OK, today's the day we visit tel el Amarna (also Tell Amarna, and other spellings) which is where Aknaton (also "Akhenaten") moved the capital of Egypt. You may remember that Aknaton was an amazing pharaoh for several reasons. He introduced monotheism with the worhip of the one god who was represented by the sun--Aten, the Sun God/Amon Raa; he was married to the beautiful Nefertiti; and he was the first to change the traditional "perfect" images of people in sculpture, paintings, and carvings to a more realistic representation. He is seen as a rather odd looking person with a pot belly and an oddly shaped body. He was assassinated by the priests, and the capitol was moved back to Luxor an the old religions (and priests) regained power.
This was a huge site--heck, it was the capitol of Egypt. We climbed the sides of a small mountain to see the royal tombs, we saw the ruins of the palace and the temple we saw two boundary stellas which were huge carvings that marked the boundaries (only two remain (it may be three, I don't remember specifically). There had been close to 20 at one time).
This was an all day trip for us that returned us to El Minya for an overnight. It was really great.
Here are some photos and a video:
1. from the foot of a boundary stella looking at the van and the road we took to get here (not a lot of vegetation!)
2. detail of one of the boundary stellas (remember this was carved here over 3,300
years ago!
3. path up to
the tombs. If you look closely you'll notice all the flights of stairs in the distance.
4. video of Lea and Stu moving along a path by tombs. Notice how high up we are. The van at the end that you see is our van that moved from where we started to be where we would come down off the mountain.
And, we saw a lot of other neat sandy, high, sites and tombs. They didn't allow us to take pictures in the tombs.
That's it for today.
Love,
Frank
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