Monastic Footprints at Amarna: Trails of the Unexpected

Amarna has a rich post-New Kingdom history: Gillian Pyke gives a tour of its early Christian remains. The abandonment of the ancient city of Akhetaten, shortly after the death of Akhenaten in about 1332 BC marked the demise of his vision of a society devoted to a sole deity. Some of the sacred spaces were…

Mud brick and termites in Amarna

While famous for its decorated stonework talatat, Amarna was predominantly a mud-brick city. Richard Hughes outlines efforts to protect and stabilise its mud brick ruins. The siting of Amarna was ideal for its speedy construction via a military-like mass-production campaign making, shifting around and placing down mud bricks (adobes). The riverbank and floodplain graded silty…

Surveying (and snake scaring) in the Amarna desert

Some of the most interesting elements of the ancient city of Akhetaten lie around its desert fringes. Corinna Rossi recalls her time working at Amarna, helping to survey the city's quarries and desert roadways.  I worked at Amarna for three seasons (2001–2003), during which I contributed to the survey of various features. The most challenging…

Busy lives – and busy archaeologists – at Amarna

Amarna is renowned for its domestic archaeology. Anna Stevens reflects on the experience of excavating small houses in the Main City – and trying to reconstruct something of the lives of the people of Amarna through the objects they left behind.   One of the things that makes Amarna so special as an archaeological site…

The disappearing Sun Temple of Queen Nefertiti

Kom el-Nana, site of a solar shrine for Nefertiti, is one of the last surviving peripheral cult complexes of ancient Akhetaten. Jacquelyn Williamson talks about her work reconstructing wall reliefs from the site, and its precarious condition. Starting in the late 1980s and ending in the 1990s Barry Kemp and the members of the Egypt…