What did Akhenaten actually look like? No one knows for sure. Egyptologists at UCLA mulled over the question at a symposium Saturday called “Akhnaten and His World.” Afterward, Anne Austin, who spoke on “Art and Akhenaten,” and who had seen the comparison pictures, noted “striking similarities” between Akhenaten and Obama. But she thought Obama looked more like a middle kingdom pharaoh, Senusret III, who has a similar careworn, attentive face and big ears.

As for the Michelle Obama-Nefertiti comparison, Austin said in fact she sees a similarity between the first lady and Tiye, Akhenaten’s mother.

Los Angeles Times

Image via Wikipedia

The missing statuette of Akhenaten holding an offering and wearing the blue crown appears to have been recovered, says Luxor Times.

According to the above mentioned source, a 16 year old boy found the relic on the Egyptian Museum’s ground next to a garbage bin during the demonstrations at Tahrir Square and took it home. His mother called her brother professor at the American University of Cairo who recognized the item and contacted the authorities.

Four out of 8 objects are still missing since stolen from the museum on 28th January.

Luxor Times

The ambitious successor of Pharaoh Tutankhamun (r. 1332-1323 B.C.) is the subject of Haremhab, The General Who Became King, opening November 10, 2010 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. This landmark exhibition’s objects are drawn entirely from the institution’s collection of Egyptian art.

Haremhab (r. 1332-1309 B.C.) was the resourceful commander-in-chief of the boy-king Tutankhamun’s army. This last pharaoh of the glorious 18th Dynasty organized successful military campaigns at Egypt’s southern border with Nubia and in the Levant. As a lawgiver, he secured civilians’ rights and restricted the army’s power. A commemorative stela (stone monument) on display illustrates priests carrying the shrine of Amun, the oracular deity responsible for sanctioning Haremhab’s kingship. Its narrative signifies Egypt’s return to religious orthodoxy following the Amarna interlude.

The exhibition compares the artistic style of General Haremhab’s abandoned tomb in the necropolis (cemetery) at Saqqara with contemporary funerary works. Early 20th-century facsimile paintings reproduce the interior of his grand royal burial site in the Valley of the Kings. There he attempted to obliterate the memory of the heretical ruler Akhenaten (r. 1353-1336 B.C.), Tutankhamun’s father, by using talatat or blocks from the disgraced pharaoh’s dismantled temple at Thebes in his tomb’s construction. Having done so, he inadvertently preserved fragmentary evidence of the earlier king’s short-lived experiment in solar monotheism.

Art Museum Journal

A one square inch fragment of a clay tablet believed to be a letter written by Abdi-Heba, the Canaanite ruler of Jerusalem to pharaoh Akhenaten has been found outside the old walls of the ancient city.

Thought to date back some 3,400 years, this would make it the most ancient written document ever found in the Holy City.

The fragment is believed to be a contemporary of the 380 tablets discovered in the 19th century at Amarna in Egypt, containing letters sent to Akhenaten by vassal rulers in Canaan and Syria.

Among these tablets are six that are addressed from Abdi-Heba.

Source: Discovery News

UPDATE: June 28, 2010 – German researchers at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in the northern city of Hamburg said in a letter published online Wednesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association that closer scrutiny of Tutankhamun’s foot bones pointed to sickle cell disease, in which red blood cells become dangerously misshaped.

One of the most common genetic disorders, sickle cell disease causes blood cells to take the shape of a crescent instead of being smooth and round, thereby blocking blood flow and leading to chronic pain, infections and tissue death.

Source: AFP

Modern genetic testing and computer technology have revealed King Tut’s parental lineage and the cause of his death, experts said.

Scientists spent the last two years scrutinizing the mummified remains of the 19-year old pharaoh to extract his blood and DNA.

They found traces of the malaria parasite in his blood.

Not long before his death, Tutankhamun fractured his leg. The bone did not heal properly and began to die. This would have left the young king frail and susceptible to malaria infection, which finished him off.

There is no compelling evidence to suggest King Tut or indeed any of his royal ancestors had Marfan’s – a disease some scholars have mentioned to explain a somewhat female appearance in Tutankhamun’s male relatives.

But they did confirm that the king may have had some form of inherited disease, a rare bone disorder affecting the foot called Kohler disease II, as well as a club foot and a curvature of the spine.

Using partial Y-chromosome information, the researchers also determined that Akhenaten, the controversial pharaoh who ruled from around 1351-1334 BC and tried to radically transform religion in ancient Egypt, was Tut’s father, and that Tutankhamun’s mother was Akhenaten’s sister.

Tutankhamun also sired two children, both girls, but they died in the womb, the study found.

Sources: BBC News and Almasry Alyoum

drhawass.com

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Dr. Zahi Hawass will soon announce the results of a DNA study conducted on the mummy of King Tutankhamen. The tests are part of a larger ambitious program aimed at confirming the identity of the royal mummies and their familiar relations.

It is believed that Tutankhamen is the son of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who tried to impose a new monotheistic type cult of the solar disk Aten, and thus grandson of Amenhotep III, whose DNA study is already concluded.

Dr. Hawass said DNA studies on all royal mummies and the nearly two dozen unidentified ones stored in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo may well require a revision on the identification of some mummies on display. His ultimate goal is to discover the mummy of Queen Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s wife, and determine whether Tutankhamen is also her son.

