Life, death and beyond in Akhenaten s Egypt: excavating the South Tombs Cemetery at Amarna

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Life, death and beyond in Akhenaten s Egypt: excavating the South Tombs Cemetery at Amarna Barry Kemp 1, Anna Stevens 1,, Gretchen R. Dabbs 2, Melissa Zabecki 3 & Jerome C. Rose 4 The authors report a summary of the results of six seasons of excavation at one of the cemeteries of Tell el-amarna, the celebrated city of the monotheistic revolutionary, Akhenaten. The osteology shows a workforce enduring stress and injuries to bone and muscle. The burial rites indicate low investment and personal interpretations as to spiritual meaning. In this exploration of a slice of a whole Egyptian urban society, the contrast between the working lives of the elite and its workforce becomes striking. Keywords: Egypt, Amarna, second millennium BC, Akhenaten, palaeo-osteology, burial rites, religion Introduction Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the study of ancient Egypt has included the drama of the Amarna period, the 17-year reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten (c. 1349 1332 BC) and a brief aftermath that ended during the reign of Tutankhamun. The prime archaeological manifestation of this episode is the city of Amarna, built by Akhenaten on the east bank of the Nile, some 350km south of modern Cairo. The site reveals something of Akhenaten s 1 Amarna Project, 1 Midan el-tahrir, Floor 5, Apartment 17, Cairo, Egypt; McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3ER, UK (Email: bjk2@cam.ac.uk; aks52@cam.ac.uk) 2 Department of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University, 1000 Faner Drive, Mail Code 4502, Carbondale, IL 62901-4502, USA (Email: gdabbs@siu.edu) 3 Parkin Archeological State Park, 60 Highway 184 North, Parkin, AR 72373, USA (Email: mzabeck@uark.edu) 4 Department of Anthropology, University of Arkansas, Old Main 330, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA (Email: jcrose@uark.edu) Author for correspondence ANTIQUITY 87 (2013): 64 78 64 http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/087/ant0870064.htm

Barry Kemp et al. Research Figure 1. A general view north-east across the South Tombs Cemetery taken in 2011, showing excavations at the Lower Site, with the Wadi Mouth Site to the left. intentions, for it was his wish to purify the cult of the sun (the Aten) by creating a place for worship that was uncontaminated by previous associations, human or divine. Amarna also became home, almost incidentally, to a population of perhaps 20 30 000 people officials, soldiers, people involved in manufacture and even more whose place in life was to serve others who followed the royal court to this new city and set about re-establishing their lives and livelihoods. Amarna has long been ancient Egypt s largest accessible urban site, a rich source for the study of domestic architecture and the material remnants of life (Kemp 1977, 1989: 261 317; Kemp & Stevens 2010a, 2010b). Research that began in 2005 is now adding further layers of information, derived from the survey and excavation of a major cemetery of Amarna s people: the South Tombs Cemetery. Some of that information is cultural, and some derives from the anthropological study of the human remains. Together, it offers new perspectives on life in Akhenaten s city; on one community s responses, physical and spiritual, to a period of social upheaval and religious re-ordering; and on the rituals and broader behaviour patterns that accompanied death for the non-elite (surprisingly poorly documented up to now; Baines & Lacovara 2002). Beyond the historical interest of Akhenaten s reign, the value of the Amarna cemetery lies in our ability to pinpoint when and where this population lived, relatively rare in the Egyptian setting, where cemeteries often survive in isolation from the cities and towns they served. In this paper, we offer a preliminary overview of the excavations and results obtained so far. The South Tombs Cemetery The South Tombs Cemetery occupies a sand-filled wadi that cuts through a limestone escarpment that forms part of the eastern boundary to the Amarna plain (Figures 1 & 2). 65

Life, death and beyond in Akhenaten s Egypt Figure 2. Map of the South Tombs Cemetery showing the three excavation areas: the Upper Site, Lower Site and Wadi Mouth Site. The inset is a map of Amarna showing the location of the cemetery. 66

