From grotto to garden suburb
Subsequent reuse of the tombs of Akhenaten's officials show that parts of Amarna had a long history of reusage, with some of the tombs becoming places of pre-Christian pilgrimage which were later converted into churches. There is no evidence so far for whether this kind of activity continued after the seventh century ce, when Egypt was controlled by Muslim rulers. Amarna may have retained its traditional aura, but equally possibly it could have fallen out of people's consciousness as a holy space. There are other instances of this from archaeological history: Stonehenge is perhaps the best example. On the other hand, some Amarna monuments were certainly resignified by the local inhabitants. In the nineteenth century, one of the boundary stelae (stela P) was blown up bv locals in the search for a cave filled with treasure that supposedly lay behind it>
The earliest written responses to Amarna are preserved by the few European travellers who made their way south of Cairo in the early eighteenth century.
THE "MUSHROOM" CITT WHICH TEMPORARILY DISPLACED THE5ES AS THE CAPITAL OP ANCIENT EGYPT IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY SC. A PICTORIAL RECONSTRUCTION Or AKHETATE! BUILT BY AKHENATEN AS THE CENTRE Of HIS NEW RELIGION OF SUN-WORSHIP SHOWING THE TEMPLE. PALACE. RECORDS OFFICE, AND UNIVERSITY (HOUSE OP LIFE).
Plate 3.1 Reconstruction of Akhet-aten from The Illustrated London Xews, 15 September 1934, by D. Macpher- son. Reproduced by courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.
Paul Lucas (1664-1737), who visited Egypt in 1704 and 1714, includes Amarna on a map published in his travelogue, Voyage du Sieur Paul Lucas au levant. Contenant la description de la haute Egypte, suivant le cours du Ml, depuis le Caire jusqua'aux cataractes. He claims to have visited all the places on his map, but does not describe the ruins of Amarna.' AJesuit hoping to make converts to Catholicism seems to have been the first European to record a visit to the site in modern times. Pere Claude Sicard was 37 when he visited Amarna in November 1714, having already been a missionary in Syria and Cairo for more than a decade.8 In addition to his religious activities, Sicard was under instructions from the due d'Orleans, regent for the young Louis XV to document the ancient monuments he encountered. While visiting local Christians at Mellawi, Sicard was shown boundary stela A at Tuna el-Gebel (see Plate 2.2). The stela impressed him so much that he recorded it both in words and in a rather confused picture - it was one of the few illustrations in the printed version of his work (see Figure 3.2). The accompanying description, the first European one of an Amarna monument, is worth quoting at length. Sicard interpreted the images on the stela in terms of biblical descriptions of sacrifices. But, like the Greek and Roman visitors, he was still fascinated by the strangeness of what he saw and struggled to make sense of what was obviously something extraordinary:
First of all one notices a sun surrounded by numerous rays, fifteen or twenty pieds [e. 4.8-6.4 m] across. Two life-size priests, wearing tall pointed hats, extend their hands towards this, the object of their veneration. The tips of their fingers touch the tips of the rays of the sun. At their side are two little boys, wearing the same head-gear as the priests, each one presenting them with two large vessels full of liquid. Below the sun there are two slaughtered lambs stretched out on three piles of faggots, each one composed of three pieces of wood. ... In front of the sun, directly opposite the two people making the sacrifice, there are figures of two women and two girls in full relief, fixed to the rock only by their feet and partly by a pillar at their backs. The marks of the hammer- blows that beheaded them can still be seen. I looked everywhere for an inscription or something else that could inform me about the different figures and how they had been used, or could at least tell me the year when this piecc of work was fashioned and the name of its crcator. But I could uncover nothing; and so I leave it to the learned antiquarians to reveal what has remained unknown to me.9
The same sort of feelings are evident in the next substantial account of Amar- na's ruins, by Edme Jomard (1777-1862). He was one of the antiquarians who accompanied Napoleon's expedition, and stopped off at Amarna on his way north in 1798 or 1799. He surveyed the site, and published the first plan of the ruins of Amarna in the monumental Description de I'Egypte in 1817 (Planches IV plate 63.6-9). Jomard's plans and description reveal the large amount that was
Figure 3.2 Claude Sicard (1677-1726), sketch of boundary stela A, from Texte de transition entre la relation d'un voyage dans Fisle du Delta et la relation d'un voyage en haute Egypte, 1716. Compare Plate 2.2. The free-standing figures of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their two oldest daughters have been absorbed onto the decoration of the stela itself.
visible on the ground, and how impressive he found it. He writes of the ruins of the small Atcn temple:
On this large road heading southwards from Et-Tell one finds, at 400 metres from the last houses of the village, an enclosure which traverses it: in the middle there is a gateway. Towards the main area of ruins and to the left is a large brick edifice preceded by a colossal gateway, the thickness of which is scarcely credible for this kind of construction: its opening is 11.15m, and its thickness 7.5 m. The walls are inclined like the faces of pylons. Although destroyed for much of their height, this is still 7.33 m. The bricks are themselves of gigantic size . . . their appearance is very fine. In fact this gateway is almost as large as the great pylon of the palace of Luxor.10
In Jomard's description and the accompanying plans, Amarna was a place of Cyclopean architecture, not a pile of weathered mud-brick mounds. After discussing the huge sizes of the brick and the vastncss of the enclosure of ruins, Jomard went on to say that the building astonished him as much as anything else he had seen in Egypt, and found himself unable to guess at its function - temple, palace, fortress, or granary?
Twenty-five years after Jomard, in 1824, the English traveller and antiquarian John Gardner Wilkinson (1797-1875) reached Amarna, and travelled there again two years later. He recorded the northern tomb of Meryre' I, and visited the alabaster quarry at Hatnub and possibly the southern group of tombs; he also surveyed and mapped the town site, and made casts and drawings. Wilkinson's visits had important consequences for the rediscovery of Amarna. He wrote about its remains at some length in his enormously popular Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1836) - perhaps the biggest single influence on early Victorian views of ancient Egypt - and in Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Egypt (1847), for years the guidebook most used by English tourists. Victorian travelogues as late as the 1890s mention visiting Egyptian sites, Murray 's in hand. It would be interesting to know whether Wilkinson had read Jomard's awed and tantalising descriptions of its ruins. Some years after his first visit to Amarna, he recorded his impressions of the tombs in Murray's Handbook: