It was immediately clear that these burials were even simpler than the ones in the south had been. This cemetery was located near the main stone quarry and as the researchers began exhuming the graves they began to notice some striking realities. It was when another cemetery was opened up at the north end in 2015 that strange findings were seen.
She wrote that the results were fairly typical for the low end of ancient Egyptian society indications in these simple burials were of “poverty, hard work, poor diet, ill-health, frequent injury and relatively early death… There were modest variations in the wealth and style of burial, there was a fairly even mix of male to female individuals, and the age distribution showed the usual pattern for ancient populations.” All of this was about what was expected. Seeking to learn more about the lower class at the city, the project was digging at a cemetery in the southern end of the site where about 6,000 burials are thought to exist. Recently, Shepperson reported in The Guardian about the gruesome findings at Amarna. The site of Amarna has seen ongoing excavations by the Amarna Project, which archaeologist Mary Shepperson has been involved in since 2006. (Credit: Mary Shepperson/Courtesy of The Amarna Project) Looking south over the site of Amarna, which laid between the Nile River and the cliffs further inland. His successor Tutankhamun (King Tut) moved the capital to Memphis, and Amarna was never rebuilt. Conventional dates for the city are from 1346 BC to shortly after 1332 BC, which marked the death of Akhenaten. Most of its stones were scavenged for building projects at other locations. Once completed, it would only serve as a thriving city for about a decade, as it was quickly abandoned and demolished after the death of the heretic king. After this shift, Akhenaten had the entirely new city of Amarna constructed for his grand capital in a matter of five brief years. Pharaoh Akhenaten’s religious revolution exchanged the traditional pantheon of Egyptian gods for worship centered on the single deity Aten (depicted as the rays of light extending from the sun’s disk). The city of Amarna (located about 200 miles south of Cairo) had a very brief history. Assessing that idea by examining the finds and then applying a patterns approach will be the subject of this two-part Thinker post. Naturally, some have latched onto this find (and its similarities to the Exodus account) to propose that this might be evidence of Israelite slaves. Evidence from the graves indicates there was oppressive treatment of this disposable and possibly foreign workforce. These slaves had worked to build the city of Amarna, Egypt’s new capital city under Akhenaten, the eccentric pharaoh of the New Kingdom’s 18th Dynasty who is thought to have adopted a form of monotheism. – Exodus 1:13-14 (ESV)Īrchaeologists have uncovered the remains of a largely juvenile slave force, numbering in the thousands, buried in Egypt. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.
So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. (Credit: Mary Shepperson/Courtesy of The Amarna Project). A multiple burial of juveniles from the North Tombs Cemetery at Amarna.
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