Funded by the American Research Center in Egypt’s Antiquities Endowment Fund (USAID), the project centres the survey, recording and protection of Amarna’s mudbrick houses. Houses form the bulk of Amarna as an archaeological site, and contribute much to its value as a heritage place. It has been estimated that Akhetaten had around 3000 houses, approximately 1000 of which were cleared in the early 1900s by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (1911–14) and Egypt Exploration Society (1921–36). Since fieldwork resumed in the 1970s, 14 or so houses have been investigated using modern techniques. Several hundred more residences remain unexcavated, mostly through the western part of the Main City.
Amarna’s ancient housing areas are under increasing threat from exposure and from modern urban encroachment and its side-effects, such as rising ground water. The threats to Amarna’s heritage are exacerbated by the fact that its boundaries are poorly demarcated, and its archaeological deposits are shallow and easily destroyed. Archaeological fieldwork has also left a complicated legacy. Most of the houses excavated in the early 1900s were left uncovered, and in the intervening years they have been gradually eroding away. Archaeological expeditions to the site have also done little, overall, to engage local communities. The Akhenaten’s City project centres the idea that heritage with demonstrable benefit has a greater chance of long-term survival, and asks how Amarna’s housing suburbs can become sites of increased, and more positive, engagements. On a day-to-day basis at Amarna, few people interact with the ancient houses and the heritage they represent. Tourists might stop quickly at one partly reconstructed house near the Small Aten Temple (Q44.1), but see little else of the housing suburbs, and there are few resources available for the wider public. For local communities, interactions with the houses are often negative, characterised by disagreements over land use. Researchers, meanwhile, rarely come to Amarna to study the houses directly, relying instead on excavation records.
The Akhenaten’s City project seeks to prolong the survival of Amarna’s urban heritage by developing and starting to implement strategies to transform the houses into more effective assets for research, education, outreach and tourism, in conjunction with direct protection initiatives. The project has four main elements which, in part, build from recent community archaeology and photogrammetry projects:
- A program of photogrammetry and on-site recording in the Main City. The goal here is to generate a large-scale landscape model of the Main City, and digital models of a sample of houses excavated in the early 1900s, while also re-recording the archaeology and architecture of the sampled houses.
- Construction of protective walls at particularly vulnerable parts of the site, in partnership with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, to give greater clarity about boundaries and prolong the time available to archaeologists to study these areas.
- A program of community archaeology and outreach, intended to include local voices in the work and continue to develop the Amarna Visitor Centre as a hub for community engagement.
- Targeted conservation of the house of the vizier Nakht, which was once a well-preserved villa, but is now heavily threatened by modern urban growth.
Outputs will include on-site infrastructure (e.g. protective walls, information panels), digital heritage assets (e.g. large-scale landscape and house models), and outreach resources (e.g. teaching guides for the Visitor Centre). The project will also generate a range of data that will inform on the condition of the site and threats it faces, stakeholders’ relationships with Amarna’s housing areas, the nature of the early excavations and reliability of their field records, and the urban nature and later history of Akhetaten itself.
Anna Stevens
Further reading
Lakin, T., E. Casey and A. Stevens. in press. A new cache of excavated artefacts from Amarna. Egyptian Archaeology.
Stevens, A. F. Balestra, D. Driaux, G.R. Dabbs, P. Docherty, S.L. Boonstra, G. Tully, J.E.M.F. Bos, T. Lakin, V. Gasperini, P. Rose and M. Bertram. 2024. Tell el-Amarna, Autumn 2023 to Summer 2024. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 110, 13–45.
Stevens, A., P. Docherty, K. Spence and G. Tully. 2025. What is the future for Egypt’s mudbrick heritage? A view from Amarna. Egyptian Archaeology Supplementary Issue 1.