Such el-Amarna

Such el-Amarna (Amarna or el-Amarna) is the archeological site of Akhetaton, the capital built by the Pharaon Akhénaton, in the neighborhoods of -1360.

Akhetaton means “the Horizon of Aton” as a former Egyptian. The Arab name of Such el-Amarna is undoubtedly the contraction of the names of the current village, el-Till, and of a wandering tribe, Beni Amran, which left the desert at the 18th century to be installed on the edges of the Nile.

At this place, located between Thèbes and Memphis, the high cliffs of the Arabic chain which are drawn up on Right Bank of the the Nile draw aside from the river to form a 12 kilometers length hemicycle; it is there that in year 4 of its reign (towards -1360) Akhénaton threw the foundations of the city which will be the capital of the Egyptian empire during a quarter century. The city, dedicated to the worship of the single god Aton, was quickly high out of raw bricks and Talatate S; four years after its foundation, she was already inhabited by a many population which one at least estimates at twenty thousand people. Stele-borders delimited the territory of the city. On one of them, the king proclaims that Aton itself had chosen this site because it was virgin presence of any other divinity. When Toutânkhamon left Akhetaton to turn over to Thèbes, the city was left with the abandonment, then dismantled by the successors of Akhénaton and covered by sands.

Akhetaton is the only city of the ancient Egypt of which we have a detailed knowledge, in particular because of the fact that she was deserted little from time after the death of Akhénaton, not to be occupied never again. However, because of its exceptional character and of the conditions under which the city was created then abandoned, it is difficult up to what point to know “the Horizon of Aton” was representative of Egyptian town planning.

Excavations

Visited sporadically by travellers and collectors of antiquities at the 18th century, charted by the scientists of the Forwarding of Egypt, the site was explored at the 19th century by British and German archaeological missions. German Karl Richard Lepsius copied the inscriptions, the frescos and the reliefs to which it had access and published them in its Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien (1849-59) ( Monuments of Egypt and Ethiopia ). Other statements of the site were carried out between 1891 and 1908 by Sir Flinders Petrie and Norman de Garis Davies. The publications of these scientists are of a great value, because since then the site was vandalisé regularly by villagers in search of construction materials and sebakh, a natural manure. From 1907 to 1914, the Deutsche Orientgesellschaft explored the workshop of the sculptor Thoutmès where she discovered the bust of Néfertiti, maintaining with the museum of Berlin. The excavations were stopped during the First World War, then included in the years 1920. Since 1977, the Egypt Exploration Society proceeds to the systematic study of the site, under the responsibility of Barry J. Kemp, director of the excavations and professor at the University of Cambridge.

Chronology of the excavations

1714 - Claude Sicard, French Jesuit, described the first a stele of Amarna;
1798-1799 - the bodies of scientists of Napoleon Bonaparte establish a chart of Amarna, published in the “Description of Egypt” (1809 - 1828);
1824 - Sir John Gardner Wilkinson explores and cartography the ruins of the ancient city;
1833 - the copyist Robert Hay and G. To wash explore southern tombs and reproduce the reliefs of them on the engravings preserved since at the British Library;
1843-1845 - a Prussian forwarding directed by Karl Richard Lepsius establishes a topography of Amarna during two 12 days visits. The drawings and the mouldings plasters some that forwarding had realized on the spot were published in the Denkmäler aus Ægypten und Æthiopien (1849-1859);
a 1881-1882 - Discovered tomb of Akhénaton by inhabitants of the area
1887 - deposit of clay shelves engraved into wedge-shaped is discovered by a villager: they are the Lettres of Amarna;
1891-1892 - Sir Flinders Petrie studies the Large Temple of Aton and the royal palaces inter alia;
1903-1908 - Norman de Garis Davies draws and photographs the tombs and the steles of Amarna;
1907-1914 - a German archaeological mission directed by Ludwig Borchardt under the supervision of the Deutsche Orientgesellschaft excavation peripheries northern and southern of the city. She discovers in particular the famous bust of Néfertiti, today exposed with the Ägyptisches Museum of Berlin. The excavations are stopped by the First World War.
1921-1936 - T.E. Peet, Sir Leonard Woolley, Henri Frankfort and John Pendlebury explore the site;
Years 1960 - excavations are organized regularly by the Supreme council of Egyptian Antiquities;
As from 1977 - Barry J. Kemp directs forwardings of Egypt Exploration Society, which become annual;
1974-1989 - Geoffrey T. Martin publishes his studies of the hypogean says the Fall Royal into The Royal Tomb At el-Amarna .

