The North Palace lay between the northern suburbs and the North Riverside Palace. This unfortified ‘palace’ was an isolated complex of rooms first identified by its excavators as a kind of zoological garden,13 but now believed to have been a palace for the use of the oldest royal daughter, Meritaten, whose name is found superimposed over that of another, as yet unidentified, female. The complex, centred around a large pool, incorporated a garden courtyard, an open-air court with altars for the worship of the Aten, a room with a dais usually interpreted as a throne room, private quarters including a bathroom and, most surprisingly, beautifully decorated accommodation for animals, including aviaries and pens complete with elaborate stone mangers. The ‘Green Room’, whose walls were painted with a papyrus thicket full of spectacular wild birds undisturbed by the hunters who so often intrude on Egyptian scenes of nature, has often been described as a masterpiece. A series of rooms within the complex has been tentatively identified as harem quarters although, as the excavators noted, ‘it is astounding that these rooms are not larger than prison cells or bathing cabins and bear no reflex of any charm of life, no indications of great ceremonies or splendid equipage’.14 Meritaten, of course, would have had little need for harem quarters in her palace, although her attendants would have needed their own accommodation.
To the south of the North Palace the Royal Road passed through the northern suburbs to reach the city centre. Here, to the west of the road, lay a vast group of buildings constructed partly of stone and partly of mud-brick. Although this complex is generally referred to as the Great Palace, argument over its exact purpose has been rife. To some the buildings are unquestionably the remains of a great royal residence whose apartments were home to the royal family, their dependants and servants and, of course, the royal harem. Others believe that the stone-built courts and halls, which originally included colossal statues of the royal couple plus decoration showing the royal family at worship, must have been in some way connected with the Aten cult. Unfortunately a great deal of this structure has been lost to modern cultivation while the stonework has been salvaged and re-used in both ancient and modern buildings; it seems unlikely that archaeology will ever be able to solve the question of its original purpose(s), although it would perhaps be surprising if such a large complex did not serve multiple functions.
The Great Palace, whatever its other duties, would seem to have been a suitable site for the royal harem which must have numbered many hundreds of women. Nefertiti is so consistently presented as Akhenaten’s consort, and is so obviously at the centre of the nuclear royal family, that there is a tendency to forget that Akhenaten followed New Kingdom tradition in having many secondary wives. His harem, which may well have been home to his shadowy sisters and aunts, included not only Akhenaten’s own brides, but all the women inherited from his father, including Gilukhepa and her niece Tadukhepa. All these ladies would have needed appropriately regal accommodation for themselves, their children and their retinues which, in the case of the foreign princesses, could number several hundred women. Given Akhenaten’s stated intention to have one capital city, and his apparent disinclination to travel outside Amarna, it seems likely that he would have rehoused some, if not all, of his women close to his home.
The tombs of Tutu, Ay and Parennefer allow us a tantalizing glimpse into some of the more public rooms which normally remain hidden behind the palace façade. However, these small-scale cartoon-like scenes, which merely form the background to the all-important spectacle of the
Fig. 5.4 The royal harem
tomb owner being rewarded by the royal couple, were never intended to be faithful reproductions of the palace interior, and in consequence are liable to pose more questions than they answer. In the tomb of Ay (Fig. 5.4) we are shown a group of women within two separate buildings whose doors are guarded, or perhaps protected, by men whom Davies, for no apparent reason other than cultural expectation, identifies as eunuchs.15 Almost all the women are either making music or dancing, while the walls of their rooms are hung with an assortment of lyres, lutes and harps. The women in the upper rooms of both houses have strange, un-Egyptian-looking hairstyles, with their long tresses divided into locks and either curled or weighted at the end. One woman, again in an upper chamber, is squatting so that her friend may part and dress her hair in this atypical style. This, combined with the unusual skirt worn by at least one of the women, has led to the suggestion that they may be Syrian musicians, perhaps part of the retinue who accompanied Tadukhepa of Mitanni to Egypt.
Most high-ranking households maintained a troupe of female musicians and acrobatic dancers who, dressed in the most scanty of garments and with their long hair weighted to produce a seductive swing, would entertain guests at dinner parties. The full extent of the duties expected of these women is not clear. The connection between music and sexuality in ancient Egypt was well understood, with prostitutes often using music as a means of seducing their clients; this link is made clear by a scene in the Turin erotic papyrus where a prostitute throws down her lyre to copulate with a client, while a fragment of wood recovered from a New Kingdom Theban tomb shows a woman who, although engaged in intercourse, refuses to put down her lute.16
Less apparent is the link between music and religion, although we know that the gods were stimulated by sound and that their rituals had, since the start of the dynastic age, been accompanied by singing, chanting, clapping and dancing. The Aten, like all his divine predecessors, was worshipped through the music which encouraged him to accept the offerings placed before him,17 and the temple precincts echoed with sound as ‘musicians and chantresses shout for joy in the court of the Benben temple and every temple in Akhetaten’.18 Music provided by the queen, whose traditional duties included the arousal of the gods, was particularly important. Nefertiti’s sistrum was used to calm and soothe the god, while references to her vocal charms, ‘one is happy to hear her voice’, or ‘the one who pacifies the Aten with a sweet voice and whose hands carry the sistrum’, should not be read as generalized compliments, but as specific references to her ability to complete her religious duties.
The King’s House was situated opposite the Great Palace and was linked to it by a mud-brick bridge passing over the Royal Road. This was the king’s official residence within the city and it was from here that he conducted his affairs of state. Here too, in a room on the north-east corner of the building, was the Window of Appearance where the royal couple appeared before their people to announce promotions, distribute gold to a faithful few and rations to the masses.19 Consequently the house, although relatively small, included accommodation for the guards and servants who would have attended the royal family, plus storage facilities including a large granary which, under other more orthodox regimes, we might have expected to find within the temple precincts. Surrounding the house were the offices and archives of the civil service and it was here, in the remains of the ‘Bureau for the Correspondence of the Pharaoh’ that the Amarna letters were recovered.
Within the King’s House there were private apartments, including bathrooms and lavatories, and a garden courtyard. Here John Pendlebury discovered an independent suite of six separate rooms, each with a niche to hold a bed; he tentatively identified this as the royal night-nursery, although it is perhaps more realistic to view the small rooms as accommodation for the large entourage of anonymous women who invariably accompanied the royal family on their travels. It was in the King’s House that Flinders Petrie found and rescued the painting of the two little princesses, now housed in the Ashmolean Museum, which originally formed part of a much larger mural of the royal family.
The beautiful painted pavement within the Great Palace suffered a less happy fate. Petrie tells us how he went to great lengths to preserve the gypsum floor, painting it with a weak solution of tapioca applied gently using the side of one finger and building a gangway to make a walkway for visitors. As word of the magnificent floor spread Amarna became a tourist attraction, and eventually the Society f
or the Preservation of the Monuments of Egypt paid for the erection of a small protective hut. However, no path through the fields was provided for the visitors, and the fields were trampled by the eager tourists. Petrie describes with some bitterness how, on 1 February 1912, at a time when the German expedition led by Ludwig Borchardt held the Amarna concession:
… One night a man went and hacked it all to pieces to prevent visitors coming. Such was the mismanaged end of a unique find. I was never even informed and allowed to pick up the pieces.20
An alternative interpretation of events, that the pavement was destroyed by local guards who resented the baksheesh earned by their colleagues in charge of the floor, is perhaps more convincing but does not alter the pointless nature of the destruction.21 The fragments were collected, transferred to Cairo Museum, and reassembled in a somewhat haphazard manner. Here we may still see the calm blue pool filled with contented fish and surrounded by a wonderful assortment of animals, birds and plants.
