Archive for 26th of January, 2008
Robin Hood’s Stride
Jan 26th
“A third of a mile SSW the gritstone crag of Robin Hood’s Stride rises jaggedly with two stubby piles of boulders jutting up at either end of its flat top like the head and pricked-up ears of a wrinkled hippopotamus.”
Aubrey Burl. A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany. Yale University Press. page 53.
A lost religion written on its victims’ bones
Jan 26th
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 More >
