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Kate Spence: We know Akhenaten comes to the throne as the king Amenhotep and we call him Amenhotep the 4th em, we know early in the reign he was actually building at Karnack he celebrated a sen festival very early in his reign in a large building he constructed to the east of the temple. Thereafter we have very little in the way of historical records, the major record we have from his reign is the boundary stele which tells us about the foundation and construction of the city after that there 1 or 2 significant incidents we know of from the Amarna letters or from images in the tomb scenes, but remarkably little considering the length of his reign. We have 17 years with a handful of historical documents to actually flesh out what was going on.

Traditionally ancient Egyptians had worshipped many gods in many different forms and this was also the case under Akhenaten’s father Amenhotep the 3rd, we find that throughout his reign he’s building temples for many different gods and worshipping the different gods em, all around Egypt, some of these were locally based, they were gods of particular places and some of them had a place in the major sort of, the major Egyptian families of gods.

Now one particular god we find appearing just occasionally at the end of Amenhotep the 3rd’s reign is the god the Aton or the visible sun disk, this was not a new god at the time he was....
This was not a new god at the time the Aton was a god that had been around for many generations in Egypt but it had never been a particularly important god prior to the later 18th dynasty.

In the old kingdom the sun god Ra had emerged as the major god of kingship, this was the sun in the sky a distant god very appropriate for expressing the universal power and divinity of the Egyptian king but not a very approachable god and not an easy god to represent yourself as king actually interacting with the god within the temple sphere, and this seems to have been what the Egyptians were trying to do.

Akhenaten goes back to this idea of a distant god because he wants to promote the idea of himself as the mediator between human kind and all divine forces in the universe and this is done far more effectively by removing the human form of the god and having the god simply represented as an icon and Akhenaten himself can then become the focus of worship and of all ritual activity on earth. And this seems to me to be why he’s so interested in changing the whole nature of the representation of gods in Egypt and why he’s so interested in the Aton which seems to have been the god that suited this purpose best.

Akhenaten himself is often represented with the cartouches of the Aton on his body and this is one of the closest ways in ancient Egypt that you can actually associate an individual with a god because the name is an aspect of an individual, so if Akhenaten had the name Aton written all over him that means he is an aspect of the Aton.

Akhenaten’s presentation of his belief in the Aton has been described as a natural philosophy, the Aton is a life giving force that gives light and life to all humanity and all animals.

In his hymn to the Aton Akhenaten describes a chick in an egg and the fact that the chick speaks or it is given life within an egg which appears to be an inanimate object and this is the mystery of the Aton as a life giver to animals humans plants and everything within the natural world.

Traditionally Egyptian families were represented in very formal poses with the husband and wife sitting stock still side by side and the children standing straight by their legs and Akhenaten changes this entirely he and his wife are shown in very relaxed poses leaning back in their chairs touching hands and the children are shown climbing all over them. The king is shown kissing his children and his wives and the children play with their mother’s earring, there’s enormous sort of emotion and motion actually within these images and that in itself would have been hugely shocking for an Egyptian. As far as an Egyptian was concerned you make an image so that its going to last you for eternity you want to be represented in a formal pose as you will be seen forever.

The fact that Akhenaten should be trying to represent the momentary interaction of the family and the affection that they feel for each other would actually be completely outside the bounds of what you would normally find in Egyptian art.

One of the things that’s so interesting about this is that within normal families this doesn’t change husbands and wives are still shown very formally side by Nobody else is represented with this extreme level of informality or expressing this emotion and this seems to be one way Akhenaten chooses to set himself and his activities apart from those of the rest of humanity. He is so important and he’s such an important god that actually his everyday interaction with his family and the love that he feels for them becomes a manifestation of the Aton’s divine power and an image to be worshipped by the rest of the population.

I think what Akhenaten was trying to show with these naturalistic poses with his family was the fact that any aspect of life is given by the Aton and is therefore important and an object for worship. And we find throughout Akhenaten’s reign that there’s this emphasis on the everyday and the ordinary being elevated to objects worthy of representation for example in temples.

