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AMARNA

Akhenaten and Nefertiti present offerings to the sun-god Aten. Limestone relief on balustrade at Tell el-Amarna (18th Dynasty); now in Cairo Museum (Photograph courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Tell el-Amarna, located half-way between Memphis and Thebes on the East bank of the Nile, for which are named an age and a cultural or religious “revolution.” This city of between 20 and 50 thousand inhabitants was constructed on virgin territory according to the plans of Pharaoh Amenophis IV (Akhenaten). Begun in the fifth year of this 14th-century b.c.e. monarch’s reign, the site was inhabited for only a generation, after which it was abandoned. Its unique history allows it to be studied as one of the most important representatives of ancient urbanism. The king and his royal family resided in the northern part of the city and preserved their own food supply. The many private houses appear to have all been occupied by professionals with titles. Their own servants and the other laborers must have lived with them or perhaps adjacent to the larger houses. The professionals’ houses are uniform in design, whether larger or smaller in size, and reflect a common identity wherein the great divide economically is between the king and his family, on the one hand, and everyone else, on the other. Some of the officials worked in a collection of small offices beside the royal house. In one of these was found the collection of cuneiform documents known as the Amarna Letters.

Akhenaten named the site Akhetaten, or “Horizon of the Aten (the disk of the sun),” reflecting the change of perspective that his reign brought to Egypt. By moving away from the religious center of Thebes (where already at the beginning of his reign he had added a cult center to the Aten at the temple of Karnak), Akhenaten broke away from traditional Egyptian religion with its worship of a variety of deities in many natural forms. In place of this complexity, Akhenaten introduced the worship of the Aten sun-disk, symbolizing the giver of all life. Akhenaten and his family received that life and mediated it to all Egypt. In the art of the period the royal family is portrayed as a unique group who alone receive the rays of the Aten disk and who appear together as a loving family. The distinctive elongation of the crania and pelvic areas in portrayals of the royal family may reflect a surrealistic artistic attempt to interpret their distinctive roles as royal intermediaries of the divine rather than indicate some genetic disease. Drawings of Akhenaten and his family, always females, enhanced the pharaoh’s status and suggest to the modern viewer that despite the Amarna cultural “revolution” Akhenaten’s self-perception did not differ from that of other New Kingdom pharaohs.

Although Akhenaten has often been viewed as an authentic precursor of Israel’s distinctive monotheistic religion, more nuanced perspectives see in him an example of intellectual trends in Mesopotamia as well as Egypt during the 14th, 13th, and 12th centuries. Oher divinities continued to be tolerated and worshipped in Egypt, and the Hymn to the Sun and other textual sources for Amarna theology appear to borrow at length from earlier hymns and prayers to other deities. Atenism arose and disappeared with Akhenaten and his immediate family. It survived in no aspect of the religion or culture of Egypt, and the whole incident appears to have been forgotten in the succeeding generations who abandoned the site and returned to Thebes and the temple to Amon-Re at Karnak.

Bibliography. B. J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (London, 1989).

Richard S. Hess

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

AMARNA

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)