7.6: Amarna

Editors' Note

This period, characterized by monotheism and a radically different artistic style, occurred during the New Kingdom, but it is so distinctive it has its own name: the Amarna Period. This name comes from present-day Tell el-Amarna, where Akhenaten established his new capital city, Akhetaten. The Amarna Period represents a dramatic departure: from many gods to just one (the creator Aten, "sun disk"), and from a style that had been remarkably consistent for millennia to a dramatically unique one.

The distinctiveness of this period's style is immediately visible in the iconic statuary portrait of Akhenaten (Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\)), one of several created for the Temple of Aten at Karnak. Unlike the rigid proportions and idealized features that had characterized other Egyptian rulers, like Menkaure, for thousands of years, Akhenaten is portrayed with a long, oval face; full and well-defined lips; and, perhaps most notably, a softly curving belly and hips. One theory proposed for this androgyny (combination of female and male characteristics) in Akhenaten's representation is that it reflects the sexlessness of Aten. What is certain is that this dramatically different style was short-lived, ending with Akhenaten's death in 1336 BCE.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Colossal statue of Akehnaten (Amenhotep IV), from the Aten temple at Karnak, Egypt. Sandstone, 12' 9 7/8". Egyptian Museum, Cairo. (Photo: Dr. Cerise Myers, CC-BY)

Amarna Period: Akhenaton, Nefertiti, and Three Daughters: A Conversation

By Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

This is the transcript of a conversation conducted at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Click here to watch the video.

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): House Altar depicting Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Three of their Daughters, New Kingdom, Amarna period, 18th dynasty, c. 1350 BCE. Limestone. Agyptisches Museum/Neues Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. (Photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Steven: So around 1350 BCE, everything changed in Egyptian art.

Beth: When we think about Egyptian art, we don’t think of change.

Steven: That’s true. The Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, the New Kingdom, and the transitional periods between—art is consistent for almost 3,000 years. But there is this radical break right around 1350. And it’s because the ruler, Akhenaten, changes the state religion.

Beth: He changes it from the worship of the god Amun to a new god, a sun god, called Aten. So he actually changes his own name to Akhenaten, which means Aten is pleased. The key is he makes him and his wife the only representatives of Aten on earth. And so he upsets the entire priesthood of Egypt by making him and his wife the only ones with access to this new god, Aten.

Steven: And in fact, after Akhenaten dies, Egypt will return to its traditional religion. So this period is a very brief episode in Egyptian history, but it also marks a real shift in style. And this small stone plaque that we’re looking at, this sunken relief carving—which would have been placed in a private domestic environment—is a perfect example of those stylistic changes.

Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): House Altar depicting Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Three of their Daughters (detail of Nefertiti). (Photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Beth: Right. It would have been an altar in someone’s home, where they would have seen Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti and their relationship to the god Aten. This has always been one of my favorite sculptures. It’s so informal, compared to most Egyptian art. We really have a sense of a couple and their relationship with one another and their relationship with their children. And love and domesticity.

Steven: So let’s take a close look. On the left, you have Akhenaten himself. This is the pharaoh of Egypt, the supreme ruler. You can see that he’s holding his eldest daughter, and he’s actually getting ready to kiss her. He seems to be holding her very tenderly, supporting her head, holding her under the thighs. She seems to be, perhaps, pointing back to her mother at the same moment.

Beth: We see Nefertiti holding another daughter on her lap, pointing back to Akhenaten, and yet a third daughter, the youngest one, on her shoulder, playing with her earring. And I think it’s immediately apparent that there’s something wrong with their anatomy. If we look at the children, or we look at Nefertiti or Akhenaten, we see swollen bellies, very thin arms, and elongated skulls, forms that have made historians wonder whether there was something medically wrong with Akhenaten.

Steven: In fact, we don’t think that there was. We think that this is a purely stylistic break. It was meant to distinguish this new age, this new religion, from Egypt’s past.

