Dynastic History | The Great Aten Temple, Amarna — More Than a Hundred and Fifty Offering Tables

In 2012 a British mission went back to the Great Aten Temple. Petrie and Carter had dug here in the 1890s; John Pendlebury's Egypt Exploration Society team cleared the stone temple area in the 1930s. What the current programme keeps recovering is less a shrine than a commissary.

The enclosure wall ran roughly 300 metres across, and 800 or 900 metres deep depending on which published survey you take. The sanctuary at the rear measured about 48 by 32 metres and held, on the Amarna Project's count, perhaps more than 150 offering tables. The Small Aten Temple down the road had around 106 more in its first court alone, on the same count. South of the great temple stood bakeries, identified by the drifts of broken bread-mould pottery around them. Food was presented to the Aten and then redistributed: the excavators read the temple as supplying the court's dependants and a substantial share of the city's population. On that reading the table count is a ration figure as much as a liturgical one, and the queue outside the gate is part of what the building was for.

Almost none of the stone remains. It was carried off for reuse after the city was given up, and what survives is the gypsum concrete poured into the foundation trenches, holding the plan like a negative. Since 2019 the mission has been laying fresh limestone and mud brick along those lines, separated from the ancient material by a layer of sand so the two can be told apart; by the close of the 2020 season the new north wall ran 100 metres. What a visitor walks today is a marked-out outline, not a ruin.

📸 Cover: the Great Aten Temple as drawn in the tomb of Meryre I at Amarna — a facsimile of the ancient relief, not a photograph of the site; public domain via Wikimedia Commons