In the Gulf of Mexico, archaeologists believe they
have identified a nineteenth-century whaling ship
crewed by a diverse group of New Englanders
By DANIEL WEISS
Monday, September 12, 2022
The first few weeks of May 1836 were pleasant ones for the whaling brig Industry. Based in Westport, Massachusetts, the two-masted, 64-foot-long ship had been built in 1815 and launched the next year. Now, two decades into her career, Industry and her crew of 15 men had been out for just over a year hunting sperm whales as far east as the Azores and as far south as the Caribbean. They had built up a store of several hundred barrels of sperm whale oil and were making their way back home when they detoured into the Gulf of Mexico in hopes of topping up their prized cargo.
Before the widespread availability of petroleum, sperm whale oil was a valuable commodity. It burned clearly and brightly without smoking, making it ideal for illuminating homes and lighthouses. It was a fine lubricant even at very high temperatures, and was used to oil timepieces, scientific instruments, and industrial machinery. In addition, spermaceti, a waxy substance harvested from sperm whales’ heads, was used to produce the brightest, cleanest-burning candles. And ambergris, an odoriferous material found in some sperm whales’ bowels, was coveted as an ingredient in perfume and worth its weight in gold. “If you were good at killing whales, then you had the ability to make cash,” says Michael Dyer, curator of maritime history at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. “Anyone who participated in the whaling trade in the early nineteenth century could stand to do quite well at it.”
In the Gulf, Industry enjoyed a stretch of fine weather with steady winds and encountered a fellow Westport whaling brig, Elizabeth. The two ships “mated,” in the nautical parlance, and sailed in close proximity for several days. They were a few miles apart when a vicious squall set in on the evening of May 26. “The thunder rolled heavily and in the most terrific tones,” reports a June 20, 1836, article in the New-Bedford Gazette & Courier. “The lightnings flashed vividly and constantly in every direction during the night.”
Industry got the worst of it. She was knocked on her side by the wind and waves, and nearly capsized. Both her masts snapped, and all but one of the small boats the crew used to pursue whales were washed away. The only thing keeping her afloat was the buoyancy provided by her precious store of sperm whale oil. The crew piled into their one remaining boat and rowed to Elizabeth, which took them in and sailed back to Westport. Around a week later, a Nantucket-based whaler named Harmony came upon the abandoned Industry and salvaged 230 of her 310 barrels of oil, along with valuable equipment including parts of her sails and rigging, her anchor cable, and at least one of her anchors. No longer buoyed by her full store of oil, Industry slipped under the water and began to drift to the seafloor. Of some 214 whaling ships known to have worked in the Gulf of Mexico between 1788 and 1878, Industry is the only one known to have sunk there.
During a 2011 sonar survey of a stretch of the Gulf of Mexico slated for petroleum exploration, what appeared to be a shipwreck was detected around 70 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River and reported to the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). Six years later, a test of an autonomous underwater vehicle captured images of the wreck, which lies 6,000 feet below the surface. The images showed features—in particular, what appeared to be a tryworks, or hearth used to render whale blubber into oil, and anchors of a style dating to the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century—that suggested the wreck might be that of a whaling vessel from the early nineteenth century. In February 2022, a team led by marine archaeologists James Delgado and Michael Brennan of the archaeological firm SEARCH and Scott Sorset of BOEM monitored footage from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration remotely operated vehicle (ROV) as it spent several hours thoroughly documenting the wreck.
Sidebar:
A Maritime Magnate
Sidebar:
Passage to Freedom
Images from the site collected by the ROV were used to create a 3-D model called an orthomosaic. Using this model, the researchers determined that the wreck’s length is 63 feet and its beam, or greatest width, is 20 feet. Both measurements are nearly identical to those of Industry as recorded in her original certificate of registration. Details of the ship’s structure that could be gleaned from the wreck site also meshed well with what is known of Industry: The wreck is a two-masted vessel with a shallow hull that lacked copper sheathing. The absence of sheathing meant that Industry’s hull was unprotected against the depredations of marine organisms, and the ship’s logbooks include references to her tendency to leak. The location of the wreck, too, some 83 miles north-northeast of Industry’s last known location, as recorded by the crew of Harmony, is consistent with the trajectory of a ship slowly sinking while caught in the Gulf of Mexico’s Loop Current. “We’ve gone back and looked at the data,” says Delgado, “and there are no other known wrecks within 100 miles that would fit.”
