Amarna

Yeah.

It's a record of something, but I can look at, you know, a sculpture from the Amarna period.

And that's still, as an artist still has some relevance to me because of the way it's made, you know, not because of what it represents or what it means, but but because of what it looks like and what it does in real space.

So it's a little bit different.

Okay, so you get, there's some plants that won't produce pollens if you have reduced rainfall, for example.

So this helps us understand the climate and then maybe why certain things were happening in the biblical text and in other texts, like the Amarna letters and so forth, that maybe we would not have known otherwise.

Like famines and things like that as well.

Scott, are you...

So am I looking for anything? Well, I mean, those were the things that were on my radar because I take the Bible as a serious historical source.

And I thought, you know, in my perfect world, this is what we would find because the Bible, at that time, everyone said the Bible was only, I'm sorry, that Shiloh was only mentioned in the Bible.

Since that time, I have located Shiloh in the Amarna letters also, in El Amarna 288, in El Amarna 235.

Can you explain what the Amarna letters are for people that are not familiar?

They then moved their whole court 400 kilometers down river from Thebes, and in less than 10 years, built a brand new city.

Known today as Amarna, its palaces, temples, and tombs were filled with images of the Aten, the Sundis god.

Gone were the multiplicity of gods to worship.

Now it was the sun that was celebrated each day with hymns, prayers, and offerings presented on a truly lavish scale.

That's pretty profound.

For all his fabled wealth, Tutankhamun was, in life, a fairly insignificant pharaoh.

But his premature death, after only a decade as king, offered Karnak's priests the perfect opportunity to obliterate all trace of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the Amarna period.

And these wonderful photos of his burial treasure reveal how they did it.

He had this... enormously influential idea that there was only one god, Aten, the sun disk, as opposed to the polytheism of ancient Egypt.

But in order to do that, he had to move physically to a brand new pristine center called Amarna, almost midway between the cult centers of the south and the north.

In order to produce the ethnogenesis of Israel, the Israelites had to move out of the big metropolis of Egypt to what was a little backwater in Canaan.

When the Prophet Muhammad instituted Islam, he had to move out of Mecca to Medina in order to produce what we now recognize as Protestant Christianity.

Mud brick structures are much more vulnerable to erosion, moisture, rebuilding, and later human activity.

And there's an especially revealing example at Amarna, the capital established by Akhenaten during the 14th century BC.

Archaeologist Anna Stevens, working with the Amarna project, helped investigate eight ordinary houses between 2004 and 2006.

Those relatively modest buildings produced more than 3,000 artifacts, including fragments of limestone furniture, jewelry, pottery, reused household objects, and evidence of decorative items.

The investigation was eventually published in a substantial two-volume study, Busy Lives at Amarna, by Barry Kemp and Anna Stevens.

More recent archaeological work has estimated that Akhenaten City originally contained approximately 3,000 houses, although only a comparatively small number have been examined using modern excavation methods.

This is important because the material evidence doesn't

Most ordinary houses were constructed from mud brick, while major temples, royal tombs, and monumental religious buildings frequently employed stone.

And so we're going to worship the Aten.

And then he stuffed everything up and then he moved the capital city to Amarna and started doing all these other practices and things.

And he actually declared that now all statues and all images have to be depicted exactly as they are.

You cannot be some fat piece of crap and then make yourself a statue where you're all perfect and The original Instagram filter.