The new capital was to lie on the east bank of the Nile in the Hare Nome of Middle Egypt, almost equidistant between the southern capital, Thebes, and the northern capital, Memphis, and several miles to the south-east of the ancient west bank town of Hermopolis (modern Ashmunein). The chosen site was a wide, hot and somewhat windswept arc of desert some eleven kilometres long and five kilometres wide, sandwiched between the river Nile to the west and a semi-circle of steep cliffs to the east. There was relatively easy access to water, but although Middle Egypt is in general a fertile area, a shortage of agricultural land on the east bank meant that all farming would have to take place on the west, with supplies being ferried over to feed the city. It was, however, a virgin site which, because it had never been built on, had never been dedicated to a particular deity. This may well have heightened its attraction for the king and his god who wanted to build the Aten’s ‘Seat of the First Occasion’, a city which would belong exclusively to the
Fig. 5.1 Map of Amarna
Aten. In fact Akhenaten’s decision was almost certainly inspired as much by practical as by religious considerations. The Nile Valley could not provide unlimited city-sites, and a late 18th Dynasty king looking for a large, completely untouched plot of land suitable for extensive development would certainly not have been spoiled for choice, as the best sites would have been long occupied. It is possible that Nefertiti recognized some of Amarna’s shortcomings, as Akhenaten rather tersely informs us:
Neither shall the queen say unto me ‘behold there is a goodly place for Akhetaten in another place’… I will not say ‘I will abandon Akhetaten, I will hasten away and make Akhetaten in this other goodly place’.3
Amarna’s main strength as a site also seems to have been its greatest weakness. The isolation that allowed Akhenaten to make a new start away from Egypt’s traditional deities ensured that his city, despite its status as the capital of a great empire, remained very much apart from the rest of Egypt. As Amarna went about its unique business of serving the king and the Aten, elsewhere in Egypt life continued very much as it had for centuries. However, it is Amarna’s very unsuitability which has ensured its preservation. Akhenaten’s city may well have suffered from decay and both ancient and modern looting, but it has been spared the complete destruction of Amarna period monuments which we find at Heliopolis and Thebes.
Akhenaten’s chosen site did not have the obvious geographical advantages of the other three capitals of the New Kingdom. It is no coincidence that the ancient capital of Memphis lay only a few kilometres distant from the modern capital, Cairo. As early as the beginning of the 1st Dynasty it was realized that the natural centre of Egypt was the point where the Valley met the Delta, the junction of Upper and Lower Egypt, and so, throughout the Old and Middle Kingdoms and for much of the New Kingdom, Memphis remained the administrative capital of Egypt.4 Memphis was always the largest and most cosmopolitan of the Egyptian cities. In contrast Pi-Ramesses, the New Kingdom capital founded by Ramesses II, was sited not far from the eastern Delta backwater home town of Ramesses’s family. Sentiment was, however, allied to shrewd political judgement since the location of Pi-Ramesses near to the old Hyksos capital of Avaris moved the centre of political life closer to the eastern border at a time when Egypt was feeling concern over her military, diplomatic and trading relationships with the kingdoms and empires of western Asia, particularly the Hittites who had superseded Mitanni as Egypt’s main rival and competing international superpower. Thebes, although far to the south, was conveniently situated for overseeing the administration of Nubia, vast tracts of which had come under direct Egyptian rule early in the New Kingdom. Thebes was also a useful starting point for expeditions into the eastern desert, while access to the Red Sea via the nearby Wadi Hammamat provided another useful southern trade route.
