EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
Flinders Petrie and the image world of Akhetaten Marie Vandenbeusch, Gianluca Miniaci and Stephen Quirke look at the excavations directed by Flinders Petrie at Akhetaten in 1891-92.The rarely seen small finds allow insights into the ancient city’s image world as well as into the distribution and display strategies of the museums that now house these objects. larger houses, the palace of the king, temple outlines and foundation deposits. Although glazing technology is not his target, he writes (Journal, 29 Nov- 5 Dec 1891): ‘it is instructive to notice the differences between this place and Gurob, of the same age,’ - ‘Moulds for pottery ornament abound here; but none occur there.’ In the new year, Petrie reported a mass find: ‘The main matter this week has been turning over some remains of amulet factories; over a thousand pottery moulds have been found, and much remains to be turned out yet. I have sorted out 70 or 80 varieties’ (Journal, 3 - 9 January 1892). A fortnight later, ‘A fresh factory of pendants has been found, and more hundreds of moulds come pouring in, some fresh types among them’ (Journal, 10 - 24 January 1892). In the 1894 publication, he gives the staggering tally of moulds from across the site (p. 30): ‘I brought nearly five thousand from Tell el Amarna, after rejecting large quantities of the commonest; and these comprise over five hundred varieties here illustrated, beside many smaller differences. All of these I have classified into series, and many of the sets have been given to public museums; other sets remain awaiting distribution to collections as opportunity may arise. Of the moulded objects about two thousand were found, including fragments.’ The task of sorting the hauls and publishing fully 596 ‘varieties’ deserves recognition as one of the great typological tools for understanding the ancient city, alongside its ceramic and sculptural repertoires. The published result combines three different object categories: rings, pendants, and inlays. Petrie himself notes how one category may be more characteristic of one part of the site: ‘nearly all the broken rings, etc., with cartouches’ came from palace waste heaps explored from March 1892, while Aten moulds were found with moulds with the names Akhenaten and Nefertiti ‘north of the temple, in some part of the town, from whence the Arabs brought [them] to me’ (Tell el Amarna, 1894: 28). His composite approach offers the advantage of re-uniting a landscape of imagery common to faience producers and designers, at the site. Plates 14 - 15 start the series of ‘scarabs, rings, etc.’ bearing royal and divine
Few sites in Egyptian archaeology raise passions as intensely as Akhetaten, ‘Horizon of the Sun’, the city founded by king Akhenaten in his breach with religious tradition. The newly exclusive worship of the Creator, visible as Aten, the solar sphere, generated a visual style which confused or repelled 19th-century historians, and captivated audiences of art in the 20th century. For archaeologists, the site is famous for other features: domestic life, preserved by the short time-span of the city’s inhabitation, and the production of glass and faience, filling its story with colour. That last, industrial story returned to life in excavations directed by Flinders Petrie in the winter of 1891-1892. Despite a report published in 1894, his contribution to our knowledge of the Akhetaten image world remains dormant in the general picture of the city, hidden in his archives and collections. Over the past five years, a new project at the Petrie Museum set out to restore this part of the picture to public and scientific attention. The story of Petrie’s excavation can be retrieved in outline from his 1894 Tell el-Amarna report, from the appointment diaries in the Petrie Museum, and from his ‘Journals’, a kind of newsletter to select readers, at the Griffith Institute, Oxford (vivid excerpts in Margaret Drower, Letters from the Desert, 2004). As he was not yet professor, and freelance excavators were not permitted, Petrie negotiated an official work permit with the help of the occupying English authorities (his Journal records how Saqqara was his first choice, Abydos his second, but both were reserved for the Antiquities Service). On 17 November 1891, then 38 years old, he arrived at the site with five Fayoumi supervisors who had previously excavated with him, including his future right-hand man Ali Suefi of al-Lahun. Thirty-two names in his worklists probably record recruits from villages near the site. We do not have their account of the season, and Petrie did not supervise closely, so exact find-places cannot be given for individual objects. Petrie wrote home: ‘It is an overwhelming site to deal with … After a few hours I concluded that I should not attempt to make a continuous plan of the whole place,’ and aimed instead at some 30