Central Michigan University
Mount Pleasant, Michigan
[Illustration: ANCIENT EGYPT]
I
DISCOVERIES AT AMARNA
Early in the eighteenth century an Arab tribe known as the Beni Amran
settled in a semicircular plain about one hundred ninety miles south of
Cairo. Here, clustered along the east bank of the Nile, they built the
villages of El Till, El Hag Quandil, El Amariah and Hawata. When the
Danish traveler F. L. Norden visited the area in 1773 he noted that the
natives called it Beni Amran, or Omarne. The name Tell el Amarna, by
which it is popularly known today, seems to have been coined by John
Gardner Wilkinson, the amateur Egyptologist who did so much to
popularize Egyptian studies in Victorian Britain. Wilkinson combined the
name of the village El Till (altered to the more common word _tell_,
which means "mound" in Arabic) with the tribal name El Amarna, from the
Beni Amran. The name Tell el Amarna is not strictly correct, for the
ancient city of Akhetaton which occupied the site of Amarna does not
have a succession of levels indicating different periods of occupation,
such as archaeologists identify in the mounds of Palestine and
Mesopotamia. Akhetaton was built to be the capital of Pharaoh Amenhotep
IV, better known as Akhenaton, about 1365 B.C., and was abandoned half a
century later.