Letters of Amarna

In 1887, a villager seeking of the Sebakh on the site discovered a deposit of several hundreds of shelves coming from the royal archives. These shelves, the Letters of Amarna, are written in wedge-shaped Akkadien, the language of the diplomatic relations of the time. It acts for the majority of missives exchanged between the royal court and its vassal of the Close East like its allies of then. This discovery is very invaluable, because it covers the exchanges between the chancelleries since the end of the reign of Aménophis III, attesting once again which a corégence with his/her son is more than probable, until turbid times of the reign of Akhénaton. Thus, they comprise a series of calls to the assistance launched by the vassal Egyptians to Syro-Palestine, threatened by the ambitions hittites, and of the letters addressed “to the large king, their brother” by the kings of Babylon, Assyrie and the Mitanni, which were them to also face this rupture of the balance of the forces in the area to which Pharaon however seems to have been indifferent.

Of course, the letters of Amarna give only one inevitably incomplete outline of this period, but they attest nevertheless the close links existing between the courses royal of the area and testify to the intense diplomatic activity which in Antiquity already characterized the relationship between the protagonists of the Close East.

The Horizon of Aton

The city, located opposite Hermopolis Magna, formed a vast unit which was stretched on nearly nine kilometers. The excavations revealed the existence of four palates, staged north in the south along the Nile. The “northern Palate of the banks of the river” surrounded by an enclosing wall appears to have been the royal residence, strengthened and isolated from the city itself. More in the south was a second palate probably built for Kiya, the “Large loved Wife of the king”. In the center of the city drew up the Large palace or official Palate with its many administrative dependences, its courses ceremonial and its royal house which included/understood a courtroom. The access was practiced in north and the west by two axes of circulation which cross and distribute the various principal parts. The northern gate gave on a vast square which preceded the Large temple by Aton, while the western access was to give on the Nile and a royal port.

The large avenue which connected the Large palace to the two septentrional palates, the royal roads, undoubtedly the processional way of Akhénaton, divided the palate into two distinct zones: one, in the west of the avenue, bordering the Nile, more administrative and ceremonial, with its gigantic court and throne room, large with a monumental kiosk broadside of colossi of the kings; the other, in the east, more intimate with the royal apartments, its gardens and its dependences. The avenue was spanned by a covered bridge connecting the two parts, and in which a " was arranged; fenestrate apparitions" , that one even since which the king covered Or of the reward his faithful subjects. On both sides of the official Palate were built the Large Temple, the “Residence of Aton in Akhetaton”, an enclosure of 760 out of 270 m, and the Small Temple, devoted him also to Aton.

With the southern periphery finally, Marou-Aton was undoubtedly a meditation and pleasure ground, built to satisfy the love carried to nature by the royal family: it had vast gardens, whose king seems to have made zoological gardens, like several artificial lakes.

