The city of el?Amarna as a source for the study of urban society in ancient Egypt

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Abstract
King Akhenaten's short‐lived capital of el‐Amarna still seems to offer the least fragmentary example of a city layout from New Kingdom Egypt. Although often regarded as of unusual spaciousness, taking advantage of the ready availability of building land on a desert site, there are strong grounds for arguing that, at the least, its range of housing reflects a mature, developed urbanism that must have been transplanted from a parent site, and even perhaps that it exemplifies a more expansive form of urbanism that had developed much more widely in Egypt during the New Kingdom. Since inscriptions are so few, and since pottery and small finds probably belong as much to ubiquitous servant activity as to anything else, the architecture remains the most significant reflection of the society that existed there. Possible ways of evaluation are sketched out. The study is intended as a background to the planned resumption of fieldwork at el‐Amarna by the Egypt Exploration Society.

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