Built in the 14th century BC by the pharaoh Akhenaten as his great capital, where he could give full expression to his devotion to the solar disc, Aten, it was abandoned just a few years after his death in c1336 BC. Standing on the east bank of the Nile, the city of Akhet-aten (today known as Tell el-Amarna) was one of the jewels of Egypt’s late 18th Dynasty. Excavations of one of ancient Egypt’s great cities reveal how the underclass paid for a pharaoh’s indulgences
