Palace Decoration at Tell El-Amarna

Together the various and extensive royal buildings created a formal environment within which the royal family lived its life, very different from the surroundings of the rest of society. The relationship between decoration and architecture is explored through descriptions of three buildings: the Great Palace, the North Palace, and Maru-Aten. The illustrations include two architectural studies which draw upon unpublished material.

The fourteenth century BC (the late Eighteenth Dynasty) has left us two major groups of palaces in which significant remains of their original decoration have survived. One group, at Malqata in western Thebes, was built by Amenophis III, the other, at Tell el-Amarna, by his son, Akhenaten. In placing their schemes of decoration beside Aegean wall paintings, however, one is seeking to compare two things that are not very much alike. The fact that they share (in part) a common medium - paint on plaster - disguises significant differences of context.

The principal reason for this concerns the role of the palace in Egypt vis à vis major temples. Within Aegean palaces (and we are aware that none of the Theran buildings so far discovered falls into this category) were evidently to be found most if not all of the formal settings within which rule was exercised and which called forth distinctive expressions in art and architecture. This was not so in Egypt. The built and decorated environment within which the king of Egypt lived and fulfilled his role covered a diverse range of buildings which included temples. The Karnak and Luxor group provides a good example. Although built as temples to the Theban gods, and especially to Amun-Ra, they were also the setting for ceremonies and rituals of kingship. Within the precinct of Karnak and close to the main temple lay a palace, its existence known to us only from texts. From it, on certain occasions in the year, the king would issue for important ceremonies. The greatest of these was the annual Festival of Opet, when the power of the royal ka was renewed within Luxor temple. The scheme of decoration for this prominent piece of ceremonial is thus the full set of scenes in Luxor temple. If the Karnak palace (presumably built of mud-bricks) and traces of its decoration had survived it would clearly be an exercise of limited value, in considering the decorative-architectural scheme in which kings performed their duties, to treat it in isolation from the other buildings - the temples - to which the king proceeded for the climax of the ceremonies which had drawn him there in the first place.

When we turn to Amarna, the separation between palace and temple becomes particularly hard to maintain, especially if we wish to use building material as a distinguishing criterion. At Karnak we imagine, for want of definite evidence, that the palace came second in the value of its materials and perhaps in its size to the decorated stone temples. Amenophis III's palace complex at Malqata seems to confirm this, in being built wholly of brick, though so too was one adjacent building which, on account of its plan, is usually regarded as a temple to Amun. At Amarna, however, this order of priorities was not maintained. In the Great Palace the portions built of brick, and at least in part decorated with paintings, were subsidiary to a colossal central part of stone the walls of which were also decorated, but in painted low relief carvings which appear to have had much in common with, and were perhaps largely indistinguishable from, those which were to be found in temples to the Aten. It makes little sense, except from the standpoint of technique, to focus on the mud-brick part of the Great Palace and to ignore the stone part, which was clearly far more important. Nor is it particularly helpful to attempt a narrower definition of what a palace was, so constructed as to exclude the more temple-like stone parts. Those who used the buildings passed from one part to the other and, although the ambience might well have changed, there is no compelling reason to deny a functional continuity.

Continuity of themes across significant architectural divisions is one conclusion that emerges from a full consideration of the evidence. What we have done to illustrate this is to take three of the royal buildings at Amarna and to review what is known of the full decorative programme, not only the remains of painted plaster. We have excluded the two large buildings which merit the term temple and which were designed for a very specific and specialised function, that of accommodating huge quantities of offerings to the sun god, even though they also played an important part in the circuit of life of the royal family. We have also taken the liberty, at the end, of reviewing briefly the evidence for the interior decoration of private houses and certain other buildings. In the contrast they make, they help further to define the proper settings of Egyptian wall art.

AMARNA PALACES 

Amarna was built to house the Aten cult and the royal family: to be, therefore, a ceremonial and sacred centre. Akhenaten's foundation decrees make this quite explicit. Its existence as a city of several tens of thousands of people was incidental, the people and ancillary buildings being there only to serve the palaces and temples. The royal buildings in which one seeks the subject of this paper seem to follow two patterns of distribution, one on a central axis, the other having a peripheral scatter. The former took a line parallel to the river and also served as an avenue along which the royal family would travel, normally, to judge from the frequency of the subject in art (especially as preserved in the tombs), in chariots. At the north end lay a huge palace complex now largely lost beneath the fields (the North Riverside Palace) and, a short distance to the south and facing onto the avenue, a smaller palace (the North Palace) ostensibly for one of the women in Akhenaten's family (initially queen Kiya, later the eldest daughter Meretaten). The avenue led on to the Central City and there gave access to the two Aten temples, to the Great Palace, and to a lesser palace (the King's House) linked to the Great Palace by a bridge across the avenue.

The scattered royal buildings, set well beyond the periphery of the city proper, numbered at least five: Maru-Aten, Kom el-Nana, the 'Lepsius building', el-Mangara and the 'Desert Altars' (Kemp 1995a). Where we have the plans they were enclosures which contained one or more brick and stone buildings, and with them the attempt to draw a distinction between temple and palace wholly breaks down. The best known, Maru-Aten, is an important source for decoration and is unavoidably part of the discussion on palace art, even though, like the others, it was probably designated as a solar shrine of a particular type (a Sunshade), in the possession of a royal woman (in this case again, first Kiya and then Meretaten).

It is difficult to imagine the private and domestic life of rulers anywhere, yet a study of palaces obliges us to try since it was played out somewhere within their intricate plans. One of the novelties of Amarna art, known mostly from the Amarna tombs and from stelae, is that the viewer is encouraged to dwell on royal domesticity through being shown the king and queen eating meals and relaxing with their daughters, a paradigm of family harmony and perfect togetherness. Indeed, since the new Aten religion dispensed with images of the old gods, these scenes might well have been substitute objects of veneration. In practice, their lives are bound to have been more fragmented and complex. In particular, as the years passed at Amarna, the eldest daughter and heiress, Meretaten, was given a life of her own, in this role replacing another wife of Akhenaten, the lady Kiya, who never figures in the family scenes at all. By coincidence, two of the major buildings at Amarna which retained significant traces of painted decoration, Maru-Aten and the North Palace (which were nearly seven kilometres apart), had originally, it seems, belonged to these two in turn. Whether the change of ownership was occasioned by the death of the former or by family politics we do not know at all. Maru-Aten, as noted above, was one of a number of enclosures at Amarna, called 'Sunshades' and ascribed to a named woman of the royal family. The two large examples that have been excavated (Kom el-Nana is the other one) combined temples to the Aten with gardens and pavilions of intricate design but built on a small scale. They (like the North Palace) provided the settings for separate lives of some scale and complexity. Indeed, the question of whether the royal family can be said to have 'lived' in anyone particular building or part of a building that has been excavated at Amarna is impossible to answer. This is not least because of the almost total loss of the North Riverside Palace which, with its separateness from the main city and its long fortified wall (almost the only part to have survived), is a serious contender for having been the principal residential base for the king.

It is in the nature of palaces to be home to a refined, precious and rather artificial life, to which many of the occupants contribute in an essentially decorative manner. Akhenaten's court was the focus of life for an elite of society, for whom attendance in order to provide an entourage for the king and to participate in ceremonial must have mixed in differing degrees with the exercise of administrative duties. The overall spread of buildings at Amarna makes fairly clear that a significant degree of separation was maintained between the ceremonial and private life of the king on the one hand, and the administrative business for which he was the source of authority on the other. Much of this was accommodated in modestly constructed buildings in the Central City which lay well outside the palaces themselves, and included the Records Office (where the Amarna Letters were found). The extent of Akhenaten's personal involvement in the administrative process is naturally not known, though the changes that he wrought, including the building of the new city, imply a considerable wielding of real power. This could, one assumes, have been done through a small number of people with whom he had direct dealings. It is likely that all of the men of this elite group lived outside the palace, in large houses of their own in the city, sometimes located a long way away (like the vizier Nakht, whose house was at the southern end of the Main City). We can thus eliminate this group from the permanent residents of the palaces. There were, of course, palace servants, who are shown in palace scenes of the Amarna period performing menial duties; as well as an armed retinue of guards. Presumably some of them lived, at least for part of their lives, within palaces, and it is possible to locate parts which look, from their plans, like small houses (for example, in Fig. 1, the rooms east and west of Room E). They are not, however, very numerous.

