Following Odysseus Not the end of the world Amarna city of light ...

5 8line that must have been close to theriver. A cluster towards the middle,called in modern times the CentralCity, was clearly his centre of government.It included the ‘House ofthe Aten’, the main temple to thesun god. A mud-brick wall encloseda flat expanse of desert measuring800 by 300 metres (around 40football pitches). Almost lost in thisspace were two stone-built templesthat were, appropriately enough fora cult of the visible sun, series ofopen courts entered through traditional-lookingpylon gateways. Thecourts were filled with rectangularstone offering tables that togethernumbered around 900. They wereinsufficient, however, to satisfy theking’s desire to display the scale ofhis piety, so a field of 920 extra oneswere built from mud bricks in a cornerof the great enclosure.The offering tables were not symbols.Contemporary pictures of thetemple show them piled with foodofferings and incense. The groundoutside housed a huge food depotwhere bread and meat, in particular,were prepared. Workingout how the system functionedis a research exercise in itself.The idea behind it, that largetemples were major providersof food and other commoditiesto the community, was not new.Akhenaten seems, in a spirit ofliteralism, to have wanted tomake the scale of his piety andthe people’s dependence on theAten fully visible. It was the ultimatestep in accounting transparency,in which everything was laidout in rows. For there can be littledoubt that, after display beneaththe sun, the destination of the foodwas Akhenaten’s court and at least aportion of the city’s inhabitants.Akhenaten took his court andan important part of the administrationwith him to Amarna.Senior officials relied on junior officials,and all of them had extensivehouseholds. Among them werepeople who manufactured thingsfor the court, including fine sculpture.In the end, probably as manyas 30,000 people moved there.They did not find a ready-madecity to inhabit, only a flattish, opendesert surface not marked out withroads. But very quickly, the arrivingcommunities organised themselvesand built neighbourhoods that werelike villages, centred on the largerhouses of the officials. If the resultresembles the plan of a squattercity, irregular but not haphazard, itmatched the expectations of the richand powerful officials who ran thecountry. The life of the city spanned65. Painted terracottapot, New Kingdom,18th Dynasty, 1351-1334. © State Museumof Berlin. Photograph:Sandra Steiss.6. Head of an Amarnaprincess. Yellow-brownquartzite. H. 7.5in.© Egyptian Museum,Cairo.7. A section of the‘Princesses Panel’wall painting foundinside the King’sHouse at Amarna.H. 38cm. W. 65cm.© AshmoleanMuseum, Oxford.7the period between Akhenaten’sfifth regnal year and his 17th andlast, and a few years beyond that, atotal of around 15 to 17 years.The successor kings, beginningwith Tutankhamun, rejectedAkhenaten’s ideas, withdrew thecourt to the old centres of powerand had the stone buildings demolishedso that their stones could bereused as building material. Themyriad houses were abandoned.Amarna was never lost, however.It remained visible – first asa ruin, then as a spread of sandcoveredmounds – until archaeologistsbegan to excavate it at the endof the 19th century. Some of its decoratedrock tombs remained openand became home to a Christian12