Barry Kemp et al. The adjacent rock face is dotted with unfinished, but often elaborately decorated, rock-cut tombs intended for officials of Akhenaten s city (the South Tombs proper). Following a surface survey in 2005, around 1550m 2 of ground has been investigated in three separate areaswithinthewadi: the Upper Site (700m 2 ), Lower Site (575m 2 ) and Wadi Mouth Site (275m 2 ) (Figure 2). The cemetery is likely to contain several thousand burials. So far, we have excavated 222 graves and recovered 274 skeletons; some incomplete, with some grave pits accommodating more than one body. Research Burial rites Two aspects best characterise the approach to burial and provisioning the dead: an overall simplicity and consistency of approach. The ground tends to be quite densely occupied by graves, which take the form of simple oblong pits dug into the sand. The 2006 excavations at the Upper Site revealed a grave with a mud-brick burial chamber (Ambridge & Shepperson 2006: 35), but this is so far unique. In terms of grave orientation, the local topography seems to be the overriding influence, with pits cut into flat ground tending to run approximately parallel to the line of the wadi, and those on sloping ground to run across the slope. Neighbouring pits usually conform to similar orientations, and there is a reasonably clear process of secondary infilling of the ground with graves that tend to follow more varied orientations. At surface level, most graves appear to have been marked by low cairns of limestone boulders, sometimes with a memorial stela showing an image of the deceased (Figures 3 & 4). A few graves were topped by miniature limestone pyramids (Figure 4). Due to erosion and previous looting of the cemetery very little survives in situ of surface markers. Most of the interments excavated thus far have been disturbed by grave robbers, who tended to rummage through the upper part of the body, probably looking for jewellery, but left much of the bone within the grave (Figure 5). It is usually still possible, nonetheless, to gain a good overall understanding of the nature of each burial, and to reconstruct the skeletons to a substantial degree. The bodies are almost always laid out in an extended, supine position, wrapped in textile and placed within a burial container (Figure 5). So far, there are no signs of deliberate mummification, although the textile may have helped maintain the form of the body. The majority of the human remains are entirely skeletonised, although hair, sometimes in elaborate braids, quite often survives. Burial containers are usually plain mats made of lengths of thick, rigid plant material, in which the body was rolled to form a kind of cylinder bound with rope, sometimes preserving carrying-loops to facilitate transport from the city to the cemetery (Figures 3 & 5). Occasionally, a mat of finer plant material was used as an intermediate layer, or as the sole layer around the bodies of small children. On occasion, the body was placed in a wooden coffin (Figure 6). Twenty coffins have been encountered to date, ranging from undecorated boxes to anthropoid-style coffins decorated with scenes of offering-bearers and funerary texts (Kemp & Stevens 2008: 35 41; Kemp 2010: 18 21). Pottery coffins seem also to have been in use, although so far found only as fragments on the surface (Rose 2005: 24). 67

Life, death and beyond in Akhenaten s Egypt Figure 3. The undisturbed grave of a child (Ind. 133) preserving a rough burial cairn, here placed directly over the interment and perhaps never visible at surface level. Grave goods, or items that might have been left beside the grave as offerings during or after burial, are rare. The most commonly encountered are pottery vessels, usually reduced to sherds, which were presumably used mainly as containers for foodstuffs and liquids (a few intact vessels containing botanical remains have been found; Dolling 2008: 31). Occasionally, amulets and jewellery items remain on the body or amongst its wrappings; sometimes a single amulet is clutched in the left hand. Other goods so far encountered include cosmetic items such as mirrors and kohl tubes, and travertine vessels. The looting of the site has certainly disrupted the artefact record, especially in terms of the loss of contextual information, but there may have been relatively little overall loss of material itself. As far as we can tell, the robbers seem to have had little interest in most of the objects represented at the site; a number of disturbed graves still contain items that they seem simply to have ignored, probably in the search for metal goods that could be melted down. Conversely, enough undisturbed burials have been excavated that contain not a single object, suggesting that grave goods were, in any case, the exception rather than the rule. Health and workloads The skeletal analysis summarised below focuses only on individuals for whom at least 50 per cent of the skeleton was recovered (n = 159; 95 adults; 64 subadults) (Table 1). 68