The original excavators of the Amarna palaces (and of Maru-Aten) saw, partly through instinct and partly through the citation of historical parallels, certain parts of these buildings as having accommodated royal harims. Although it is debatable whether the term is strictly appropriate, for the Egyptians possessed a word for a royal harim which was used as if it designated a complete establishment of some scale, rather different from the subdivisions of palace buildings that we are dealing with at Amarna, nevertheless the general idea deserves respect. For it is likely that palaces were, indeed, home to a population of women such as those shown in Amarna tomb pictures, where they play musical instruments in the presence of the king or just relax in apartments which appear to be deeply within the palace building. For an idea of scale (perhaps an unusual one), one can cite how, when Princess Gilukhipa from the Kingdom of Mitanni reached the court of her future husband Amenophis III, she came with a retinue of no fewer than 317 "chief women of her harim". To accommodate at least a part of the large community of women of the court a separate palace town had been constructed earlier in the Eighteenth Dynasty near the entrance to the Fayum (the site of Medinet el-Ghurab/Gurob).

Those who, in the past, interpreted parts of Amarna palaces as providing homes for a population of ladies-in-waiting allocated minimal architectural space to each individual, mostly a single chamber of between five (garden court of the North Harim, Great Palace) and fifteen (north-east court, North Palace) square metres. One is so used at Amarna to dealing with separate and relatively well appointed houses within the city that this provision seems poor, although these women probably lived a largely communal life. Yet if one is going to insert into the palaces a permanent population of this kind then one is left with little or no choice but to adopt this initial interpretation. The alternative, especially at the North Palace where we have the complete plan, is to imagine the palaces as almost empty outside daylight hours, which seems implausible. When looked at in detail, however, other interpretations for the 'harims' become possible. It will be necessary to review the evidence later, for it is in and around these parts of the palaces that, perhaps by coincidence, many of the surviving paintings have been found.

The very existence of decoration in palaces challenges our powers to interpret. Was it primarily decoration (glorified wallpaper), with only a subdued effect on the minds of onlookers, or was it intended to create an ambience similar to that in temples? We might reasonably expect that all aspects of the king's life were never far from ritual. The 'palaces', including the examples looked at here, contain much that is very formal, as, for instance, the likely presence of a throne dais in part of the North Harim of the Great Palace (Fig. 1). One of the judgements that we have to make is whether, in contexts such as these, the formality of the setting excludes the rarefied form of domesticity that kings might have had and points instead to aspects of defined ritual which were not performed in the principal stone buildings of the city, especially the central part of the Great Palace.

At the heart of the problem is the ability which we all have to invest spaces with special significance. Architecture, decoration and furnishings can aid this, and often do. The nature of that special significance, however, covers a wide spectrum of meaning which includes religion but also extends beyond it. Indeed, 'religion' (an equivalent term for which the ancient Egyptians did not possess) is really a subdivision of a mode of perception which we all possess and is devoted to 'otherness'. If the otherness which is brought to the forefront of our minds is religion, then the space which is having this effect becomes a shrine or temple. Not far removed is human power and its palaces. But otherness encompasses an infinite number of unpredictable mental inventions which can be hard to define, even by those who are party to them. They include that curious creation of Victorian-Edwardian villa culture in Britain, the front parlour, "more a museum or a temple or a furniture showroom than a living-room" (Thompson 1954, 610), the cold compelling sanctity of which is perhaps hard to appreciate if one has not experienced it at first hand.

For it to exist, that sensation of otherness which special architecture and decoration, sometimes aided by notable scale, creates has to stand in contrast to more neutral surroundings which represent normality. Moreover, it is not a fixed or absolute quality. Its existence lies in the mind and is likely to be affected not only by personal sensitivity but also by the frequency and circumstances of contact. To those who become habituated to it - priests in temples, kings in palaces - its quality of otherness will be felt differently from how it will appear to outsiders; and they might remain unmoved or find within it a reinforcing agent for their own special status, exulting in the sensation, so that it becomes a support for their own power. The Amarna royal family probably lived all the time in surroundings designed to create the sensation of otherness. Our interpretations of meaning should allow those surroundings to have acted on them simultaneously as a constant reminder of their unique divine role and as a form of luxury decoration. Their states of mind, from moment to moment, as they passed their lives in this elaborately contrived environment are beyond objective recapture. In trying to imagine it, our own individual attitudes also come into play and blur still further the boundary between ritual and domesticity.

The general nature of the interiors of palaces and temples at Amarna was evidently known to a section of the population. It formed a standard subject of decoration in the tombs of officials, not all of whom were high ranking-courtiers. To them, and to visiting delegations from client states of the Egyptian empire and from the great powers that lay beyond, the scale of the buildings and the ubiquity of decoration are likely to have created the impression that the king followed a life of constant ritual. There is sufficient evidence from archaeology and texts to show that the Egyptians of this time, and probably of earlier periods too, kept religion very much in its place and lived largely secular lives (Kemp 1995b). At Amarna their meagrely decorated houses stood in sharp contrast to the otherness which surrounded the royal family. When present within the palace-temple environment of distinctive art and architecture, or even when imagining it, outsiders are likely to have been deeply impressed.

In the end, much depends upon whose point of view one is adopting and the degree of detachment that one allows them at an individual level; but the conclusion is unavoidable that palace and temple surroundings demarcated royal lives in a unique manner and, in the amount of the ground that these buildings covered, allowed the royal family to sustain a ritualised life on a grand scale.

SURVIVAL OF THE EVIDENCE: THE PAINTED PLASTER

In contrast to the decorated stonework, most of which was removed in ancient times from the site, the paintings on brick walls and floors of Amarna royal buildings can be studied in a straightforward way, although one cannot emphasise too strongly how tiny a proportion of the likely original paintings survived to modern times. On the walls the pigments were applied in a medium usually directly over a layer of mud plaster which was reinforced with chopped straw and laid over the walls. In the case of floors there were usually two layers of hard white plaster. The lower one, ca. 1.0-1.5 cm. thick, has been shown not to be made of gypsum alone, as commonly assumed, but to include a proportion of calcium carbonate. The top layer is almost pure lime plaster, 1.0-2.00 mm. thick. It is likely that pigments were applied to this layer while the surface was still wet in the 'true fresco' technique (Weatherhead forthcoming). The lower layer of plaster was, according to Petrie, laid directly over a layer of bricks as a foundation.

After the Amarna period the brick buildings, even those belonging to the royal family, seem to have been left alone to fall down and to decay, although there are signs that some of the gypsum floors were broken up and removed. Being of a not particularly robust material, the unprotected painted wall plaster would have fallen victim to weathering and erosion, and the straw in the mud plaster would rapidly have been consumed by insects (termites). Both Petrie (1894, 14-15) and Davies (in Frankfort 1929, 67) have left vivid descriptions of the remains of paintings which confronted them in the Great Palace and North Palace respectively:

        "These figures were all painted directly on mud plaster; and the white ants having eaten out every trace of straw from it, and tunnelled it all to pieces, it was impossible to attempt to move the paintings, as they were really on mere dust, held together by a wash of colour and pierced in all directions by the prickly roots of the halfa grass. Within a few hours of being cleared they began to crumble away while I copied them" (Petrie).

An archive photograph for the North Palace (23/67) shows roots (said to be from palm trees: Whittemore 1926, 4) protruding through the mud plaster on a wall here, as well.

        "The mud plaster on which the colour was directly laid had been so riddled by white ants that it consisted almost entirely of their excreta, and the film of colour adhered to the wall so lightly in parts that a touch would bring it down" (Davies).

One consequence of the fragility of the preserved areas of wall painting is that several perished after discovery, such as most of the fragmentary strips of fowl-feeding scenes in the North Palace. This could happen quickly. Another exposed painting in the North Palace copied by Newton in 1923 (Frankfort 1929, pl. VIIB) had completely disappeared by the time Davies worked there in 1926 (ibid. 69). It appears that most of the wall plaster that did survive at Amarna was still attached to the walls and presumably survived because it was buried and preserved either beneath massive collapses of brickwork from above or through rapid sanding up before it had disintegrated into powder. It is not known how much fallen plaster, which might have been very degraded, was discarded by the excavators. Records show, for instance, that quantities of loose fragments were found in the North Palace, but this has not been located in museums. Except for Petrie's successful removal of the 'princesses' panel from the King's House in 1892 (it is now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), there was little attempt to recover paintings from the walls of buildings until 1926. It was only at this time, when some areas of painting were removed from the North Palace, that the excavators could feel confident about methods and also had the necessary chemicals available to them.

