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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 Africa, the Levant, and the Mediterranean region. The lavish painted walls of Amenhotep's palace at Luxor and the rock tombs of his nobles on the west bank of Thebes still bear witness to the political and economic stability of a country which had been dominated by the same ruling family for over 200 years.

In the mid-sixteenth century BCE, the Theban prince, Ahmose, drove out the Hyksos, a group of Asiatic rulers who had held sway over lower Egypt during the so-called Second Intermediate Perio...

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Site of the City of Akhenaten and Amarna. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 12:19, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681509.html