Barry Kemp et al. Research Figure 4. Limestone grave markers with typical pointed tops: a roughly faced slab with engraved triangular motif (obj. 39425, top left); a well-carved stela topped by two peaks that may represent the horizon, an image of the deceased probably once shown in the front recess (obj. 39446, top right); a round-topped stela set into a pointed frame, showing a seated man and woman carved in typical Amarna period style (obj. 39938, bottom left); and a three-dimensional pyramidion with a small recess for an image of the deceased (obj. 39433, bottom right). Photographs by Gwil Owen. 69

Life, death and beyond in Akhenaten s Egypt Figure 5. The skull and upper torso of an adult female lying on a well-preserved roll of plant-stem matting (Ind. 176, top); an undisturbed skeleton of an adult male in typical extended, supine posture (Ind. 121, bottom left); and the burial of an adult male showing the common pattern of disturbance whereby the upper torso has been jumbled by robbers and the skull removed (Ind. 125, bottom right). 70

Barry Kemp et al. Table 1. Summary of skeletal evidence for nutritional deficiency and workload in the South Tombs Cemetery sample. Condition n = Affected Severe Nutritional deficiency Cribra orbitalia 103 44 (42.7%) Porotic hyperostosis 105 3 (2.9%) Scurvy 158 8 (5.2%) Workload DJD-upper limb 91 60 (65.9%) 12 (13.2%) DJD-lower limb 88 42 (47.7%) 19 (21.6%) DJD-spine 90 51 (56.7%) 32 (34.6%) Trauma-upper limb 92 20 (21.7%) Trauma-lower limb 89 10 (11.2%) Trauma-trunk 95 53 (55.8%) Research Figure 6. An anthropoid wooden coffin excavated at the Lower Site (unit (13262)), each side of which was decorated with four male offering figures separated by columns of hieroglyphs. On this coffin the hieroglyphs do not form meaningful phrases and look as though they were copied by a craftsperson, and probably for an owner, who was illiterate. Nutritional stress Stature reflects the balance between the contribution to a body s overall health of calories and nutrients when set against depletions occasioned by growth, maintenance, immune response and other demands (Steckel 1995). Adults at Amarna are shorter than those from most other sites from which comparable data are available (comparative samples found in Zakrzewski 2003). Adult females, at 154.02cm (5ft 0.5in) are shorter than those from all other sites, and periods. The males at Amarna, at 163.75cm (5ft 4.5in), are slightly taller than a sample from the Badarian period but shorter than males from all other periods. Significantly, delayed growth during childhood at Amarna suggests that hardships began early in life. Comparison of age estimates based on the development of the teeth (Al Qahtani et al. 2010) and the length of the long bones (using Maresh 1970 standards for long bone growth) show that the majority of Amarna children were experiencing significantly delayed 71

