It is certain that the court of Akhenaten was a home and fostering ground of the arts.1
Norman de Garis Davies (1905)
Almost 3,500 years ago someone dropped a broken piece of inscribed ivory in a courtyard in the royal city of Amarna. When, on 17 December 1912, this fragment was recovered by a team of German Egyptologists led by Ludwig Borchardt, it was dismissed as an insignificant vessel cover. Only in 1983 was it recognised as a horse blinker.2
Blinkers, or blinders, are curved pieces of horse tack that are attached to a driving harness at each side of a horse’s head in order to narrow the field of vision and prevent the animal from being spooked by the sight of a vehicle approaching from behind. In ancient Egypt, blinkers were designed to keep the chariot horse’s attention on its job. Scenes of horses and chariots carved on temple and tomb walls show that the blinkers were fitted so that the eyes of the horse were visible, suggesting that they specifically shielded the horse’s view of the driver in the chariot behind.3 He would be standing above and behind the horse; this is something that horses dislike, and which will cause them to bolt. Relatively rare in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt – as, indeed, were horses and their chariots – the blinkers recovered from this period are usually made from leather, wood or metal. Ivory is unusual and would have been very expensive; it seems probable that this blinker was made for royalty, either for their own use or to bestow as a gift.
Who was the privileged owner of this precious blinker, its horse and its pair and their associated chariot (and, presumably, charioteer)? Sadly, the hieroglyphic inscription is fractured, with only the upper part of the first line of text readable as ‘the praised one of the Perfect God, the chief of works, the sculptor Thutmose’. It seems reasonable to conclude from this that the Thutmose in question once owned the blinker. The ‘Perfect God’, or ‘Good God’, is a title often used for the reigning king; given the find-spot, this is likely to be a king who ruled at Amarna. Akhenaten must be the clear favourite here, although Smenkhkare and Tutankhaten are also candidates, and there is an outside chance that the blinker was already old when it was brought to Amarna. It could not, however, be much older than the reign of Akhenaten’s father because, while the horse and chariot had been introduced to Egypt at the start of the Eighteenth Dynasty, blinkers are first seen in the art decorating the Theban tomb of the royal scribe and overseer of the granaries, Khaemhat, which dates to the reign of Amenhotep III.4
The horse-owning sculptor must have been extremely wealthy, or a royal favourite, or both. Egypt’s monarchs traditionally rewarded their loyal followers with lavish presents and Akhenaten was no exception. Images carved on the walls of the elite Amarna tombs show him quite literally showering his loyal supporters with gold: he stands on a balcony with his family and they stand below, arms outstretched, to receive his largesse.5 So it is entirely possible that Thutmose received his expensive equipage as a gift from his king. It is a leap of faith – but a reasonable one – to assume that he was the owner of the extensive compound, incorporating not only luxurious living quarters and a stable for horses but also a flourishing sculptor’s workshop, where the blinker was found. It is not reasonable to assume – as some have done – that all the artwork discovered within this compound should be attributed to the hand of the master-sculptor, Thutmose. In ancient Egypt, as today, any sculptor whose workshop created large-scale or multiple public works is likely to have been supported by a team of assistants and apprentices.
Where, exactly, did Thutmose live and work? Amarna was an elongated city running north to south, and sandwiched between the River Nile to the west and limestone cliffs to the east. Its official buildings were linked by a wide processional way – today designated the Royal Road – which ran parallel to the river.6 Subverting the tradition that chariots were primarily weapons used in fighting and hunting, the royal family used this road to display themselves to their people.
The Central City, the religious and administrative heart of Amarna, was a carefully planned zone which included the Great and the Small Aten Temple precincts, the ceremonial complex known as the Great Palace, the police and army barracks, and a warren of offices where the civil servants ran Akhenaten’s extensive empire. Thutmose lived approximately a kilometre to the south of the centre, in an upmarket neighbourhood known today as the Main City. Here some of Amarna’s most influential citizens occupied extensive villas, which were built alongside more humble housing and workshops producing luxury goods. To the south of the Main City lay the Southern Suburb; to the north of the Central City lay the Northern Suburb, a less prestigious area where bureaucrats lived alongside carpenters, and where fishermen and merchants – their houses identified by their extensive storage facilities – lived within easy reach of the quay. Further north still lay the North City, which included the North Riverside Palace; the private home of Akhenaten and his family.
