Piecing Together Amarna

The ancient Egyptians aren’t really known as a radical bunch. They had a good thing going, and they stuck with it. Consistency. That’s what built the pyramids, and that’s what kept the Egyptian empire intact for the better part of 3,000 years.

Amarna, then, is a little episode that one suspects the Egyptians happily would have swept under the rug.

They did, in fact, until 100 years ago. That’s when Egyptologists began piecing together the upheaval that led to the founding of the city of Amarna. The 250 artworks and artifacts included in “Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen” shed some light on what scholars know. The exhibition opens Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, after drawing more than 200,000 visitors in Boston.

At the heart of the Amarna experiment is the pharaoh Akhenaten, who is still the subject of much debate (see story at right). But one thing is for certain: For the 17 years he was in charge, things were really different in Egypt.

Back around 1400 BC, Egypt was at the height of its imperial power. The religion was polytheistic; armchair Egyptologists may recall Osiris, Ra and Ptah, though local or household gods were worshiped as well. The god Amen had been elevated to a national deity and had a particularly powerful priesthood.

Change was brewing by about 1360 BC, when a pharaoh named Amenhotep III declared himself a god while he was still alive, even though pharaohs typically weren’t deified until their death. Then, Amenhotep IV, around 1353 BC, decided everyone should worship Aten, a god represented as the sun’s disk and the god most closely associated with the pharaohs.

Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning “one who is effective for Aten.” He outlawed Amen and banished Amen’s high priest to the quarries. Then he moved 175 miles north and built a brand-new city on the Nile dedicated to Aten. Originally called Akhetaten (“Horizon of Aten”), it is now referred to as Amarna, the name of a nearby village.

“We don’t have every bit of writing, so we have to piece the history together,” said Egyptologist Nancy Thomas, LACMA’s deputy director of curatorial affairs. “But indications are that Akhenaten chose to worship the Aten, and to achieve that he had to relocate everything. All the temples in Thebes were dedicated to other gods . . . so he needed to build new temples and start over.”

In a very short time, Amarna housed an estimated 20,000 people or more.

“It’s like GM moving to a new site,” Thomas said. “Everyone sort of had to follow the royal court.”

Earlier museum shows have explored facets of Amarna. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, curated “The Royal Women of Amarna” in 1997. Others have focused on Tutankhamen or Akhenaten specifically. “Pharaohs of the Sun,” curated by Rita Freed of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, takes the largest possible view.

“It’s very rare that you have an exhibition that tries to tell the whole story,” said Yvonne Markowitz, a researcher at the Boston museum who worked on the exhibition. “We have these two big aspects: the personalities--which don’t always stand out so uniquely in Egyptian history--and the city.

“We know a lot about the city because it was abandoned, and it wasn’t a continued area of settlement. Usually people build on top and top and top,” Markowitz said. “Excavators were able to go back to the city and look at the layout.”

New Art for New Tombs, Temples and Palaces

Border markers were carved into the cliffs looming on either side of the Nile. Below lay a highly structured and symbolically designed city. On the eastern bank were the buildings, including the Great Temple, which covered 1.8 million square feet. “Pharaohs of the Sun” includes a scale model of Amarna and aerial photographs of the excavation. Barry Kemp, the archeologist currently working at the site, was a consultant on the model and provided details from discoveries made just last year.

The temples in Amarna were markedly different. Traditional temples had a series of chambers leading to a holy--and darkened--center where the carved statues of the gods were kept. Because the god Aten was the sun-disk, the temples dedicated to him had no roof, so the sun’s rays could shine in.

All these new temples, tombs and palaces meant lots of new art. Concurrent with the religious changes--or perhaps, as with the temples, because of them--there was a dramatic shift in artistic style. The stiff, square-shouldered physiques became softened, in some cases even paunchy. Some facial features became more naturalistic--but also more stylized. Two colossal statues of Akhenaten, each about 7 feet tall, are particularly striking examples.

“You can’t help but say this is a very odd physique,” Markowitz said. “There’s a tendency to say, ‘What would make someone look this way?’ . . . I think it’s responding to some kind of inner psychological or spiritual motive, trying to express something different from the past. It’s quite deliberate.”

Akhenaten’s queen, Nefertiti, also was represented in this new sculptural style, and several busts of her are on display at LACMA. But the depictions in carvings also raise some questions. She is shown holding an enemy by his hair and striking him with a mace. That “smiting” pose is one only kings are shown in, leading some to speculate that Nefertiti inherited the throne for a time or ruled alongside Akhenaten.