Life, death and beyond in Akhenaten s Egypt growth, beginning at about 7.5 months and continuing throughout childhood (Figure 7). At its most extreme, the delay in long bone growth was 23.7 months (Dabbs & Zabecki, forthcoming). The overall short stature of adults indicates that the difficult conditions were not alleviated at any point during growth and therefore that biological stresses may have been present throughout life. Figure 7. Right femur of a typical 8.5-year-old (left) and right femur of an 8.5-year-old child with delayed growth (right). The age determination is assessed with mandibular tooth development. Other, more direct evidence of nutritional stress is also present. High levels of cribra orbitalia (porosity in the bone of the superior eye orbits) in both children and adults suggest a diet deficient in iron (Stuart-Macadam 1989) and other important nutrients (Walker et al. 2009). A total of 44 of the 103 (42.7 per cent) individuals retaining superior orbits exhibited cribra orbitalia. An additional 2.9 per cent of the sample (3 individuals of 105 with parietal bones available for assessment) demonstrated lesions characteristic of porotic hyperostosis (porosity of the cranial bones), another condition linked with nutritional deficiency. Furthermore, at least eight subadults (5.2 per cent) exhibit the porotic lesions of the sphenoid, temporal and occipital bone characteristic of scurvy, vitamin C deficiency (Ortner & Ericksen 1997). Prior to the skeletal manifestation of these conditions, the clinical symptoms can be quite severe. Iron deficiency anemia can cause lethargy, pallor, disorientation and reduced problem-solving abilities, while scurvy can cause evulsion of the dentition, opening of healed scars and failure of growing bone to properly mineralise (Aufderheide & Rodriguez-Martin 1998). Intense workloads Workload can be examined using a number of features manifested on the skeleton. The following discussion focuses exclusively on the development of degenerative joint disease (DJD), trauma, and the development of musculo-skeletal stress markers (MSM), and is restricted to the skeletally mature adults of the Amarna sample (n = 95). The physical manifestations of DJD and MSM are not observed on children, as they often do not participate in the activities thought to cause the skeletal changes observed, and even when they are known to participate they will have not done so for a sufficient length of time to provoke bony response. The subadult sample at Amarna shows little trauma, with only two individuals exhibiting fractures. Both individuals were teenagers, and both injuries spondololysis (separation of the vertebra arch or posterior side from the main 72

Barry Kemp et al. Research Figure 8. Left) degenerative joint disease as evidenced by porosity or porotic lesions and associated extra bone growth on the inferior aspect of a cervical vertebra. Right) carved scene of a man carrying a talatat block on his shoulder, an activity that may have contributed to the DJD seen on the Amarna skeletons. The scene is carved on an actual talatat block found at El-Ashmunein but probably originally part of a building at Amarna. (Brooklyn Museum 61.195.1. After D. Laboury 2010: fig. 4 3.) body of the vertebra) of the fifth lumbar vertebra and a fractured foot bone could have been work related, possibly indicating the young were working early in adolescence. Overall rates of DJD at Amarna, however, are very high. A total of 71 adults (77.2 per cent) exhibited some evidence of DJD in at least one joint. The joints considered include the shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee, ankle and all three regions of the spine. More than half of the individuals exhibiting DJD had severe manifestation (42/71; 59.2 per cent) in at least one joint. At the population level, a lower frequency of individuals exhibited DJD of the lower limb (47.7 per cent), but in contrast to the upper limb, the DJD of the lower limb was more often severe (21.6 per cent). Upper limb DJD was nearly ubiquitous among the South Tombs Cemetery population (65.9 per cent), but it was less often severe (13.7 per cent). The spine also exhibited high frequencies of DJD development (56.7 per cent presence; 35.6 per cent severe), with the most common severe manifestation being observed in the lumbar region. The city at Amarna was constructed quickly, progress on the stone buildings facilitated by the introduction of a standardised limestone building block (talatat in modern Egyptian Arabic), measuring a nominal 52.5 25cm (one cubit by a half, and often slightly larger than this), its weight approaching 70kg. One person could now carry each building stone, creating a more production-line style of working. It is tempting to view the carrying of talatat blocks as contributing to the widespread DJD seen at the cemetery; the hauling of such heavy loads, which puts stress especially on the lower body, fits the kinds of DJD attested here (Figure 8). 73