Akhenaten seems to have made the decision to build the city at Amarna in year 5 of his reign. We have a set of boundary inscriptions which were created at the site announcing his choice of the site and his arrival there and the initial dedicatory rites which were carried out at the site prior to the building of the new city

Akhenaten actually tells us in the boundary steely why he chose this particular site. And what he says is that, the Aton inspired him to make the choice but also that what was important about the site was that it hadn’t been dedicated previously to any god or goddess or male or female ruler and the fact that it was uninhabited.

And the fact that it was essentially uninhabited territory seems to have been essential to Akhenaten’s decision, he wanted a new place somewhere that wasn’t tainted by association with any previous ruler or god. And this explanation given by Akhenaten himself seems to be the best interpretation that we can come up with for why he chose this particular site.

It may seem strange to us that if a king decides to move the rest of the courts simply gets up and follows him to the new site at Amarna, but if you think about instances of absolute monarchies and court societies it becomes far less of a surprise.

Akhenaten was an absolute king and if courtiers wanted to maintain status, prestige, jobs and income they had to be near the king and so they simply followed him to the city in their 100s and along with them went all of the people who supported the institutions the food production the creators of luxury artefacts and all of the artists and all those people went along as well, and before long there was a city of many 1000s of people all centred around the royal court in the presence of the king and his family in the city itself.

The site of Amarna is not a sensible place to build a city, it’s basically a stretch of desert which would not naturally support human life, and the decision to build there must have seemed fairly strange to people who were used to building structures in Ancient Egypt. This has, incidentally, proved a massive boon for archaeology because it’s such a stupid place to build a city that no one’s ever built on it again, and that’s why we have a fabulously preserved site these days, whereas the majority of other Egyptian towns have simply been built over again and again by later cities, and this hasn’t happened at Amarna.

Akhenaten tells us in some detail in his boundary stele of his intentions for the new city. He tells us he, that.. He tells us that he will build temples for the Aton and palaces for the royal family along with burial places for himself and his wife and children in the valley to the east of the city.

Under Akhenaten, temples changed as did the ritual practice of worshipping the gods, and what we find is that the hidden, dark mysteries that took place within side...

What we find is that the mysteries that were conducted within traditional Egyptian temples, the offerings that were carried out in secret within dark spaces were transformed into open, light temples which were un-roofed, and multiple offering tables which were laid out within the temples and on which food produce was piled to be offered to the Aton. This image of sort of abundant offerings seems to be giving back to the Aton the produce and the goodness that the Aton himself creates.

In addition to the temples we have a number of palaces in the city, there are at least four palaces of very different ground plan, size and layout which are found at various points on the site, and these must have served different aspects of royal life. We also find institutional structures around the central city where, for example, the administration was carried out, where the police force was based, and then we find outlying religious structures around the boundaries of the site, structures for royal ritual and worship which were constructed on small locations in the desert outside the city.

The north palace is very interesting, it seems to be a ceremonial structure with a very strongly axial layout. It has some sort of sunken garden in the middle which aligns with the throne room, and there are stalls for keeping animals on one side of it, which, as far as I know, is unprecedented in Egyptian palace structures and is a very strange part of a palace set up.

One possibility is that the animals were kept there in order to show by their, their movement and their activity the power of the Aton to give life to animals as well as humans and the fact that animals also rejoice and appear happy when the sun rises.

Early in his reign Akhenaten seems to have tolerated other gods and their cults seem to have continued. Some time around year 9 there does seem to have been a fairly major change. We find, for example, that the name of the Aton has actually changed to exclude reference to any other gods, and the evidence that we have for the persecution and closing of other cults mainly seems to come later in the reign.

At some point during Akhenaten’s reign people seem to have been sent to temples around the land to actually chisel out images and names of other gods around the country. Although some solar gods seem to have escaped, this seems to have been fairly widespread destruction in the vast majority of temples throughout Egypt. So it was a pretty significant act.

Shortly before his death, Akhenaten had appointed a co-regent which is the shadowy ruler Smenkaray who rules for a couple of years after Akhenaten dies, and we know very little about this individual. When Smenkaray dies, Tutankhamen comes to the throne, so there’s no direct succession from Akhenaten to Tutankhamen. The identity of Tutankhamen himself is not certain, he’s most probably a son of Akhenaten but we’re not sure of the identity of the mother. Kia is one very likely possibility, but other people have suggested that Tutankhamen could have been a son of Akhenaten and Nefertiti who was simply kept out of the limelight as a royal son and as a potential threat to Akhenaten’s power.

