Site of the City of Akhenaten and Amarna

The site of the city of Akhenaten, the only virtually complete ancient town to have survived from ancient Egypt, lies 160 miles south of Cairo, midway between the modern towns of Minya and Asyut (Weigall 92). It is only at el-Amarna that a comprehensive range of official and residential buildings have been preserved, comprising the essential elements of an Egyptian royal city of the mid-fourteenth century BCE. This paper will look at how urbanism theories apply to the city of Amarna.

The city of Amarna (or "Horizon of the Sun Disk") is located on the eastern side of the Nile in Middle Egypt, half way between Cairo and Luxor. The ancient city is formed by a bay of cliffs to the east and the Nile to the west, taking the shape of an archer's bow, with the Nile as the string and the city couched inside the cliffs. The cliffs were eventually hollowed out as final resting places - tombs for the capital city's most important families (Silverberg 78). The city was first conceived by king Akhenaten, but it was abandoned just twenty years after its first boundary stele was laid. When the rebel pharaoh died, his new religion died with him, and his successor, Tutankhamen, returned to the old capital city of Thebes, and to the old religion (Silverberg xiii).

At the beginning of the fourteenth century BCE, in the reign of Amenhotep III, the Egyptian state had reached a peak of power and influence, and was unrivaled in its dominance of North Afric

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rs of Atenism. In this respect, Amarna was an unusual city, arising out of the beliefs of one man, Akhenaten, and his vision. In this respect, Amarna also fits the model of urbanism of cities as centers of dominance (Wheatley 613). Aten and his worship were the dominant theme in Amarna. The city was dominated by Akhenaten, who considered himself the living representative of the god Aten. The size of the population of Amarna, estimated at 100,000, would fit the expediential theory described by Wheatley (620-21), but as he points out, non of these theories is mutually exclusive, and there is a lot of overlap. No absolute theory of urbanism has yet been developed which is applicable worldwide throughout time, according to Wheatley. The idea of cities as centers of dominance is expanded on by Mumford (99-100). He cites as proof that long before the city became a center of communication, persistent restrictions over the extension and communication of knowledge was commonplace. Vast resources were pre-empted by a small group of intellectuals, usually the priesthood, who saw no reason to extend their knowledge to the peasantry. The ruling classes held a monopoly over the creative process. A large part of the surplus produced

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