Book Description

Over more than a century and a quarter of excavations the royal and administrative buildings in the city of Amarna have yielded the remains of many hundreds of statues that had been part of Akhenaten's visionary plan. But fragmentation and dispersal have up until now made the results almost invisible. Only a relatively small number of the original statues have been widely known, even to experts. The present publication brings together all these traces of the city's past to reveal the abundance, beauty, variety, and novelty of the statuary and to begin the process of reintegrating it in considerations of the temples and palaces of the city. The work is presented in two parts. The first volume presents extensive observations about the creation of the statuary, comprising chapters dealing with the range of materials and the methods of working them, a detailed explication of the novel creation of composite statuary, and an overview of the workshop buildings that have been identified so far at Amarna. In the second volume, the excavated fragments themselves, most of them previously unpublished, are catalogued in a series of chapters devoted to individual royal buildings. The original statues are envisioned and analysed for their contexts, resulting in new information about these buildings, the intentions and concerns behind them, and the evolution in those intentions.