The two temples of Aton occupied the center of the city, being next to the Large palace. Contrary to the usual Egyptian temples, where one passes from the light in the major shade of the Holy of Holies, they offered to the rays god-sun their courses to open sky and their three hundred sixty-five covered furnace bridges of offerings. These sanctuaries were probably based on the same pattern that Gem-Aton ( Aton is found ) Karnak, partially released, that Akhénaton had made build at the beginning of its reign when it still resided at Thèbes: they were composed of a hypostyle room and a succession of pylons, giving on six large courses with the furnace bridges to offerings - contrary to the structure of the traditional temples where the courses precede the hypostyle rooms. The doors of the pylons were to comprise a characteristic: perhaps the lintels were broken so that nothing blocks the access of the sun to the temple. That for the architectural details the archeologists are often reduced by it to assumptions, each one however should be noticed proposing his, the more so as of the two temples there remains only the foundations and the representations in the tombs.

Nevertheless, one can reasonably suppose that the architecture of these temples is the same one as that which Akhénaton wanted for its Héliopolis of the South, Thèbes, and it developed it in a masterly way in Akhetaton like it sied with a new capital: they were thus monuments exclusively dedicated to solar light, which more attaches them to the solar temples of the Ancient Empire that to the traditional sanctuaries of the Nouvel Empire. Perhaps can we even detect in this type of architecture of the héliopolitaines influences, although the site of Héliopolis was upset as much than that of Such el-Amarna.

With the Large palace, the two temples of Aton were the crucial factor of Akhetaton - its raison d'être, and they thus formed the scene on which the life of the royal court was played, but also great ritual ceremonies exclusively dedicated to Aton, and exclusively accomplished by the king himself.

Around this vast unit without any city planning the residences of the dignitaries, surrounded by more modest houses scattered, which makes say to Sergio Donadoni that the city emerges without premeditated plan: close to the god the king, close to the king dignitaries of the kingdom, close to the dignitaries their auxiliaries - but all this without there existing districts basically differentiated by the statute from their inhabitants . The principal interest of this disordered town planning is to be preserved at least as for its foundations. Thus we have true plans of residences amarniennes, since the royal palace to the house of the simple servant. These testimonys are single for the period of.

Necropoles and the village of the craftsmen

The other radical transformation that Akhénaton undertook by melting its new capital was to transfer the necropolis royal by giving up Western bank from Thèbes and the Valley of the Kings. This event without precedent also applied to large kingdom, which gave up their thébains projects to be made bury with nearest to their sovereign. Perhaps this change could not be done without the establishment with Akhetaton from a community of craftsmen, these same which lived in Deir el-Medineh.

The necropolis of the noble ones

The burials of notable were dug in cliff, in the north and the south of the city. They are very few, forty approximately, intended for the high-ranking dignitaries who had chosen to follow the Pharaon in his capital. Best preserved, the most beautiful also because decorated in the purest style amarnien, is the tomb of Mahou, the chief of the police force, and that of Aÿ, the successor of Toutânkhamon. These tombs comprise rooms with columns, undoubtedly designed and worked out on the model of the big rooms of pageantry of the residences which the dignitaries occupied of their alive. In that, they are very similar to those which the courtiers of Amenhotep with western Thèbes were made arrange, in particular the vizier Ramosé who was contemporary of the two reigns and whose tomb in addition carries on his walls the first elements of the stylistic change inspired or imposed by Akhénaton itself.

In the necropoles amarniennes on the other hand, the carved scenes are exclusively carried out in the new style amarnien and they milked all with the life with Akhetaton. One sees Pharaon and his family there to make offering with the Aton god, just as of seizing descriptions of the palate of realism, although it is sometimes difficult to interpret them because in the way not-prospect which the buildings had the Egyptians to represent. It does not remain about it less than these scenes slice with the reliefs of the traditional tombs. Thus, in the entry, the owner and his partner are illustrated knelt vis-a-vis the exit and making it epic of the prayer in front of a long text which is an anthem with the sun. This way, they could profit from the first rays of the rising sun and address a prayer to him which the king himself would have written: the Anthem in Aton.

