Statuary from Royal Buildings at Amarna
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. Extensive observations about the creation of the statuary are presented in the first volume, comprised of 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 In the second volume, the excavated fragments themselves, most of them previously unpublished, are cataloged in a series of chapters devoted to individual royal buildings. The original statues are envisioned and analyzed for their contexts, resulting in new information about these buildings, the intentions and concerns behind them, and the evolution in those intentions.
- ISBN: 978-0-85698-254-5 (hardback collectors' edition); 978-0-85698-256-9 (eBook)
- Published: May 2024
- Size: 297 × 210 mm
- Pages: 870 across two volumes
Praise for this book
This major work of many years of scholarship by two leading experts is about largely hidden masterpieces of Amarna art. They have been hidden not because of deliberate concealment but because of the determination of Akhenaten's successors to obliterate through breakage a programme to grace the city of Amarna with some of the finest works of sculpture that ancient Egypt ever produced. By this means the memory of Akhenaten and of his ideas would be forever lost.
The broken pieces, coming to light spasmodically over the last two hundred years, recover their status as masterpieces only once our imagination has been guided by explanation and carefully chosen illustrations. The illustrations and catalogue entries of hundreds of the pieces are at the heart of the two volumes. Readers will also find information on the sources of the stone, the original locations of the statues and on the unusual fact that excavation of the city has supplied us with many of the workshops where the statues were made. The unfinished pieces amongst the debris instruct us in how the sculptors exercised their prodigious skills.
Many of the fragments—from excavations or in early modern times picked up as souvenirs by travellers or purchased from dealers—have become scattered worldwide. In order to create as comprehensive a catalogue as possible and one based on personal inspection no location seems to have proved too out-of-the-way to the authors. In creating this magnificent publication, they have truly left no stone unturned.
The royal buildings at Amarna teemed with statuary and relief-carvings, with the workshops of the city still manufacturing yet more when Amarna’s status as Egypt’s capital came to an abrupt end. These volumes present for the first time the full extent of Akhenaten’s sculptural programme, much of it painstakingly reconstructed from the myriad fragments to which so many pieces of its art were later reduced.
The authors of this publication consider in meticulous detail the fragments of stone statues recovered from royal buildings at Akhenaten’s capital Amarna, beginning with the materials and techniques employed by the skilled and ingenious sculptors in the workshops at the site down through the contexts of the finished products. Every chapter bears witness to their commitment to provide a fundamental source not only for those specialising in the Amarna Period but for everyone interested in ancient Egyptian stone statuary.
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