One especially striking feature of the wreck is the dearth of artifacts—which lends support to the theory that it is indeed Industry. “There are things that are absolutely missing that would be there,” Delgado says. “This vessel has all the appearance of having been stripped, which we know was the case with Industry.” The smattering of items that researchers were able to document is also consistent with what would have been aboard Industry. The outline of a wooden cask visible at the center of the wreck’s hold may be the remnants of an oil barrel that remained onboard as the ship sank. A number of glass liquor bottles appear to date to the early nineteenth century. There are three anchors, all of a style known as Old Admiralty Pattern, which dates to the late eighteenth century and was commonly used through the early nineteenth century. Wedged next to one of the anchors is a pane of glass that, Delgado says, would have fit as a stern window in a vessel of Industry’s time. “It was very obvious that we were looking at the form of a vessel from that early nineteenth-century period,” he says.
When the researchers got a close look at what they had initially believed was a tryworks, however, they found it puzzling. A typical whaleship tryworks consisted of a pair of large iron cauldrons embedded in a brick hearth. Once the crew caught a whale, they would flense, or strip, the blubber from the carcass with large hooks and knives, winch it onto the deck in strips, chop it into small pieces, and cook it in the cauldrons over high heat around the clock until the fat was rendered into oil. “It’s kind of like making bacon,” says Judith Lund, a whaling historian and former curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. “When you make bacon, you pour off the grease and eat the bacon. It’s the opposite way with whaling: You save the oil, and the stuff that’s left over gets thrown on the fire to boil more blubber.”
Rather than a typical tryworks, the researchers saw an iron stove known as a camboose resting atop a pile of bricks, a peculiar find for several reasons. First, shipboard cambooses known from the archaeological record typically sat on an insulating sheet of lead or iron, but no such metal sheet is evident at the wreck site. Second, unlike other known shipboard cambooses, which tend to have flat surfaces for heating cooking pots, the wreck’s camboose features two large open wells, both of which appear to be fitted with iron pots or cauldrons. For Delgado, this raises the possibility that the camboose was a hybrid tryworks, insulated by a brick hearth and used to render blubber into oil.
However, the pots in the camboose don’t appear large enough to have handled the amount of blubber that the crew of Industry would have had to process. The crew would also have needed a stove to cook food. There are accounts of whaling crews occasionally snacking on doughnuts fried in whale oil and pork rind–like “cracklings” fished out of the rendering cauldrons, but this would hardly have been sufficient to live on. An alternative scenario, says Delgado, is that the camboose was used as the ship’s cookstove, while a brick hearth held cauldrons that are missing—either removed by Harmony’s crew, or lost in the storm or during the ship’s journey to the seafloor. The camboose might have been adjacent to this tryworks and come to rest on the bricks as the wreck settled. Nonetheless, suggests Delgado, the wreck appears to be the lost whaling ship. “We’ve got a wreck in the right area, the size fits, the age fits, the rigging fits,” he says. “We’ve looked at the other targets around it, and there’s nothing quite like it. So, in the absence of a bell or something with the ship’s name on it, we believe it is likely Industry.”
Sidebar:
A Maritime Magnate
Sidebar:
Passage to Freedom
Like other New England ports such as New Bedford, Nantucket, and New London, Westport grew wealthy from its involvement in the whaling industry. Unlike these other ports, however, which by the 1830s were home to larger whaleships that embarked on multiyear voyages to the Pacific or Indian Ocean, most of Westport’s fleet consisted of smaller ships such as Industry that went out for at most 14 months or so and usually stuck to the North Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico. “Westport crews were, generally speaking, from the immediate community, and they all knew each other and were often related to each other,” says Dyer. For instance, according to Robin Winters of the Westport Free Public Library, Hiram Francis, who began Industry’s final voyage as captain, was a half brother of George Sowle, captain of Elizabeth, the ship that rescued Industry’s crew. There was also at least one pair of brothers aboard Industry when it got caught in the storm: David Sowle, who began the final voyage as first mate and appears to have taken over as captain along the way, and his younger brother Jethro.
