Royal Tomb of Akhenaten
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The Royal Tomb of Akhenaten is the burial place of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, in the Royal Wadi in Amarna.[1]
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[edit] Layout
A flight of twenty steps, with a central inclined plane leads to the door and a long straight descending corridor. Halfway down this corridor a suite of unfinished rooms (perhaps intended for Nefertiti). The main corridor continues to descend, and to the right again a second suite of rooms branches off. Two of these chambers are decorated wirh reliefs and inscriptions, and seem to have been the tomb of Meketaten. The corridor then descends via steps into an ante-room, and then to the pilared burial chamber where his granite sarcophagus sat in a slight dip in the floor. It was decorated by carvings of Nefertiti acting as a protective goddess, and by the ever present sun-disks of the Aten.
Large amounts of the decoration have been destroyed by flooding.
[edit] After burial
His body was probably removed after the court returned to Thebes, and reburied somewhere in the Valley of the Kings. His sarcophagus was destroyed, but has since been reconstructed — and now sits in the car park of the Cairo Museum.
[edit] Excavation and preservation
The tomb was excavated by Alessandro Barsanti, in 1893/1894.
[edit] References
- ^ Amarna Royal Tomb. UCL. Retrieved on December 19, 2006.
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