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About this Site

This project is part of my on-going research into the Amarna period, preparation for a book I will write as soon as I feel done enough to begin it. Since that day will be long in coming, I wanted to do something in the meantime with the information I've collected, to make it available to others who share my interest... and hopefully benefit from their comments and corrections. However, I didn't want to make another site describing the "cast of characters" of the drama played out at Akhetaten, because it's already been done, and done well, by others. While my research is by no means limited to the subject matter of this site—it can be as pyramid-pointy-minute as this site is pyramid-base-broad—the world beyond Akhetaten during the Amarna period seemed to me to be one with little "coverage" on the Web. But I think that it's useful to consider the events at Akhetaten within the historical and cultural context of the entire Near East. The history of Egypt would not have been what it was if the history of the Levant had not been what it was, and vice versa. That relationship is what I hope to reveal with this site.

Guide to Using This Site

As I develop this site, I find it is divided into two parts: the History section will be a collection of "articles" covering a variety of broad topics dealing with the culture and history of the Amarna period. The rest of the site is a sort of almanac/atlas, with detailed information about individual topics. The Nations section will cover the major and minor political entities of the period, such as Hatti and Assyria. Since political divisions in ancient times, like those today, did not necessarily follow ethnic boundaries, a separate section, Races, deals with the ethnic groups whose different backgrounds combined to form the cosmopolitan culture of the ancient Near East. Cities gives details about important cities of the period, and some of the city-states that were semi-independant nations at the time. The Maps section features large- and small-scale maps of Egypt and the Levant, including links to the cities displayed. Finally, People is a sort of Who's Who of the Fourteenth Century BCE, with biographies of kings and other important contemporaries of Akhenaten.

Viewing References

I have tried to document my sources whenever possible, but I have taken advantage of the possibilties offered by HTML to hide my references from the casual reader. If you are using a relatively recent version of Internet Explorer to view this site, just hold your mouse pointer over a sentence to see the reference: if one is available it should appear as a "Tool-Tip" after a moment. Try it with this paragraph– you should see "Meryt: Akhenaten's World, p.123". If you're using Netscape or another browser, you'll have to view the HTML source of the page. I use the <SPAN TITLE=""> tag to set the Tool-Tip; everything between the beginning and ending "SPAN" tags is included in the reference given by the "TITLE" attribute. In this case you would see <SPAN TITLE="Meryt: Akhenaten's World, p.123"> Complete information on cited works is available at the site's bibliography page.