Message #7387

[Bianca]

                          T H E   D I S C O V E R Y   O F   A K H E N A T E N     





Almost 300 Kilometres south of Cairo, about midway between ancient Memphis
and Thebes, on the west bank of the Nile, lie the ruins of Hermopolis.  This was the seat in pagan times of the
moongod Thoth, whom the Greek equated with their Hermes, and the capital of a thriving district that extended to  a depth of nearly 20 kilometres, to meet the verges of the Libyan Desert on the west.  By contrast with this still fertile and populous tract, the opposite bank presents an inhospitable face with sheer limestone cliffs, plunging headlong into the Nile and scarcely affording space for a continuous highway at the water's edge.  The vast escarpment extends further south for some 65 kilometres when, at Sheikh Sa'id, the bluffs recedes from
the river in an abrupt curve, for a distance of 12 kilometres and a maximum depth of five, before resuming their southward course.  This opening in the rocky wall forms the sandy plain of Amarna, a vast natural amphitheatre in which one of the great dramas of ancient Egypt was played out in little more than a decade in the fourteenth century BC, when it became "a chance bivouac in the march of history, fulled for a moment with all the movement and colour of intense life, and then was abandoned to a deeper silence, as the camp was hurriedly struck and the course of Egyptian history relapsed again into more wonted highways."

For this was the site to which Akhenaton, visionary and religious reformer, was directed by divine inspiration, in his fifth regnal year, as the place where his sole god, Re-Herakhte, immanent in the sunlight that streamed from the Aten, or disk of the sun, had manifested himself at the creation of the world.  It was here that the Pharaoh founded a capital city on virgin ground, which was built for the Aten, extended during the remaining twelve years of his reign, and forsaken soon after his death.