252 



DISCOVERY 



The City of 

 / Sun-Cult 



the 



An Account of the Recent 

 Excavations at Tell-el-Amarna 

 By T. H. Peet, M.A. 



Professor of Egyptology in the University of Liverpool 



To the student of Egyptian history Tell-cl-Amama 

 is something more than a mere place-name. It is con- 

 nected with what is perhaps the most striking event 

 in the hfe of Ancient Egypt, the so-called heresy of 

 Akhenaton. Any exploration undertaken on this 

 site has a very definite purpose, namely the clearing 

 up of the history of this little-known and supremely 

 interesting episode, and it would be useless to describe 

 the excavations which have been made there without 

 giving the reader some general account of Akhenaton 

 and his religious revolution. 



First, however, a word regarding Tell-el-Amarna 

 itself. The name is a solecism, for which the archteolo- 

 gist is to blame. The mounds to which the name is 

 given, and which cover the remains of .\khenaton's city, 

 lie near a modem Arab village called Et-Till, on the 

 east bank of the Nile some 200 miles above (i.e. south 

 of) Cairo. The district in which Et-Till lies is inhabited 

 by a formerly nomadic tribe named the Beni Amran, 

 from whom it takes the name of El-Amarna. Thus 

 the village may for purposes of closer definition be 

 called Till-el-Amama, that is. Till of the Amama district. 

 The blunder was made when Wilkinson, as early as 

 1835, mistook Till for the word tell, which means a 

 mound or hill, and put into currency the compound 

 Tcll-el-Amama, which is now too firmly established 

 to be suppressed. 



The XVIIIth Dynasty, which began about 1587 B.C.,' 

 had witnessed the widest expansion of Egyptian power. 

 The kings of the Xllth Dynasty (2000 to 1788 B.C.) 

 had conquered Nubia, and even on occasion brought 

 back great booty from Syria-Palestine, but they had, 

 so far as we know at present, attempted nothing like 

 a policy of conquest in nearer Asia. In the dark years 



' The dates of the Egyptian Dynasties are determined astrono- 

 mically, the calculation being based on the fact that the Egj^)- 

 tians, though they had a year of 365 days, failed to provide a 

 Leap Year, and so got out of time with the Solar Year and its 

 sea.sons to the extent of a day in every four years. Thus, 

 if an inscription tells us that in a certain year of a certain 

 king the beginning of the true or Solar Year fell on the 23rd 

 of the third month of the Calendar Year, we can at once fix 

 the date of that year, since we happen to know from ancient 

 writers the dates (recurring every 1,460 years) at which the 

 Eg>'ptian Solar and Calendar Years began on the same day. 



which followed the fall of this dynasty, Egypt had been 

 herself invaded by .Asiatics, the hated Hyksos. After 

 the expulsion of these intruders by the first kings of 

 the XVIIIth Dynasty, she again rose to prosperity, 

 and a period of reprisals again.st the Asiatics followed 

 almost as a matter of course. There is not space here 

 to describe the details of the wars which ensued ; 

 suffice it to say that by the time of Thothmes III 

 (1501 to 1447) the Egj'ptians had conquered the whole 

 of Palestine and Syria as far north as the Lebanon, and 

 had even struck off to the north-east through the 

 country known to them as Naharin and reached the 

 Euphrates. Under ,\menhotep III this empire was 

 maintained, and his son, Amcnhotep IV, after^va^ds 

 called Akhenaton, inherited it unimpaired. There 

 were, however, heavy clouds on the political horizon, 

 for at the very moment of his accession the Hittites, 

 whose empire lay in Central and Eastern Asia Minor, 

 were threatening Syria from the north, while a people 

 called the Khabiri (by some identified with the 

 Hebrews) were drifting across the Jordan into Palestine 

 in ever-increasing numbers. 



Amcnhotep III died about 1375 B.C., leaving a widow. 

 Queen Ti, and a young son, Amcnhotep, to succeed him. 

 The internal situation in Egypt at this moment seems 

 to have been perfectly normal. The court resided at 

 Thebes, the modem Luxor, 450 miles above Cairo, as 

 it had done since the beginning of the Xllth D^Tiasty, 

 six hundred years before. The state religion consisted 

 mainly in the worship of the god Amon-Ra, who, as the 

 name implies, was a syncretism of the Sun-god Ra, 

 one of the most ancient of deities in Eg^-pt, with Amon, 

 the local god of Thebes. This combination was both 

 old and stable, and had been made in the usual easy 

 Egyptian manner at the time when an obscure Theban 

 family rose to power and conquered the whole of Egypt, 

 conciliating religious prejudices and differences by 

 uniting its own city-god Amon with the old state-god 

 Ra. Side by side with the state worship of Amon-Ra 

 there coexisted that of an almost innumerable pantheon 

 of other deities, some local, some general, all with their 

 priesthoods and adherents. 



Such, then, was the state of affairs in 1375 B.C. 

 But an astounding change was at hand. Not later than 

 the sixth year of his reign, possibly as early as the 

 fourth, the young king had moved his court from 

 Thebes to Tell-el-Amama, suppressed the time- 

 honoured pantheon of Egyptian deities, and established 

 a monotheistic worship of the Sun's Disk, or Aton, 

 as it was called in Eg\-ptian. \\'orkmen were sent 

 throughout the land to chisel out the name of Amon, 

 and often those of the other gods too, in the monumental 

 inscriptions of temple and tomb ; the temples of Thebes 

 stood empty, and shorn of their revenues, and all the 

 most skilful men in Egj-ptian art and craft were 



