Akhenaten

Akhet-aten was also a functioning capital city.¹⁸ Straddling the Nile, it eventu­ally covered an area so considerable

(c. 1,200 hectares) that nineteenth-ccntury travellers assumed it must have been occupied for centurics to have grown so large.¹⁹

In fact, the residential parts of Akhet-aten seem to have been more a series of village communities aggregating around the ceremonial ccntrc than a planned city. Estimates of its population vary from 20,000-30,000 to as many as 50,000 people, who lived in domestic buildings ranging from the large, imposing and comfortable to the poky, institutional and basic. The domestic buildings at Akhet-aten in some ways bear the burden of proof for extreme interpretations of the site as being cither a unique aberration or completely normal architccturally. The elite houses, some of them architccturally different from those at other Egyptian sites, seem to show how environmental factors as well as ideology shaped the city. Some of their features may be responses to living in a severe desert environment which builders, accustomed to conditions in the Nile valley, had not had to consider before, but the houses still reflect the traditional elite ideal of rus in urbe.

^B On the other hand, the houses in the so-called workmen's village, a satellite settlement in the desert east of the main city, are comparable with the houses in the similar settlement of Deir el-Mcdina, on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes. Both of them were planned villages provisioned by the state, since the village had no water supply or cultivable land and had to be supplied from the main city. At Akhet-aten the central city and the workmen's village probably looked very different from the clean, pristine reconstructions often rcproduccd in books (see Plate 3.1). Industrial, domestic and ritual space was not strictly demarcated. There were smoky bakeries alongside temples, mounds of domestic rubbish in the city's open spaces, and the houses themselves were eco­nomic units which produced waste from manufacturing and animal-keeping. Akhet-aten was also equipped with the administrative buildings needed to run a bureaucracy. Reliefs in the rock-cut tombs of Akhenaten's courtiers, clustered together in two groups at the northern and southern edges of the site, give a sense of how they might have looked. These carvings show Akhet-aten's civil and domestic buildings, including parts of the palaccs, and religious/ritual events, such as royal processions through the city and appearances on the palace balcon­ies to reward officials. These scenes are not included as 'snapshots' of Akhet-aten, however. They arc representations of the places whose produce and offerings would sustain the tomb owners in the next world. The temples and estates were controlled by Akhenaten, illustrating how he was taking over the god Osiris' role as provider in death.

Scenes in some of the same tombs also record three more daughters born to Nefertiti and Akhenaten: Neferncferuaten ('Perfection-of-Aten'), Neferneferure' ('Perfection-of-Re'') and Setepenre' ('Chosen-of-Re''). The -Re

elements in the names of the two younger daughters may suggest that they were born after the Atcn's new nomenclature, which emphasises Re', was introduced in about year 9. Akhenaten had other co-wives, and probably children by them: at least one of his co-wives, Kiya, achieved some prominence on official monuments at Akhet-aten. Other royalty visited the city, including Tiye and one of her daughters. In year 12, c. 1341 bce, there was an important set of ceremonies and festivities at Akhet-aten. Tomb scenes dated to this year show Akhenaten and the royal family receiving tribute from subjugated foreign lands (the so-called 'dur­bar').²¹ In one relief, the king, queen and six daughters are all represented. This confident and wholly conventional picture of Egyptian supremacy in foreign relations is undermined by an archive of diplomatic correspondence found at

Amarna, the so-called 'Amarna letters'. This archive apparently shows the Egyp­tians neglecting the administration of their foreign colonies and other imperial interests outside Egypt. Since this is one of the very few times that the voice of the colonised rather than of triumphalist Egyptians is heard, it may be unwise to make too much of the political situation in the Amarna letters. Confusion at the boundaries of the empire may have been a fairly usual state of affairs, but unlikely to be recorded in official Egyptian propaganda. This correspondence is sometimes seen as evidence for Akhenaten the pacifist humanitarian, or the Akhenaten who neglccts practical affairs in favour of art and abstruse theological speculation. In fact, Akhenaten often presents himself in the martial way con­ventional for pharaohs, and there is no reason to suppose that he was uninterested in the governmental repercussions of his political and religious changes."