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New evidence from Akhenaten’s capital suggests that a ‘disposable’ workforce of children and teenagers provided much of the labour for the city’s construction

There’s a whiff of magic about the site of Tell el-Amarna that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. It’s partly down to the effort of imagination needed to conjure a great capital of ancient Egypt from the sea of low humps stretching between the cultivation and the desert cliffs, and partly the long shadows cast by its founders – the ‘heretic’ pharaoh Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti.

Amarna came and went in an archaeological moment. It rose and fell with Akhenaten and his religious reformation, under which Egypt’s ancient pantheon of gods was briefly usurped by the worship of a single solar deity; the Aten.

On an uninhabited stretch of the Nile’s east bank, Amarna was founded, constructed and abandoned in under fifteen years. When Akhenaten died in 1332 BC, Egypt’s ancient religion was restored under his successor Tutankhamun and the heretical city of Amarna was flattened and forgotten.

Recent research at the site has focused on Amarna’s cemeteries; not the flashy rock-cut tombs of the royal family and its courtiers, but the simple desert graves of the ordinary Egyptians who lived and worked in Akhenaten’s city and never got to leave.

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