Likewise, the whole royal family is depicted in domestic settings--also a departure. Akhenaten and Nefertiti play with their children in some carvings and worship in the embracing rays of Aten. The sun’s rays actually turn into little hands reaching out to the royal family.

Artists Quickly Adopt a New Style

Tile fragments and floor paintings also reveal a more realistic rendering of plants and animals. Clearly, artists working in the new city quickly adopted a new style.

“For artisans, it was probably an exciting place to be,” Markowitz said. “There’s rapid building, and the old restrictions [on style] are taken away. Egyptian drawings, for instance, had black outlines and were colored in. But now they dispense with the black lines. There’s just a few strokes of green for the stems and a stroke of red for the flower. I imagine that artists found this very satisfying. There’s a creative momentum in the city as it’s being built.”

Akhenaten’s Leadership Held Up to Question

Still, evidence suggests that not everyone was happy with the new direction in which Akhenaten was steering Egypt. Amarna’s buildings include military bunkers. Depictions of royal parades show the pharaoh guarded by police.

Archeologists found objects relating to the worship of gods other than Aten, as well.

“There are some amulets, jewelry people would wear for protective purposes--the goddess Taweret, the protector of women in childbirth, and the god Bes, a household deity,” said Sue D’Auria, a former research fellow at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts who oversaw installation of the exhibition in Los Angeles.

Archeologists also found an unfinished statuette of a ram, the animal that represented the outlawed god Amen.

A Backlash After Death of Pharaoh

Scholars aren’t quite sure what happened after Akhenaten died in 1336 BC, but clearly there wasn’t the widespread support needed to keep the cult of Aten going. After four years of uncertain rulership, 10-year-old Tutankhamen came to the throne. He is believed to be Akhenaten’s son, though not Nefertiti’s. His youth suggests that advisors may have held sway, however, and influenced him to return the royal court to Thebes.

“There was a complete backlash,” said LACMA’s Thomas. “I can imagine as they moved out of the city they wanted to damage and destroy the city.”

The wholesale destruction came a bit later, under Horemheb, a general who came to power after Tutankhamen died with no heirs. Legions ransacked Amarna, crushing any image of Aten or Akhenaten in their path. Later, the beautiful stone reliefs were used as filler for new construction at Hermopolis.

As Egypt was excavated by the British and the Germans, the antiquities from Amarna were spread around the world. They wound up in museums in Paris, Berlin, London, New York and, of course, Cairo. Some 35 collectors and institutions lent objects for “Pharaohs of the Sun.”

“It’s the piecing together of the whole history and then bringing the objects together,” Thomas said. “You really get a different impression from seeing the materials collected in one exhibition.”

BE THERE

“Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. $12.50, $15 Saturdays and Sundays; seniors and students, $10 and $12; ages 6 to 17, $5; 5 and younger, free. Tickets are for specific dates and times and also allow access to the rest of the museum. Through June 4. (877) 522-6225.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Egyptian Timeline

3100 BC

Egyptian civilization begins. Upper and lower Egypt are united by Menes, who rules the world’s first national government.

*

2682-2181 BC

Old Kingdom. The Great Pyramid and other pyramids at Giza are built.

*

1938-1759 BC

Egypt’s power and sphere of influence grow under Amenemhet and his successors.

*

1630-1539 BC

Hyksos, leaders of the Canaanites, rule Egypt.

*

1539 BC

Ahmose expels the Hyksos, reunites Egypt.

1479-1425 BC

Egyptian empire reaches its height under Thutmose III.

*

1353 BC

Amenhotep IV changes his name to Akhenaten, begins national worship of Aten, and moves the capital from Thebes to Amarna.

*

1336 BC

Akhenaten dies. It is unclear who immediately succeeds him.

*

1332-1322 BC

Tutankhamen, only 10 years old, becomes pharaoh. The capital moves back to Thebes, worship of Amen resumes.

*

1075 BC

The Egyptian empire begins to decline.

*

332 BC

Egypt becomes part of Alexander the Great’s empire. Alexandria is founded.

*

37 BC

Cleopatra marries Mark Antony, co-ruler of Rome.

*

31-30 BC

Cleopatra and Antony lose the battle of Actium. They both commit suicide and Egypt becomes a province of Rome.