Middle Egypt · New Kingdom
Ancient name: Akhetaten, "Horizon of the Aten"
Akhenaten's new capital for the sun disk, built fast and abandoned soon after he died.
Akhenaten put one god, the Aten (the disk of the sun), above all the others, and built a city for it on empty ground where no other god had been worshipped. Akhetaten had palaces, open-air temples to the Aten with hundreds of offering tables in the sun, a main road along the river, houses for officials and workmen, and tombs for the court in the cliffs. Its edges were marked by large stelae carved in the rock, telling how the king founded the city.
How far Akhenaten's religion was a true monotheism is debated. After his death the court went back to Memphis and Thebes, the old gods were restored under Tutankhamun, and the city was taken apart for its stone.
Because the city was lived in for only about twenty years and never built over, Amarna shows an Egyptian city's plan better than anywhere else. In 1887 local people found the Amarna letters, about 380 clay tablets in cuneiform: letters between the pharaohs and the kings of Babylon, Mitanni, the Hittites and the cities of Canaan.
In 1912 a German team found the painted bust of Nefertiti in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose; it is in the Neues Museum in Berlin. Many boundary stelae still stand in the cliffs.
3 short, well-known texts from Amarna, each with its transliteration (the Egyptian sounds in Latin letters) and a translation. Tap Sign by sign to see what each sign is and how it is read. Royal names are drawn in their cartouches.
Where: On the boundary stelae and in the tombs of his officials in the cliffs, wherever it was not later hacked out.
Born Amenhotep, "Amun is content", the king changed his name in about his fifth year. The Aten's name, with the sun disk, comes first out of honor but is read last.
Reading: The standard reading; the Wikipedia article "Akhenaten" gives this spelling.
Where: Everywhere at Amarna, often inside a pair of cartouches holding the god's long official name.
The Aten was shown as a sun disk whose rays end in little hands, holding the ankh of life to the noses of the king and queen. Giving a god cartouches like a king's was something new.
Reading: The standard spelling (j, t, n with the sun disk); the Wikipedia article "Aten".
Her cartouches use signs and groupings the site's font cannot yet show faithfully, so they are given in transliteration only.
Where: In her cartouches on the boundary stelae, in temple reliefs and in the tombs of the officials.
Nefertiti was Akhenaten's great royal wife and appears beside him in almost every scene. Her name means "the beautiful one has come"; early in the reign she added Neferneferuaten in front of it.
Reading: The standard reading; the Wikipedia article "Nefertiti".
Dates follow Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000); before 664 BC they are approximate. Readings are the standard ones in the sources named under each inscription; translations are Teddy Rook Book's own. The hieroglyphs are drawn in the site's font, TRB Hieroglyphs, so their shapes are simplified; where an inscription's arrangement or signs can't be shown faithfully, the card says so.