New England whaling crews, including those from Westport, regularly included African Americans, Native Americans, and those with mixed heritage. (See "Maritime Magnate") In part, this was because whaling ports were heavily Quaker communities with strong humanitarian, antislavery leanings. Whaleships were also relatively meritocratic workplaces, with crew members by and large rewarded for their abilities without regard to their ethnic or racial background. “This is one of the few pre–Civil War opportunities for African Americans to be equal, to be accepted on the merits of who they are as a person and the work they can do as opposed to being judged by the color of their skin,” says Delgado. “If you worked hard, and you worked with others, then you got equal pay. You don’t get different pay because you’re Native or African American.”
Industry’s crew lists provide evidence that a significant portion of her crew over the course of her career was African American. While these lists don’t directly identify individuals’ race or ethnicity, they do specify their physical traits, describing their skin as “light,” “dark,” “mulatto,” “coloured,” “brown,” or “yellow” and their hair as “brown,” “black,” “wooly,” or “curley.” It appears that at least one crew member on Industry’s final voyage, named Charles Hall, was African American.
When the ship foundered in the storm, Hall would have faced peril not only from the turbulent Gulf, but also from local authorities if he were to wash up in a nearby southern port. There, Hall might have been targeted by ordinances known as seaman’s laws, according to which free Black people could be thrown in jail and, if they failed to pay for their upkeep, could be sold into slavery. For Dyer, the contrast between the freedom Black sailors enjoyed on whaleships and the potential threat to their liberty on land is striking. (See “Passage to Freedom”) “If they’re onboard a Yankee whaler, they’re carrying a seaman’s passport and protection paper,” he says. “This means that Black sailors in foreign ports were protected under the full weight of American sovereignty, but they could be arrested in South Carolina or New Orleans.” Fortunately for Hall and the rest of the crew, Elizabeth was available to take them home to Westport. Once there, several of those who had weathered the storm on Industry, including Hall, headed back out to sea within the next few months. After all, there were more whales to hunt and plenty of money to be made.
How King Tutankhamun’s family forever changed
the land of the Nile
By JASON URBANUS
Monday, August 22, 2022
The banks of the Nile River in modern-day Luxor are strewn with so many ruins of Egypt’s illustrious past that the area is sometimes called the world’s largest open-air museum. Luxor was once ancient Thebes, the erstwhile capital of Egypt, and for more than 1,000 years, the pharaohs erected temples, monuments, and sculptures there as testaments to their power, wealth, and piety. The New Kingdom (ca. 1550–1070 B.C.), which many scholars believe was the cultural and artistic zenith of Egyptian civilization, was an especially prolific period. Among the archaeological sites on the Nile’s east bank are two of the largest and most important temples in all of Egypt, the Karnak Temple, called the “most selected of places” by ancient Egyptians, and the Luxor Temple, known to them as the “southern sanctuary.” These two massive religious complexes, both of which celebrated the holy Theban trinity of Amun-Ra, the greatest of gods, his consort Mut, and their son Khonsu, still boast reminders of their former glory—ornate columns, giant statues, soaring obelisks, and expertly carved reliefs. The complexes were connected by an almost two-mile-long grand processional way known as the Avenue of Sphinxes, lined with more than 600 ram-headed statues and sphinxes carved in stone.
The most prominent archaeological remnants on the west bank, an area known to scholars as the “city of the dead,” are a group of mortuary temples built by some of the New Kingdom’s most notable rulers, including Hatshepsut (r. ca. 1479–1458 B.C.), Ramesses II (r. ca. 1279–1213 B.C.), and Ramesses III (r. ca. 1184–1153 B.C.). Mortuary or funerary temples were not where pharaohs were entombed, but where they were commemorated and worshipped for eternity after their deaths, alongside other Egyptian gods. Dwarfing all these complexes was the one known to have been built by Amenhotep III (r. ca. 1390–1352 B.C.).