Beth: Egyptian art had been dominated by rectilinear forms. Here, Akhenaten seems to be demanding this new style dominated by curvilinear forms.

Steven: Look at the careful attention to the drapery. There is a softness throughout that is an absolute contrast to the traditions of Egyptian art. But in some ways, there are elements of traditional Egyptian sculpture.

Beth: Right. We still see a composite view of the body. A profile view of the face, but a frontal view of the eye.

Steven: Right. Or one hip is facing us. But the shoulders are squared with us. So as much of the body is exposed to us as possible, while the figures are still in profile. So let’s take a look at some of the iconography here. This little panel really tells us a lot. God is present. Aten is present, here rendered as the sun disk. And from that sun–which has a small cobra in it, which signifies that this is the supreme deity, the only deity. Akhenaten was a monotheist. And this was in such contrast to the pantheon of gods that traditional Egyptian religion counted on. Here Akhenaten says, no, there is only one true god. So we can see the cobra. We can see the sun disk. And then we can see rays of light that pour down. And if you look closely, you can see hands at the ends of those rays, except for the rays that terminate right at the faces of the king and queen. And there, you see not only hands but also ankhs, the Egyptian sign of life. And so it’s as if Aten is giving life to these two people, and these two people alone.

Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\): House Altar depicting Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Three of their Daughters (detail of the sun disk and rays). (Photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Beth: Those rays of light are holding those ankhs right at the noses, the breath of life for Akhenaten and Nefertiti. We can see in the throne of Nefertiti symbols of both Upper and Lower Egypt, indicating that Nefertiti is the queen of both.

Steven: Akhenaten himself is sitting on a simpler throne. It does give a sense of her importance and the fact that they would rule Egypt together.

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Portrait Head of Queen Tiye (a conversation)

by Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

This conversation was recorded between Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker in front of Portrait Head of Queen Tiye with a Crown of Two Feathers at the Neues Museum, Berlin. Click here to watch the video.

Figure \(\PageIndex{5}\): Portrait Head of Queen Tiye with a Crown of Two Feathers, Egypt, New Kingdom, Amarna period, 18th dynasty, c. 1355 BCE. Yew wood, lapis lazuli, silver, gold, faience, 22.5 cm high. Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection at the Neues Museum, Berlin. (Photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: One of the most interesting women in all of Egyptian history began her life as the daughter of a bureaucrat but would marry the pharaoh of Egypt. She would then be demoted upon his death and would simply be the queen mother. But her son would then elevate her status substantially, making her divine, making her a goddess.

DR. BETH HARRIS: So much of that history can be seen in this tiny sculpture of Queen Tiye.

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: There’s a clear sense of her nobility. Even though she began in a relatively modest way as a commoner, although with fairly high status, she looks out and past us here, and there’s no doubt she’s a queen. She’s completely unapproachable.

DR. BETH HARRIS: And we may also be getting a sense here of what she looked like. There seem to be some individual characteristics. She seems to be a little bit older, we can see lines extending below her nose on either side of her cheeks. And there are some distinctive facial characteristics. So perhaps we have a little bit of a window into what she really looked like.

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: The face and neck are made out of yew wood, this beautiful dark wood. The eyes are made out of ebony and alabaster. And then there’s some other materials as well, gold and some of the semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli, is visible just under that headdress that seems to have been chipped away.

DR. BETH HARRIS: That’s right. What we’re seeing are in fact evidence of these changes in Tiye’s life. Underneath the headdress that we see her in now would have been a gold headdress that signified her status as the queen, as the wife of the pharaoh. And we can also see that in the two gold clips that we see on the forehead, that are evidence of where that crown would have been worn.

Figure \(\PageIndex{6}\): Portrait Head of Queen Tiye with a Crown of Two Feathers (detail of the queen's head). (Photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: There would have been a cobra placed there, the insignia of royalty. That was presumably removed when her husband died, and she actually fell in status to that of queen mother.

