Message #7390

[Bianca]

 







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





All this, of course was unknown to the European travellers who came to this spot in
the early years of the nineteenth century.  They found a desert tract covered with scrub and low mounds of pebble-strewn rubbish, sloping from the crescent of east-
ern hills to a narrow strip of cultivation, bordering the river and scored by shallow wadis.  This untamed place was not made any more inviting by the evil reputation of the inhabitants of the wretched villages, strung along the river bank from north to south at EtTil, El Hagg Qandil, El Amirya and El Hawata.  These were occupied by the sullen and quarrelsome descendants of the Beni Amran, nomads who had left the Eastern Desert in the early eighteenth century and settled on the river banks, giving their name to the whole region.  The full description of their northernmost village, Et Til el Amarna, was mis-heard by early travellers as Tell el Amarna, and still persists, though it is a misnomer, since there is no single 'tell' or great mound marking the ancient site.  Scholars have now generally agreed to call the place El Amarna, or more simply, Amarna.

Despite such deterrents, in 1824 the first of the notable modern explorers stopped at Et Eil and visited some of the open tombs cut in a terrace that extended half-way up the cliffs at the northern edge of the site.  This was John Gardner Wilkinson, who had come to Egypt three years earlier in search of a more congenial climate in which to cosset his fragile health, and stayed for a further decade investigating the monuments, particularly those at Thebes.

He returned to Amarna in 1826, this time in company with James Burton, an elder brother of the more famous architect Decimus and a member of a team that had made a geological survey of Egypt for Mohammed Ali in 1822.  Wilkinson and Burton copied scenes and made squeezes in the tombs of the High Steward of the Queen Mother, Huya; Pharaoh's Private Secretary, Ahmose;  the High Priest, MeryreI; the Chief Servitor, Pinhasy; the Cupbearer, Parennefer; the Chamberlain, Tutu and the Master of the Horse, Ay.