Amarna

The ground here is pale and dry. Under your feet, sand mixes with small broken pieces of pottery and the low outlines of mud-brick walls. To the east, a long curve of limestone cliffs closes the horizon. To the west, the Nile and a thin band of green fields. The wind is often the only sound. You are standing in a city that lived for barely a generation, more than three thousand years ago, and was then left almost empty.

This place is known today as Amarna, or Tell el-Amarna. Its ancient name was Akhetaten, which means Horizon of the Aten. The Aten was the disc of the sun, worshipped as a god. The city was founded in the fourteenth century BCE by the pharaoh Akhenaten, a king of the Eighteenth Dynasty. He did not choose an old town with old temples. He chose open, unused land on the east bank of the river, ground that belonged to no other god.

To understand why, picture Egypt before him. The great god of the empire was Amun, and his temples at Thebes, far to the south, were rich and powerful. Akhenaten began his reign as Amenhotep, a name that honours Amun. Then he changed it. He raised the Aten above the other gods and moved his court here. Many historians see this as one of the most radical religious shifts in the ancient world... though scholars still argue about exactly what he believed.

The new faith also changed the art. In Amarna-style carvings, the king and his family have long faces, narrow chins, and soft, curved bodies. They kiss their children. They sit together informally. Above them, the sun disc sends down long rays, and each ray ends in a tiny human hand. Some of those hands hold the ankh, the Egyptian sign of life, to the noses of the royal family. It is an image you will see again and again in the tombs here.

Akhenaten marked the edges of his city in a very public way. Along the cliffs, his workers carved large boundary stelae — tall stone panels with texts and images of the royal family worshipping the sun. The inscriptions describe the founding of the city and its limits. Here is a detail many visitors miss: some of these markers stand on the west bank, across the river. The territory of the Aten included farmland on both sides of the Nile.

The city itself stretched for several kilometres along the river. At its centre stood palaces, offices, storerooms, and temples to the Aten. North and south of this core lay residential districts, where officials lived in large villas with gardens and wells, close to the smaller houses of ordinary people. Most buildings were made of sun-dried mud brick. The stone structures used small, standard blocks that archaeologists call talatat, light enough for one worker to carry. They allowed the city to rise very quickly.

The temples of the Aten were unusual. Traditional Egyptian sanctuaries grew darker and more closed as you walked deeper inside. Here, the sacred spaces were open to the sky. Worship happened in direct sunlight, at rows of offering tables in courtyards. If you stand on the site in the middle of the day, you can feel what that meant. There is very little shade. The sun is not a distant symbol here. It is a weight on your shoulders.

In the late nineteenth century, Amarna produced one of the great documentary finds of the ancient world. In 1887, clay tablets written in cuneiform, a wedge-shaped script from Mesopotamia, came to light here. According to the usual account, a local villager found them while digging. They are now called the Amarna Letters. Most are written in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the time. They hold letters between the Egyptian court and kings of Babylon, Assyria, and Mitanni, along with rulers of cities in Canaan.

These letters are full of very human voices. Foreign kings ask for gold and complain when the gift is too small. Local rulers in Canaan beg for soldiers and accuse their neighbours of betrayal. They give us a picture of international politics in the late Bronze Age, from inside the royal mailbox. Today the tablets are scattered among museums in several countries, but they were once stored in an office in the central city, not far from where you are now.

Another famous object also came from this ground. In 1912, a German expedition excavated a sculptor's workshop here and found the painted limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti, Akhenaten's principal wife. The workshop is linked to a sculptor named Thutmose. The bust is now in Berlin. Look closely at photographs of it and you will notice something surprising: one eye has a fine inlay, while the other socket is empty. Nobody knows for certain why.

In the cliffs to the east, the officials of the city cut tombs for themselves, in a northern and a southern group. Their walls show scenes that exist almost nowhere else — chariots on the city streets, the royal family at the temple, the palace and its storerooms. The tomb prepared for Ay, a high official who later became king, carries a long version of the Great Hymn to the Aten, a poem in praise of the sun. Many of these tombs were never finished, and many were probably never used.

The royal tomb lies further away, in a remote desert valley several kilometres into the cliffs. After Akhenaten's death, the court did not stay long. The young king Tutankhaten changed his name to Tutankhamun, and the old gods returned. Later rulers took the city apart. Many talatat blocks were carried across the river to Hermopolis and reused in new buildings. And yet that abandonment is a gift. No later city was built on top, so the street plan of Akhetaten survives in the sand.

That is why archaeologists have worked here for well over a century. Flinders Petrie excavated in the 1890s, followed by German and British teams. Long-running British excavations have studied not only temples and palaces but also the houses and cemeteries of ordinary people. Skeletons from a non-elite cemetery show signs of heavy physical work and early death. The bright hymns to the sun tell one story. The bones of the people who built the city tell another.

Today the site is spread out across a wide plain, between modern villages and the desert edge. You will need transport between its different parts, and the heat can be strong for much of the year. Before you leave, look again at the cliffs to the east. Every morning the sun rises over them, exactly as Akhenaten watched it. The walls of his city are low now, just traces in the sand. But the light he worshipped still arrives here first, and it still fills this quiet plain.