Read Online Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings by Graham Phillips - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Graham Phillips
Tags: Egypt/Ancient Mysteries
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ten-kilometre stretch of the Nile: a northern town with its royal palace and suburbs, a central city with its sacred temple, and a southern town with its mansions for the upper classes. The whole city was constructed around a great forty-metre-wide processional way, now referred to as the Royal Avenue or Kingsway, which swept down from the northern palace and on through the central city, where it was flanked bya series of official buildings, a ceremonial palace, and the new style, open-air temple to the Aten. There were many smaller temples too, such as the sun kiosks along the routes to the cliff tombs to the east of the city, where devotees could bask in the life-giving rays of the sun. This central city seems to have been an administrative and religious centre, deserted at night except for guard patrols. Its day-time population of priests, clerks and artisans probably commuted from the suburbs, while the high officials had a separate district of mansions which stood in extensive grounds, surrounded by the lesser habitations of their attendants.
A specific feature of these great residences revealed just how different Amarna was. In one of the principal rooms there was a shrine consisting of a niche in which stood an inscribed and decorated stela. Similar shrines housing such a stela – an upright stone slab or pillar – were common to larger dwellings throughout Egypt and were dedicated to a particular deity or ancestor venerated by the residents. In the Amarna mansions, however, the decorations depicted no such gods or ancestors – only Akhenaten and his queen, accompanied by one or more of their daughters as they worshipped the Aten. The larger mansions even had their own chapels adorned with statues and votive images of the royal family. It was clear that Akhenaten not only dominated all official ceremony, but private prayer and meditation as well.
It was the same in the nobles' tombs, which would normally be decorated with scenes from ancient texts, such as the
Book of the Dead,
in which various gods would be depicted in order to invoke their influence as guides and guardians in the afterlife. These elaborate burial chambers were built to the same basic plan as those at Thebes, but were decorated very differently. Unlike the Theban tombs, the wall reliefs all focused on theking and through him the Aten. Akhenaten, usually accompanied by Nefertiti and a number of daughters, was shown engaged in various ceremonial activities, such as proceeding in a chariot along the processional way to worship at the temple of the Aten.
Akhenaten's image completely dominated the city, and in life the man himself ensured that his subjects were continually aware of his physical presence. We can see from the tomb illustrations that the royal palace had an architectural feature unique to ancient Egypt: a special window where the king and his family could appear before their followers. Like the Pope from his balcony overlooking St Peter's Square, from here Akhenaten would regularly address his subjects
en masse
in a way that no other Egyptian pharaoh seems to have done.
Amarna was ringed by a natural amphitheatre of cliffs on both sides of the Nile, where a series of fourteen immovable tablets, ranging from two to eight metres in height, were hewn . into the rocks to delineate the city's sacred perimeters. These boundary stelae, carved with reliefs showing Akhenaten and his family adoring their god, had been inscribed with lengthy decrees made by the king. Not only were they damaged, like the rock tombs, by the hammers of the local populace in the late nineteenth century, but they further suffered the far more devastating attentions of treasure hunters. A legend had grown up that Ali Baba's secret treasure-cave was somewhere in the area, and in 1906 one of the stelae was actually blown to bits with dynamite in the mistaken belief that the entrance lay beyond it. Thanks to early explorers like the Scottish laird Robert Hay in the 1820s,
A specific feature of these great residences revealed just how different Amarna was. In one of the principal rooms there was a shrine consisting of a niche in which stood an inscribed and decorated stela. Similar shrines housing such a stela – an upright stone slab or pillar – were common to larger dwellings throughout Egypt and were dedicated to a particular deity or ancestor venerated by the residents. In the Amarna mansions, however, the decorations depicted no such gods or ancestors – only Akhenaten and his queen, accompanied by one or more of their daughters as they worshipped the Aten. The larger mansions even had their own chapels adorned with statues and votive images of the royal family. It was clear that Akhenaten not only dominated all official ceremony, but private prayer and meditation as well.
It was the same in the nobles' tombs, which would normally be decorated with scenes from ancient texts, such as the
Book of the Dead,
in which various gods would be depicted in order to invoke their influence as guides and guardians in the afterlife. These elaborate burial chambers were built to the same basic plan as those at Thebes, but were decorated very differently. Unlike the Theban tombs, the wall reliefs all focused on theking and through him the Aten. Akhenaten, usually accompanied by Nefertiti and a number of daughters, was shown engaged in various ceremonial activities, such as proceeding in a chariot along the processional way to worship at the temple of the Aten.
Akhenaten's image completely dominated the city, and in life the man himself ensured that his subjects were continually aware of his physical presence. We can see from the tomb illustrations that the royal palace had an architectural feature unique to ancient Egypt: a special window where the king and his family could appear before their followers. Like the Pope from his balcony overlooking St Peter's Square, from here Akhenaten would regularly address his subjects
en masse
in a way that no other Egyptian pharaoh seems to have done.
Amarna was ringed by a natural amphitheatre of cliffs on both sides of the Nile, where a series of fourteen immovable tablets, ranging from two to eight metres in height, were hewn . into the rocks to delineate the city's sacred perimeters. These boundary stelae, carved with reliefs showing Akhenaten and his family adoring their god, had been inscribed with lengthy decrees made by the king. Not only were they damaged, like the rock tombs, by the hammers of the local populace in the late nineteenth century, but they further suffered the far more devastating attentions of treasure hunters. A legend had grown up that Ali Baba's secret treasure-cave was somewhere in the area, and in 1906 one of the stelae was actually blown to bits with dynamite in the mistaken belief that the entrance lay beyond it. Thanks to early explorers like the Scottish laird Robert Hay in the 1820s,
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