Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [109]
In its prime, the city of Akhetaton must have been a fitting capital for a pristine new god. The handsome villas of the nobles were surrounded by gardens filled with pools and with flowers, surrounded by high walls for privacy. The workmen’s houses were small and monotonously alike, but they compare favorably with some of the twentieth-century fellahins’ dwellings. The king himself built several palaces. Like most Egyptian domestic dwellings they have almost disappeared—the tombs were the Houses of Eternity, but a house was only designed for one lifetime. But the palaces were handsome structures, filled with luxurious furniture and ornaments. From the objects found in Tutankhamon’s tomb, some of which were doubtless made in Akhetaton, we know that domestic furnishings were designed with an eye to beauty as well as utility.
Akhenaton’s palaces had lovely painted floors and walls with scenes of animals, flowering plants, and gracefully flying birds. Here he lived in peace with his exquisite wife and his six little daughters. In the great temple enclosure he worshiped Aton at the appointed hours; and in the cliffs behind the city he prepared his tomb. This tomb, together with those of his chief courtiers, has been excavated. All had been robbed and defaced in antiquity. But from the scenes carved and painted upon the chamber walls, archaeologists have learned much about Akhenaton and his times; perhaps the most valuable inscription is the copy of the great Aton hymn. And from the walls of the royal tomb we learn that the king’s life had its tragedies. The first person to occupy the rock-cut sepulcher was not Akhenaton, but his small daughter, the princess Meketaton. The scenes of her funeral covered the walls of one chamber, and the grief of the royal parents is poignantly portrayed.
The loss of his daughter was a shattering blow, but it was only the first of Akhenaton’s troubles. It is safe to assume that the displaced priests of the old gods had not taken their demotion lightly. And outside Egypt other clouds were gathering. We know of these foreign problems in some detail, thanks to an archaeological discovery that far surpassed the tomb of Tutankhamon in historical value, though it was composed of no more precious material than common clay.
In 1887, peasants tilling their fields near Tell el Amarna turned up some curious objects—broken squares of dried clay that could hardly be distinguished from the brown earth that hid them. An ordinary cultivator would have thrown them away, but the Egyptian fellah had become sophisticated. He knew that the black soil of Egypt yielded riches other than crops, and that even the most unlikely-looking object might have value. The peasants scraped off the disfiguring earth and found that the bricks were covered with strange scratches, too regular to be accidental.
Eventually the objects found their way to Cairo. They created little stir at first; unprepossessing in appearance and humble in material, they did not attract tourist or scholar. Many of the bricks were broken to begin with, and others were deliberately smashed in order to increase the find in numbers if in nothing else. But finally they came to the attention of specialists, and the queer scratches were recognized as cuneiform writing. Cuneiform, pressed into damp clay tablets by wedge-shaped styluses, was the script of ancient Babylonia; during the fourteenth century B.C. Babylonian was the language of international diplomatic communication, much as French was in the nineteenth century. The ruins of Akhetaton and the antique shops were combed, and some three hundred of the baked clay tablets were found. (Others turned up later.) They are the ancient equivalent of the Foreign Office or State Department archives of our day, covering the reigns of Akhenaton and his father, and including