by Professor Barry Kemp, who died the day after his 84th birthday, was a distinguished Egyptologist who led the excavations at the site in Middle Egypt known as Amarna, the city founded by the mysterious pharaoh Akhenaten around 1344 BC. , and about which he wrote. The city of Akhenaten and Nefertiti – Amarna and its people (2012).
In about 1353 BC a pharaoh called Amenhotep IV decided that everyone should worship one god, the Aten, represented as the disk of the sun, and changed his name to Akhenaten. He then moved his court from Thebes, for centuries the seat of pharaonic power, 175 miles north to a new capital, Akhetaten (named Amarna by 19th-century archaeologists), on a previously uninhabited desert shelf above the east bank of the Nile. .
Akhenaten ordered over 20,000 people to move to the site from other parts of Egypt and undertook a massive building program. Palaces, temples and government buildings were built at an amazing pace. There was one place of worship, the Great Temple of Athens, half a mile long.
Within a few years, between 30,000 and 50,000 people arrived in Akhenaten’s desert city. Eventually the pharaoh would completely ban the traditional gods, making Isis, Osiris and up to 2,000 other gods redundant.
Akhenaten’s revolution was not only religious but artistic. For over a thousand years, depictions of people in Egyptian art were rigid and idealized. Under Akhenaten they became more individual and informal. In sculpted reliefs and paintings the pharaoh was depicted with his famous wife, Nefertiti, in unusually natural positions; one scene even the couple about to get into bed together. In portraits they were shown kissing and caring for their children.
But Amarna was occupied for less than two decades. Shortly after Akhenaten’s death around 1336 BC. it was almost completely abandoned. Afterwards, his successors systematically destroyed images of Akhenaten – carved all over Egypt. The campaign of destruction was so successful that Akhenaten disappeared from history for 31 centuries – until archaeologists rediscovered his name in the mid-19th century.
Egyptologists have traditionally focused on pharaohs, priests and other elites, and Akhenaten was particularly interesting, some seeing him as a Christ-like figure, philosopher and prophet of the true God before his time. By the time Kemp was a student at Liverpool University, however, there was a new emphasis on investigating the lives of ordinary people.
Amarna, the best-preserved capital city from ancient Egypt, was the perfect site for such a study, as, as Kemp put it, “basically a replicated mud village with a few isolated monuments”. And Kemp did much to dispel the saintly myth surrounding its founder.
One obvious reason why Amarna was abandoned so quickly is that the site was not suitable for settlement in the first place. There was no fresh water readily available; crops could not be grown there; local well water would be too salty to drink, so residents would have to draw water from wells further away or from the Nile. “The danger of being an absolute ruler,” Kemp said drily, “is that no one dares to tell you that what you have ordered is not a good idea.”
Meanwhile, while carvings and hieroglyphs from the site often emphasize themes of abundance and prosperity, burial site excavations by Kemp and others tell a story of child labor, severe malnutrition, bone deformities and early death.
They also tell a story about alienated people from the cult of Akhenaten the Aten. At a cemetery where workers who erected Akhenaten’s palaces and temples were buried in shallow graves, numerous excavations of amulets and votive objects showing common minor deities were buried as grave goods, but not a single representation of the Aten, nor a reference to Akhenaten on finger rings or scarabs.
Beneath the surface, Kemp argued, the people were worshiping their old gods, despite the official gods who claimed otherwise: “Atenism gave little to people who wanted the comfort of a God who could anyone to contact them, even in their own home. Akhenaten’s message was too radical to garner widespread support.” After Akhenaten’s death there was no one to stand up to his religious revolution.
Tall and soft-spoken, with a full white beard, Kemp spent many more years digging through the city than Akhenaten spent building it. During that time he lived for much of every winter and spring in a rudimentary dugout located on the southern edge of the site.
In 1996 he enjoyed the amusing diversion from the routine of digging when he and Delwen Samuel, a veteran botanist, worked with the Scottish and Newcastle brewers to brew ale according to recipes obtained from sediment from old jars found in a brewery located within the town. Sun temple of Nefertiti. The drink, reported the New York Times, was “slightly cloudy with a golden hue” and according to Delwen Samuel, was “very rich, very malty and has a flavor that reminds you a bit of chardonnay”.
Although his primary interest was in the common people of ancient Egypt, Kemp worked tirelessly to save the “elite” temple and palace sites at Amarna from the pressures of environmental degradation and modern population growth, carrying out restoration work to protect it from further erosion and deterioration. .
At the time of his death he was tackling the re-excavation of the massive Temple of Aten, which was threatened by the expansion of a modern cemetery.
Barry John Kemp was born on 14 May 1940. After graduating in Egyptology from Liverpool University in 1962, he became an assistant lecturer at Cambridge University, where he rose to Professor of Egyptology in 2005 and trained the Egyptian generations and archaeologists. . He was a Fellow of Wolfson College from 1990 to 2007.
From 1977 to 2008 Kemp directed the survey and archaeological excavations at Amarna for the Egyptian Exploration Society. In 2008 he was appointed a senior fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge. From then on he continued and expanded his work at Amarna, funded by private donations to the Amarna Project, which he founded, working in collaboration with the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Kemp was a prolific writer. His Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (1989, now in its third edition) remains a core text for university courses. In Think Like an Egyptian: 100 Hieroglyphs (2005), he noted that, contrary to popular belief, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was not like “a piece of film or a cartoon strip”, most hieroglyphs requiring mental substitution of concepts which was very different from the image.
In How to Read the Egyptian Book of the Dead (2007), he attempted to explore, by analyzing ancient Egyptian spells designed to overcome the dangers of the Otherworld, the Egyptians’ view of the relationship between the individual and the divine.
Ancient Egypt: All That Matters (2015) was a lively account of why and how ancient Egypt was able to thrive with stability for so long.
Kemp was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992 and appointed CBE in 2011 for services to archaeology, education and international relations in Egypt.
Barry Kemp, born 14 May 1940, died 15 May 2024
