The City That Was Abandoned, and Why That Matters

Almost every major Egyptian settlement was built, rebuilt and lived in continuously, which means the earlier phases lie under later towns and are largely unrecoverable. Amarna is the exception. It was founded on a site with no previous occupation, occupied for roughly a generation, and abandoned when the court returned to the old centres and the old priesthoods after Akhenaten's death. Nothing substantial was built over it. The result is that archaeologists have a complete Egyptian city plan of a single period: the palaces and temples, but also the workmen's village, the bakeries, the wells, the rubbish, the small household shrines that show what people kept in their homes. Those household finds complicate the picture the official monuments give, because a number of them are images of ordinary domestic gods that the reform was supposed to have displaced.

The site also preserves the distinctive art of the reign, with its elongated bodies and unusually intimate family scenes, and the tombs cut into the cliffs behind the city carry hymns to the Aten in their inscriptions. What Amarna cannot supply is the view from the other side. The reaction that followed removed Akhenaten's name from monuments and left later Egyptians with no memory of him, so the surviving evidence about the most disruptive religious episode in Egyptian history comes almost entirely from the disruptors.