DR. BETH HARRIS: But she was so important and so smart, and her son depended on her so much that in order to have her be able to actively participate in politics, in the affairs of the royal court, he elevated her status to one of a goddess.

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: And that’s when this headdress would’ve been added. This would have been spectacular when it was first made. Now it simply looks a little bulbous, but if you look a little bit to the back right of the skull, you can just make out some brilliant blue faience beads that catch the light and really shimmer. That would’ve covered the entire headdress. And so she would have looked regal and almost celestial, appropriate to a goddess.

DR. BETH HARRIS: Her headdress extends upward where we see horns, a solar disk, and two feathers. Now that solar disk may refer to the religion founded by her son, Akhenaten. Akhenaten got rid of Egypt’s traditional polytheistic religion and established a monotheistic religion centered around Aten, who is symbolized by the sun.

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: This sculpture really does give us a sense of her importance, her power, her son’s respect for her, and gives us just a little glimpse into the complexity of Egyptian life at this high station.

Figure \(\PageIndex{7}\): Portrait Head of Queen Tiye with a Crown of Two Feathers (detail showing the queen's left profile). (Photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

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Model Bust of Nefertiti: A Conversation

by Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

This conversation was recorded between Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker at the Neues Museum, Berlin. Click here to watch the video.

Figure \(\PageIndex{8}\): Thutmose, Model Bust of Queen Nefertiti, New Kingdom, Amarna period, 18th dynasty, c. 1340 BCE. Limestone and plaster, 19 in. (41 cm.). Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection/Neues Museum, Berlin. (Photo via Smarthistory)

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: We’re in the Neues Museum in Berlin. And we’re looking at the famous bust of Nefertiti. It is a life-size, full-color image, and it’s really impressive.

DR. BETH HARRIS: It’s the treasure of this museum. And it’s been placed in a rotunda with a large dome. She’s been placed slightly higher than eye level, so we look up at her. She’s fabulously beautiful.

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: She’s virtually the sole work of art in this very large space. Clearly, she is the focal point.

DR. BETH HARRIS: Yeah, it’s quite theatrical. And unlike so many other Egyptian sculptures, she wasn’t intended for a tomb. She was found in the studio of the artist who made her, Thutmose.

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: We think that this sculpture was actually a model that he’d created in order to work on other sculptures of her. That is, this sculpture would function really as a three-dimensional sketch.

DR. BETH HARRIS: As a prototype.

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: That’s right. And there are a few reasons why that’s thought. Not only was it found in his studio, but it is incomplete in a way that suggests that it was never meant to be completed. If you look, for instance, at the sockets of the eyes, that would generally be inlaid with semi-precious stones. But only one eye has any inlay in it. And in that case, it’s a temporary material, even wax, and so not the kind of quality one would expect in a full-fledged sculpture for the queen.

DR. BETH HARRIS: Art historians have discovered through scientific analysis that she’s made not just of painted limestone but limestone that’s been covered with a very, very thin layer of plaster. And that enabled the sculptor to achieve really subtle effects modeling her face.

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: But then the neck and the headdress plaster gets much thicker, and it would have been much easier to work and create that very fine detail on the plaster rather than the coarser material of the limestone core.

DR. BETH HARRIS: And that’s so important where we see the lines, very subtle movement around her cheeks. What’s so remarkable about the sculpture is how sensitively carved she is, how we really get a sense of skin and bone and these lovely movements around her face.

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: She’s tremendously elegant, but even beyond the simple elegance of the contours of her face, her high cheekbones, the shallow of her cheeks.

DR. BETH HARRIS: Her long neck.

Figure \(\PageIndex{9}\): Thutmose, Model Bust of Queen Nefertiti. (Photo via Smarthistory)

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: Beautiful symmetry. A way in which line is unified throughout the entire portrait bust. For instance, follow the lines downward that are constructed by the contours of her headdress that tapers as it moves towards her chin. So her face and headdress create a perfect triangle. But that’s actually continued by the lines of her neck below her chin. And it’s accentuated by the lighting in this museum. But it really does create this sense of continuity from the top of the sculpture to its base.