Thutmose’s extensive compound lay at the junction of East Road South, a major highway running more or less parallel to the Royal Road, and a narrower lane running at right angles to it. Behind a mud-brick wall – a physical and symbolic boundary, separating the creative world of the craftsman from the humdrum daily life of the city – lay a sizeable, square, two-storeyed villa which, it seems reasonable to assume, was Thutmose’s own home.7 A gateway opening from the lane allowed visitors to pass through a courtyard and reach the raised and canopied doorway. Beyond this, a small vestibule led to an anteroom where a doorway to the right allowed access to the plaster workshops which ran along the east side of the villa. A collection of old alabaster and obsidian artefacts, which were presumably awaiting recycling, suggests that inlays made from precious materials and maybe smaller hard stone sculptures were manufactured here.
Back in the anteroom, a doorway to the left allowed access to a columned reception hall whose plastered and painted walls were decorated with floral designs that have survived as detached fragments. Opening off the reception hall were two small interconnected rooms (Room 18 and Room 19) equipped with water jars and a table, which archaeologists have tentatively identified as pantries or larders used when entertaining guests. A door in Room 19 allowed access to the large stoneworking courtyard, and its well. Thutmose’s private quarters were reached via a spacious living room, and included the master bedroom, bathroom and a non-flushing toilet. A staircase led to the now-vanished upper storey. A small, enclosed courtyard behind the villa was dominated by four large granaries capable of storing enough grain to feed not only Thutmose and his family but his workforce too, grain being, in Egypt’s moneyless economy, the usual form of wage. Essentially, his granaries were Thutmose’s bank, and it is not surprising that he wanted to retain complete control over access to his wealth. Four beehive-shaped mud-brick ovens provided the bread that formed an important part of the Egyptian diet.
As the business developed, a second, somewhat smaller house was added to the compound, beside the main villa. This smaller house, which had its own entrance, served as the nucleus of a cluster of relatively humble living quarters and working areas. It shared basic facilities – granaries, ovens, the stable and a well – with the main villa. It is tempting to speculate that this new accommodation was built for a member of Thutmose’s immediate family, a son perhaps, who was now working alongside his father. Employment, even employment by the state, was largely hereditary, and we would expect to find Thutmose training his sons and grandsons from a young age to follow in his footsteps. He would not have trained his daughters and granddaughters; we know of no female sculptors or artists in ancient Egypt.
A wide gateway, large enough to admit the delivery of large stone blocks and the passage of a chariot, opened from East Road South into a spacious courtyard. Beyond this lay the stable that housed the chariot horses and a range of farm animals. Fragments of diorite and quartzite indicate that the heavy stone was worked in this courtyard, as close as possible to the delivery point. This would have been hot and thirsty work, and the masons would have been grateful for the large well, which was essentially a deep water-hole accessed via a winding staircase. A row of trees, planted alongside the house, would have offered welcome shade. The trees are, of course, long gone, but the pits dug for their roots remain obvious in the archaeological record. It was in one of these pits (originally identified as a rubbish pit) that Borchardt’s men discovered the broken ivory blinker that allows us to name the compound’s owner.
As Amarna grew, so did the demand for Thutmose’s products. When the expanding business needed yet more working space the complex was extended southwards, beyond the original compound wall. This allowed the creation of new working areas, residential quarters for the workmen and apprentices, a third house and a second well. A large food container set into the floor of one of these newer units recorded the name ‘Ramose’ in hieratic script; this is the only non-royal name aside from Thutmose to be recovered from the workshop.8 We know nothing more about this Ramose, who was presumably one of several workmen employed there.
High-quality sculpted pieces (complete, incomplete and fragmented), sculptors’ tools, stone chips, gypsum plaster artefacts and flakes of gold foil have been found throughout the extended Thutmose compound, making it clear that this was a functioning workshop. Many of these pieces have been identified as royalty, proving, as we had already suspected, that the workshop was closely linked to Akhenaten’s court. A nearby but entirely separate house has yielded the remnants of a range of small-scale industries – stone working, faience manufacture, textile working and glass production – and it seems likely that goods manufactured here were supplied to the Thutmose workshop.9 Linen, which at first sight might seem an odd requirement for a sculptor’s workshop, would have been needed to clothe the finished statues. Texts tell us that temple statues were dressed each morning as part of the daily temple ritual, and this is confirmed by the discovery, in Tutankhamen’s Valley of the Kings tomb, of statuettes of the king and his gods shrouded in linen cloaks.10
Thutmose was not Amarna’s only sculptor. He lived in a city of thriving small-scale and cottage industries where, as Flinders Petrie noted during his brief excavations:
The sculptors’ workshops proved of much interest. The most extensive was at the north of the palace … Fragments of statues, trial pieces of an arm, a foot, hieroglyphs with master’s corrections in black ink, and pieces of various works in stone and glaze were found here … Another sculptor’s place was found near the south end of the town, containing many stages of work, from the first practice of the beginner on the simplest sign, the neb, to more advanced studies from life.11
As the early archaeologists tended to concentrate their excavations on Amarna’s buildings while neglecting their courtyards, there may well be many more workshops still hidden under the Amarna sands.12
However, the fact that Thutmose’s workshop specialised in royal statues gave him a particularly high status. Royal statues were precious items, with a value that extended far beyond the individual components of their manufacture. They were commissioned by the king and his representatives, and displayed in official contexts primarily, but not exclusively, in the Central City, which was enhanced by multiple stone images of Akhenaten and his family, many created at a larger-than-life scale. Whereas other kings had commissioned sculptures of Egypt’s many gods plus the royal family, Akhenaten commissioned statues of himself and his family exclusively. The more public of these had an obvious decorative and propaganda function, but they could also serve as a focus of worship for people who were forbidden entry to the temple precincts and so denied direct access to the state god.