In few places did wall scenes survive to a significant extent, and then only along the lower part of the composition, such as in the case of the famous 'princesses' scene from the King's House in which the princesses sat at the feet of much larger scale figures of Akhenaten and Nefertiti which had mostly perished. A little higher were the paintings in the north-east court of the North Palace, which reached a height of 1.5 m.. Since only the bases of walls were normally preserved, an important consideration in judging how extensively the palaces were painted is to know how far down the walls the decoration stretched. In the North Harim of the Great Palace paintings of jars and bowls on stands began very close to the ground (above only a 20 cm. strip of white in one instance: Pendlebury 1951, 39 n.1), as did scenes of nature here (a scene of a winding watercourse which probably had only a limited vertical space available to it) and in parts of the North Palace and at Maru-Aten (see below). Scenes of people and palace life (and sometimes scenes of nature, too) normally began above a painted dado which varied in depth from about 45 cm. to a metre. Dado designs took two main forms (a possible third type, imitating wood panelling, will be mentioned towards the end of this paper). In one, horizontal bands of colour ran above a line of panels using a striped 'false door' pattern (itself over a narrow white strip at floor level) which either repeated continuously or alternated with groups of the heraldic plants which stood for Upper and Lower Egypt (Weatherhead 1995). In the other design (principally encountered at the North Palace), beneath the band of horizontal stripes, a plain unornamented strip of black or intense blue replaced the panels and extended to the very floor. Wherever a dado existed it is a likely pointer to the presence above of a full-height wall painting. The 'princesses' scene from the King's House originally stood above such a dado (Weatherhead 1995, 110-111). The distribution of surviving painted dados implies that much of the brick portions of Amarna palaces were painted with wall scenes, even some of the parts which seem to have been more utilitarian, such as the entrance passage to the North Magazines in the Great Palace (Pendlebury 1951, 47, pl. XXXIV.5, and see further below). It is something that has been reaffirmed in a recent examination of the central portion of the King's House where small areas of dado still survive beneath banks of earth in all of the rooms and a connecting corridor (Weatherhead 1995). They are a witness to just how much has been lost.

Two examples of wall painting continued directly across a corner, from one wall to its neighbour (North Harim of the Great Palace, Hall E, Fig. 1; North Palace, Green Room), a feature rarely encountered in Egyptian art although present in one of the Amarna rock tombs (that of Meryra, no. 4). Parallels occur in the Aegean, as pointed out by Frankfort (1929, 25-26). The poor rate of survival of wall paintings at Amarna prevents us from judging how common this was, although other examples of wall decoration show that it was not an invariable practice.

With regard to the painted pavements, one would have expected them to have survived relatively well. At first sight they were uncommon at Amarna, even in palaces. The earlier excavators actually found only three groups in situ. Two were in the eastern wing of the Great Palace: the throne room complex of the North Harim, and rooms to the south of it (Fig. 1) and in the South Harim; the third was in one of the buildings in the Maru-Aten enclosure. It might be thought unlikely that all traces of gypsum floors over a brick base could be lost, but this is something that has to be countenanced. One place where this is likely is the North Palace. Although parts of it have much in common with the places where the painted pavements have been found, no trace of one has actually been recorded. It is hard to believe that it was devoid of them. In recent years, moreover, three further instances have come to light in other buildings, but all reduced to small loose fragments. These are: a) the King's House: fragments picked from Pendlebury's spoil heap adjacent to the central columned hall (Weatherhead 1995, 104-106). The most likely source is one or more of the halls themselves, but the interior of this building has not been re-examined by us; (b) the Great Palace, the southern building O42.2: a small number of fragments was discovered in 1996 associated with an early phase of the palace which was destroyed to its foundations to make way for the Smenkhkara Hall; (c) the South Pavilion at Kom el-Nana: a quantity of fragments was found along with a deposit of rubbish (mostly pottery) which had been used as filling material for a sunken garden. It is still not clear whether this debris was thrown in during or after the Amarna period.

Ceilings, plastered with straw-reinforced mud like the walls, provided a further surface for decoration, but were even more vulnerable to annihilation. Their survival at Amarna was rare (more so than at Malqata). Only a single slab of any size of painted ceiling with a design more elaborate than flat colours and block patterns was recorded and published by past excavators, and that from a small building on the edge of the Central City, R43.1 (see towards the end of this paper). It does appear, however, that quantities of fallen ceiling fragments showing vine patterns were found in the northeast court and central apartments of the North Palace, fragments of a duck ceiling in the southern hall of the King's House (Pendlebury 1951, 87), and fragments of vine design in the Great Palace (Petrie 1894, 7; Pendlebury 1951, 60).

SURVIVAL OF THE EVIDENCE: THE STONEWORK

The decorated stonework met a fate which poses a singular problem. After the end of the Amarna period it was, with great thoroughness, removed and taken off to be used as building stone elsewhere, fortunately leaving behind much of the plans of the buildings as traces on the original foundation beds of gypsum concrete. Well over two thousand of the blocks from Amarna have been recovered from other sites, the most important being the ancient regional metropolis across the river, Hermopolis (El-Ashmunein: Roeder 1969; Hanke 1978). So far, however, little progress has been made in matching blocks to original buildings. In particular, we normally cannot be sure whether blocks derive from the two main Aten temples or from the other royal buildings. To judge from the fragments of blocks left behind at the original sites, however (and they constitute a significant corpus for the Great Palace), there might not actually have been much difference.

It has also not been possible so far to reconstruct (as has been done in the Luxor Museum for one of Akhenaten's buildings at Karnak) a significant area of wall blocks. The overall decorative schemes into which the blocks fitted are, however, preserved in sometimes modified forms in the wall scenes of the rock tombs at Amarna, which belonged to the royal family and to the senior figures at the royal court. The Karnak blocks also offer many helpful parallels, although overall the balance of subject matter of the Amarna and Karnak blocks appears not to have been the same, and one should not assume that both sets were carved by the same craftsmen.

THE THEMES OF AMARNA PALACE DECORATION: THE ROYAL ESTATE

Palace wall decoration in stone and paint broadly evokes two themes: the world of the king and that of nature. To what extent they were equally present on stone and brick is now hard to tell, for the evidence is so fragmentary, although a preference for scenes of nature in the mud-brick constructions where much decoration has survived is apparent. In the former, the king, with his complement of royal women, carries out the functions of office: endlessly offering to the Aten and making appearances in public: in chariots, in carrying chairs, via the palace balcony (the Window of Appearance) or inside a palace. They appear as a model family, demonstrative in mutual affection. Much attention was paid to delineating the spatial and specifically the architectural settings (Figs. 2 and 4), extending to well beyond the limits of the paths that the royal family would follow, to take in service buildings, storerooms and even private housing. Sometimes the frame of reference extends further still, to include the river bank with moored boats, the life of the fields, and even the desert and the creatures that dwelt there, so merging with the other major artistic theme, that of nature. This penumbra of normality is peopled with officials, soldiers, workmen, servants and the general run of ordinary humanity as they live and work independently of the king. The outdoor and indoor elements of scenes were frequently juxtaposed: desert creatures adjacent to one of the temples or to a domestic residence (Fig. 4d), stonemasons at work adjacent to another domestic residence.

The architectural elements create a busy, compartmentalised framework of closely subdivided spaces, which provides a fascinating insight into the artists' approach to composition. In combining partial plans with selective elevations (usually of doorways and colonnades), they show an attempt at three dimensionality. Yet their appearance of verisimilitude is treacherous for modern study. The seeming plans of buildings are mental maps, remembered layouts that have been manipulated and modified, sometimes simplified and sometimes elaborated, to create a design with an integrity of its own which is independent of the buildings from which inspiration was drawn. We are able to pass judgement on them, partly because (at least in the depictions of the idealised Aten temple) we can compare more than one example of the same subject and note the obvious differences, and partly because we can also make comparison with excavated ground plans, and again spot obvious differences.

It is only in the rock tombs that complete or nearly complete examples of architectural scenes survive, and these, of course, are already quite distant from the city and its buildings. Of the equivalent scenes from the walls of the temples and palaces themselves only fragments have been recovered from their original locations (one a painting in the North Harim of the Great Palace: Fig. 2a). Amongst them one finds a poor match between the buildings depicted and the building that is the source of the evidence. Thus scenes of a towered or buttressed enclosure lying within a parkland setting, which is reminiscent of Maru-Aten, and a scene of another parkland setting for what might have been a house, come from the Great Palace (Figs. 4a, 4b and 4d). It was enough that they were fragments of an idealised portrayal of the city as a whole.