The two temples of the Aten lay on the east side of the Royal Road, on opposite sides of the King’s House. Immediately to the south was Hwt-Aten, or the ‘Mansion of the Aten’, more commonly called the Small Temple of the Aten, a temple which although ‘small’ was of roughly the same size as the Theban Gempaaten. The Small Temple, however, lacked the colonnades and colossi found at Thebes; instead its outer wall was provided with towers and battlements with niches for flagpoles, and it is possible that it was at least in part roofed. This may well have been a centre for the celebration of the royal cult, perhaps even the king’s version of a mortuary temple, and it may be no coincidence that it is aligned towards the distant royal tomb.
Per-Aten, the ‘House of the Aten’ or Great Temple of the Aten was a confusing complex of independent stone buildings bounded by a massive oblong enclosure wall some 229 metres wide and 730 metres long and entered via either a western gateway or a northern entrance pavilion. Unfortunately, all that now survive are the foundations, and much of the site has been lost beneath the modern cemetery of el-Till. We know that within the enclosure wall were a number of small shrines and so-called sunshade temples associated with the royal women, a vast open space, and at least three stone buildings. Per-Hai, ‘The House of Rejoicing’, led to Gempaaten, ‘The Sun Disc is Found’, a progression of open-air courtyards diminishing in size and housing many limestone offering tables arranged in neat rows. Two hundred and forty metres away, at the eastern end of the complex, was the sanctuary, occasionally called Hwt-Benben, or the ‘Mansion of the Benben stone’, which was sited close to a sacrificial butcher’s yard and was associated with a collection of subsidiary buildings and a rubbish dump.
Conspicuous offerings had been a prominent feature of Aten worship at Thebes, but at Amarna this became more exaggerated, with a plot of land to the south of Gempaaten housing 920 mud-brick offering tables arranged in orderly ranks (forty-six tables by twenty tables). It has been suggested that a further array of tables may have existed on the opposite side of Gempaaten, but aerial photographs indicate that this is unlikely. The tables were used to hold the offerings of food, drink and flowers which were to be presented to the great god. Their presence in the temple highlights the illogical and contradictory mixture of tradition and innovation which was the cult of the Aten. Akhenaten, who had gone to considerable lengths to establish his god as a remote, non-anthropomorphic deity, never discarded the custom of making offerings. He may well have felt it necessary to retain the ceremony in order to stress his unique relationship with the god. The light of the disembodied sun – to modern eyes at least – appears to have no immediate need of offerings and, indeed, no means of consuming them. However, the rays of the sun with their tiny hands were able to reach down and touch or take whatever they wanted. The idea of the solid physicality of the sun’s rays was certainly not a new one; the Old Kingdom pyramid texts describe the ramp of the sun’s rays connecting Egypt with the sky.
The Amarna benben stone was no longer an obelisk, but a free-standing stela, most probably carved from quartzite. The change in form of the benben, which may well have been a practical necessity rather than a theological choice, seems to have gone hand in hand with a change in the pattern of Aten worship, for at Amarna there is no sign that the cult of the benben is exclusively connected with Nefertiti, as it appears to have been at Thebes. Instead the highest-ranking royal women, including Queen Tiy, were provided with individual sunshade temples for their exclusive worship of the Aten. Several of the Amarna tombs show the new-style benben-stone: in the tomb of Panehesy it takes the form of a large, round-topped stela which stands on a raised platform with a ramp or stairway, in front of several offering tables and next to a larger-than-life-sized sculpture of the seated king wearing the blue crown.22 Although this stela has not survived, Petrie tells us how Howard Carter discovered its probable site:
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; and the cores of the walls consisting of mortar and chips still remain to show the position. Mr Carter turned over nearly all of this without finding anything more than two or three blocks of the great stela. This was built up of small blocks, and bore a life-size figure of Akhenaten (of whom the head was found), and doubtless similar figures of the queen and princesses, whose titles were also found.23
During Pendlebury’s 1933 excavation many broken pieces of purple quartzite were discovered in the area between the sanctuary and the butcher’s yard.