Akhenaten’s vision was not continued during Tutankhamen’s reign, it’s not clear whether the impetus came from Tutankhamen who was actually a very young child at the time, or more likely whether it came from his courtiers. And there were a number of senior figures at the court at this time, names such as Ay and Horenheb who later went on to become kings in their own right who may well have been manipulating the king behind the scenes. But whoever was responsible for the change, at some point during Tutankhamen’s reign the court left Amarna and returned to Memphis, the traditional capital of Egypt, and from that point onwards, em, the Eighteenth Dynasty established itself back at Memphis, and Amarna itself was abandoned.

Akhenaten’s reign and his changes were viewed very negatively by later Egyptian rulers. We find that he simply removed from the king lists by later Egyptian kings very often taking Tutankhamen and Smenkaray, even Ay with him, so whole periods of history were simply removed in order to take away the stain from Egyptian history. In later texts he’s often referred to simply as the heretic. Em, he was not a popular ruler in the eyes of later Egyptians, and what he had done was viewed very negatively. Em, Tutankhamen leaves a very interesting inscription in which he says that the gods had abandoned Egypt because of what Akhenaten had done, and Tutankhamen went about restoring the cults to their traditional splendour and abandoning the Aton. And very much as Akhenaten had removed the names of the gods from existing temple buildings, Tutankhamen started to remove the names of the Aton, and over time the entire Amarna incident was removed from Egyptian history so that the kings were no longer recorded in king lists and the period was simply referred to with Akhenaten’s name as the heretic when it was referred to in later texts.

It’s easy to see why Akhenaten was hated, he undermined the values that Egyptians had held for many years and he attacked the traditional gods which were the mainstay of Egyptians’ understanding of the universe and, in particular, of the afterlife.

Because he’d shown such disrespect for everything Egyptians traditionally held dear, it’s very difficult to see how they could have gone back to traditional practices without some sort of backlash against what Akhenaten himself stood for and what he was trying to do. So I, I think it’s very easy to understand why he was such an unpopular figure.

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Interviewer: Tell me a little bit about this cemetery up by the South Tombs.

Jerry Rose: Well, South Tombs Cemetery is an interesting one. First of all, for more than a hundred years archaeologists had looked for the remains of the dead, they estimated there should be thousands of dead individuals from the time that Amarna was occupied, and no one had found a trace of them. The tombs of the nobles, er, of course, are, are well known, of course empty because the nobles all, the dead left with the living, but there should have been remains of the people who built the city, the people who took care of the households, the people who did the work, the general population of the city. And so this is very interesting that, that we have here, then, the people who, who lived in Amarna, the people who built it, the people who, who served the royals, the high officials.
And this is very exciting because from people, the common people from even middle class down you can tell about life in, in ancient times.

Right. The wealthy are always going to be in reasonably good health, they’re gonna be reasonably well fed, we assume, but as things change, as the society does better, as the society does worse it’s the people at the lower levels that go up and down. So their, their diet will change, they’ll be better fed, lesser fed, their workloads will change, they’ll work harder, they’ll work less, they’ll, em, the diseases, the infectious diseases, the parasites, all of this will fluctuate up and down depending on the economy of the, er, greater society.

History records those in power, and the skeletons record and tell us about those without power, those who served the powerful, and, and it’s really, you know, exciting, it’s, it’s the great part of society. And, well, no matter all historic periods, our own time period we can look at cemeteries of the forgotten, historically invisible and learn an awful lot. And the same thing is true here, the people of Amarna are indeed historically invisible, they’re, they’re not there, they’re there in the cemetery and they can tell us what life was like in, er, in the time of Amarna, which is a very exciting time period in, not only in Egyptian history but in the history of the world.

The, er, skeletons at Amarna are very well preserved, we have fragments of skin, we have lots of hair, we have remnants of, of brain being preserved, there’s a fair amount of soft tissue. The bones are in excellent state of preservation, they are, em, complete, they’re measurable, we can take x-rays, we can diagnose the, er, diseases. The one thing that is, er, was a little bit disturbing at first was we expected the skeletons to be, to be complete, intact. Graves were excavated and, and these individuals were buried wrapped in, er, em, mats, sometimes in, em, coffins made out of sticks, sometimes even fancier ones, em, made out of, there’s one made out of wood, very nice. Er, but all of these have been robbed and they’ve been robbed in ancient times.