The limits of the god’s new territory were defined in a series of massive inscriptions carved at strategic points into the limestone cliffs of both the east (eleven stelae) and west (three stelae) banks. In fact, the area enclosed within these so-called ‘boundary stelae’, measuring some sixteen by thirteen kilometres, was far larger than the area eventually occupied by the city itself and included ‘mountains, deserts, meadows, water, villages, embankments, men, beasts, groves and all things which the Aten shall bring into existence’. Akhenaten was providing his god with a small self-contained kingdom which allowed plenty of room for internal growth but which, the king swore, would never be expanded beyond its stated boundaries. It is difficult to calculate how much of this area was fertile land, but it has been suggested that the Amarna cultivation would have been capable of supporting a population of up to 45,000.5
The first three boundary stelae, most probably carved during Year 5, detailed the founding of Amarna. By Year 6 a further eleven stelae had been carved to mark the final boundaries of a city which was already substantially complete. Several of these stelae are now, due to a combination of ancient and modern vandalism plus natural damage, completely unreadable. One stela (known as stela P) was even blown up by local Copts searching for the treasure behind the ‘door’ in the cliff. Fortunately the stelae were fully documented at the turn of the century by Norman de Garis Davies, working on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Society, and this record, combined with the surviving sections, has allowed scholars to make a fairly complete composite reconstruction of Akhenaten’s full message. From this we learn that the king first decided to abandon Thebes for Amarna during Year 4, formally establishing the limits of his new city in Year 6 when he swore an oath of dedication. This oath was renewed in Year 8 when the king inspected his boundaries and a postscript to this effect was added to eight of the stelae. All the boundary stelae were carved to the same pattern; they were rectangular with straight sides and a rounded top which allowed the Aten to shine in an arched sky. Beneath the Aten there was inevitably a scene showing Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their daughters at worship, while beneath this came the text. To either side of all but three of the stelae, and standing free although carved from the same rock, were statue groups of the royal family, the king and queen holding large plaques inscribed with the names of the Aten, Akhenaten and Nefertiti.
The stela known as boundary stela S, which was by happy accident carved into a vein of exceptionally hard limestone, is the best preserved of all Akhenaten’s proclamations. Measuring approximately one and a half metres wide by two and a half metres tall, it displays four columns and twenty-six lines of inscription. The scene at the top of the stela depicts Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Meritaten and Meketaten worshipping the Aten (Fig. 5.2). All are shown in the early, deliberately exaggerated Amarna style, so that ‘the work in the scene above the inscription is beautifully fine, though the profiles are hideous and the forms of the body outrageous’.6 Nefertiti wears her usual flimsy robe with sleeves, which partially conceals her breasts but highlights her stomach, hips and pubic region; on her head she wears the long wig and the uraeus, disc, horns and double plumes seen in the Hwt-Benben reliefs. Akhenaten wears a pleated linen kilt which emphasizes his paunch but conceals his genitals, and his favourite tall blue crown. The family, as always, line up in order of importance. Nefertiti stands behind her husband, yet she is virtually the same height as Akhenaten, and has abandoned the queen’s sistrum to follow her husband in holding out her arms to the god. The rays of the Aten in turn hold the ankh, sign of life, before the faces of king and queen. The two little princesses, dressed like their mother in long transparent robes designed to emphasize their lower regions, but with elongated bald heads displaying the side-lock of youth, shake their sistra before the god. In the damaged statue groups to each side of the stela the king has his genitals covered by a belt, while Nefertiti and the princesses appear naked.
Akhenaten intended his new city to be Egypt’s permanent capital, home of the one state god Aten and the bureaucracy which hitherto
Fig. 5.2 Boundary stela S
had been centred on Memphis. He seems to have rejected the old peripatetic styl
e of kingship and, although we cannot state for certain that the king never left his new home, to have settled more or less permanently in the one base which fulfilled all his needs. The city included a full complement of temples, royal residences, housing for the civil servants, army chiefs and priests, artisan housing and a burial ground. The siting of the royal tomb in the Amarna cliffs was a sign of Akhenaten’s certain faith that his new city would outlast its founder:
A tomb shall be made for me in the eastern mountain of Akhetaten, and my burial shall be performed in it with a multitude of festivals which the Aten has ordered for me. If the Great Queen Nefertiti who lives, should die in any town of north, south, west or east, she shall be brought and buried at Akhetaten. If the King’s Daughter Meritaten should die in any city of north, south, west or east, she shall be brought and buried in Akhetaten. And the sepulchre of Mnevis shall be made in the eastern mountain of Akhetaten and they shall be buried in them.