Where did this theme of the royal estate come from? A unifying element was the rays of the sun, studiously carved over a great many of the scenes. The hymns to the Aten praised the myriad forms of life in Egypt (and even beyond) which owed their animation to the daily appearance of the sun, but they place their emphasis upon wildlife rather than upon humanity. In Amarna art, the ordinary people themselves do not visibly respond to the appearance of the sun, although they do so to the appearance of the royal family, mostly with abject prostration. The normality of the ordinary people living undemonstrative and orderly lives was, it seems, an important part of Akhenaten's view of the ideal condition of his world, exemplifying the good order of everything (the concept of Maat, on which he placed great emphasis).

One can trace the roots of this theme back to the wall decoration in mortuary temples and tomb chapels of previous centuries. In private tombs, ordinary people going about their tasks, industrial and agricultural, were an important part of the tomb owner's vision of eternity. They guaranteed the perpetuation of orderly and servile human life which, for the Egyptian scribal elite, was the essence of normality and from which they drew status and well-being. Sometimes the figures are placed in representations of buildings (shown as profile only, although for a time in the early second millennium wooden models were also used) or in a simple landscape (for example, gridded vegetable beds seen in plan). If we move closer in time to the Amarna period, aspects of the world over which the tomb owner presided were depicted - in paint on plastered surfaces at Thebes - with striking liveliness and realism that pushed at the limits of accepted conventions. Pictures of town houses and even a built-up street scene in which commodities change hands (Manniche 1988, 64-67, pls. 7-8) introduce urban life into what had previously been an unspecified setting or one of apparent country estates.

In the equivalents made for Pharaoh, the mortuary temples, the balance was inevitably somewhat different but not wholly so. Much space had to be given to rituals and ceremonies and also to illustrations of kings achieving: pious acts of building, triumphs over foreign foes. Yet the pyramid temples of the Old Kingdom also found space to portray ordinary Egyptians, not just in supporting roles as sailors and soldiers, but also in a neutral role of just going about daily activities. A major source is the decorated walls of the immensely long causeway leading to the pyramid of Unas at Saqqara (ca. 2350 BC), where there were scenes of craftsmen at work, of agricultural activities in different seasons, and one of barter in a food market (a scene which recurs in a number of private tombs). Here the thought must be of the whole country as the king's estate, filled with the order the maintenance of which was one of the king's principal duties. Normality had a place amongst the marvels of his reign and must have been seen to enhance his claims to effective sovereignty. It extended to depictions of emaciated dwellers of the deserts, into which the Egyptians ventured in search of stone for special parts of the pyramid (see now Hawass and Verner 1996 for a similar scene from Sahura's causeway). In the sun temples of the same period, the Fifth Dynasty (or at least that of Neuserra, ca. 2400 BC, the only example where much of the decoration has survived), the natural life of the Nile valley in its cycle of three seasons was celebrated in great detail.

On the model provided by the Old Kingdom, we are entitled to look for something comparable in the royal mortuary temples of the period leading up to the reign of Akhenaten. At this crucial stage in the argument, however, we unfortunately face a large gap in the available evidence, for of the eight temples that are likely to have been built only one, that of Queen Hatshepsut (another 'rogue' Pharaoh whose scheme of decoration might not have been typical), has preserved significant portions of its decoration. Scenes of the marvels of her reign chose detail and elaboration of select scenes rather than variety of subject matter, of which there were only two leading examples: transportation of obelisks and an expedition to the land of Punt in search of incense.

What is so striking about the Punt scene (which continues across a corner from one wall to another, although with a vertical divider) is that, although the accompanying texts make the visit a miraculous royal event, in the scenes themselves the key figures are the members of the Egyptian mission and their opposite numbers amongst the Puntites, who emerge from a piece of carefully observed landscape. Within the limits of a somewhat austere style the artists have been allowed to depict an event on a human scale without visual interference by the fabulous. Did other royal mortuary temples of the Eighteenth Dynasty allow space for this approach to realism in the form of depictions of a neutrally portrayed world? The loss of the mortuary temples of Tuthmosis III and Amenophis II is particularly damaging, for it was during their reigns that this artistic interest is most developed in the tombs of their officials. And did it surface in the decoration of the palace of these kings at Memphis, a building or buildings of which we know absolutely nothing? The gap in the evidence that is the Tuthmoside palaces (and, indeed, the palaces of most periods of Egyptian history) is a particularly serious impediment to exploring the world of Egyptian wall art and to placing the Amarna palaces in their full context.

It remains, nonetheless, a curious but exciting thought that, by the time of Akhenaten, Egyptians - and especially those from or visiting the Memphite area - would have been surrounded with art from periods which extended across the previous thousand years (it was Ramses II who seems to have inaugurated a great national clear-up of old monuments). The opportunity for historical eclecticism in art was readily there, and Akhenaten could well have found ideas (although not models which he chose to copy recognisably) in the art especially of the Old Kingdom for portraying the theme of the ordinary and orderly world presided over distantly by the supremely paternalistic king. What is novel at Amarna, apart from vastly increased prominence, is the careful placing of this world within spaces defined much more precisely by the local surrounding architecture.

THE THEME OF NATURE

The other major theme in palace art at Amarna, known mostly on the painted plaster but present also in the decorated stonework (Fig. 6b), is the portrayal of nature, as lush and sometimes swampy vegetation. One can, for convenience, divide the nature scenes into three types, although similar layers of meaning were probably shared by all three. There were Nilotic scenes, such as appear on walls in the North and South Harims of the Great Palace; 'water-bank' designs (Fig. 6a) which are stylised, layered depictions of water and swamp plants which were widely used throughout the North Palace (and perhaps at Maru-Aten); and 'duck and marsh' designs which occur in the Great Palace (Fig. 3) and at Maru-Aten.

The vision of nature had a powerful hold on the Egyptian imagination, and at more than one level of perception. As in other societies (including those of Renaissance and modern Europe), it seems to have served as a palliative against the ordered (and perhaps duplicitous) life of the official circle, whether royal or private. The lure of the country life and the near-universal preference for depicting it has given rise to the false modern perception of the non-urban character of ancient Egypt. As a kind of vegetal womb it was the setting for myths of creation and of the birth of gods. Its ideal expression was an island refuge called Chemnis (Akh-bity) where the goddess Isis gave birth to Horus. At a town in the Nile delta, which bore this name, a reedy island in a lake was maintained in the Late period (described in Herodotus ii.156). In a text which describes a sacred parkland (a Maru) built by Amenophis III at Thebes, the god Nun, personification of the primaeval water from which life was originally created, is said to be in its lake at all times. This is a particularly pertinent text, for one of the painted buildings at Amarna, complete with lake, was called a Maru of the Aten (Maru-Aten: Fig. 7).

There was yet a further aspect to nature which drew in the fauna of the deserts as well. It existed to be subdued. Fish and hippopotamuses (whose images in other contexts were to be venerated as the goddess of childbirth) were to be speared, wildfowl to be snared or brought down by throwing-sticks, the beasts of the desert to be shot with arrows. A literary text copied down close to the Amarna period, but probably many centuries older, describes the pleasures of fishing and fowling on hunting parties in marshland, over which, in a characteristically Egyptian expression, the personification of the marshland presides as a goddess (Caminos 1956, 7; Parkinson 1991, 83-84; cf. the Ramesside text, Caminos 1954, 126-127). Partly this satisfied an atavistic hunting urge, but it also offered a symbol of how Egyptian vigour (primarily exercised by the Egyptian king) subdued a chaotic force in the universe. This is made most explicit in temple scenes in which king and gods together gather wildfowl in the marshes by means of a clap-net (in late temples desert animals as well as bound human figures are also part of the catch). We find echoes of this theme at Amarna, too.

How deeply into the Egyptian intellect the symbolism of scenes of nature penetrated would doubtless have depended on individual sensitivity to more thoughtful layers of meaning and to an openness to being moved by symbols. And it must be remembered for the Amarna period that Akhenaten's ideas on the subject, insofar as we known them from the handful of hymns to the Aten, focused on the daily recreation of life rather than on a mythical past and single moment of creation. It was, nonethless, an image of great potency, rich in associations for Egyptians, and one which some scholars see as having overtones of human procreation, even of eroticism, and of rebirth after death (Derchain 1975, 62-64; Manniche 1987, 39-40; Robins 1993, 187-189).

