Excerpt from The Tell El Amarna Period: The Relations of Egypt and Western Asia in the Fifteenth Century B. C. According to the Tell El Amarna Tablets As early as 1820 it was known in Europe that in Middle Egypt, on the east bank of the Nile, in the district between Minieh and Siut, there lay the remains of a great city of Ancient Egypt. The Prussian exploration expedition of 1842-45 gave special attention to this site, where indeed were found, about sixty miles south of Minieh, extensive ruins, beginning at the village of Haggi Kandil and covering the floor of a rock-bound valley named after the fellahîn village, El Amarna. At that time the ground-plan of the city was still easy to distinguish; the regular lines of the streets could be traced, and enough could be seen of the great design of the principal temple to excite the admiration of the discoverers. This example of the laying out of an ancient Egyptian town still remains almost unique, for of old, as now, private buildings were constructed of flimsy material. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

AMARNA--the name breathes mystery and romance. Called Akhet-Aten (horizon of the Aten) by its founder, 18th Dynasty Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten, it lies nearly forgotten today near a tiny village in Middle Egypt.First explored by Sir William Flinders Petrie in the last decade of the 19th century, this is his account of his marvelous discoveries there. He mapped palaces, temples, and common houses, finding statues and ceramics by the ton.Petrie's work was invaluable to our knowledge of ancient Egypt and the then-unknown reign of the heretic pharoah, Amenhotep IV--Akhenaten.