Amenhotep III presided over Egypt during an unprecedented time that is often referred to as the Egyptian Golden Age. The pharaoh initiated an extraordinary building campaign that spurred urban growth in his capital of Thebes. He commissioned monumental structures such as his mortuary temple, the scale of which is only just beginning to be understood as a result of archaeological research over the past two decades. The picture of Amenhotep III’s “golden” Thebes has only been enhanced by the recent chance discovery of a previously unknown city built during his reign, now buried amid the monuments of the west bank. Some archaeologists consider this city one of the most important discoveries of the past century in Egypt. The remnants of both the temple and the city now stand as potent reminders of an era of peace and prosperity that preceded one of the most tumultuous periods in Egyptian history.
A century ago, in the autumn of 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter stunned the world with images of a tomb he had discovered in the Valley of the Kings on the Nile’s west bank. The photographs showed a small burial chamber filled with some 5,000 objects stacked nearly floor to ceiling, many of them made of gold. The tomb held the remains and funerary goods of Tutankhamun (r. ca. 1336–1327 B.C.), a relatively unheralded pharaoh who became Egypt’s ruler at the age of nine and reigned for only a decade.
Archaeologists believed that, like several other 18th Dynasty (ca. 1550–1295 B.C.) pharaohs, Tutankhamun likely had a mortuary temple somewhere along the Nile’s west bank—but they had been unable to find it in such a vast area dotted with ruins. However, a clue to the temple’s location may have been buried with the pharaoh himself. Among the golden chairs, beds, and chariots was a relatively simple pottery vessel with an inscription suggesting that Tutankhamun’s temple was located near a place on the west bank known today as Medinet Habu. “The inscription indicated that the mortuary temple was built in the most sacred area of the god Amun, which is Medinet Habu,” says Egyptologist Zahi Hawass. “I thought further investigation was needed in this area.”
Following this small but promising piece of evidence, in 2020 Hawass began his quest to find the temple just north of Medinet Habu, near the site of the mortuary temples of Ay (r. ca. 1327–1323 B.C.) and Horemheb (r. ca. 1323–1295 B.C.), two of Tutankhamun’s successors. As the excavations unfolded, Hawass’ team failed to turn up definitive evidence of Tutankhamun’s mortuary temple, but instead found something unexpected. As they began removing layers of debris amassed over thousands of years, they gradually exposed a network of well-preserved mudbrick walls that seemed to extend in every direction. Eventually they revealed streets, houses, storerooms, artists’ workshops, and industrial spaces, along with at least 1,000 artifacts. Some of the walls still stood to a height of 12 feet. Yet the settlement was an enigma as no ancient records mention it. Scholars wondered when it was founded, who built it, and what it was called. The answers became apparent when Hawass uncovered a series of wine jars. Mudbrick seals used to close the vessels were inscribed with hieroglyphs that spelled out the name of the city—Tehn Aten, or “Dazzling” Aten, a name that unequivocally pointed to one ruler: Tutankhamun’s grandfather, the pharaoh Amenhotep III. “I originally called it the Golden City or the Lost City because it dates to the reign of Amenhotep III, which was the Golden Age of ancient Egypt, and because nothing was known about it,” Hawass says.
During the New Kingdom—with one brief interlude—Amun (or Amun-Ra), the supreme god, was worshipped as first among the Egyptian gods. Over time, however, Amenhotep III increasingly began to portray himself as a sun god and promoted a new aspect of the deity known as Aten to prominence. Aten was the disk of the sun, the giver of light and life, and Amenhotep III adopted the epithet “the dazzling Aten” for himself as well.
The city of Dazzling Aten was just one part of the extensive building program Amenhotep III carried out throughout Egypt. The pharaoh was responsible for commissioning some of the grandest monuments Egypt had ever seen, and he ruled during a period when Egyptian artists were extremely prolific—more statues of Amenhotep III survive today than of any other Egyptian pharaoh. Through his excavations, Hawass has discovered that Dazzling Aten was linked to Amenhotep III’s greatest project of all: his enormous mortuary temple.