The statues and statue fragments recovered from the Thutmose workshop do not exhibit the huge scale of the pieces that once decorated the Great Palace and the Great Temple, but this is not unexpected. Thutmose did not run a shop and did not need to keep stock; he worked to order and his completed statues were despatched straight to their planned display site. Indeed, his larger pieces and those made of hard stone, which is as heavy as it is durable, are unlikely ever to have visited his workshop. In order to avoid transporting unnecessary weight, they would have been roughed out in the quarry then completed in situ in the Central City. As the sources of hard stone were situated a considerable distance from Amarna – with granite and granodiorite being quarried at the southern border town of Aswan, and quartzite being quarried either in the north, at Gebel Ahmar near modern Cairo, or in the south, at Gebel Tingar, near Aswan – this suggests that the quarries employed teams of specialist masons to work alongside their quarrymen and labourers. It may therefore be that, as part of his royal duties, Thutmose was regularly required to undertake the long river journey to the hard stone quarries, to liaise with their sculptors.
Unfortunately, no stone statue could withstand the fury of those who wished to eradicate all memory of the aberrant Amarna Period. The royal images were attacked and in many cases smashed to pieces – and so rendered ineffective as a means of accessing the divine – not long after Akhenaten’s death. Official architecture was attacked too, with all of Akhenaten’s religious buildings being dismantled and, in many cases, their stone blocks reused in other official buildings. This leaves us in the difficult situation of having an extensive artistic record of an extraordinary time in Egyptian history, which is almost entirely represented by fragments, defaced scenes and dispersed blocks.
The impressive series of colossal statues that once lined the courtyard of the Amarna Great Palace is today represented by a stark collection of empty statue bases plus thousands of red granite and quartzite fragments.13 The statues which once adorned the colonnades and halls of the two Aten temple complexes were destroyed along with all the others, but live again on the carved walls of the Amarna elite tombs. Huya’s tomb, for example, allows us a clear view of the interior of the Great Aten Temple, where we see multiple statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti lining the porticoes or colonnades, many bearing rectangular offering tables loaded with gifts for the god.14 A similar concentration of temple statues may be seen at Thebes, where Akhenaten built an open-air sun temple, Gempaaten (‘the sun-disc is found’), shortly before his move to Amarna. This temple included a court lined with five-metre tall sandstone images of the king. These statues were destroyed when the temple was dismantled at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, but as the pieces were used as fill in later buildings, it has proved possible to reconstruct many of them.15 It is a testament to the productivity of the royal workshops that, in spite of the post-Amarna attacks, we have more engravings and sculptures of Nefertiti than of any other Egyptian queen, Cleopatra VII included.