They were robbed when the decay was such that the bones were still being held together, and the ancient robbers would dig down to the head and, and they would take the head for valuables, sort of toss the head aside and then they would reach in and, and grab the shoulders and, and literally, er, yank them out of the, the graves. We’d find the graves usually with the legs and feet and then the torsos are, have been stacked up by the robbers where they’ve been rummaged through. So that we’ve had a little bit more difficulty in, in reassembling the individuals. But that has been coming together and we’ve been able to then put some heads back together with the bodies because some of the vertebrae or neck bones are still attached to the head and we can then match those to the neck bones, em, that are the vertebrae that are still attached to the torsos.

In the previous excavations and analysis we had identified about fifty individuals that we were able to assemble, and this year we have gone through and identified with this year’s excavations and some of the bones from last time about another twenty-five, so we’re looking at about, em, seventy-five individuals represented so far. By the end of the excavation we expect to find, em, be able to put together at least a hundred individuals, children and adults that we can record.

Interviewer: And that’s useful is it?

Jerry Rose: And that’s moving into the area where the, the, the percentages and the comparisons are, are very meaningful. We can talk about the frequency of a condition being 20 percent, 30 percent with a reasonable reliability.

The other thing that’s interesting is the fact that, that Amarna was, was conceived and, and, and planned and built in a very short period of time and it, people came here in a big rush, and, and this is a very interesting thing that, that, that Akhenaten came with his friendly, his, his compatible high officials that he was happy with, they, they came to live with him and then they also brought their, their servants and, and families and, and the people who built the city. So these people arrived probably from Memphis in a very short period of time so that the children, the babies were born here but everybody else, of course, came from some place else. But still, even though they’re migrants from elsewhere, they represent a microcosm of, em, Egyptian society and a little snapshot that we have available to us in no other way, especially for the lower classes.

We knew that, that they were servants and working class, not necessarily the workers of the tombs but probably the builders of the city, the people who operated the city, the servants of the, of the, em, elite, and I expected a number of different things somewhat in my naïveté. But if you look at the paintings in the tombs and the paintings in the palaces and stuff here, you’re seeing a life of abundance. And I saw several things, one, this is a brand new city built on brand new soil and not contaminated by hundreds of maybe thousands of years of human occupation. So I expected few parasites, em, lots of opportunity for a sort of uncontaminated environment, and also assumed that as a capital city that it would be well supplied, that the workers, everybody from top to bottom would be well fed, em, so we were talking about a brand new city, big, open environment, not so much congestion, em, good food and, er, in abundance and low parasite load.

So I assumed that we would see a sort of a high point of, em, of health in the, em, in Egypt, if you compared it to other skeletons, and in fact every aspect of my hypothesis was, was dashed from, as we went from study to study, er, this just simply wasn’t the case. That, em, er, anaemia was, was very high running, em, 60 percent in the children, and those are children that should have been born here, the, the very young ones, and 20 percent in the adults, that of course is reflecting their childhood experience elsewhere. But, er, we’re finding lots of accidents, em, so we’ve got poor diet, indications of other, em, dietary deficiencies, we’ve got high workloads with a number of, er, teenagers having accidents that involved major damage to their back, their spine, and life really seemed to be hard.

The food didn’t seem to be in the abundance that I expected, the nutrition didn’t seem to be the quality that I expected, and right now Amarna is not differentiating itself much from the other, er, studies that have been done in, in, er, the pharonic time periods. But it, it’s looking like it could turn out to be far worse than, than I even expected. There’s lots of teenage deaths, teenage deaths should be very, very rare, and they, the diseases that they’re dying of, of course, are still not known, but still we’re having a high mortality at a, between the ages of 12 and 20 years of age, very, very unusual in any population. So my hypotheses have now one by one all fallen to the data that we’ve caught.

Interviewer: Okay. And this, em, herniated disc that you found, tell me a bit about that.

