The City Palace of Amarna

Hello! I'm Deborah, a student pursing a bachelors of science in architecture (aptly named B.S. Arch). As my writing and content develops, I wanted to post an assignment I had to research and compose. Since I enjoy writing, each essay I labor over with love. Despite that, sometimes I try not to care too much due to time constraints. This was finished while on study-vacation in New Orleans. It did not end up being as tight or polished as it could be. The scope was also probably too large, but the premise was sincere. I wanted to investigate the labor talked about in the Bible of the ancient Hebrews in Egypt. But it turns out no one knows much about that. So I had to switch my topic a little and it kind of got stuck in the transition. Overall I got 8.5/10.

There is no conclusion because I totally forgot to wrap it up as I sat hunched over my laptop, typing away in my hotel room. There are also few in-text citations - boo, I know better! A friend edited a couple grammatical things - adding a plural "s" and a comma. Thanks friend! That's about it for today. Until next time!

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Architecture_History_II
02_08_2019


Shrouded by the mystery of time and desert, the city of a strange and deviant pharaoh lies in ruins. Tell-el-Amarna, or Amarna, is the present day name for the old city Akhetaten, built by Pharaoh Akhenaten (Etheridge). As history goes, this pharaoh rejected the polytheism of the day and began a new monotheistic order that worshiped only the sun god, Aton. This power shift transformed vast, established priesthoods to basically a dual priesthood of just Pharaoh Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti alone. This was not a popular move. Akhenaten used military force to wipe out remnants of the old order across his kingdom and also relocated to a newly-built city, the subject of this paper. It was built rapidly with both stone and mud brick in the space of roughly two years, in order to move physically away from the old. Some of the remaining temple decorations appear hastily done. Because of the complete ruins still left of the site, it remains a thriving archaeological treasure and ongoing discovery. In the theme of labor, this paper looks at the workforce behind the city palace in its political and social context.

One theory is that the workers of this rapid city were comprised of non-Egyption slaves. Scriptures in the Old Testament or Jewish Torah indicate the earliest Israelite nation was living displaced in Egypt. While at first welcomed, with successive generations they grew in number so that the pharaoh of the time felt threatened by their potential political power. He reasoned that should an enemy rise against Egypt, this nation in his midst may join forces with them and overthrow his kingdom. As a result, he put them to hard labor for various building projects. It is recorded that they had to meet daily quotas of mudbrick and had no time for religious practices of their own. While the details are vague as to which pharaoh or pharaohs they served (most historians think it was at least two during their time of both enslavement and exodus), the conspicuous nature of their work - making mud brick - is a tie to the mud-built city of present day Amarna.

The research performed for this paper began by questioning the nature of labor for the Israel nation at the time of their slavery in Egypt. It was quickly discovered that they did not, in fact, have anything to do with the Great Pyramids of Giza, nor was it clear what they actually worked on. A cursory search revealed that new information was coming to light that showed the pyramids and some other structures could have been built by a well-fed, well-cared for citizen population of Egypt - not slaves of another land.

In the process of flipping through old National Geographic publications, little was mentioned about labor in general, except for Egyptian farmers. Both the World Book of 1926 and a 1985 National Geographic issue spoke of the fellahs or peasant farmers. The World Book called them “docile and subservient, yet naturally deceitful”. By contrast, the National Geographic expeditions had a friendly attitude towards this poorer, working class, and even mentioned the difficulties that minority Coptic Christians face from Muslims in the area (Caputo). Browsing Israeli-based news outlets and contemporary scientific outlets like CNRS France, it became clear that no evidentiary link between the enslaved Israel nation and Egyptian building projects has yet been proven.

While following up this line of thought, the ruins and graves of Tell-el-Amarna came up because of its possible association with that Biblical story. It was not unfamiliar, having been studied briefly in a previous class, but the discovery of the newly unearthed gravesites was certainly stunning. The reports from the archaeological project itself, Amarna Project, appeared the most objective, while more dark-web sites seemed to sensationalize the findings into “child slavery and Egyptian cruelty.” This cannot be proven, even though some remains seem to substantiate that narrative.