The necropolis royal

Vast a hypogean located at the variation in a desert throat, royal Wadi, could have been the tomb having sheltered the momifiée skin of Akhénaton, like those of the royal family, but nothing proves it. However, this hypogean was conceived to shelter the body of the king. One indeed raised a multitude there of fragments of a sarcophagus in red quarzite, which was reconstituted and is currently exposed in the gardens of the museum of Cairo. This sarcophagus resembles much those of the following reigns carved for Toutânkhamon, Aÿ or even Horemheb and which one found in their tombs of the Vallée of the kings. The major difference lies obviously in the cartridges at the names of the King and the Aton god, and especially in the fact that the four female characters who extend their protective wings around the sarcophagus are not the prophylactic goddesses traditional whom one will find later on, but well four representations of Néfertiti personified in Sothis, the star which in Egyptian mythology ensured the eternal return of the annual flood at the time of sound to raise heliacal. This last detail shows that the religious reform had reached all the fields, including that of resurrection, prerogative of the god Osiris. Akhénaton in addition kept of them the principal symbols and rites of which that of the momification, which attests the remainders of a box with canopes or the Ouchebti S found in the hypogean royal one, but there still just as for the person of the king, solarization had made its work, and Pharaon was completely compared to the god sun even in his tomb.

The architecture of hypogean in is another proof. It was conceived on a rectilinear level facing the east in order to receive the solar rays which theoretically could have penetrated with deepest of the vault. The site even of the necropolis completes the demonstration. It was either selected in the west, in the traditional field of Osiris, but in the east of the city, in a ouadi which, from the city, appears between two hills in the medium of which each morning the sun rises, the divine star that Pharaon with his death will join for eternity. Thus Akhénaton returned to the life each morning, with each new paddle. The religious revolution had thus taken place well until in the interpretation of the myth of resurrection and this ultimate act of faith, inter alia, was undoubtedly at the origin of hatred that Pharaon attracted on him after his disappearance, when its successors are unable to resist the pressures of the clergies of the large ancestral gods of the country, of which that of Osiris in Abydos.

Another characteristic of this hypogean: right before the room of the sarcophagus are two side galleries of which one leads to two other rooms, they so unfinished, but whose decoration is at the very least strange in a tomb royal. The walls are indeed decorated with scenes of mourning where one sees Pharaon and his queen to cry Mâkhétaton one their girls died around the 12th year of the reign. It is about a single testimony in its kind, delivering to us one of the most touching aspects of the reign of Akhénaton. After the year, successive deaths endeuillèrent the royal family and started the extinction of the royal line. Mâkhétaton probably died in layers, because one can distinguish on the lower register a maidservant leaving the room where rests the late one and carrying an infant in his arms, whereas all the assistance seems éplorée, which gives to the scene a dramatic intensity.

Akhénaton probably wanted that his/her daughters were buried with him and thus transformed its hypogean into a family vault. The other gallery would have been planned for its queen, Néfertiti, but this assumption remains to be confirmed.

Near the tomb royal of other hypogean had started to be arranged, but they were never completed. They were probably intended to the other members of the royal court.

The village of the craftsmen

Near the southern necropolis, the archeologists cleared a village where the craftsmen lived with their families: an about sixty houses built out of clay bricks, including/understanding four parts, and undoubtedly not very comfortable. Just like Deir el-Médineh, the village was surrounded by a bored enclosing wall of only one door, less to sequester the craftsmen that to prevent the material diversions. However with the difference of the royal city, and even of the thébain example, the village of the craftsmen of Akhetaton was designed on an urban level determined good, with streets cutting itself to right angle and of the dwellings to the standardized proportions. In that this village recalls the example of a town of pyramid of the Average Empire discovered to Kahun at the entry of the Fayoum, near Illahun, where Sésostris {{II}} had made build its funerary complex.

Art amarnien

The Art amarnien is single, from its realism in particular, in complete rupture with the Egyptian art traditionally idealizing. The scenes represented also leave the religion, the history and the policy by appearing for example the royal family playing with her children. After the end of the experiment amarnienne, the Egyptian art turned over to the iconography and the traditional style.

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