herodotus, for example, mentions a king who closed the temples; Manetho tells a very confusing story of great upheaval at the end of the reign of Amenhotep III – suggest that Akhenaten’s story may have survived in the oral tradition, but this was of little help to those who, following Jean-François Champollion’s 1822 decoding of the hieroglyphic script, started to reconstruct Egypt’s long history. None of the names mentioned in the newly discovered Amarna inscriptions could be tied into the king lists which formed the backbone of Egyptian history. It would take many years for the fragmented evidence for Akhenaten’s reign to be joined into anything resembling a realistic history, and several key aspects of the Amarna Period are still the subject of fierce academic debate. No two Egyptologists interpret this period in exactly the same way. Because they developed only during the twentieth century, the myths that today envelop the Amarna royal family are entirely modern ones. Nefertiti, unlike her rival celebrity queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, is not burdened with the biases of the classical authors and Shakespeare.
Deserted first by the king and then by his people, Amarna started to deteriorate. As the mud-brick housing disintegrated into fertile soil it created a valuable resource that, over the centuries, has been collected and spread over neighbouring fields. The enterprising priests of Hermopolis Magna arrived to exploit Amarna’s stone temples as quarries, collecting the ready-cut blocks and incorporating them in their own architecture. More calculated is the damage wrought during the reign of Horemheb, when a deliberate attempt was made to smash and efface the images of the royal family that once adorned the city. This vandalism stripped the surviving Amarna art of its immediate context and meaning, while destroying the inscriptions that might have helped us to understand the complexities of Akhenaten’s religion. As a result, while we may understand how Amarna’s art was created, we don’t really understand how and by whom it was intended to be seen.
Aware of the threat posed by grave robbers in an unguarded royal cemetery, Tutankhamen had already returned to Amarna to empty the royal tomb and transport his family’s remains to the Valley of the Kings. Within eight years of his visit, valuable grave goods ‘rescued’ from these Amarna burials would be recycled in his own tomb. While the royal and elite tombs were emptied, the ordinary people were forced to leave their dead behind. It is estimated that the Amarna desert cemeteries hold between 6,000 and 14,000 graves, many of which were robbed not long after the city was abandoned. Bones recovered from these graves betray the signs of a harsh life, with a poor diet and constant hard work leading, in many cases, to death at less than thirty-five years of age.
Soon, Amarna had become a ghost city. No other king was tempted to occupy the Amarna plain and no substantial modern town ever developed, although there is evidence of sporadic late-Roman/Christian occupation, and a handful of modern villages have caused parts of the ancient settlement to disappear under cultivated fields. Centuries of dry conditions have ensured that the archaeology remains relatively intact, with many of the buildings surviving as foundations and low mud-brick walls, the taller walls, roofs and upper storeys having crumbled away. The brief lifespan of the city – no more than thirty years – means that the stratigraphy and dating of these buildings is relatively easy to interpret and so, following a century of near continuous excavation and publication, we know far more about the structure of Amarna, atypical though it undoubtedly is, than we do about any other dynastic city. The major work conducted at Amarna may be summarised as follows:
1714: Father Claude Sicard becomes the first European to record details of a visit to Amarna; his publication includes a highly imaginative illustration of Amarna Boundary Stela A.
1798–9: Edme Jomard, a member of Napoleon’s expedition, visits Amarna, noting ‘a great mass of ruins’. His plan will be published in the Description d’Égypte in 1817.
1822: Champollion deciphers the hieroglyphic script. For the first time, it is possible to read the Amarna inscriptions.
1824 and 1826: John Gardner Wilkinson visits ‘Alabastronopolis’ and the nearby Hatnub quarry; he plans some of the elite tombs and publishes scenes from Meryre’s tomb plus a sketch map of the site.
1843 and 1845: Karl Richard Lepsius and the Prussian Archaeological Mission explore the city in two brief seasons totalling just ten days, subsequently publishing a folio of drawings and a revised map.
1873: Amelia Edwards, author of A Thousand Miles up the Nile, includes Amarna in her list of important Middle Egyptian sites visited.
1880s: Gaston Maspero and Urbain Bourriant start to record the elite tombs. The royal tomb is discovered and emptied by locals, before being ‘excavated’ by Alessandro Barsanti.
1887: A local woman discovers the ‘Amarna Letters’. Many are lost, the remainder are dispersed to various museum collections.
1891–2: Flinders Petrie surveys and partially excavates the Central City, assisted by Howard Carter.