Amenhotep III was the ninth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, one of ancient Egypt’s most storied bloodlines. Among its rulers were conquerors such as Ahmose (r. ca. 1550–1525 B.C.) and Thutmose III (r. ca. 1479–1425 B.C.), military commanders including Horemheb, the controversial king Akhenaten (r. ca. 1349–1336 B.C.), his renowned wife Nefertiti, and Tutankhamun, perhaps Egypt’s most famous ruler. The 18th Dynasty was the first dynasty of the New Kingdom and began when its founder, Ahmose, drove out the Hyksos, foreign kings who originally hailed from the Levant and who had ruled parts of northern Egypt for more than 200 years. Ahmose’s reunification of Egypt ushered in a period of unparalleled prosperity.
Amenhotep III achieved some military success by launching campaigns into Nubia early in his reign and benefited greatly from the martial exploits of his great-grandfather Thutmose III. He inherited a territory that stretched across more than 1,000 miles from modern Sudan to Syria. The gold that poured into his coffers from this great empire and the relative peace the country enjoyed enabled Amenhotep III to employ an army of expert architects, builders, painters, sculptors, and artisans who expressed the glory of his age in art and architecture. He commissioned the construction of and sponsored the restoration of temples and monuments up and down the Nile and transformed the capital of Thebes. On the east bank, he carried out extensive additions and renovations to the Karnak and Luxor Temples, as well as to smaller religious complexes. On the west bank, the pharaoh built himself a vast sprawling estate at the site of Malqata. This lavish complex was the largest residence in Egypt and included an artificial harbor measuring one and a half miles long.
Yet no building project of Amenhotep III’s compared to his mortuary temple, one of the grandest religious structures ever built. The entire temple precinct was once surrounded by a painted mudbrick wall that enclosed more than four million square feet, or around 95 acres. The first pylon, or main entrance, was guarded by two colossal statues of the seated king. A grand processional way then led through two additional elaborate pylons, the gates of which were flanked by a pair of giant statues of Amenhotep III as well. It then entered a great peristyle court with a forest of columns shaped like bundles of papyrus where hundreds of free-standing statues were installed. Near the rear of the complex was a temple dedicated to Amun-Ra, as well as the mortuary temple proper of Amenhotep III, where the dead king received the gifts and offerings that would sustain him in his journey through the afterlife.
Although Amenhotep III, like other pharaohs, called his mortuary temple the House of Millions of Years, in actuality it only lasted for a century and a half. Around 1200 B.C., a devastating earthquake reduced it to ruins. Its stones, bricks, statues, and other materials were carted off to be reused in nearby construction projects and to adorn new temples, especially those of the pharaohs Ramesses II and Merneptah (r. ca. 1213–1203 B.C.). What was left was periodically flooded, until most of the sanctuary was covered in six to 10 feet of alluvial deposits. The greatest temple in ancient Egypt had all but disappeared.
All that remained were the two gargantuan statues of Amenhotep III sitting at what had once been the temple’s main entrance. The northern statue was named Memnon by the Romans who associated it with the Ethiopian Trojan War hero-king Memnon, these behemoths each weigh more than 720 tons and rise to a height of nearly 70 feet. For more than 3,000 years, they towered above the Nile plain, but little else of the original structure was visible—that is, until the late 1990s, when Egyptologist Hourig Sourouzian began to lament the condition of the ruins and wonder what might still be buried beneath the surface. “The colossi were all you saw,” she says. “There were some column bases and fallen fragmented sculptures, but it looked like a field. I said, ‘I wish someone could do something to save this ruined temple.’” Sourouzian, with Rainer Stadelmann of the German Archaeological Institute and a few colleagues, made a proposal to the Egyptian authorities. They founded the Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project, of which she is the current director. Over the past two and a half decades, her team has grown from a few scholars and a handful of workers to a total of more than 300. Their goal is to save the last remains of the temple from further degradation and to at least partially restore the parts that were felled by the earthquake or damaged by the passage of time.