During the 1891–2 season of excavation at Amarna, Howard Carter discovered many fragments of royal statuary and stelae inside the remains of the Great Temple. As Petrie explains:
The site of the temple, or shrine, which was entirely excavated by Mr Carter, is marked by heaps of broken pieces of mortar and stone … The absence of all sculptures was partly explained on searching the heap which lay just outside the temenos wall, on the south of the temple. Here were found portions of seventeen limestone statues of the king and queen, probably those which are represented in porticoes in the drawing of the temple … Beside these lifesized statues in the temple, there were also colossal standing statues of Akhenaten, in soft limestone, of which an ear, a toe, and a piece of the chest were found. The attitude seems to have been with crossed arms holding the crook and flail, but whether standing (like an Osirian figure or ushabti) or seated (like his statue in the Louvre) is not determined.16
The statues and associated fragments entered the private collection of Lord Amherst, the sponsor of Petrie’s Amarna expedition. The collection of fragments was subsequently sold by auction and, as a result, many are now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Others, as Petrie later recorded, were simply thrown away:
The torsos and fragments of the queen’s face were – after Lord Amherst’s death – sold for hundreds of pounds at Sotheby’s, while the boxes full of flakes which should have completed them were thrown away as stone waste. Thus perished the chance of reconstructing the priceless figures of that age.17
A more substantial statue fragment – a female lower torso wearing a pleated robe tied with a red sash, which almost certainly represents Nefertiti – was recently discovered in the rubble used to raise the ground level during the second phase of building at the Great Temple during, or shortly after, Akhenaten’s regnal year 12. The limestone used to create this statue includes significant amounts of microscopic silica (quartz), and this has allowed it to be traced to a siliceous crystalline limestone quarry situated near to Amarna’s well-known Hatnub alabaster quarry. The limestone quarry has yielded cut blocks and statue roughouts that confirm that a lot of preliminary work was done in the quarry, before the heavy stone was transported to the city.18
The Great and Small Aten Temples were not the only official places of worship. Amarna was riddled with shrines, chapels and ‘sunshade temples’ provided for the private worship of the royal women. These are not always easy for us to identify or understand. During Pendlebury’s 1936/7 Amarna excavation season, for example, a curious building was discovered in the border between the Central City and the Main City, on East Street South.19 Although built of mud-brick and situated in a predominantly residential area, this was not a conventional house; its open forecourt and two columned halls suggest that it may have been a private chapel. The building yielded statue components, including a faience king’s crown, twin wooden plumes that probably formed part of a (queen’s?) crown, and a wooden (human) arm. A fragmented wooden shrine, which originally stood on a podium in the central room, was decorated with a painted scene which has been reconstructed to show Akhenaten smiting a group of enemies who grovel before him. Comparison with more conventional temple shrines suggests that the shrine doors (known as the ‘doors of heaven’) would have been opened to reveal the cult statue and allow worship and the performance of ritual. This statue is, of course, missing, but the reconstructed inscription identifies it as the ‘great statue which the king caused to have made’. As the wooden shrine was found in scattered fragments, it is possible that there were originally two shrines each holding a statue, one for Akhenaten and one for Nefertiti.
The ‘smiting scene’ – a scene showing the king raising his arm to despatch one or more cringing enemies – was a favourite two-dimensional motif throughout the Eighteenth Dynasty. In stark contradiction of the popular modern perception of Akhenaten as a pacifist, we can see both Akhenaten and Nefertiti killing Egypt’s enemies in scenes carved at both Amarna and Karnak. Although it is generally assumed that this is a symbolic image, it may be that we are witnessing an actual ritual. Remote killing – the idea that a host of foreign enemies might be vanquished by Egyptian temple rituals – was an accepted means of defeating foes, and the effect would presumably have been magnified had the ritual involved the despatch of an actual token enemy. Real or not, the image of the king as a victorious warrior killing representative enemies of Egypt is an obvious illustration of maat in action: pharaoh fulfilling his duty to subdue the chaos, represented by the foreigners, which constantly threatens the status quo within Egypt. The image of the queen smiting female prisoners in exactly the same way is, as far as we know, an innovation during Akhenaten’s reign.20
Statues may have been commissioned as part of the royal burial equipment but, as the Amarna royal tomb was emptied in antiquity and stripped again by modern looters, our only guide as to what it might have contained comes once again from Tutankhamen’s tomb, which was sealed no more than fifteen years after Akhenaten’s death. As a devotee of Amen, Tutankhamen must have had afterlife expectations very different from those of his predecessor, and we cannot assume that the two kings were interred with the same range of grave goods. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that Tutankhamen was buried with a large number of three-dimensional images of himself. These range from a pair of life-sized ‘guardian statues’ which protected the entrance to the Burial Chamber, to a series of small-scale gilded wooden statuettes recovered from the Treasury.21 It seems that later Eighteenth Dynasty kings might, indeed, be buried with multiple images of themselves, but that these images were likely to be created from wood rather than stone. This makes sense. Wood was never seen as a cheap option in Egypt, a land lacking tall trees. A wooden figure was a prized item which would serve exactly the same function within the tomb as a statue made from stone. True, wood was a more ephemeral material, but it was lighter and therefore easier to work and transport than stone and, once in place, the wooden statue would be protected by the stone tomb, which was itself designed to last until the end of time. Stone, being more durable than wood, was connected with ideas of permanence and longevity, and this made it a highly suitable medium for public or outdoor art.