1901–7: Norman de Garis Davies records and publishes the elite tombs and the boundary stelae.
1907, 1911–14: Ludwig Borchardt surveys then excavates much of the Main City for the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft. They discover the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose.
1921–1937: The Egypt Exploration Society conducts excavations directed by, amongst others, T. E. Peet, Leonard Woolley, Francis Newton, Henri Frankfort and John Pendlebury. In an exclusive deal with the EES, The Illustrated London News publicises the ongoing work at Amarna.
1960s: Occasional unpublished excavations by the Egyptian Antiquities Organisation.
1970s and 80s: Geoffrey Martin and Ali el-Khouly complete the recording and publication of the tombs in the Royal Wadi.
1977–present: Excavations directed by Barry Kemp, working successively with the Egypt Exploration Society, Cambridge University and the Amarna Trust.
Archaeology is destructive: the excavator has only one chance to get things right as, once dug, a site can never be restored. Fortunately, Amarna has attracted a series of competent excavators, all of whom worked to the highest standards of their time, and all of whom published their results. However, the standards of the past are not the standards that we expect of our archaeologists today. Many of the earlier excavators left areas within the houses unexcavated, and minor finds frequently went unrecorded. Indeed, their record keeping in general left something to be desired. As a result, it can be difficult to tie finds to specific buildings, or to specific rooms in those buildings. The current work, directed by Professor Kemp, is slowly but surely expanding our understanding of this remarkable city.
Alongside the archaeology, Amarna has provided us with a useful quantity of written material. This largely takes the form of monumental inscriptions and funerary texts; unfortunately, we lack the private writings and eyewitness accounts that would fully explain the complexities of life in Akhenaten’s city.
Nefertiti and her family spoke the language that Egyptologists today call Late Egyptian. This was not, however, the language of the wider Mediterranean world. The correspondence that linked the kings, chiefs and vassals of the Near East was conducted in Akkadian, the language of Babylon, and diplomatic letters were inscribed in cuneiform wedges pressed into clay tablets. In 1887 the remains of the diplomatic archive were discovered at Amarna. The collection is incomplete, and the letters are difficult to translate and date.
Within Egypt, formal pronouncements and monumental inscriptions were written in the Late Egyptian language using the intricate but time-consuming hieroglyphic script. Less formal messages, also written in Late Egyptian, used the far speedier, cursive hieratic script. Although the spoken language consisted of both consonants and vowels, neither script recorded the vowels; the ancient scribes, practical as ever, saw no need to write the obvious. Those who could read the writings – no more than 10 per cent of the population and almost always male – automatically knew how the words were pronounced. This is a system that will be familiar to anyone who regularly sends and receives text messages.
Since Late Egyptian is no longer spoken, modern scribes have to take an educated guess which vowel goes where. Generally, ‘e’ is the vowel of choice, but this may not be the vowel that the Egyptians used, and we may not be inserting it in the correct place(s). As a result, all but the shortest Egyptian words – including personal and place names – have alternative English spellings, all equally valid. The situation is further confused by the tendency for Egyptologists to use Greek variants of Egyptian names. So, the sculptor who we will here call Thutmose (a personal name meaning ‘[the god] Thoth is born’) bore exactly the same name as Nefertiti’s grandfather-in-law Tuthmosis; acceptable variants of his name range from Thothmes to Djehutymose. The original Thoth was the divine scribe. In a land where words (hieroglyphic writing) took the form of images, he would always be linked to the carvings, painting and sculptures that could be read as words. Thutmose was therefore a highly appropriate name for any artist. The women whom I call Tiy (wife of Amenhotep III) and Tey (wife of Ay) actually bore the same name: I have chosen to use variant modern spellings to make the distinction between the two obvious.
We can, with reasonable confidence, translate the hieroglyphs. However, this does not mean that we can understand the full meaning of those ancient words. Different experts will translate the same text using different, equally valid, modern words, and their choices will affect our understanding. In a longer writing, this may not matter; the popular story of Sinuhe remains an action-packed adventure no matter who translates it. But when we want to understand precise titles and short messages it does matter. So, while we can see that Thutmose was described as a s’ankh, and we can understand that this can be translated as ‘sculptor’, we don’t know what this title meant to his contemporaries. This becomes particularly important when we start to look for the evidence of Nefertiti’s life and death, with complex scholarly arguments hanging on the precise interpretation of randomly preserved words and images.
We know a great deal about Amarna, its queen and her people. But it would be a huge mistake to think that we know and understand everything. There is still an enormous amount for us to learn.