The focus of Sourouzian’s project is mainly conservation rather than excavation, but she has occasionally found it necessary to dig in certain areas. “We have emergency cases to solve, but in order to conserve, we have to excavate to identify the objects that need to be conserved,” she says. “While cleaning and digging, we discovered so much. In the beginning, I could have never imagined there were so many things left to discover.” Within the temple precinct, Sourouzian and her team have unearthed tens of thousands of sculpture fragments that attest to the grandeur of the temple’s artistic program. Its halls and courts once teemed with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of statues. “Because Amenhotep III’s reign was so prosperous and because they had so many brilliant sculptors and artists in the workshops, they could produce so many sculptures,” says Sourouzian. “And each of them is an all-time masterpiece.”
To date, the team has reconstructed part of the peristyle court, which was once adorned with two huge stone stelas recording Amenhotep III’s accomplishments, as well as dozens of statues of the pharaoh and sculptures depicting sphinxes, a crocodile, a hippopotamus, falcon gods, and other deities. They have also discovered hundreds of statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet that once lined the court’s walls and passageways. Discovering such a great number of representations of the goddess is extraordinary, explains Sourouzian. “That our project would find so many was really a surprise,” she says. Scholars continue to question why effigies of the goddess were present in such great numbers in Amenhotep III’s temples; some suggest a plague may have ravaged Egypt at some point during his reign or perhaps Amenhotep III himself was ill and needed Sekhmet’s protection, Sourouzian says, because besides being a goddess who spreads illness, she also cures. Sourouzian believes that the abundance of statues may have also had to do with Sekhmet’s and Amenhotep III’s shared close connection with the sun. “After thirty years of reign, we know that this king celebrated his first jubilee, and later two more, and when he does that, he is assimilated to Ra and becomes a sun god,” she says. “Sekhmet is the manifestation of the daughter of Ra and she lights fires to annihilate the enemies of the sun. So Amenhotep surrounded himself with Sekhmets. You will find that the king made this monument to serve the gods, to be beneficial to them. The most important thing was to perform his piety.”
One of the project’s most daunting endeavors has been to reerect the temple’s enormous statues. In a painstaking process, each of the hundreds of fragments of a given statue is cleaned, conserved, and joined to neighboring pieces. Then, these massive stone figures, each weighing hundreds of tons, must be carefully lifted and set back in their original positions. “It’s hard work,” says Sourouzian, “but we are constantly fascinated by this extraordinary heritage and we are strengthened every day by knowing we have saved these ruins from oblivion and destruction.”
Thus far the team has successfully raised numerous sculptures within the peristyle court as well as the two 45-foot-tall striding statues of the pharaoh that were once positioned at the temple’s Northern Gate. Their largest undertaking has been reconstructing the pairs of colossi that once flanked the second and third pylons along the grand processional way. Before the project started, it was not known how much, if any, of these gigantic works had survived. To the excavators’ delight, they found that most of the statues’ bulk was still buried where the figures had fallen during the earthquake—and that both their state of preservation and their artisanship were awe-inspiring. Sourouzian was especially moved when she first saw the renderings of Amenhotep III’s wife Tiye, whose figure was carved next to the right leg of the pharaoh in each of the seated statues. “Four times I was surprised and joyful when we discovered the statues of the queen hidden under the four colossal statues of the pharaoh that we uncovered,” Sourouzian says. “It is unforgettable and I will always keep those moments in my eyes and heart.”
After decades of work, the splendor and grandeur of Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple can finally begin to be imagined. Sourouzian believes that there would not have been a great deal of open space within the enormous enclosure. Instead, it would have been filled with smaller temples, courtyards, processional ways, gardens, pools, storerooms, and priests’ quarters. Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple would have rivaled the great Karnak Temple across the river, but that complex was added to and built up over a period of 2,000 years until it eventually became the largest religious complex in the world, a distinction it retains. By contrast, Amenhotep III’s temple was completed during his 39-year reign. “Each Egyptian king liked to say they had done things that had never been seen before and that they surpassed all that was done in the past,” says Sourouzian. “But Amenhotep III really did surpass many things that were done before him. It’s a fantastic achievement which corresponds to the height of Egyptian civilization.”