DR. BETH HARRIS: What we’re describing is a new ideal of beauty that’s really different from the tradition of ancient Egyptian sculpture. And that’s because Nefertiti was the wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who established a new religion in ancient Egypt which was monotheistic instead of the traditional polytheistic religion. And with that, he created a new ideal of beauty that we see in the sculptures that were created during his reign.

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: That’s right. I think we see this sculpture really as a perfect exemplar. Nefertiti is especially interesting because we believe she did not simply function as the wife of the pharaoh. She is shown in so many portraits with the accoutrements of the ruler that we think that she actually shared power.

DR. BETH HARRIS: It’s interesting, this period that we call the Amarna period of Akhenaten’s reign, where we have two powerful women– his mother, Tiye, and his wife, Nefertiti.

DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: Both represented as beautiful women, as powerful women, and giving us a kind of insight into late Egyptian culture.

Backstory, by Dr. Naraelle Hohensee

In 2009, the refurbished Neues Museum in Berlin celebrated its reopening, with the bust of Nefertiti prominently displayed as one of its main attractions. The celebration coincided with one of the Egyptian government’s repeated pleas for the official return of the bust to Egypt. The museum has staunchly refused to give up the sculpture, asserting that the bust was acquired legally by the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt in 1912. Borchardt had excavated it along with several other objects from the studio of the ancient Egyptian sculptor Thutmose, and had brought his finds to Germany as part of an agreement with the Egyptian Antiquities Service. While there is no proof that Borchardt’s dealings were explicitly illegal, as early as 1925, the Egyptian government began to take issue with Germany’s possession of valuable antiquities. They began imposing sanctions, and the bust has been the source of tension between the two nations ever since.

This controversy relates to a general growing public awareness about the provenance—and politics—of antiquities held in European and American museums. In 2016, Nora al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles, two artists from Germany, made a bold statement about these issues by staging an event they called “NefertitiHack.” They secretly mapped the sculpture using a consumer-grade 3-D scanning device, and then released the data openly under a Creative Commons license. The artists’ intention was “to inspire a critical reassessment of today’s conditions and to overcome the colonial notion of possession in Germany,” according to their website.

Many groups have advocated for using digitally-produced replicas either as stand-ins for objects that are returned to their places of origin, or vice versa—as ways of offering highly accurate replicas in place of the originals. The sharing of data between institutions and groups who lay claim to objects has also been suggested as a way to ease tensions over restitution. Nelles and al-Badri’s project is a critical statement about the growing questions around repatriation and public access to objects via 3-D models and other data, as the Neues Museum does not allow photography or publicly share its own 3-D model of the bust.

Nora al-Badri, one of the artists behind NefertitiHack, stated:

“The head of Nefertiti represents all the other millions of stolen and looted artifacts all over the world currently happening, for example, in Syria, Iraq, and in Egypt…Archaeological artifacts as a cultural memory originate for the most part from the Global South; however, a vast number of important objects can be found in Western museums and private collections. We should face the fact that the colonial structures continue to exist today and still produce their inherent symbolic struggles.”

Over a century after it was excavated, the bust of Nefertiti remains a flashpoint for institutions and the public, driving us to consider the ways in which objects and their data are acquired, displayed, and shared.

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Articles in this section:

• Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris, "House Altar depicting Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Three of their Daughters," in Smarthistory, December 6, 2015 (CC BY-NC-SA)
• Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, "Portrait Head of Queen Tiye," in Smarthistory, December 9, 2015 (CC BY-NC-SA)
• Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris, "Thutmose, Model Bust of Queen Nefertiti," in Smarthistory, December 6, 2015 (CC BY-NC-SA)