Life, death and beyond in Akhenaten s Egypt Musculoskeletal stress markers have also been a subject of study for this sample (scored as in Hawkey & Merbs 1995). While ancient Egyptians typically fall in the lower-workload spectrum compared to other world regions from all periods, including the Levant, North and South America, the Amarna individuals display more pronounced muscle attachments than other Egyptian samples from all periods (Zabecki 2009). Even more significantly the lower body (legs) has been found to display heavier workloads compared with the upper body (arms), paralleling the DJD data of heavier work being done with the lower body. Again, the carrying of talatat blocks provides a possible explanation for this kind of damage (see Mehrotra et al. 2004 for evidence of the relationship between higher than normal body mass index and arthritis). Adult trauma levels at Amarna were also extremely high, with 67.4 per cent (64/95) of adults exhibiting at least one healed, or healing, fracture. This is again consistent with a population working at hard and somewhat dangerous jobs. Overall, limb trauma was less frequent than trauma to the axial skeleton. Twenty-eight individuals (29.5 per cent) exhibited a fracture of at least one long bone, with greater frequency observed in the arms (20/92; 21.7 per cent) than the legs (10/89; 11.2 per cent). The most significant representation of trauma is its high frequency in elements of the axial skeleton. Fifty-three individuals (55.8 per cent) displayed a fracture in the trunk region. Most of them (41/53; 77.4 per cent) exhibited multiple axial fractures. The most common manifestations of trauma to the trunk were Schmorl s nodes, protrusions of soft tissue of the spinal disk into the bone of the vertebral body (21/53; 39.6 per cent); compression fractures of the vertebral bodies (20/53; 37.4 per cent); rib fractures (16/53; 30.2 per cent); and spondololysis (15/53; 28.3 per cent). With the exception of the rib fractures, all of these conditions are associated with heavy work and high stress in the vertebral column. Discussion Amarna s urban architecture and layout have long been utilised as a source for studying the internal workings and general shape of New Kingdom society. The clustering of small houses around the larger estates of officials, for example, is suggestive of co-dependent relationships between officials and the broader population (Kemp 1989: 261 317; Kemp & Stevens 2010a, 2010b), whilst house size and internal fittings have been used to develop socio-economic profiles of the city (Crocker 1985; Tietze 1985, 2010: 98 117; Kemp 1989: 298, 300). The floor areas, when plotted on a graph, follow a gradient of decreasing numbers of examples of ever larger houses, and it is possible to view the gradient as rising either more or less evenly or containing steps that represent social classes. By contrast, when we turn to the cemetery, the graded transition from the houses of the poor to those of the rich is replaced by two broad levels separating the group of people who chose, and found the means, to make rock-hewn tomb chapels and burial chambers, and those who did not. An initial impression is that the latter partook of a burial style that greatly compressed variation in personal circumstances, in what looks like a levelling down in family burial aspirations. The building of houses in ancient Egypt was commonly parallelled by the construction, where the terrain was suitable, of tomb superstructures with offering-places likewise built from mud-bricks if not of stones. These could be usable chapels or could be 74

Barry Kemp et al. miniatures, too small even to be entered (well-preserved examples from the Middle Kingdom are known from Abydos; Peet 1914: ch. 4, 6; O Connor 1985; Richards 2005: 144 49, 162 69). Amarna citizens who used the cemetery went a stage further in economy, breaking up surface boulders into handy fragments that could be made into a low, rough pile over the grave and into which a small memorial slab or rough pyramid-stone could be plastered. The near-homogeneity of burial style from a society that shows a much greater degree of differentiation in its places of living raises the question, is further social analysis possible? The ease with which a pit could be dug into the sand makes it unrealistic to give much weight to grave dimensions (a common measure of status for graves, e.g. Richards 2005: 55 56, 108 109; Castillos 2007). Even with the rock-cut tombs, factors were at work that challenge a simple assumption that size equals status; for example, in the apparent modesty of the tomb of the vizier Nakhtpa-aten (even in its unfinished state), and the tomb of Any which, though not amongst the largest, belonged to someone with the title royal scribe which, on its own, was not of particularly high rank. Within the wadi, burial containers, and to some extent grave goods, look more promising, inviting the development of a scoring system (e.g. as used for Middle Kingdom assemblages, Richards 2005: 109 11), although the scattering of material from robbery and the natural degradation of wood and matting hinders this, and so far we have not attempted it. In cemeteries with well-defined places of burial, characteristically brick-lined shafts and burial chambers cut into the bedrock, a tendency to create burial places for groups of people presumably members of the same family can be recognised (Abydos again supplies examples; Peet 1914: ch. 4; Richards 2005: 144 49, 162 69). This is far more difficult at the South Tombs Cemetery, with its simple burial architecture, although there are occasional areas where graves cluster together in a manner that could reflect social ties such as familial links, whilst other clusters of slightly richer burials likewise break up the homogeneity of the site (three decorated coffins found close together at the Lower Site is one). The only way to increase the chances of identifying social patterning of this kind is to excavate on a large scale, something that is being pursued at the Upper and Lower sites. By their nature, cemeteries also provide windows on to individuals in ways that settlement sites do not. The remains of the bodies (in our case reduced to skeletons) contain a partial record of personal life histories. The analysed skeletal remains reflect the antithesis of the dominant theme of abundance and opulence as depicted in the temple and tomb reliefs from the city (e.g. Davies 1903 1908), which created the expectation that the people at Amarna would have had reasonable health. After all, they lived in the capital city and had the benefit of taxes and offerings paid into the treasury from all over Egypt during one of the most prosperous times in the country s history. The emerging reality for the majority of the inhabitants, however, is one of hardship with severe nutritional stress and extreme workloads. How typical Amarna was in these respects is difficult to assess. When the Amarna dataset is compared to other skeletal assemblages from Egypt (and Egyptian-occupied Nubia), it sometimes suggests conditions of reduced health, although these datasets are often quite distant in time and place from Amarna relatively few come from non-elite New Kingdom cemeteries (Rose & Zabecki 2009: 410). In the matter of religion, the South Tombs Cemetery presents its own miniature world of practice and the beliefs we infer from them. The decoration of Akhenaten s own tomb at Research 75