Evidence of one way the pharaoh was able to accomplish this may lie just a few hundred yards away from his mortuary temple. The logistics of supplying and maintaining a complex of this size would have been extremely complicated and involved thousands of people. It would have required its own support city, one that, in fact, eventually rose just beyond its gates—the city of Dazzling Aten. Hawass’ ongoing excavations have thus far uncovered parts of three separate districts surrounded by serpentine walls. These districts were likely part of an even more extensive settlement—which may have reached the gates of Amenhotep III’s Malqata Palace to the southwest and Deir el-Medina to the north, where the workers who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived. For Hawass, this new discovery dispels the misconception that, unlike other contemporaneous cultures, ancient Egypt lacked major metropolises. “It is the largest ancient Egyptian settlement ever found,” he says. “Egypt was not a civilization without cities.”
Dazzling Aten had residential and administrative quarters, where people lived and royal officers carried out official business, but perhaps its most telling characteristic was its industrial space. There were numerous workshops producing faience jewelry, clothes, sandals, leather goods, food, and even toys for children living in the Malqata Palace. “The city really existed to provide the palace and the temples with what they needed,” Hawass says. Most recently, a large lake was discovered north of the city that provided fresh water not only for drinking and cooking, but also for the city’s booming mudbrick industry, which manufactured the materials for Amenhotep III’s building projects.
There is even evidence that sculptors working and living in Dazzling Aten created the hundreds of statues that once decorated the great peristyle court of Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple. “We have uncovered a workshop where the statues of Sekhmet were crafted,” Hawass says. “I believe they were all built in this city.” It’s also likely, he says, that some of the extra-ordinary objects that would be entombed with Tutankhamun just a few decades later were originally crafted by Dazzling Aten’s artisans. “It was the Golden Age of the New Kingdom,” says Hawass, “but if anyone closes their eyes to imagine the magnificence of this area with the palaces and the city of Dazzling Aten and the funerary temple, it goes beyond that, especially in the architecture and statuary.”
The city changed drastically after Amenhotep III’s death, as his son, Amenhotep IV (r. ca. 1353–1349 B.C.), enacted radical religious changes that brought great turmoil to Egypt. Although Amenhotep III had been the first ruler to favor the sun disk Aten as a god, he was careful not to neglect the other popular gods and goddess of ancient Egypt. His son did not follow his example. Amenhotep IV elevated Aten to a position as Egypt’s sole and superior deity, denigrating Amun and the other Theban gods, and introducing a type of monotheism that was anathema to the Egyptians. Five years into his reign, he changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning “Effective of the Aten.” He also named his son Tutankhaten, the “Living Image of Aten.”
Akhenaten slighted the powerful class of temple priests, which put him in a very tenuous position in Egypt’s capital at Thebes, the holy city of Amun. Rather than take on the priests in their power center, the pharaoh founded a new capital, which he built on virgin desert around 250 miles north. He called it Akhetaten, or “Horizon of the Aten”; today it is known as Amarna. In Thebes, Dazzling Aten, which had been home to so many workers and craftspeople whose livelihood depended on royal employment, was deserted nearly overnight. “The people picked up, went to Amarna, and left the city as it was,” says Hawass. “Some even closed and boarded up their houses, which is why the city was found completely intact.”
Archaeologists are still searching for evidence of whether Dazzling Aten was reoccupied after Akhenaten’s young son abandoned his father’s city and restored Thebes as Egypt’s capital and Amun as the supreme god. He dropped the Aten from his name and changed it to Tutankhamun, the “Living Image of Amun.” This did not, however, stop his eventual successor Horemheb from trying to wipe Tutankhamun from the historical records along with his father for their perceived heresies, scarring the family legacy. The 18th Dynasty, which had ruled Egypt on the strength of a single family and its allies, finally came to an end after two and a half centuries, but not before its members, and especially Amenhotep III, had changed the face of Egypt forever.
Jason Urbanus is a contributing editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.