The Mnevis were sacred animals, living gods in the form of a bull, consecrated to the solar cult at Heliopolis. Their high status at Amarna is curious but perhaps indicates both Akhenaten’s respect for aspects of the old solar cult, and his intention to develop Amarna, rather than Thebes or Heliopolis, as Egypt’s religious capital.
Akhenaten had almost unlimited wealth at his disposal. Not only did he have access to the richest royal treasury in Egypt’s history, now further swelled by the offerings withheld from Amen, he also had full control over the funds belonging to the Aten priesthood, plus the right to commandeer the labour of his people. Nevertheless, the speed with which Amarna rose from the barren desert is impressive. Construction had only started during Year 5, yet by the end of that year the royal family was ensconced in temporary quarters, ‘the tent of apartments’, while they waited for their palace to be finished.7 By Year 9, the city was fully functional. The builders were helped in their task by a crafty choice of construction materials. As usual, the domestic buildings were made from sun-dried mud-brick with occasional stone and wooden features. As Flinders Petrie discovered in his 1891–92 season of excavation at Amarna, a simple mud-brick hut can easily be built in a day:
We settled to live at the village of Haj Qandil… building a row of mud-brick huts as we needed them. Such rooms can be built very quickly; a hut twelve feet by eight taking only a few hours. The bricks can be bought at tenpence a thousand; the boys make a huge mud pie, a line of bricks is laid on the ground, a line of mud poured over them, another line of bricks is slapped down in the mud so as to drive it up the joints; and thus a wall of headers, with an occasional course of stretchers to bind it, is soon run up. The roof is made of boards, covered with durra stalks to protect them from the sun; and the hut is ready for use, with a piece of canvas hung over the doorway.8
The inner walls of the ancient houses were plastered and painted with some of the most lively scenes of the natural world ever to be seen in dynastic Egypt, which allowed any defects in the structure to be hidden beneath a thick layer of plaster. The standard of painting was not, however, always of the highest, and Petrie was able to detect rooms in the palace where the work of a good artist was placed next to that of an obviously inferior craftsman.
Sandstone talatat blocks, even smaller than those used at Thebes, played a part in the construction of the Amarna temples, but now extensive use was made of both limestone and mud-brick, while mud-brick rather than stone was employed as a core. These buildings, although outwardly impressive, were again not of the highest standard. All too often the plaster which covered the walls, and into which were carved the sunken reliefs, served to conceal the inferior workmanship beneath. It seems likely that within its enclosure wall the Great Temple complex remained substantially incomplete; had Amarna continued as the capital of Egypt we would probably have seen successive monarchs vying to expand and embellish the temple just as Akhenaten’s predecessors had competed over the development of the Karnak complex. Archaeological evidence suggests that this rebuilding had already begun towards the end of Akhenaten’s reign, when mud-brick temple elements started to be replaced with stone.9
Naturally the intensive building created a huge demand for craftsmen, not only labourers but artists, architects, sculptors, painters and the bureaucrats who would supervise them, while the cult of the Aten demanded its full complement of priests. Within the city, although proper care was taken to ensure that the principal religious and administrative buildings were in the correct relationship to each other, there was no overall plan. Akhenaten seems to have resisted the temptation to regulate the private lives of his citizens, or maybe he lacked the resources to devise and build an entire city.10 In consequence the city simply grew organically around its palaces and temples, while the magnificent walled villas of the nobles served as the focus for clusters of smaller houses which may well have been economically dependent upon the larger estates. The city may have been founded to serve the Aten, but it needed a sound economic basis to survive. It was provided with a full complement of transport, storage and manufacturing facilities many of which, but by no means all, fell under the control of the king. The southern suburb, home to some of the most influential of Akhenaten’s courtiers, was also the site of the sculptors’ studios and a large glass factory, while the northern suburb, where many merchants lived within easy reach of the quay, even developed what can only be classed as a slum area.