THE THEME OF ABUNDANCE

Certain design elements appear with great frequency, both within or bordering a scene or as the main subject of a limited area. They comprise pottery storage jars resting on wooden stands, bowls of incense decorated with flowers and also on stands, boxes, and tall bouquets of flowers. Alternating bouquets and incense bowls on stands are a particularly common border design of areas of floor paintings (Fig. 3). A regular abbreviation, widely painted on pottery storage jars, took the form of garlands, floral collars or simply endless repetitions of coloured petals in which blue was the dominant colour. These motifs seem to be symbols of the good life, signifying abundance and luxury, the Egyptian equivalent of the cornucopia, although even here it is possible to read from the full range of contexts the thought of regeneration and rebirth (Bell 1987). They appear in depictions of the interiors of buildings shown in Amarna scenes, and they might also refer to objects present on festal occasions and which were intended to reinforce the air of ceremony appropriate to the rooms in which they occur, and to perpetuate it.

We wish now to turn to the principal examples of palace decoration at Amarna, both in stone and on plastered brick. We have limited the examples to three which offer, nevertheless, considerable scope for discussion of how decoration fits into architecture and the extent to which the painted plaster had an artistic life of its own or followed the stone-carved scenes in theme and style, insofar as one can judge from a body of material which is so relatively small as to admit the possibility of distortion through accidents of survival. We omit, except as passing references, certain important sources of paintings, namely the King's House and adjoining Bridge, and the Great Gateway at the North Riverside Palace. The paintings that have survived from these buildings mostly add to the impression that often this medium was, in subject matter, following the carved relief scenes, although, as the 'princesses' painting from the King's House shows, sometimes with a greater delicacy of line work and colouring.

THE GREAT PALACE

A portion of this building of unknown area is now lost or hidden beneath the modern fields. The impressive extent of what does survive (around 43,000 square metres) is divided into a central part of stone, arranged rather like a temple but around a north-south axis, and a range of brick buildings along the east side, and probably originally (before being replaced by the hall of Smenkhkara) along the south side, too. It was investigated briefly by Flinders Petrie in 1891/2 (Petrie 1894) and much more thoroughly by John Pendlebury between 1934 and 1936 (Pendlebury 1951).

The plan of the stone core of the palace (the 'State Apartments') was largely recovered from the gypsum foundation platform. From the mountain of stone chippings and gypsum dust that covered it around 150 fragments of decorated limestone and sandstone blocks were recorded. Since these pieces must be only the minutest proportion of the total wall decoration it is pointless even to consider that they might be a representative sample. All that one can do is to note that examples of the general range of subject matter of Amarna wall scenes were present. The cult of the Aten was featured, with its well stocked offering-tables and fat cattle. The royal family were there, as were courtiers, musicians, horses, chariots and foreigners. Quite a number of the fragments come from scenes with onlookers and background figures within architectural frames. The buildings shown included one within a towered enclosure wall and a tree-filled garden (Figs. 4a, 4b), a shrine(?) with Hathor-headed columns, a bakery, stables with horses, and a butchery (Fig. 4c, where joints of meat hang from a line as they are dried to form pemmican). Of particular interest for comparison with the wall paintings were outdoor scenes: of moored boats and of nature, with water-bank and land plants (including cereals) and birds nesting in reeds. One piece (Fig. 4d) juxtaposes an exterior scene of gazelles leaping amongst bushes with the interior of a house or palace where the bedroom with large bed is shown.

The carved and painted scenes formed the background to a sumptuous display of three-dimensional stonework: statues, both life sized and colossal, in quartzite and granite, stelae in alabaster, and carved balustrades. Extravagant treatment had been given to some of the columns of both the stone portion and the brick side annexe. Highly stylised and simplified plant forms were the traditional model for Egyptian columns, but here some of them were reinterpreted with an eye to greater naturalism. Some fragments brought forth from Petrie an almost rapturous description (Petrie 1894, 10, pl. VIII.3-14; also Egyptian Exploration Society photograph 35/6.O114):

        "The form was as strange as the decoration, many of the fragments not belonging to circles, but shewing irregular flattened sections, as if even the cylindrical column had been abandoned, and variety and naturalism sought by copying the curves of tree trunks. The surface decoration is unique in Egypt, and can only be paralleled in mediaeval art. Winding branches of a climbing vine twist around the column in wild confusion, their leaves turning in all directions and overlapping, with a pointed disregard of any symmetry or pattern."

He related them to a few pieces of foliage capitals (Petrie 1894, pl. IX.1,2) which were also "irregular in outline, and accord with the erratic forms of the columns". On more subdued palm leaf capitals naturalistically criss-crossing stems were carved.

For the finish of the architectural stonework no expense was spared. Individual hieroglyphs and other elements in inscriptions were separately made inlays in stone and faience. Petrie comments on black granite hieroglyphs: "The enormous labour required to form the slender signs in such a brittle material as black granite is truly astonishing"; "great inscriptions", he continues, "intended to be seen from a distance on the palace walls, were blazoned out in gorgeous coloured glazes set in the white limestone". On date-palm capitals the spaces between inlays had been gilded, whilst the shafts had been clad with green glazed tiles fluted to imitate pairs of reeds (the capital and shaft pieces were found in the same room; they would make an incongruous column design). In many parts of the Great Palace, too, small glazed tiles of flowering plants on a bright green background, sometimes with insects and birds, were used, in which certain elements were made separately and inlaid into the tiles. They were probably set into some of the brick walls, although none has been found in situ.

The elaborated columns expressive of vigorous plant life were to be found in the stone-and brick-built parts alike and so brought an element of unity to the whole of the Great Palace. Where the two parts differed, and quite markedly, was in their subdivision. Wide spaces, some roofed and with columns, and some open in which sunlight bathed the coloured reliefs and the sculpture, characterised the former; proliferation of relatively small spaces, many of them like cubicles, characterised the latter, although they, too, often surrounded open spaces of limited extent. It was in these brick apartments (the North Harim) that the best known of the paintings occurred (Fig. 1).

The painted surfaces that had survived best were floors (Fig. 3; also Weatherhead 1992). The principal theme was formalised nature. In the three columned halls of the North Harim, central panels depict a rectangular body of water on which appear lotus plants, fish and wild fowl. In surrounding borders grow land plants over which birds flutter (and sometimes locusts, butterflies and dragon-flies) and within which calves browse or leap. The design finishes with an outer border of abundance motifs: alternating bouquets of lotus flowers and bowls on stands, the contents of which were also draped with lotus plants. The theme of nature rose up to continue to the ceiling in the plant forms of the columns, one set clad with the shiny green fluted tiles mentioned above.

Into this overall tranquillity intrude symbols of violence. A lion savages one of the calves (Hall F; its flying gallop pose a motif long established in the repertoire of Egyptian art, but perhaps derived ultimately from the Aegean). Down the centre of the three halls runs a painted pathway decorated with alternating bound captives from amongst Egypt's enemies and groups of nine bows subdivided into threes which had long symbolised the king's foes. The paths seem to mark the king's progress as he symbolically trampled his enemies beneath his sandals. It echoed parts of an alabaster paving in the stone part of the Great Palace which also had been carved with figures of bound captives.

Very little remained of painted wall scenes. They seem normally to have started above a dado, about 75 cm. high, painted in a simple panel pattern. The principal surviving scene, painted with a yellow background, was evidently one of the palace and its environs (Fig. 2a; also Weatherhead 1994). It ran unbrokenly around a corner. All that survived was a group of servants going about their tasks which included cleaning the floors. They appear to be outside, for a horse had been shown, on too small a scale for it to have been drawing the royal chariot. Possibly the rest of the wall had been dominated by figures of the royal family, but, judging by a very close parallel supplied by one of the private tombs (no. 25, of Ay; see Fig. 2b), the space above could have continued with a detailed view of palace architecture containing little anecdotal scenes of servants. Here, in paint, is just the kind of scene which was carved on the stone walls, showing that a change in materials did not necessarily dictate a change in theme.

The painted pathways connect to a sunken garden flanked on the long sides by colonnades behind which lay a row of small chambers (Fig. 1). The colonnades must have been like a cloister, for between them and the garden was a thick wall which had perhaps been pierced by windows. Its outer face, thus looking towards the garden, had been painted with a continuous scene of the life of the valley: "a lake, lotus plants, an overseer and servants with cattle, a winding canal and boats sailing on it, the shores being painted black to shew Nile mud" (Petrie 1894, 15; also Pendlebury 1951, 38). Its outside location is notable, and its subject matter complements its garden setting, but we can still recognise a stock scene known from relief carving on blocks and from one of the tombs. The interior of this screen wall (at least on the east) was painted with a panelled dado for two-thirds of its length, perhaps a sign that pictorial scenes with human figures (placed between the openings) had run above.

