Amarna (Akhetaten)

Egyptian temples were dark. The plan moves from an open forecourt through progressively lower and narrower halls to a small sanctuary with no windows, where the image of the god stood in the dark and was attended by a few priests. The Great Temple of the Aten at Akhetaten inverts this. It is a series of open courts filled with hundreds of offering tables, with no roofed sanctuary and no cult statue at the end, because the object of worship was the sun itself and the point was to stand under it. The change in architecture follows directly from the change in theology.

Akhenaten's Aten is not a god who lives in an image and must be woken, washed and fed each morning; it is the disk overhead, whose rays are shown in reliefs ending in small hands that reach down to the royal family. The reliefs are also the clue to who was allowed to approach. In traditional Egyptian religion any person could petition a local god through its image, but at Amarna the Aten is shown attending to the king and his family, and ordinary worshippers are shown honouring the king. Whether that made the cult a genuine monotheism or a royal monopoly on access is an argument scholars continue to hold, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than settling it.

Almost every major Egyptian settlement was built, rebuilt and lived in continuously, which means the earlier phases lie under later towns and are largely unrecoverable. Amarna is the exception. It was founded on a site with no previous occupation, occupied for roughly a generation, and abandoned when the court returned to the old centres and the old priesthoods after Akhenaten's death. Nothing substantial was built over it. The result is that archaeologists have a complete Egyptian city plan of a single period: the palaces and temples, but also the workmen's village, the bakeries, the wells, the rubbish, the small household shrines that show what people kept in their homes. Those household finds complicate the picture the official monuments give, because a number of them are images of ordinary domestic gods that the reform was supposed to have displaced.

The site also preserves the distinctive art of the reign, with its elongated bodies and unusually intimate family scenes, and the tombs cut into the cliffs behind the city carry hymns to the Aten in their inscriptions. What Amarna cannot supply is the view from the other side. The reaction that followed removed Akhenaten's name from monuments and left later Egyptians with no memory of him, so the surviving evidence about the most disruptive religious episode in Egyptian history comes almost entirely from the disruptors.