Life, death and beyond in Akhenaten s Egypt Amarna is the most important opportunity we have of gauging his view of otherworld existence. Its simple scheme, though damaged, seems to represent a rejection of the otherworld journey, including its Osiris component (Martin 1989). What remained to Akhenaten was existence as a proximate spirit in the main temple to the Aten, where he could forever witness sunrise and supervise the presentation of food offerings. In the prayers in their own tombs, the elite likewise loyally pray for the constant opportunity to witness the daily passage of the sun, the appearance of the king and the chance to feed from the offerings laid out in the Aten temple (Murnane 1995). At first sight, Akhenaten s steering of society, or at least its elite, towards his revised vision of life after death, a major step of denial of ancient beliefs, was successful. The evidence is not, however, consistent and implies that it was difficult for people wholly to come to terms with the new spiritual world. A few references to the traditional otherworld (the Duat)are to be found in tombs of senior officials, one of them the high priest Meryra, no less (Murnane 1995: 155, also 120 [Ay], 185 [Suty]). Themaking of ushabti-figures for burials also attests the retention of an important traditional belief, even for the king himself. Some of those who prepared burials chose memorial stones displaying mountain peaks, a seemingly local development in iconography, whilst others chose a small pyramid, an ancient symbol that evoked the sun. Were they defining their own proximate habitat, a blessed region where the sun rose but was separate from the king s realm? We can also ask how far the reduction of burial goods reflects developments in underlying beliefs regarding the afterlife, and whether the ideas that Akhenaten embraced provoked the change, or whether it was a development already in progress as a barely articulated alteration of custom that reflected changes of other kinds taking place in society. At present, it is hard to tell, because of the difficulty of finding other non-elite cemeteries of comparable age that have been excavated and recorded with sufficient thoroughness to make detailed comparisons possible. For the Egyptian elite, a practice central to preparations for burial was the ritual of Opening of the Mouth, that signified rebirth. That the ceremony continued in Akhenaten s reign is attested by scenes on a model coffin found at Amarna in 1931 (Pendlebury 1951: 90, 92, pl. 74.9, 104). A small metal blade with wooden handle recovered in situ under the head of a juvenile buried in the cemetery recalls the adze used in this ceremony (Kemp & Stevens 2008: 32 34). It may be a sign that the ceremony was still performed (presumably during the preparation of the body for burial), thus recognising the continuing existence by the spirit of the deceased in the vicinity of the grave. Taken together, the evidence from the cemetery implies that those who used it had, at the very least, positive but not unanimous ideas of their own as to a spiritual existence after death, and that these ideas were not a simple extension of Akhenaten s views as we currently understand them. Conclusion Despite the looting of the site, and taking into account the unique circumstances of Amarna itself, including the relocation of a population en masse and the need for the sudden construction of an entire city, the human remains from the South Tombs Cemetery stand 76