We would have expected to find statues in Akhenaten’s mortuary temple; the temple which represented the public aspect of the king’s funerary provision where, under a more orthodox regime, offerings would be made on a daily basis to the dead king. However, Akhenaten’s mortuary temple is missing, and we are left to wonder if the Small Aten Temple, which was aligned towards the royal tomb, fulfilled this function. His father’s mortuary temple, once the largest royal temple in dynastic Egypt, is missing too. However, in this case we know precisely where it stood as the site, at Kom el-Hetan on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, is still guarded by a pair huge quartzite seated kings, known today as the Colossi of Memnon. We know what the temple looked like, too:
A monument of eternity and everlastingness, of fine sandstone worked with gold throughout … It is enriched with statues of the lord [Amenhotep III], of granite, quartzite and of all kinds of precious stones, worked in enduring workmanship. Their height rises to heaven.22
The temple was graced with numerous hard stone images of Amenhotep III, family groups of the more important state gods, and a zoo of sacred animal statues including sphinxes, rams and jackals. Most remarkable of all were the multiple granodiorite statues of the fierce lioness goddess Sekhmet.23 Approximately 600 of these statues have been recovered, and it is assumed that originally there were 730 of them, one seated and one standing for each day of the year. At first glance, the Sekhmets appear identical. Closer inspection, however, reveals minor differences in execution which seem to reflect the varying skills of the team of sculptors engaged in their production. These differences would have been less obvious if the Sekhmets were painted or gilded, and they certainly would not have affected the effectiveness of the statues which, we assume, were intended to protect the ageing king against illness throughout the entire year.
Unlike his father, Akhenaten had no use for stone gods or goddesses. His god had started life as a falcon-headed deity, but from regnal year 4 onwards had become a faceless, bodiless disc which hung in the sky emitting long, thin rays ending in tiny human hands. These hands were important, as they allowed the Aten to interact with the royal family just as the traditional gods had previously interacted with kings and queens, by supporting their crowns, for example, or holding the ankh, symbol of life, above their heads.24 Although this tableau could be depicted quite satisfactorily in two-dimensional art, it was simply impossible in 3D. This was not a problem, however, as the Aten temples could dispense with cult statues altogether. Akhenaten’s god could be accessed directly, through the open temple roof. The benben – a solar cult object linked to the cult of the sun god Re of Heliopolis since the start of the dynastic age – offered an alternative focus for worship. Over the centuries the benben had varied in appearance from temple to temple; it might be a cone- or pyramid-shaped structure, an obelisk, a boulder or even a meteorite. The Amarna benben has not survived, but images in the elite tombs suggest that it was a large, round-topped stela which stood on a raised platform next to a large statue of a seated Akhenaten.25
We might quite reasonably deduce that the Aten had no need for temples; that the sun could simply be worshipped in an unstructured way by anyone who stepped outdoors and looked up at the sky. But Atenism was not a democratic religion, and the common people were not expected or even encouraged to worship the state god. This was the privilege of the elite, with the temples allowing the priests and the royal family to control access to the god and his valuable resources. It was here, hidden from public view, that the Aten – a greedy god – accepted the generous offerings of food, drink and flowers that he craved. To accommodate his needs, the Great Temple was provided with almost a thousand mud-brick offering tables.
Prominent citizens who could not access the temple were expected to worship the Aten using the royal family as intermediaries. For this purpose, their homes were furnished with statues of the king and queen, or carved stone stelae depicting the royal family going about their daily business beneath the Aten’s rays. These served both as an aid to official worship and as a very obvious means of demonstrating loyalty to the regime.
Akhenaten died in his regnal year 17 and was buried, as he had wished, in the still incomplete royal tomb. Initially, Amarna life continued as it always had done. A wine jar fragment recovered from Thutmose’s villa bears an inscription dating the wine to ‘year 1’ of an anonymous king.26 A broken blue faience ring discovered in the Thutmose compound takes the form of a cartouche inscribed with the name Nebkheperure: the throne name of Tutankhamen.27 Combined, these two pieces of evidence suggest that the workshop continued under the new regime. But then, in Tutankhamen’s regnal year 3 or year 4, came the decision to reverse the Amarna experiment. The traditional gods were to be reinstated and the court was to relocate. The southern city of Thebes would be restored to its position as Egypt’s religious capital, while the northern city of Memphis would once again be Egypt’s administrative hub. A large stela erected in the Karnak Temple at Thebes, and dedicated to the newly restored Amen, explains Tutankhamen’s pious desire to placate the old regime:
Now when His Majesty [Tutankhamen] arose as king, the temples of the gods and goddesses, beginning from Elephantine to the marshes of the Delta, had fallen into neglect, their shrines had fallen into desolation and become tracts overgrown with weeds, their sanctuaries were as if they had never been, their halls were a trodden path. The land was in confusion, the gods forsook this land …After some days had passed, [His Majesty appeared] on the throne of his father; he ruled the countries of Horus, the Black Land and the Red Land were under his dominion, and every land was in obeisance to his might … Then His Majesty took counsel with his heart, searching out every excellent occasion, seeking what was beneficial to his father Amen.28
We cannot take this statement literally. Tutankhamen’s body, discovered lying undisturbed in his sealed sarcophagus, shows that he was approximately eighteen years old when he died, while wine-jar dates from his tomb suggest that he reigned for approximately ten years. Tutankhamen was therefore a child of maybe eight years when he came to the throne. He would have been far too young to make such an important decision and, indeed, having been born at Amarna and raised in the cult of the Aten, he would probably have been unaware that such a decision could be made. It is doubtful that he knew much, if anything, about Amen of Thebes, the god who was now his ‘father’. This was a decision made by advisors who could remember the old ways, who felt no personal devotion to the Aten, and who found Amarna an inconvenient city from which to govern an empire. It was time to go home.