How were the two contrasting parts of the Great Palace, the one built of stone, the other of mud-brick, used? The forms of columns and the decoration of flat surfaces show a degree of similarity across the two parts which does not help us much to separate their functions. We are left with intuition as much as with specific clues. The monumental formality of the stone part reads as the showpiece for Akhenaten's kingship. It was itself divided into two. The outer part, to the north, comprised a huge open space (ca. 170 metres square), surrounded by granite colossi of the king, onto which faced a projecting columned platform. It was suited for display to a large gathering. The inner part covered approximately half the area and was subdivided into a series of courts and halls. What is particularly striking is the emphasis placed upon patterns of movement, from front to back and from side to side. Some of this movement took place across an alabaster pavement carved with figures of bound captives.

Despite his changes to theology and cult, there is much evidence to show that Akhenaten retained important aspects of the symbolism and ritual of Egyptian kingship. Indeed, the nature of the Great Palace perhaps implies that they now had enhanced importance. In his early years, before the move to Amarna, he celebrated the traditional jubilee festival (the Sed festival) which was commemorated on the walls of one of his stone buildings at Karnak. Some scholars have suggested that there is evidence that he celebrated another at Amarna, although it remains uncertain (Mallinson 1995). An important part of the celebration was the appearance on twin thrones of the king as ruler of both Upper and Lower Egypt. In one of the stone courts (in the south-east corner) stood a facing pair of foundations for platforms reached by a ramp, one possible interpretation being that they were for facing thrones. This connection can be no more than a suggestion, but it illustrates the most profitable direction for explanations for the plan of the Great Palace to take: that it is a vast setting for processional rituals of kingship.

The North Harim, by contrast, offered its users a hidden world which drew upon an ancient tradition of domestic privacy, but which, because it was royal, also used some of the standard iconography of kingship as we find it in other palaces. It possessed an interesting dual perspective as a building designed to be seen from one end - the north - yet entered from the south. The entrance took one along a route, circuitous and discrete, which filtered out the processional formality of the stone palace rather as a stage exit might. Once within the heart of the building, the eye was led out through columned halls to a central sunken garden. The nature and pattern of pathways painted on the floor, however, point to the likely presence at the southern end of the axis of a throne dais (Fig. 1; Weatherhead 1995).

Two models seem to converge here. Seen from the north, the alignment follows a sequence of colonnaded court followed by columned halls which grow slightly narrower, culminating in a royal throne. This is a version of the classic design of New Kingdom temples which is also present in the throne room of the Palace of Merenptah at Memphis. In this design, the principal real movement that is possible is through an entrance situated on the axis, but at the opposite end of the building to its principal focus, the shrine or throne. Although this part of the North Harim was destroyed down to its foundations, the pattern of walls at the northern end rules out the possibility of a northern entrance. The other model goes back to an older design of elite housing, which we know of from a few excavated examples but also rather more vividly and informatively from models of estates buried with the dead in the early Middle Kingdom. It is also reflected in the architecture of some tomb facades. The focus of interest is the portico, which mediates between a garden and the interior of the house. In some models, a chair is placed like a throne at the rear of a ground floor or an upstairs hall and looks out through a colonnade to the garden beyond (e.g. Petrie 1907, pl. I). In laying out a domestic building of this kind an important consideration seems to have been that it should face to the north (as with the North Harim), to take advantage of the cool breezes, something to which ancient texts give some prominence.

The combination of throne room formality and elite house design creates an uncertainty in understanding how the North Harim was used, a recurrent problem in dealing with palaces. Presumably, no part of the king's life indoors, no matter how 'domestic', was spent in anything other than a very formal setting which utilised the expressive symbolism of Egyptian kingship. For this reason it becomes a matter of our own intuition as to the level of engagement with people outside the king's family that the North Harim was intended to provide for.

How, in particular, should we understand the cubicles which faced the garden on the east and west? Petrie saw them as bedrooms for attendants, convinced that brick supports at the back held up sleeping-benches. Pendlebury, on the other hand, thought that they were probably used for storage, interpreting the brick supports at the back as intended to hold up shelves. He was almost certainly correct, for one of his photographs shows the brick supports and a line in the wall plaster from the shelf itself at a height of about one metre from the floor (Petrie himself gives 33 inches as the height of side shelves). The question is of more than local interest, for two similar sets of small rooms in comparable settings are known, at the North Palace and in Building MIV at Maru-Aten (they are the subject of comment in the next two sections). Suffice it to say that the last building supplies the only direct archaeological evidence that we have for usage, in the form of a mass of wine jars and the remains of their mud sealings. This, if it were at all typical, would help to confirm that some were storerooms. Moreover, one can find support in the fact that outside wall surfaces between the doorways of the cubicles on the east side had been painted with pictures of boxes and jars on stands, including wine jars with mud sealings (see the labels on Fig. 1). Abundance would have manifested itself here both in stored commodities and in the wall paintings. Inside the walls had been white-washed throughout, with occasional traces of bands of yellow or red. What survived of the paintings was not wholly symmetrical to the two sides, however. The spaces between the doors of the western set of cubicles (which were very poorly preserved) were painted with a panelled dado rather than with pictures of containers reaching to the ground. It is possible, therefore, that eastern and western cubicles did not serve the same purpose, and we are, in the end, left uncertain as to the correctness of Petrie's view that they were sleeping-places.

A group of rooms to the south (the South Harim) has some resemblance to the overall design of the North Harim, but with foreshortened proportions because the whole faced to the east and was thus squeezed into a relatively narrow space. We see again the circuitous entrance which leads, via a group of small chambers, to a portico which faces a sunken garden. This, however, has been reduced to a narrow lateral strip because it is itself only a transitional feature. The object of gaze this time is a stone and gypsum pedestal which supported: what? No clues come from the material found by Pendlebury's excavations, but a stela or statue of the king is the most likely, the shape of the base fitting better a seated statue. The domestic garden court has here taken on the character of a shrine and, in replacing a dais with the entrance, it accommodated movement rather than static contemplation.

Despite the fact that the South Harim preserved significant amounts of decoration, there are no published illustrations (though recently discovered tracings of the floors, made at the time of the Pendlebury excavation, are shortly to be published by Weatherhead). Painted pavements covered the floors of chambers and of the entrance corridor. Their designs repeat, often over much smaller areas, the themes of the pavements in the North Harim: bodies of water, vegetation from which birds rise in flight, and bouquets and incense bowls on stands. The edge of one pathway of bows and captives survived, suggesting an original network of such paths. A new feature is the inclusion in the water scenes of pictures of small boats being poled along by boatmen.

The walls of these rooms were eroded to below the level at which paintwork would register. This was not so, however, with the corridor along the north side which did actually preserve traces of wall scenes. Sadly, we have only a single sentence of description, but no visual record whatsoever, and the originals cannot have survived for very long once exposed (they are certainly not present now). Its north wall retained, wrote Pendlebury (1951, 44-45): "traces of a life-size male figure, of which only the feet remain, and a river scene; its south wall [was] decorated with pictures of a chariot and a ship". We are not told even if these scenes stood above a dado. The best guess is that these were renderings into paint either of the scenes on the stone reliefs which showed the waterfront beside the palace, or of rural life beside the river.

The brick parts of the Great Palace continued further south still, into an area conventionally termed 'Magazines'. The remains of panelled dados showed that even these had been painted. It is likely, therefore, that the full 270 metre length of this building, which included large columned halls, one of which had its own 'throne' dais, was used ceremonially and not just for the purpose of storage.

THE NORTH PALACE

With this building we come closest to a palace which is, at first sight, intuitively comprehensible. For one thing, it is complete, although its south-western part had, by modern times, been reduced to foundations. On closer inspection, however, it is open to divergent interpretations which reflect, as in the case of the Great Palace, the difficulties we have in imagining and understanding the lives of ancient royalty in their totality. There is firstly the question of its attribution. It was a large and well appointed building laid out with scrupulous care for axial symmetry, and it occupied a key position in the layout of the city. Yet the carved hieroglyphic texts which survived imply ownership not by the king, as one might expect, but by a female member of his family. When the building was abandoned it bore in a number of prominent locations the name of the eldest daughter who was now the queen (Meretaten), but this had been carved over an earlier name which has, with some difficulty, been read as Kiya, a secondary wife of Akhenaten who features in the royal art in only a marginal way. This attribution does not really match the prominence of the building and leaves the feeling that we are missing some very basic knowledge as to the purpose which it served. If the palace was structured around the person of the king, a somewhat different set of circumstances has to be envisaged than if it had been an actual residence for a royal woman.