Like any other city, Amarna required a vast amount of water, not only for human and animal consumption but to maintain the elaborate pools and private gardens which were very much a feature of Akhenaten’s palaces and temples. The city could thus not expand too far away from the river, and developed into a long ribbon-like entity running parallel to the line of the Nile and set slightly back from the thin strip of cultivation. Even so, an entire city could not rely on water transported from the Nile, and it proved necessary to develop a system of wells sunk deep into the subsoil. Sanitation throughout the city was primitive, and few homes had any form of toilet facility. Although the larger houses were furnished with stone-lined bathrooms and lavatories, there was no proper drainage system and the water which was poured over the bather simply collected in a vessel sunk into the floor or, in the more elaborate bathrooms, ran off through a conduit in the bathroom wall to sink into the ground outside. The lavatories, basic earth closets housed in a small chamber next to the bathroom, consisted of a wooden seat balanced on two brick pillars and set over a deep bowl of sand. It was customary to sweep the inside of the houses, but the sweepings were simply tipped out into the street. Large dumps developed, not necessarily confined to the outskirts of the city, which from time to time would be levelled or burned to allow building on the site. Such dumps are a conspicuous feature of Egyptian villages today where the heat brings about rapid decay, and there is a constant problem with vermin.
If Amarna was not a particularly well-planned city, nor even a clean one, it was certainly well defended. The task of protecting Amarna and its royal tombs was made easy by the geography of the site. To the west the Nile provided an effective barrier which could be patrolled by boat, while the cliffs to the east rendered a city wall unnecessary. The military and armed police who had been so prominent at Thebes maintained their high profile at Amarna, and both Egyptian and foreign troops were stationed within the city. The tracks worn by the soldiers who guarded the eastern cliffs and desert are clearly visible today. What we cannot tell is whether the guards were engaged in keeping foreigners out, or the citizens in. It would not be too surprising if some resented their enforced seclusion in the king’s model city, and perhaps even more so their enforced burial away from their ancestral tombs. Elizabeth Riefstahl has gone as far as to compare Amarna with ‘an embattled city, a luxurious concentration camp’.11
Mahu, Chief of the Medjay (police) and ‘General of the Army of the Lord of the Two Lands’, was an important figure at Amarna. He was assisted in his work by a ‘General of the Army’, a battalion commander and several commanders of the cavalry, incl
uding Ay. It was Mahu’s duty to keep the peace within the city, a job which he obviously did well, as a badly damaged vignette in his tomb shows him receiving the gold which rewarded Akhenaten’s favourites. In a more unusual tomb scene we see Mahu heading the king’s bodyguard as Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Meritaten leave the temple and drive in state along the Royal Road in their chariot (Fig. 5.3). The people assume an uncomfortable posture, bowing low from the waist, as the royal family pass. As Mahu and his soldiers are compelled to run alongside the royal chariot, we must assume that their presence as bodyguards is a formality rather than a necessity. In fact the ride itself seems fraught with danger. Although Akhenaten holds the reins of the two prancing horses, his attention is on Nefertiti whom at first sight he appears to be kissing, although it is possible that the two were simply sharing the ankh of life held between them by one of the Aten’s rays. Whatever the reason for their distraction, tiny Meritaten is taking full advantage of the situation as, ignored by her parents, she goads the horses with a stick.12
The long and fairly straight road which formed the backbone of
Fig. 5.3 A royal chariot ride
Amarna functioned as the all-important processional way, which allowed the royal family to display themselves to their subjects in a semi-secular version of the old religious processions, as shown in the tomb of Mahu. This road, now known as the Royal Road or the Sikket es-Sultan, ran from north to south, linking the North Riverside Palace, the fortified private home of the royal family which now lies largely under the modern cultivation, to the city centre which housed the main religious and administrative buildings. Beyond the city centre the road ran on to reach the outlying Maru-Aten cult centre, although by now it was no longer part of the processional way.
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