Jerry Rose: When you look at, em, the vertebrae that we have from the cemetery you’ll frequently see little depressions in the surfaces of the vertebrae, and these depressions, these, er, node like depressions occur as a result of a trauma where the, the disc that sits, the cartilage in this disc that sits between the vertebrae, sort of like your ear, em, and, and provides the padding, under a serious traumatic event basically sort of pokes out into the bone, and this is the kind of event that would have occurred if you’d received a very heavy load on your shoulders, er, or on your head or you leaped out of the second floor of a building and landed on your feet, it’s, it’s this kind of a very intense trauma.

And these are frequently occurring, and what’s most interesting is they’re occurring on these teenagers at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years of age, and maybe 50 percent so far, but it’s, er, maybe not, will not get as high as in the end, but to find that much vertebral trauma in such young people certainly indicates that, that, that heavy loads were involved and, and we’re looking at, em, sort of major accidents. And we have a couple of individuals where we not only have the Schmorals nodes but we have broken ribs and, and also some fractured vertebrae, so we have two teenagers showing that, em, level of, er, trauma. So we can be thinking about, em, carters, people loading and unloading, em, em, wagons and, and trucks, if you will, during more modern times is the analogy to what we’re looking at here.

If you look at the tomb scenes, you look at the palace scenes they give indications of great abundance, and we’re not seeing great abundance in the skeletons. And as we held discussions between the archaeologists and, and the osteologists and discussed the general situation the idea came about that the, the scenes that we’re looking at, the recorded history for us is, is an aspiration of what life should have been like, but the skeletons that we see are certainly not participating in that form of life. They are, they, the food is not abundant and certainly food is not of high nutritional quality, and the workload for the commoners, certainly, is, is quite high. And, and we’re looking at life not being well, that this is not the, the city are being taken care of, em, this, this is a city of, em, er, of hard work and, and, er, very poor quality food.

And this is a very interesting aspect, a different way of looking at it where we can look at there was an aspiration of what life should be like but participation in that life, actual participation has, has not really been the case, and not just looking back and re-examining things here at, er, Amarna but maybe looking back and re-examining life in the new kingdom in general, er, for the common, er, people of, er, ancient Egypt.

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John Hayes-Fisher: My name is John Hayes Fisher and I’m the Producer/Director of Timewatch, The Pharaohs’ Lost City. In January 2007, Barry Kemp, who is Professor of Egyptology at Cambridge, invited us to join him in Egypt to see the remains of the 3,300 year old city of Amarna he’s been working on for the past three decades. The current archaeological work was exciting because the cemeteries are revealing the recently discovered skulls and bones of the people who actually lived and worked at Amarna. But what excited me as a filmmaker were not just the people but the huge city itself that they’d built from nothing in just two decades. Time and the environment had taken its toll on Amarna. The desert sand had covered much of the city, preserving parts of it, but unlike other places, such as Karnak, with its massive temples, here there’s not a single original building which was over five feet tall. How were we to show the City to a television audience? It was here that I turned to Colin Thornton.

Colin Thornton: My name’s Colin Thornton. I’m one of the Timewatch graphic designers. I’m going to show you a bit of how we made the graphics for Timewatch’s The Pharaohs’ Lost City.

Obviously, when the story centres around this city that Akhenaten has created, we knew straightaway that we were going to need to see it, we were going to need to see this city in its former glory. And that was really when the first problem came around because John Hayes Fisher came up to me and said there really isn’t a great deal there, and he wasn’t kidding.

And, from the ground level, you couldn’t see anything at all. I mean it literally was just desert.

Fortunately, one of the experts who was actually featured in the film, Gwill, was able to take images of the landscape from above. And, all of a sudden, we had the City; we had the blueprint for the City.

We were able to get a hold of these and scan them into the computer. From these blueprints, I was able to block out each individual house and each individual road so we knew exactly where it all was. And, from there, I was able to begin to shape the blocks in a 3D environment.

People, like Barry Kemp and Suresh, they were able to point me in the right direction with the finer details. Okay, so I had the blueprints but, you know, what were the trees, what were the plants, what were the walls, how high were these buildings, you know. Were they two stories, were they one storey, and what colours did they use, what were the designs of the buildings and the pillars and things like this. And so, from working closely with the experts on hand in Armana, I was able to create a proper visual representation of the City.