Dynastic History | The North Tombs, Amarna — The Cemetery Under the Officials' Cliff

The rock-cut tombs in the northern cliffs at Amarna were prepared for Akhenaten's senior men: Meryre I, high priest of the Aten; Panehsy; Ahmose; Pentu. Their walls carry the reign's standard scene, the king at a window handing down rewards, the disc above with hands at the ends of its rays. Most were never finished. On the published record none was completed or used for a burial. Akhenaten reigned about seventeen years on either of the chronologies in use, and the city did not long outlive him.

In the desert near these tombs the Amarna Project excavated a non-elite cemetery in 2015 and 2017. Around 231 individuals were lifted from closely packed pit graves, out of an estimated 3,500 to 5,000 burials. The age profile is the finding: the great majority were between 7 and 25 years old when they died, with widespread skeletal evidence of hard working lives. Anna Stevens and Gretchen Dabbs, publishing in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology in 2018, read the group as labourers.

It matched what the South Tombs Cemetery had already shown. Between 2005 and 2013 that site gave up 381 graves holding some 494 people: low adult stature, frequent linear enamel hypoplasia, the enamel marker of growth interrupted in childhood, and spinal trauma and degenerative joint disease. Burials were mostly pits with textile and matting; forty wooden coffins in the whole excavated sample.

The walls above are the state's account of Akhetaten. The graves are the only account left by the people who built and provisioned it. The North Tombs sit on the visitor route, reached by a track running up from the plain.

📸 Cover: the northern cliffs at Amarna with the entrances to the North Tombs, Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons