Tell el-Amarna

A wide, empty bay of desert on the east bank between Cairo and Luxor, ringed by cliffs. For about fifteen years in the 14th century BCE this was the capital of Egypt, built from nothing on virgin ground and abandoned almost as quickly.

What survives is foundations, not standing buildings — but the plan of an entire ancient city is legible on the ground, which exists almost nowhere else. Because nobody rebuilt over it, Amarna is the one place you can see how Egyptians actually laid out a town.

What to see

• The boundary stelae cut into the surrounding cliffs, on which the king swore the city's limits would never move
• The Great Temple of the Aten — open to the sky, with no dark inner sanctuary, because the god was the visible sun
• The North Palace and the workmen's village
• The rock tombs of the nobles in the cliffs, whose reliefs are the main source for what the city looked like

It is a long day from Luxor and there is little infrastructure. Go for the history, not for comfort.

Akhenaten came to the throne as Amenhotep IV, changed his name, and did something no Egyptian king had done: he abolished the worship of the traditional gods in favour of one — the Aten, the disc of the sun. He closed temples, cut the name of Amun out of monuments across Egypt, and moved the capital to this empty site, calling it Akhetaten, "Horizon of the Aten".

The art changed with the religion. Amarna sculpture and relief abandoned the rigid idealised style for something elongated, fluid and strange, and for the first time royal images show intimacy — the king and Nefertiti with their daughters on their laps, kissing them, one child reaching for an earring.

What was found here

In 1912 a German expedition under Ludwig Borchardt excavating the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose lifted from the floor the painted limestone bust of Nefertiti. It went to Berlin, where it remains, and Egypt has requested its return for a century.

Earlier, in 1887, a woman digging for sebakh — decayed mudbrick used as fertiliser — turned up clay tablets covered in cuneiform. They were the Amarna Letters: 382 pieces of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian court and the kings of Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni and the Hittites, plus anxious dispatches from vassal rulers in Canaan begging for troops. It is the single richest surviving archive of international relations in the Bronze Age.

Erased

Akhenaten's successors dismantled all of it. The city was abandoned within a few years of his death, the old gods were restored, the temples were pulled down and their blocks reused as rubble fill elsewhere. His name was struck from the king lists — which is why Abydos does not mention him.

Ironically, that is why so much survives. The blocks were buried inside later structures rather than weathered, and thousands have since been recovered essentially fresh.