Papers > History > Assess the importance of the Amarna letters in revealing key elements of Akhenaten s rule
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Assess the importance of the Amarna letters in revealing key elements of Akhenaten s rule
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...
In the fifth year of his reign Amenhotep IV made two crucial and iconoclastic decisions: he changed his name from Amenhotep ("Amun is content") to Akhenaten ("glory of the sun disc"), and he began to construct a new capital city called Akhentaten ("horizon of the Aten") at the site now known as El-Amarna in Middle Egypt. ... The ensuing phase in Egyptian history, consisting of Akhenatens reign and that of his ephemeral successor Smenkhkara, is therefore described as the Amarna period. ... The relieves and stelae in the temples and tombs of Akhenatens reign repeatedly show the royal family (Akhenaten, his wife Nefertiti, and the royal princesses) worshipping and making offerings to the Aten, which was depicted as a disc with arms outstretched downwards, often proffering Was Scepters and Ankh signs, symbolizing power and life respectively. The names of other deities - especially that of Amun - were excised from temple walls in an apparent attempt to establish the Aten as a single supreme deity, which has led many scholars to attribute the introduction of monotheism to Akhenaten mistakenly.
It has also been asserted, primarily on the basis of evidence of the Amarna Letters, that Akhenaten neglected foreign policy and allowed the Egyptian "empire" in western Asia to be severely eroded. ... It should also be borne in mind that the view of foreign policy in other reigns during the New Kingdom tends to be automatically distorted in that it derives principally from Egyptian temple reliefs and papyri rather than from genuine diplomatic documents such as the Amarna Letters.
After a sole reign of only about eighteen years, Akhenaten was succeeded first by an ephemeral figure called Smenkhakara (which may even by a pseudonym for Nefertiti) and soon afterwards by Tutankhaten, who may have been a younger son of Amenhotep III or a son of Akhenaten. Within a few years the city at El-Amarna had been abandoned in favor of the traditional administrative center at Memphis, and the new king had changed his name to TutanKhamun, effectively signaling the end of the supremacy of the Aten.
The Amarna tablets are named after the site Tell el-Amarna (in middle Egypt) where they were discovered. The first Amarna tablets were found by local inhabitants in 1887. ... Subsequent excavations at the site have yielded less than 50 out of the 382 itemized tablets and fragments which form the Amarna corpus known to date.
The el-Amarna letters are an ancient Egyptian collection of mainly diplomatic papers written in a space of about thirty-five years from about 1370 to 1335, i. ... They were found in the city of Akhentaten, a city built by Amenhotep IV (better known as Akhenaten) to become the new administrative capital of the Egyptian empire.
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Title: Assess the importance of the Amarna letters in revealing key elements of Akhenaten s rule
Words: 2264
Rating: None
Pages: 9.1
submitted by: yourmamaa
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