Amarna had been built to service Akhenaten and his god. Without Tutankhamen’s support, it was unviable. Slowly but surely the city population dwindled until Amarna was empty. One of the last houses to be occupied in the North Suburb was owned by a man named Hatiay whose name and titles, helpfully carved on a door lintel, tell us that he was the ‘overseer of works, confidente of the Lord of the Two Lands’.29 While the houses all around show evidence of looting, Hatiay’s house retains a relatively large amount of stone masonry suggesting that he remained at Amarna long after his neighbours had departed. Given his impressive title, it may even be that he was charged with overseeing the official evacuation of the city, and the reuse of many of its stone elements.
Thutmose – entirely dependent on royal patronage for his livelihood – had little choice but to follow his new king. Packing his goods and chattels, and leaving the items that he no longer needed, he sailed away from Amarna. His abandoned property constitutes what archaeologists term a ‘negative collection’: a collection of things that Thutmose did not want, things that he could not move, and things that he had lost or forgotten. In this respect his excavated workshop differs from Pompeii or the Titanic, where a sudden, unanticipated disaster preserved an almost complete snapshot of daily life (albeit, in the case of the Titanic, an atypical daily life), and differs again from Tutankhamen’s tomb, which was packed with goods deliberately selected for burial alongside the king.
In Thutmose’s private villa the pantries (Rooms 18 and 19) were converted into a storage area, with the external door leading to the courtyard bricked up. Here, on 6 and 7 December 1912, Borchardt’s team discovered a jumble of more than fifty artefacts made from limestone, quartzite and gypsum plaster, including the bust of Nefertiti which he believed had fallen off a shelf, although the lack of damage to the extremities makes this seem unlikely. The collection also included a similarly styled but deliberately damaged painted bust of Akhenaten, a collection of plaster ‘portrait’ heads and several unfinished stone sculptures, some still covered in the black ink lines used to guide the craftsmen.30 There were at least three other Nefertitis: an unfinished and fragmented limestone statue, a plaster model and an unfinished limestone head wearing traces of a crown.31 Amongst all these artefacts the Nefertiti bust stands out as being substantially intact and complete. It is not, however, the most curious find.
During the course of his own Amarna excavations Petrie had discovered a plaster cast or mask ‘rough on the back, and without any name or mark’ which he identified as the death mask of Akhenaten:
That this is a death-mask and not modelled by hand, is shewn by the delicacy of the curves of the bone, by the flattening of the ear in casting, by the absence of modelled detail in the lips, and by the similar absence of detail in the eye, reinforced, however, by added lines done by a graving-tool to make it clearer. In all these points it is clearly not made by hand. The fillet on the head was to keep back the hair in casting.32
The identification was later supported by the sculptor Alfred Gilbert, creator of the ‘Eros’ figure on the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain at London’s Piccadilly Circus. Petrie’s death mask developed an instant fame which abated only when Borchardt’s men discovered twenty-three similar but better made gypsum plaster faces and heads in Thutmose’s pantry. Four of these pieces were sculpted heads, nineteen were faces with or without ears, and there were also four isolated body parts: an ear, a mouth and two feet. Although they were initially described as being ‘some … from the living, others from the dead model; others, again, are apparently casts of statue-faces’, this is unlikely as death masks cast from the face of the deceased are unknown in ancient Egypt.33
Borchardt believed that, while some of the masks had been cast from stone statues, others had been cast from living individuals, and he catalogued them accordingly. Art historian Günther Roeder then suggested that they might be casts taken from clay models as part of the sculpting process; this also seems unlikely, as there is no other evidence to suggest that Egypt’s sculptors worked with clay models.34 Recently, it has been accepted that they are probably casts taken from finished statues, created, perhaps, to guide the royal artists in their work and serve as a reference for future works. The fact that some of the masks have hollow eyes and eyebrows indicates that they were cast before the precious inlays were added to the statues. As they would have been both cheap to produce and easy to transport, identical plaster masks might have been circulated to workshops throughout the empire, ensuring that the royal image remained constant wherever it might appear. Thutmose’s pantry may, therefore, have housed his reference library. We can deduce that the masks were made on the premises, as quantities of gypsum plaster were discovered in the courtyards and in the workrooms running alongside the villa.
