Professor Barry Kemp, who died the day after his 84th birthday, was a distinguished Egyptologist who led excavations at the site of Middle Egypt known as Amarna, a city founded around 1344 BC by the mysterious pharaoh Akhenaten. The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti – Amarna and its people (2012).
Around 1353 BC IV. A pharaoh named Amenhotep decided that everyone should worship a single god, Aten, represented as a solar disk, and changed his name to Akhenaten. He later moved his palace from Thebes, the center of pharaonic power for centuries, to Akhetaten, a new capital located 275 miles north on a previously uninhabited strip of desert on the east bank of the Nile River (named Amarna by 19th-century archaeologists). carried it. .
Akhenaten ordered the relocation of more than 20,000 people from elsewhere in Egypt to the area and began a massive construction program. Palaces, temples and government buildings were built at a dizzying pace. One of the places of worship, the Great Aten Temple, was half a mile long.
Within a few years, Akhenaten’s desert city was home to between 30,000 and 50,000 people. Eventually the pharaoh would ban the traditional gods altogether, making Isis, Osiris, and up to 2,000 other deities unnecessary.
Akhenaten’s revolution was not only religious but also artistic. For over a thousand years, depictions of humans in Egyptian art were rigid and idealized. They became more individualistic and informal during the reign of Akhenaten. In sculptural reliefs and paintings, the pharaoh is depicted with his wife Nefertiti, famous for her beauty, in unusually friendly and natural poses; In one scene, the couple is even seen about to go to bed together. In portraits, they were depicted kissing and caressing their children.
But Amarna remained occupied for less than twenty years. It was almost completely abandoned shortly after Akhenaten’s death in 1336 BC. Subsequently, images of Akhenaten carved throughout Egypt were systematically destroyed by his successors. The campaign of destruction was so successful that Akhenaten disappeared from history for 31 centuries until his name was rediscovered by archaeologists in the mid-19th century.
Egyptologists have traditionally focused on pharaohs, priests, and other elites, and Akhenaten proved particularly fascinating; some viewed him as a Christ-like figure, a philosopher and prophet of the true God before his time. However, while Kemp was a student at the University of Liverpool, a new emphasis was placed on the investigation of the lives of ordinary people.
Amarna, Ancient Egypt’s best-preserved capital, was the perfect location for such a study because it was, in Kemp’s words, “essentially a replicated mud village with a few isolated monuments.” And Kemp has done much to dispel the saintly myth surrounding its founder.
One of the obvious reasons why Amarna was abandoned so quickly was that the area was unsuitable for settlement. There was no fresh water readily available; crops could not grow there; local well water would be too salty to drink, so residents would have to transport water from further away wells or from the Nile. “The danger of being an absolute manager,” Kemp observed dryly, “is that no one will dare tell you that the decision you just made wasn’t a good idea.”
Meanwhile, although carvings and hieroglyphs from the site often emphasize themes of abundance and prosperity, excavations by Kemp and others at burial sites tell tales of child labor, severe malnutrition, bone malformation, and premature death.
They also tell the story of people alienated from Akhenaten’s Aten cult. Excavations at a cemetery where workers who built Akhenaten’s palaces and temples were buried in shallow graves have found numerous amulets and votive objects depicting popular minor deities buried as grave goods, but neither a single representation of Aten nor finger rings or Akhenaten’s name on them. was not mentioned. dung beetles.
Beneath the surface, Kemp argued, people worshiped their old gods despite official orders demanding otherwise: “Atenism offered little to people who wanted the comfort of a god whom all could approach, even in their own homes. Akhenaten’s message was too harsh to garner broad support.” After Akhenaten’s death, there was no one left to support his religious revolution.
Tall and soft-spoken, with a full white beard, Kemp spent many more years digging up the city than Akhenaten spent building it. During this time he lived most of each winter and spring in a simple dig house located at the southern end of the area.
In 1996, he had a fun diversion from his normal digging routine when he and Delwen Samuel, an archaeobotanist, worked with Scottish and Newcastle brewers to brew beer according to a recipe derived from sediments taken from old jars found in a brewery. Nefertiti’s Sun Temple. The New York Times reports that the drink is “slightly cloudy with a golden color” and, according to Delwen Samuel, “very rich, very malty, with a taste that reminds you a little bit of chardonnay.”
Although his main interest was 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 them from further erosion and decay. .
At the time of his death, he was engaged in the re-excavation of the massive Great Temple of Aten, which was threatened by the expansion of a modern cemetery.
Barry John Kemp was born on May 14, 1940. After graduating with a degree in Egyptology from the University of Liverpool in 1962, he was appointed assistant lecturer at the University of Cambridge, where he became Professor of Egyptology in 2005, training generations of Egyptologists and archaeologists. . He served as a Fellow of Wolfson College from 1990 to 2007.
From 1977 to 2008, Kemp directed research and archaeological excavations at Amarna on behalf of the Egyptian Exploration Society. In 2008 he was appointed senior fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge. He later continued and expanded his work at Amarna, funded by private donations to the Amarna Project, which he founded by working with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Kemp was a prolific writer. His Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (1989, now in its third edition) remains a staple text of college courses. In Think Like an Egyptian: 100 Hieroglyphs (2005), he observed that, contrary to popular belief, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is not like “a motion picture piece or a cartoon”; most hieroglyphs require the mental substitution of concepts quite different from Egyptian hieroglyphs. image.
In his book How to Read the Egyptian Book of the Dead (2007), he sought to explore how the Egyptians viewed the relationship between the individual and the divine through the analysis of ancient Egyptian spells designed to overcome the dangers lurking in the Otherworld.
Ancient Egypt: All That Matters (2015) was a vivid account of why and how ancient Egypt was able to develop with such stability for so long.
Kemp was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992 and was appointed CBE in 2011 for services to archaeology, education and international relations in Egypt.
Barry Kemp was born on May 14, 1940, died on May 15, 2024.