Tomb #9 at Amara. Photo (cc) Ross Day.

The BBC’s promoting an episode of Timewatch broadcast at 20:10 on 26 January 2008 (and on your iPlayer if you live in the UK shortly after). This one looks like it could be worth watching. It’s news from the Amarna Project and archaeological project with an excellent website. Amarna is one of the most unusual places in Egypt. It was a capital built by Akhenaten who beat off stiff competition to be the strangest pharaoh Egypt ever had. If the ancient Egyptians had has their way, we wouldn’t know about Akhenaten.

Akhenaten was the pharoah who turned his back on the traditional religion of the ancient Egyptians. In place of the whole pantheon he put the Aten, the sun disc. I thought this was move from a polytheistic to a monotheistic religion, but some Egyptologists involuntarily quiver when then hear that. It seems it’s more complicated than that. What can be said was that the Aten was the most important divinity and its worship by Akhenaten, led to root and branch reforms of the state religion.

One of these changes was the move from Thebes and the priesthood of Amun-Re to a new site uncontaminated by other gods for his own religious base. This is the city of Amarna, or as Akhenaten called it Akhetaten, the Horizon of Aten. This fresh start might be helpful. The planning of the city could express cosmological beliefs of the Egyptians at the time of Akhenaten, without distortion from the restrictions imposed by buildings from earlier periods. Amarna is especially helpful as the site seems to have been rapidly abandoned after the pharaoh’s death. The problem is that life in Akhenaten’s Amarna could be very different to life in the typical worker’s perception of Amarna. To what extent did Akhenaten’s religion impact on the masses? The answer, according to findings from the Amarna project would suggest that Akhenaten’s religion warped the very bodies of his subjects. Life in Amarna was nasty, brutish and short – and so were the people living it.

The evidence is from burials.

Prof Jerry Rose of the University of Arkansas has been examining the bones found in the burials for several years. One of the advantages of working in Egypt is the soil is extremely dry, so even though the bones are over four thousand years old they’re still yielding useful information. One of the most shocking findings are the ages at death. There’s a chart you can look at and it’s pretty clear that Amarna was a lethal place. The 2007 report has a chart of its own. This shows that aging a skeleton isn’t always possible, but both charts indicate that a life in Amarna would likely be over at 35. The report by Melissa Zabecki, also from Arkansas, is grim. They had dental caries but probably didn’t complain too much about toothache as they were also likely to have extremely bad backs. Zabecki has found evidence of osteoarthritis and spinal trauma in many of the skeletons. Zabecki’s conclusion is that these people were worked to death.

Akhenaten wanted to change Egyptian religion overnight, and that can’t be done without a lot of work. The twisted bones of the workers of Amarna show some of the cost of turning from the old gods. It could be a fascinating programme. Then again Timewatch rendered the Sea Stallion voyage into a bit of a snooze, so maybe not.