As none of the plaster masks is labelled, Egyptologists have struggled to attribute them to specific individuals. The preliminary sorting is easy; it is obvious that some of the original statues were equipped with wigs while others – the royals – had crowns. On this basis we can be confident that the collection includes nine royals (four heads and five faces). While the royal masks tend to be slightly smaller than life-sized and to display idealised features, the non-royals are life-sized and appear to be true, and not always flattering, representations of real people. Dietrich Wildung, who has described them as ‘old, haggard and ugly’, has suggested that their extreme realism is a sign that they are not members of the elite, who would have been represented as stereotypically perfect, but members of the lower classes: ‘stable boys and workers, whose miserable living conditions have been testified to in a horrifying manner by the graves uncovered at the edge of the desert in recent years’.35 This seems a little harsh: the non-royal faces, while not idealised, are by no means as repulsive as Wildung suggests. It may be that these are models for the statues which would have been added to the elite tombs, had any of them been finished before Amarna was abandoned.
Two of the plaster faces have been identified, on the basis of their hairstyle and large, round earrings or ear plugs, as Kiya, a secondary queen of Akhenaten. The two masks are not identical but they are similar enough to suggest that they represent the same person, and neither resembles either Nefertiti or her daughters. We have no confirmed portrait of Kiya in the round, but several 2D images allow us to recognise her oval, slightly smiling face, her firm chin and her inevitable round earrings or ear plugs. Under normal circumstances, secondary or harem queens remained in the background, and we known little about them. But Kiya was uniquely prominent at Amarna, where she was allowed to play a part in the rituals of Aten worship.
Until relatively recently, Thutmose’s story ended here. Then, on 24 November 1996, a French mission led by Egyptologist Alain Zivie, excavating in the Sakkara necropolis, discovered an insignificant, thoroughly looted private tomb belonging to a late Eighteenth Dynasty artist named Thutmose. Thutmose’s title, proudly displayed on the tomb wall, identifies him as the chief of the sesh ked – the chief of painters or chief of draughtsmen – in the set maat, or Place of Truth.36
The Sakkara necropolis is part of the ancient and extensive cemetery associated with the equally ancient royal city and administrative centre of Memphis. Alongside some of Egypt’s earliest pyramids, it houses the tombs of many of Egypt’s most successful bureaucrats, officials and court favourites, including individuals who first came to prominence at Amarna. Maya, Tutankhamen’s wet nurse, built an impressive tomb here, and this second Thutmose built his tomb near to hers. Long after Maya’s and Thutmose’s tombs were sealed, the area around their tombs was remodelled for the burial of mummified cats, sacred to the goddess Bastet and, because of this, this area is known as the Bubasteion.
The ‘Place of Truth’ is less easy for us to pinpoint. There is an automatic assumption that this must be a reference to the Valley of the Kings, because the specialist workers who built the royal tombs, and who lived in the state-owned village of Deir el-Medina, often referred to themselves as the ‘servants in the Place of Truth’. During the Amarna Period there was no significant work in the Valley. Deir el-Medina was abandoned, and it seems that the workforce was moved wholesale to Amarna. Here they occupied a brand-new state-owned workmen’s village, and laboured to create the rock-cut tombs in the nearby cliffs. With the decision to close Amarna, they were returned to Deir el-Medina, and picked up their former lives.