Worship before the benben-stone, no longer an exclusively female ritual, was still a vital aspect of Akhenaten’s religion. A large, rectangular, red quartzite stela recovered from Heliopolis, the original cult centre for solar worship, and now housed in Cairo Museum, provides a clue to its importance.24 One face of this stela was recarved during the reign of Horemheb and now depicts an entirely conventional scene. The other, badly damaged face shows two aspects of the Amarna royal family at worship. The upper tableau is of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Meritaten kneeling to pray to the Aten. Beneath this is a portrayal of the king, a princess and an unknown male prostrate before the Aten, whose rays can be seen holding the ankh of life to Akhenaten’s lips. This is an unprecedentedly humble posture for Akhenaten to adopt.
The southern suburb housed some of Amarna’s most luxurious private homes including the house of the Vizier Nakht, who owned one of the largest and most elegant villas. Situated on the fringe of the suburb, a somewhat inconvenient two kilometres from the King’s House, Nakht’s home was set in a spacious compound defined by a mud-brick wall enclosing the kitchens, storage areas, outbuildings, servants’ quarters, animal pens, stables, a private chapel and a walled garden whose plants would be embedded in fertile Nile mud and watered from the private well. The villa itself was enormous. Its ground floor, which survives in plan form only, consisted of almost thirty rooms. The upper floor, which may have provided accommodation for the children and the household servants, has vanished, but it has been estimated that this would probably have represented an additional ten rooms, with further use being made of the flat roof. The villa, in spite of its exceptional size, followed the standard Egyptian tripartite house-plan, with the main door leading into public reception rooms. The reception hall, or ‘north loggia’, was a rectangular room with eight wooden pillars whose elaborately frescoed walls, blue ceiling and red and yellow floor were clearly designed to impress visitors. Beyond this lay a series of semi-private family rooms and finally the private area, including two en-suite bedrooms, which was probably restricted to women, children and immediate male family members.
The Royal Road, no longer a processional way, continued southwards, running beyond the southern suburb out into the desert until it reached Maru-Aten, an isolated complex of walled gardens, water and open-air shrines including sunshade platforms.25 Maru-Aten was initially interpreted as a leisure centre where the royal family could spend a relaxed day eating and drinking away from the pressures of city life. The dis
covery of numerous fragments of wine vessels seemed to confirm this view. However, it is now recognized that, like so many of Akhenaten’s buildings, Maru-Aten had an as yet unidentified religious purpose, and that it was firmly associated with one of the royal women. The inscriptions recovered from Maru-Aten now bear the name and titles of Meritaten, but her name is not original, it has been written over that of another royal woman. The erased name and titles are those of a hitherto unknown lady of the harem, Kiya, ‘wife and greatly beloved of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt living on Truth, Lord of the Two Lands Neferkheperure Waenre, the perfect child of the living Aten who shall live for ever’.26
Kiya’s name, unrecognized until the mid twentieth century, has since been found on a handful of objects recovered from Amarna, including a fragment of a badly damaged offering slab, various broken cosmetic pots and tubes and the broken lid of a small wooden box. On blocks recovered from Hermopolis it has even been found beneath the names of Meritaten and Ankhesenpaaten. Kiya’s origins, however, remain even more obscure than those of Nefertiti, and our only clue is provided by her unusual name. It is likely that ‘Kiya’ was a contraction of a longer Egyptian name, although the theory that Kiya was simply a pet name for Nefertiti must be ruled out as we have enough evidence to confirm that Kiya was a separate individual. It is just possible that Kiya bore a foreign name and that, even though her titulary does not give any indication of high birth, she may have been one of the foreign princesses who were, as far as we know, still housed in the royal harem. Kiya could have been Gilukhepa, the contraction being spelt with a ‘K’ in transcription, but Gilukhepa, who was married to Amenhotep III during his Year 10, may well have been too old to have borne Akhenaten’s children.27 Tadukhepa, who was probably of a similar age to Nefertiti, seems the more likely candidate. It has even been suggested that the romantic story of Kiya, a princess of Mitanni, may have been incorporated into the New Kingdom Tale of Two Brothers, a fable which tells how the pharaoh fell in love with a beautiful foreign woman after smelling a lock of her hair: ‘His majesty loved her very much, and he gave her the rank of Great Lady.’28
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