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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

Since 1997, the Amarna project has been engaged in a programme to record and restore one of the ancient city’s most important buildings: the North Palace.  In Spring 2011 we will return to the site with the aim of meeting a major milestone – the completion of repairs to the Royal Suite – and we are asking for your help in reaching this goal.  Your donation will pay for the established teams of skilled local workmen who will undertake the rebuilding under the supervision of Conservation Architect Surésh Dhargalkar. In this way you will also be supporting the local community.

More information on the North Palace can be found here:http://tempuri.org/tempuri.html and details of the restoration work here:http://tempuri.org/tempuri.html

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity and make sure Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a UK taxpayer.

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

The seal impression was found inside a pit that cuts into layers of the Late Period in Tel El-Daba, an archaeological site in the Sharqiya governorate, 120 km north-east Cairo.

It bears the name of a top governmental official who lived during the old Babylonian era, during the reign of king Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC).

Dr. Manfred Bietak, the head of the Austrian mission, said that both seal impressions are of great archaeological importance, as they are the oldest to be found in Egypt. They are dated to 150 years before the cuneiform correspondence found in the capital of Akhenaten at Tel El-Amarna.

drhawass.com

KV 62, the famous tomb of King Tutankhamen will undergo a five-year project to clean and restore the wall paintings.

The restoration project is a collaboration between Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Getty Conservation Institute.

This is not the first time the Los Angeles based Getty Institute has worked in an Egyptian tomb. From 1986 to 1992, Egyptian authorities and the Getty Conservation Institute undertook the saving of the Tomb of Nefertari (QV 66), using the most advanced scientific and artistic restoration practices.

Tutankhamen’s tomb is by far the most visited tomb in Egypt, more on account of the glittery fame of the boy king and the mystery of the curse upon those who perturbed his resting place back in November 1922, when it was discovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter.

KV 62 is not a large tomb designed for royalty, but a hastily built four-roomed burial place for the pharaoh who died at age 18. Only the burial chamber was decorated with scenes depicting the ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth, the Weighing of the Heart and passage through the Netherworld into the Afterlife.

The paintings are done in the Amarna style, yet show the return to the more traditional forms of ancient Egyptian art. The figures are represented on a yellow background. Brown spots have marred the wall paintings to a large extent.

The experts from the Getty Conservation Institute will analyze the cause of this and other damages. It is a well known fact that heat and humidity from the thousands of tourists who have to pay a special price to enter the tomb accelerate the process of deterioration.

The restoration project is expected to last five years, the first two for research and the rest for implementation of the restoration plan.

As of now, it hasn’t been decided whether the tomb of Tutankhamen will remain partially opened or be closed.

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

I have purposely not mentioned anything about the debate regarding the authenticity of the bust of Nefertiti, as this sort of superfluous information is, in my opinion, more intended to sell copy than to inquire for the truth.

This article, however, has some very useful information about the statue and is revealing of the methods used by the ancient Egyptian sculptor in creating this masterpiece.

The piece (Nefertiti), which bears inventory tag number 21300, is one of the most famous pieces of art from ancient Egypt. And in recent weeks, its authenticity has been the subject of much debate.

“You can prove a fake, but you can’t prove originals. That’s an epistemological problem,” Stefan Simon told Spiegel Online. Simon is a material scientist who directs the Rathgen Research Laboratory, which belongs to the association of national museums in Berlin. As a scientist, Simon’s main allegiance is to the evidence.

That, though, is a difficult prospect. Radiocarbon (C-14) dating measures the decay of radioactive carbon isotopes, necessitating samples of organic material. Nefertiti, though, is largely free of such material. A bit of wax was allegedly found in Nefertiti’s right eye. When it was carbon-dated a few years back, scientists concluded that might be more than 3,300 years old.

Still, the wax sample’s path from the bust’s eye to the laboratory was long. It was obtained in 1920 by Friedrich Rathgen, the chemist who first directed the laboratory that now bears his name. For decades, Rathgen’s sample lay in a small specimen bag in the museum before finally being dated, opening the door to doubt.

The paint used on the bust yields even fewer clues as to its age. The pigments are all made from minerals, meaning carbon dating cannot be used. Simon points to the network of fissures and cracks in the paint on the surface of the bust. “I cannot imagine that one could reproduce that artificially,” he says.

Simon also points out that the complicated painting technique used on the bust, leading him to believe that it much older than 100 years. Under a microscope, Simon has found at least five different layers of paint layered one upon the other: first a layer of white paint with blue undertones, then white, then yellow, then blue, then red.

The organic agent used to bind the paint is also not available in sufficient quantities to enable testing. The traces of straw in Nefertiti’s headdress could, in theory, also be used. But testing would have be refined such that only a very tiny amount of material is used to avoid harming the bust, Simon says.

And then there’s the matter of the left eye. The right is made from quartz and beeswax darkened with soot. If there was a bit of telltale wax where the left eye once was, it could be tested. But up to now, no one has tried — perhaps out of fear of damaging the statue. Simon says that there are traces of paint of the same type used in the right eye.

The sculpture is composed of the so-called Amarna-mix, a blend of gypsum anhydride plaster applied on top of a limestone base. The material is named after Tel el-Amarna, a small city in central Egypt founded by Pharaoh Akhenaton in the 14th century B.C. That is also where the bust of his queen would be found in 1912.

Currently, researchers are comparing material used in the Nefertiti bust with that utilized in statues of her husband, Akhenaton, and other artifacts from the Amarna period. A model of her husband is also currently in Berlin — lying in storage in much worse condition.

The secrets held by Nefertiti seem almost endless, despite the bust having been an object of all manner of tests for years. Why, for example, was so much oripiment, a toxic arsenic sulfide, used in the yellow paint? And just how solid is the bust? In a recent examination using a remote sensing technique known as video holography, Simon and his colleagues found damaged areas around the statue’s headdress and upper chest. The scientists are particularly worried about the condition of the layered paint, bits of which have been flaking off for years.

Simon dreams of one day hosting a colloquium of experts drawn from the world’s best museums, who would work together on unlocking some of the statue’s secrets.

Excerpted from an article by Christoph Seidler for SpiegelOnline