Overall, not too much has been discussed or found in the past two hundred years of modern expeditions and excavations. Much is known and recorded about the nobility and leadership, and the succession of pharaohs, but little is known about the workers who built a whole city for a rogue monarch. The only other finding, so far, is that the city palace had small homes or even chambers where slaves and/or servants would have stayed.

In conclusion, the older sources seemed to have a strongly negative view of working classes, and in the case of the World Book, a glossing of the plight of lower classes. The newer sources seemed more objective and curious, rather than dismissive. In the reading titled John Ruskin’s Labor, the writer Peter Anthony analyses Ruskin’s thoughts about labor and his romantic ideal of returning to the Gothic period of craft and creative work. In this light, Ruskin argued that it would be better to be a slave than to be restricted to the monotony of the industrial factory and its repetitive tasks. Under those auspices, the work of the slave in decorating the walls of the temple of Aton would be almost liberating. This is not the case, however, when one realizes the timeline of the work, so compressed as to effectively remove creative freedom from that laborer in order for it to be completed as quickly as possible, errors and craftsmanship notwithstanding.

A second reading, Palladio’s Villas and their Predecessors by James Ackerman, discusses the ability of architecture to legitimize power structures and subvert societal frameworks. While this is ancient architecture, the same concept is at play, with Pharaoh Akhenaten seeking to legitimize his rule through the use of a new palace, a city-size religious and political complex. Further, through the use of stone cut tombs for the nobility, and the absence of architecture for the very lowest classes, reinforces that inequality even when all become equally human in death and mortality.

While there is little conclusive evidence as to the identity of the workers in this place, there was a recent finding of mass graves by the Amarna Project that gave more information of what kind of people could have been part of the construction. Two mass grave sites have been found, filled with very simple burials containing few artifacts, if any, and only reed-like shrouds. The skeletons are small and identified as being young adults and children, some even as young as 7 years old. Some remains also show evidence of hard labor such as physical trauma and spinal fractures (Borschel-Dan). While these findings are incomplete, as the sites were most likely robbed, the simplicity of what remains stands out in stark contrast to the wealthier and nobler graves of the same period. Those were the stone tombs carved into the rock cliffs, begun during Akhenaten’s time, lavished with carvings and goods as fitting for their station in the afterlife.

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Bibliography of Research

Amarna Project, The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University,

www.amarnaproject.com/index.shtml.

Arden, Harvey. "Eternal Sinai." National Geographic, vol. 161, no. 4, April 1982, pp. 420-438.

Borschel-Dan, Amanda. "In Ancient Mass Graves, Archaeologists Find Child Slaves of Biblical Egypt." The Times of Israel,

9 June 2017.

Calloce, Laura. "The Lost City of Akhenaten." CNRS News, French National Center for Scientific Research, 11 Apr. 2016.

Caputo, Robert. "Journey Up the Nile." National Geographic, vol. 167, no. 5, May 1985, pp. 576-633.

Crossway Bibles. The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Wheaton, Good News Publishers, 2001, pp. 45-57.

"Egypt." History of Egypt. The World Book. Edited by M. V. O'Shea, 1926, pp. 1969-70.

El-Baz, Farouk. "A Dam Against Famine." National Geographic, vol. 167, no. 5, May 1985, pp. 594-595.

El-Baz, Farouk. "Egypt’s Desert of Promise." National Geographic, vol. 161, no. 2, February 1982, pp. 212-213.

Etheridge, Laura. "Tell el-Amarna." Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 23 Oct. 2008.

Handwerk, Brian. "Pyramids at Giza." National Geographic, National Geographic Society, 24 Jan. 2019.

Holy Bible: The New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982

Karasavvas, Theodoros. "Was Pharaoh Akhenaten so Cruel that he Forced Children to Build his City of Amarna?" Ancient

Origins, Ancient Origins, 9 June 2017.

Rosenberg, Stephen G. "Who Was the Pharaoh of the Exodus?" Jerusalem Post, edited by Maayan Hoffman, The Jerusalem

Post Ltd., 1 Apr. 2015.

Uphill, E. P. "Pithom and Raamses: Their Location and Significance." Journal of Near Eastern Studies, vol. 27, no. 4, Oct.,

pp. 291-316. JSTOR.

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P.S. Here is a link to the Amarna Project website that shows lots of great pictures. Amarna is a real place in Egypt and the documentation of the archaeological finds is just fascinating.