However, Egypt recognised more than one ‘Place of Truth’. The term could be used to designate any place connected in general with sacred or holy ground and, more specifically, with tombs, cemeteries and the west (the west bank being the usual location of Egypt’s cemeteries).37 It is therefore possible that Thutmose’s Place of Truth was located at Amarna, and that it is actually a reference to the royal and elite tombs in the Amarna cliffs. If we visit Tutu’s rock-cut tomb, we can read his prayer to the Aten, which includes a hope for a proper burial in the Amarna ‘Place of Truth’:
It is with arms worshipping you and eyes beholding you without cease that I have come to you – for you are the life-giving (?) breeze [that sustains the king (or similar). May he grant] a good burial in the mountains of Akhet-Aten, the Place of Truth. For the ka of the chamberlain Tutu, justified.38
One of a row of tombs cut into a south-facing cliff face, Thutmose’s Sakkara tomb is both simple and, in comparison to the tombs around it, very small. A now-vanished wooden door would once have kept the sand out of his eternal home. Today a well-cut but undecorated facade opens directly into a short corridor leading into a chapel with one stone pillar; the left (west) wall of the chapel incorporates an alcove housing the shaft which allows access to the subterranean burial chamber. Unlike the private subterranean burial chamber, this chapel was a public room, designed to attract visitors who might be persuaded to leave an offering which would benefit the soul of the deceased. To encourage this, the walls were decorated with a colourful mixture of sunken relief, paintings and brief texts featuring the deceased and his family. Thutmose is not the only chief of workmen in the Place of Truth to appear on these walls; in addition to his father, Amenemwia, we can see the artist Kenana and his family. It seems that Thutmose and Kenana are colleagues; the fact that they share a tomb suggests that they are also related, maybe as brothers-in-law. Thutmose is, however, the dominant tomb occupant, and the more important scenes belong to him. Zivie believes that it was Thutmose himself who created the intimate scenes of his own family. This was not without precedent; the workmen of Deir el-Medina also used their skills, honed on the royal tombs, to create their own, beautifully decorated family tombs.
The walls to the left of the entrance to the burial chamber display what Zivie has designated a ‘triptych’: three linked scenes presented in chronological order and designed to be read as a history, although the corner created by the niche makes it impossible to see all three at the same time. The first of these scenes introduces us to Amenemwia, an artist whose name – literally ‘Amen is in the boat’ – suggests that he may have been born at Thebes. Amenemwia’s wife, Mutemweskhet – literally ‘Mut [the goddess wife of Amen] is in the broad hall’ – has a similarly Theban name. The fact that Amenemwia and Mutemweskhet are depicted on the walls of their son’s tomb does not mean that they were buried with him, and it is tempting to speculate that they were buried at Thebes. Next we meet Thutmose, who is dressed in an unremarkable white linen kilt, wig and broad bead collar, and who carries a stylised painter’s palette inscribed with the name of Amenhotep III. Thutmose is supported by his wife Iniy, and we see their children Itiu, Djedet and Mutemweskhet known as Tuy. Finally, we see a unique double coffin from which the full faces of Thutmose and Iniy look directly at the tomb visitor. The accompanying text tells us that this curiosity was designed by Thutmose himself. Whether or not the couple were eventually interred in one coffin is not clear – this could pose some practical difficulties – but the effect is unsettling. Standing beside the coffin, Thutmose’s children offer to their deceased parents. Elsewhere in the tomb, an unfinished scene shows Thutmose and Amenemwia standing before the god of the afterlife, Osiris. Again, Thutmose carries the painter’s palette which defines his role in society.
Thutmose’s inscribed palette links him directly to Amenhotep III, but his tomb also includes references to the Aten, and his father’s name is in places ‘corrected’ with the ‘Amen’ element being replaced by the more politically acceptable ‘Re’. This suggests that Thutmose was one of a family of later Eighteenth Dynasty artists who worked on royal projects throughout the Amarna Period and beyond. Could the Sakkara Thutmose be the Amarna Thutmose? The dates certainly fit, the name is the same, and the title is similar, if not identical. The Amarna Thutmose ran a sculptor’s workshop, while the Sakkara Thutmose wished to be remembered as a painter, but we know that the Amarna workshop produced beautifully painted works, and it is entirely possible that Thutmose was a painter rather than a sculptor. This may be a coincidence – the name Thutmose was certainly not an uncommon one – but it may be that Zivie’s discovery allows us to place our Thutmose in a wider, pre- and post-Amarna context. This allows us to end our chapter with an indulgent paragraph of unabashed speculation:
Thutmose son of Amenemwia was born into a family of highly respected sculptors, carvers and painters. The family lived and worked in Thebes, where they ran a successful workshop engaged on royal and occasional private projects connected with the west bank tombs and temples. Trained by his father, Thutmose became an accomplished craftsman then, following his father’s death, he took control of the family business. When the court moved to Amarna, he sensed a good business opportunity and moved too, setting up a new workshop to meet the almost insatiable demand for royal statuary. Married to Iniy, sister of his fellow-sculptor Kenana, he raised a family who lived and worked alongside him. While Akhenaten ruled, Thutmose was a privileged royal favourite. When the Amarna experiment ended Thutmose and his family moved to Memphis, where he continued to work for the state and the temples while creating his own family tomb. Here, eventually, he was buried with his wife and his brother-in-law, in a tomb whose walls he himself had decorated.