Source:  Google News

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• Egypt to soon announce King Tut DNA test results (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Despite popular belief that he (Akhenaten) shied away from warfare, Professor Prof. James Hoffmeier, of Trinity International University, found evidence that the heretic-king kept a well-equipped, and supplied, fortress in the Sinai desert. It was located on the east side of the modern day Suez Canal.

How well supplied? Well for starters the fortress had a moat around it, of all things. Secondly, from the sealings found on the site, it seems that all the Amarna pharaohs sent wine out to keep the isolated soldiers provisioned – got to have something to pass away those desert nights!

Excerpted from an aeticle by Owen Jarus for Heritage Key

Exploring Amarna: Akhenaten’s Abandoned City is a course directed by Professor Barry Kemp, a renowned Egyptologist and Director of excavations at the site since 1977. This will be a unique opportunity to hear Professor Kemp give a week of lectures in addition to guided tours of Tell el-Amarna.

Course Description
This course will be a unique opportunity to study, in the heart of Egypt, one of the most fascinating periods of pharaonic history with one of the world’s leading experts on the subject. Professor Kemp will explore the most intriguing questions of Akhenaten’s reign. Was he a monotheist? Why and how did he build his new city of Akhetaten? How did the temple cult function? What did the people of Akhetaten really believe in? What was their quality of life? How did they cope with death? Why did Amarna lose its population? This course will also examine the city itself: the palaces, temples, houses and gardens; and the surviving art, craft, and decoration.

Professor Barry Kemp is Emeritus Professor of Egyptology at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. He has been Field Director at Tell el-Amarna since 1977, pioneering excavations formerly for the Egypt Exploration Society, and now as The Amarna Project supported by the Amarna Trust. His important publications include Amarna Reports, I-VI (EES, 1984-95) and Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilisation (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2006).

Bloomsbury Summer School in Egypt: 30 Nov – 7 Dec 2009

The long-term exhibition Amarna: Ancient Egypt’s Place in the Sun at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia debuted on November 12, 2006. Expertly designed by the McMillan Group, the state-of-the-art installation features more than 100 artifacts from Akhetaten (present-day el-Amarna), the desert capital of heretical Pharaoh AKhenaten (r. 1353-1336 B.C.) and the birthplace of Tutankhamun (r. 1332-1322 B.C.). All of the objects on view come from Penn Museum’s collection of Egyptian antiquities.

The visionary Akhenaten relocated the Egyptian capital and his court from Thebes to an arid uninhabited region in Middle Egypt. The remote site’s central cliffs are broken by an unusual gap whose shape resembles the Egyptian hieroglyph for the word “horizon” (akhet). Akhenaten’s religious experiment called for Egypt’s pantheon of traditional gods and goddesses to be abandoned and replaced by a single deity embodied in the sun’s disk (Aten). Its daily appearance through the aperture in Amarna’s rocky promontory may have inspired the pharaoh to name his new capital city Akhetaten or Horizon of the Aten. In this environment of religious and cultural upheaval, Akhenaten, the father of six daughters by the beguilingly beautiful Queen Nefertiti and founder of a new metropolis, possibly sired Tutankhaten (later called Tutankhamun), perhaps by a minor wife often identified as Kiya.

Akhenaten’s short-lived radical revolution in religion was accompanied by one in the visual arts. The centuries-old strict formalism of ancient Egyptian art gave way to refreshingly relaxed and naturalistic poses in sculpture. Artistic innovations, presumably sanctioned by the pharaoh, eventually led to pictorial exaggerations of the human form that emphasized its sensual curves.

Amarna: Ancient Egypt’s Place in the Sun includes religious and royal statuary, monumental relief sculpture, artisans’ materials, gold jewelry and personal items that belonged to Akhenaten and his entourage. These objects date from before the advent of the Amarna Period to the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, supplemented by digital recreations, elaborate illustrations, maps and photographs.

Excerpted from an article by Stan Parchin for Art Museum Journal

The exhibits displayed at the exhibition were taken away from Germany in time of the Second World War and were kept in the State Hermitage until 1958; they were returned to the Egyptian Museum of Berlin the same year.

Three sculptural heads from the workshop of Tuthmosis created in the middle of the 14th century BC are presented at the exhibition. They are: Head of Young Nefertiti (sandstone, colouring); Head of Nefertiti as a Mature Woman (granodiorite); Head of the princess, daughter of Nefertiti and Akhenaten (sandstone), as well as Head of Amasis (grey wacke) created in the middle of the 6th century BC.

A number of temple statues that reached us from the very first years depict Akhenaten so emphatically ugly that the style was called caricatural. The king has broad feminine hips, pendulous belly, big breasts; the face is matching the body – drawn with equine lower part, long nose, exaggerated sized eyes, mouth and ears; the neck is arched unnaturally. Feminity of some features is explained by the fact that the king was depicted as Shu whose part was assigned to the son of Amenhotep III at the beginning of joint reign and Shu was hermaphrodite, however the meaning of other distortions remains unclear. In later images of Akhenaten we can see the same features but in a noticeably moderate way. Iconography of the king spread on to his followers, from his reign we got great number of images of men and women with thin ankles and heavy hips, swollen bellies, long fingers, drawn skulls and droopy chins. Unnaturalness and affectation of style is partially compensated for by dynamism of movements and wealth of details uncharacteristic for Egypt.

Hermitage Museum