Chapter 3 City PlansTo reconstruct the city of Amarna in 3d space first required a coherent set of plans in order to provide an accurate layout of the site and gain some idea of the scale of the city area. With all the documentation that has been accumulated over the centuries, this would at first seem to be a relatively easy task, but for Amarna this was not the case.
Unlike most ancient Egyptian sites, which still have a fair proportion of the architecture intact, Amarna was purposefully dismantled by later pharaohs in an attempt to wipe Akhenaten from existence. What remains are the foundations of the city which until fairly recently were buried under the desert sand. Egyptologists have pieced together the layout of the city from excavations and pictures found in tombs nearby. Excavations made at other sites have revealed that much of the building material from Amarna was used to fill later monuments, mainly, the Temple of Amun at Karnak. This material, known as the ‘Talatat’, consists of broken wall decorations and tiled freezes. At present the many thousands of small blocks that make up the Talatat are being pieced together, with the help of computers to further aid Egyptologists in the reconstruction of life during Akhenaten’s reign and events at Amarna. To begin the search for an adequate set of plans, the internet was ‘trawled’ for a few weeks prior to the start of modeling. At first, results were a little scarce, but one site opened the doorway to a reasonable amount of relevant information – and maps! This site was ‘The Akhet-Aten Home Page’ at http://kate.stange.com/egypt/, later to become http://www.akhet-aten.com. The links from this website proved invaluable in gaining an overall ‘picture’ of the layout, and geographical orientation of the city. The next step was to look into the structure of the buildings. The City StructuresThe Amarna period was very different to all other ancient Egyptian periods in many ways, two major areas of change where in art and temple construction.
Elsewhere in As the city was built on a new site in the desert the architecture was all in the same style, with large open spaces, where the Aten’s rays could reach everyone.
Running through the middle of the Central
City was the King’s Road, along which it has been thought, chariots
were raced for entertainment. The road was cut by a structure
known as the King’s Bridge, which created an undisturbed pathway
for the king to move from his house to the palace. In the middle
of the bridge was an open area named ‘The Window of Appearances’,
and it was thought that from this opening the king would hand
out favours to his most loyal subjects. This structure has been
recreated in The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research is based in the University of Cambridge and in association with the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, the Amarna Research Foundation and the Egypt Exploration Society have done quite extensive research into the city of Amarna. In the summer of 1999 the Institute commissioned the construction of a scale model of the central city complex for exhibition, using the set of map sheets prepared by the Amarna Survey of the Egypt Exploration Society. The model is at a scale of 1:400 and covers an area 12 feet by 16 feet. Fortunately for this project the whole model was photographed and placed with full written documentation onto the internet which can be accessed from http://www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk/Projects/Amarna/Model/model.htm. This provided a wealth of additional information for the construction of the 3d version of the city, and also led to quite a few changes being made to the existing geometry. The
|
|||||||||||||||
| BACK | |||||||||||||||