Barry Kemp et al. as a major new dataset from which to reconstruct the experience and quality of life of the general population of ancient Egypt. Future work will continue to explore the diseases that affected the people of Amarna, including the important issue of whether they were exposed to epidemic disease, in light of the Hittite plague prayers (Pritchard 1969: 394 96) that name Egypt as the source of an apparent epidemic, as yet unidentified, that swept through parts of the Near East around the time of the Amarna period. Emerging techniques of DNA analysis, as employed recently on the body of King Tutankhamun (Hawass et al. 2010), might offer a path forward here. Research Acknowledgements The excavations at the South Tombs Cemetery run with the permission of the Ministry of State for Antiquities of Egypt and have been supported by the Amarna Trust, King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies (University of Arkansas) and the Bioarchaeology Foundation. The authors wish also to thank the team of archaeologists who have contributed to the excavation and recording of material from the cemetery, Corinne Duhig for supplying reference material and the Antiquity reviewers for their feedback. For information on how to support the work of the Amarna Project, visit www.amarnatrust.com. References AMBRIDGE,L.&M.SHEPPERSON. 2006. South Tombs Cemetery, 2006, in B. Kemp, Tell el-amarna, 2005 06. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 92: 27 37. AUFDERHEIDE, A.C. & C. RODRIGUEZ-MARTIN. 1998. The Cambridge encyclopedia of human paleopathology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. BAINES,J.&P.LACOVARA. 2002. Burial and the dead in ancient Egyptian society: respect, formalism, neglect. Journal of Social Archaeology 2: 5 36. CASTILLOS, J.J. 2007. The beginning of class stratification in early Egypt. Göttinger Miszellen 215: 9 24. CROCKER, P. 1985. Status symbols in the architecture of El- Amarna. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 71: 52 65. DABBS,G.R.&M.ZABECKI. Forthcoming.Subadult age estimation at Tell-el Amarna: a systematic, site-specific approach. Journal of Comparative Human Biology. DAVIES, N. de G. 1903 1908. The rock tombs of el-amarna, Parts 1 6. London: Egypt Exploration Society. DOLLING, W. 2008. South Tombs Cemetery, in B. Kemp, Tell el-amarna, 2007 8. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 94: 13 31. HAWASS,Z.,Y.Z.GAD, S.ISMAIL,R.KHAIRAT,D. FATHALLA,N.HASAN, A.AHMED, H.ELLEITHY,M. BALL, F.GABALLAH,S.WASEF, M.FATEEN,H. AMER,P.GOSTNER, A.SELIM,A.ZINK &C.M. PUSCH. 2010. Ancestry and pathology in King Tutankhamun s family. Journal of the American Medical Association 303: 638 47. HAWKEY,D.E.&C.F.MERBS. 1995 Activity-induced musculoskeletal stress markers (MSM) and subsistence strategy changes among ancient Hudson Bay Eskimos. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 5(4): 324 38. KEMP, B. 1977. The city of el-amarna as a source for the study of urban society in ancient Egypt. World Archaeology 9/2: 123 39. 1989. Ancient Egypt: anatomy of a civilization. London: Routledge. 2010. Tell el-amarna, 2010. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 96: 1 28. KEMP, B.&A.STEVENS. 2008. Appendix: artefacts, in B. Kemp, Tell el-amarna, 2007 8. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 94: 31 41. 2010a. Busy lives at Amarna. Excavations in the main city (Grid 12 and the House of Ranefer, N49.18). Volume 1: the excavations, architecture and environmental remains. London: Egypt Exploration Society & Amarna Trust. 2010b. Busy lives at Amarna. Excavations in the main city (Grid 12 and the House of Ranefer, N49.18). Volume 2: the objects. London: Egypt Exploration Society & Amarna Trust. LABOURY, D. 2010. Akhenaton. Paris: Pygmalion. 77

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