Central to this uncertainty is the status of a separate suite of rooms incorporated into the rear part. It consists of a finely made bathroom, a bedroom next door to it, and several adjacent rooms, all opening from a common corridor. One can look for a parallel to the larger private houses in the city which were equipped in a very similar way, though not laid out in quite this fashion. This points one in the direction of domestic occupancy of the palace, turning it into the actual residence of, successively, Kiya and Meretaten. 'Bedrooms' and 'bathrooms' were, however, possessed by several of the royal buildings at Amarna where residency has to be ruled out. Clear cases of one or the other in the Central City are to be found in an entrance pavilion which straddles the north enclosure wall of the Great Aten Temple and the rear of the so-called 'Priest's House' in the Small Aten Temple (Pendlebury 1951, pls. X, XVI); a third is in the small pavilion MIV at Maru-Aten (Fig. 7; Peet and Woolley 1923). These are presumably places to which a royal person could retire temporarily and  perhaps also be prepared for ensuing rituals. It is true that the North Palace example is more substantial, but in this it could be said to match the general scale of the building. Because we cannot be sure who was using the building and how, ambiguity affects explanations for many of its elements and for the meaning of its decoration.

All of the parts of the North Palace were contained within a simple rectangular outline and were arranged on either side of a single central axis, and in two groups, front and rear, separated by a stone gateway set within a mass of brickwork which must have resembled somewhat a pylon. The centre of the rear court was largely filled by what, in modern times, has been a deep rounded depression which must mark the site of a sunken pool or possibly a broad well (an exploration of this feature has only just begun). On at least one of its sides a line of trees had been planted. The reception rooms, including a tiny throne room against the back wall, looked out onto it from behind a raised stone veranda (examined in detail only in 1992). Here, now magnified to the proportions of a major building (and turned through ninety degrees), is the essence of the North Harim at the Great Palace.

The evocation of nature was taken a step further. The north side of the rear court was wholly filled by three smaller courts, similar in their design. Their function would probably have escaped us had it not been for the fact that the easternmost had been fitted out with stone feeding-troughs and tethering-posts. The troughs were in two sets, one each for the subdivisions of the court. On one were carved pictures of fat cattle and on the other species of ibex and gazelle/antelope feeding. The near-identity of plan of the other two courts of the series (though they lacked the troughs) points to them also having housed either animals or birds. The wall of the veranda which faced the centre of the court had been painted with water-bank scenes (see below). In this combination of pool/well, trees and animal courts the subject matter of the floor paintings of the Great Palace is translated into a living tableau, although the idyll was tempered by the fact that the corresponding area on the opposite side of the great court was occupied by a range of buildings which seem to have been workshops (where faience jewellery was made) and, more pointedly, kitchens. Violating the admired tranquillity of nature by slaughtering its living elements caused the Egyptians no more difficulty than it does most of us. It existed simultaneously as symbol and to be used and subdued.

The architectural theme of the garden court was repeated on a smaller scale in the north-east corner of the palace enclosure (Fig. 5). The central sunken garden, subdivided into a grid of cubit-sized growing plots for flowers, was watered by a stone conduit which led from the main court, a sign incidentally that a water-hoist (presumably one or more shadufs, the earliest representation of which in Egypt is shown in one of the tombs at Amarna) was installed beside the pool or well situated there. This garden was surrounded on three sides by small rooms shaded by a colonnade, on the model of the North Harim at the Great Palace. On the fourth side, against the palace reception rooms, was a feature which tells us directly that static contemplation from afar was part of the purpose of such places. At the far end of a corridor from the main palace hall a short flight of steps led to a window in the wall, the thickness of which created a platform from which the garden court beyond could be viewed.

The wall paintings found in the North Palace come from the rear part and mostly from this northeast area, where the walls stood as much as two metres high, and had evidently been rapidly buried by a massive collapse of bricks and rubble (some of it possibly from an upper storey). They became the principal subject of a handsome volume on mural paintings at Amarna (Frankfort 1929; additional material in Weatherhead forthcoming). The palace also produced a certain amount of very fragmentary carved stonework, but little of it bore pictorial scenes. A few fragments from the main hall area presumably derive from the veranda, and depict an architectural scene, garlands and bowls on stands, the king worshipping, and vegetation.

The north rear wall of the main hall had been painted in the style of parts of the Great Palace and King's House: above a dado of the panel and heraldic plant type a row of bare feet and sometimes the commencement of a robe had been preserved, all facing towards the central axis. From the lengths and grouping of the feet, a procession of figures on a half life-size scale can be inferred, at least five or six adults followed by at least two figures of roughly half the size again. In the rooms and corridors behind, areas of dado survived sufficiently widely spread to suggest that all parts had been painted. They were of plain blue, about a metre high, surmounted by bands of colour and simple patterns which also framed the sides. One such was in the bedroom (mentioned above). In the adjoining bathroom, drips of colour which survived on the gypsum splash-back which reached part-way up the walls suggest wall paintings above in this room, too. In some rooms, fragments of fallen paintings give a guide to the subject matter of the scenes above the dados. The most important group was found in debris against the walls of the throne room and suggest that in this small room more than one of the basic themes of Amarna palaces were represented. There was evidently a depiction of royalty, for some fragments showed red flesh as visible through fine and translucent linen garments, and bracelets and collars coloured with gold and with blue and green. Pottery jars in wooden stands and decorated with garlands represented the theme of abundance. Fragments of zigzag water lines enclosed in black, and of parallel black lines on green which merged into yellow background almost certainly derive from a water-bank scene, although possibly this comes from a neighbouring room. The convergence of motifs in this one room (and possibly its neighbour) is a telling demonstration that, between room function and decorative theme, whilst there might have been general preferences or tendencies, there were no fast rules. All elements were appropriate to the presence of royalty. This variety of subject matter was maintained in the transverse corridor which separated throne room from main hall and which possessed, at either end, the viewing platforms pierced through the walls to open courts beyond. Over them all spread ceilings painted with grapevine patterns, fragments of which were found in many of the rooms, as were blue glazed models of bunches of grapes which, it has often been thought, were attached to the ceilings to add verisimilitude.

The most extensively preserved decoration was found in the garden court which occupied the north-east corner of the palace (Fig. 5; Newton 1924; Frankfort 1929). Most of it was found on the interior walls of rectangular chambers which faced the central garden on three sides. Enough survived on the walls of the western set of chambers to suggest a common decorative theme: greylag geese and probably cranes and ducks (Houlihan 1986, 54, 56) feeding from the ground or from large pottery jars and tended by male courtiers. In the rooms on the east of the court only dados and coloured bands were left so that we cannot be sure that the same designs were repeated, but fowl-feeding scenes were present in the north-eastern room, which was larger and possessed a central brick pillar which was itself painted with the water-bank motif.

A second and distinctly different design covered the walls of the central chamber on the north, which the excavators named the Green Room. It had no entrance of its own from the court, only one from a chamber on the west. Instead the wall facing the court had been pierced with a tall window which seems to have extended down to within about 60 cm. of the ground. Imagining it as open would not really make sense: it could then so easily have been used as a door. It is preferable to see it closed by a wooden screen (on the lines of the tall latticed window indicated in the wall of the Meketra house model, Winlock 1955, pls. 10, 57). The painted design (Fig. 6a), above a black dado, ran continuously around the east, north and west walls, although ultimately it was framed by a deep border of brightly painted parallel stripes. At the bottom runs a band of water design in which lotuses grow, flanked by strips of flowering weeds and grasses on a black background. From it rises the dense mass of a papyrus thicket, brown-tinged towards the base where the plants emerge, becoming green as the stems ascend and are interrupted by flowering heads which often bend beneath their own weight. The reeds are populated by birds, who sit or flutter or, in the case of a pied kingfisher, prepare to dive for a catch. The upper part of the scene is lost, but, on the basis of numerous parallels, probably ended with a clear space in which more birds and perhaps butterflies fluttered. Another unique feature of this room (and its adjacent companion on the west) is the series of small niches formed at two levels in the east, west and north walls. Below the upper niches on the west wall and below both sets on the east a small pool of water was painted.

