Amarna Palace Paintings, Volume 78

The City of El-Amarna (Akhetaten, "The Horizon of Aten'), the capital and residence of the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten, is a site of unique interest. Not only is it the only major Egyptian settlement to have been preserved to the point where it can be largely reconstructed, but it has the unique distinction of being a time-capsule located firmly at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The religious revolution of Akhenaten brought significant changes of emphasis and iconography, some of them grotesque, but many characterized by a vigorous and luminous naturalism which give the art of the period a freshness and immediacy which has few parallels at any other stage of Pharaonic civilization. Fran Weatherhead's volume is devoted to the study of one of the most important aspects of this artistic tradition: the large corpus of painting which has largely lain either unpublished or only partially known to the scholarly world. In a painstaking and thorough assessment she has worked through all the surviving documentation and has been able to produce an outstanding study of the material, frequently providing new insights even into pieces which have long been known.