Both designs - the feeding and water-bank - were also carried onto the outside walls, beneath the colonnade and facing the garden. Mostly all that survived were patches of coloured bands above the distinctive plain black dado, but traces of the bird-feeding theme were recorded on the north side, and a stretch of water-bank scene survived in the south-east corner, where it adjoined the limestone pilaster which marked the end of the colonnade and which was itself carved with a continuation of the same scene. A minor addition to the painting here was a landing-stage beside the strip of water (a real one was actually found at the lake at Maru-Aten, see below).

In considering the function of these rooms and their decoration, we return to the ambiguity already encountered at the North Harim of the Great Palace. The excavators' initial reaction was to call this part the 'Women's Quarters', turning it again into a harim. The authors of the principal publication (Frankfort 1929), however, concluded that the subject matter of the decoration pointed directly to function, and that geese and cranes fed in the side rooms. From here they were led to argue that the niches of the Green Room and its neighbour had been designed as nesting-places, but were later kept as a decorative feature after the decision was made to cover the walls with paintings. Given the seeming ubiquity of wall paintings in the rear part of the North Palace, the idea that these rooms were initially to be left plain seems forced and unnatural. The artist, in fact, emphasised the niches by painting patches of water design below some of them. A suggestion (by A. Boyce), which keeps to the theme of the paintings, is simply that lotus and papyrus plants were laid in them, probably, for preference, lotus blossoms, the perfume of which was highly regarded. They would then have contained in reality the plants painted on the walls.

The main question - aviary or personal rooms? -does, however, persist for the court as a whole, a parallel to the question for the garden court of the North Harim of the Great Palace: was that surrounded by personal rooms or storerooms? One can interpret the paintings as depicting the real-life raising of fowl which featured prominently in the domestic economy of the palace or were kept for the purpose of cult offerings. Aside from doubts as to the suitability of the building for this, one can, on the other hand, also point to the way that the rooms on the east side had been additionally provided with a single window beside the door, the limestone window sills surviving in two cases. This is a reasonably clear sign that they were intended to be occupied by humans. Moreover, the North Palace possessed, in the three adjacent courts to the west, places specially made for the keeping of livestock. Only one was fitted out for cattle and related animals. One could argue that both of the others were suited to the raising of fowl and other large birds. The Green Room seems to have been created specifically as a human retreat within a tranquil evocation of nature which lay outside its walls. The alternative to a literalist interpretation of the fowl-feeding scenes has to accept that the pleasure that was taken in painted substitutes for untamed nature was equally found in those for domesticated nature which reproduced the activities of a part of the palace which lay very close at hand but not at the actual place of the paintings. But it is, in the end, hard to be sure how this distinctive part of the palace was used.

Problems of functional interpretation arise also with the corresponding area in the south-eastern corner of the building. In place of a garden court is a hall of forty-five brick pillars behind a court flanked by probable storerooms which had subsequently been converted into a pair of dwellings. This hall had been painted. The abbreviated version of the water-bank scene survived on the pillars. During the lifetime of the palace some of the pillars were joined by screen walls, and these, too, had been painted, although the nature of the decoration is not clear. Pillared brick halls were used in contrasting ways at Amarna. They could house animals (as in the rear parts of the cattle court at the North Palace), but could also serve as a place of formal assembly for people. A colossal example, which contained five hundred brick pillars in seven subdivisions, was built (possibly as a temporary measure) at the southern end of the Great Palace in the time of Akhenaten's successor, Smenkhkara. In being painted, the North Palace example seems to belong in the latter category, but how such places were used remains a mystery.

Outside the eastern wing of the North Palace only a single instance of a painted scene survived, but it is one of great significance. It was located on the southern outer face of the brick colonnade in front of the easternmost set of animal pens, at the eastern end just short of the corner (Frankfort 1929, pl. XIIC). The black dado was again almost negligible. Above it came a narrow band of water with lotus plants, and, rising from that, yellow and green reeds of the abbreviated water-bank design. Should we also reconstruct higher up pictures of bird and insect life? Why this fragment is so important is that it takes the water-bank motif, widely spread within the eastern wing, onto the outside walls around the central court. The central body of water and its surrounding trees seem therefore to have been framed by a painted water-bank scene. Into this recreation of nature by diverse means - painting, water, trees, live animals - protruded the limestone veranda, itself bearing carved and painted scenes and inscriptions. The suites that we have encountered in the North and South Harims of the Great Palace are here scaled up to monumental proportions.

MARU-ATEN

Maru-Aten (Fig. 7; Peet and Woolley 1923, chapter V; von Bissing 1941; Badawy 1956) takes us to the limit of what we can consider under the heading 'palace', to the point at which it merges with the category 'temple'. It also shows us an expansion of the most distinctive elements of the North Palace, and of the two Harim buildings of the Great Palace, into an artificial landscape of some scale, in which living forms served to animate the principal theme of the art. The name Maru is an ancient one and probably designated an area of sacred parkland; as an institution the site was called a 'Sunshade', a term for a solar shrine, and was one of several built at Amarna for the benefit of one of Akhenaten's women, in this case for Queen Kiya in the first instance, whose ownership was later to be replaced by that of Princess Meretaten, as at the North Palace.

It was laid out (for reasons we do not understand) as two adjacent enclosures, ca. 200 x 100 and ca. 160 x 80 metres. The centre of the larger was occupied by a rectangular man-made lake (ca. 120 x 60 metres) which had been puddled with mud. Its shallowness (it is said to have been a metre deep) and the obvious difficulty of maintaining a large body of open water in a desert location make it more likely that it was a water garden supporting a good deal of plant cover, although it might still perhaps have offered scope for light skiffs of the kind that are shown being poled through just such a setting in the painted pavements of the South Harim at the Great Palace and probably also on the decorated stonework at Maru-Aten (to judge from a small fragment found there). A small basin to hold water in one of the adjacent buildings actually yielded direct evidence (in the opinion of the excavators) for the growing of lotus and papyrus: "the impressions of their stalks and leaves were innumerable in the light water-laid mud which overlay the thick bed of heavy soil at the tank's bottom" (Peet and Woolley 1923, 116). Such places would have naturally attracted birds.

All around the central lake stretched a garden: "Wherever we dug we found just below the surface either the straight mud ridges which divide flower - or vegetable-beds and cut them up into compartments for irrigation, or else the remains of trees" (Peet and Woolley 1923, 115) which had been planted in tree pits surrounded by neatly built mud walls (remains of trees were found in a small sample area of the southern enclosure, too). Here the carefully gridded garden, which formed a small centrepiece in the north-east court of the North Palace, had been expanded to cover a substantial area with this manifestation of the urge to display nature under the control of a human population whose well-being depended upon carefully regulated flood plain agriculture. Across the garden and into the lake stretched a stone causeway which ended at a jetty (resembling one included in a painted water scene at the North Palace) which had evidently been shaded with a portico supported on stone columns, each carved as a bundle of reeds and supporting a palm leaf capital. The little that survived of the carved stonework exemplifies the mix of motifs known from other Amarna stone buildings, combining themes which illustrated royal power with others more appropriate to the particular setting: an architectural scene, running soldiers and foreign captives, as well as Aten worship and boating.

Unlike at the North Palace there were no specially constructed buildings for livestock. But the macabre find of the bones of two cows on the floors of passageways at a group of houses (MVI) beside the northern enclosure raises the possibility that animals had, all the same, been kept at Maru-Aten; the bones of nine dogs lay in rooms of adjacent buildings, and of thirty more (including puppies) in a small building with box-like compartments just outside the enclosure wall at this point.

From living forms, art continued the theme of nature into wall decoration and architecture in a number of small isolated buildings spread across the wide spaces, some for the cult of the sun, some for the benefit of the royal users seeking the ease of retreat. To judge from fragments of painted plaster found in the south-east corner of the southern enclosure, even the interior face of the enclosure wall had been painted. The identified theme was of trailing vines with grape clusters which had been framed with coloured bands and, at the top, a painted cavetto cornice moulded in mud.

The most extraordinary group of buildings lay in the north-east corner of the north enclosure. One of them (MI) consisted of an elongated space down the centre of which ran a single row of brick piers. Between each pier lay a T-shaped basin (to a total of eleven), partly cut into the ground and partly built up with decorated brick surrounds, the top bar of the Ts alternating between north and south in order to achieve a compact grouping. The edges of the basins were separated from one another and from the surrounding pavement by walls, 50 cm. high, on which were painted water plants below a trellis-work pattern in red, blue and white and depictions of vines and pomegranates on a yellow background. The brick floor which ran around the row of basins had borne a painted gypsum pavement of which a good deal survived (fragments were dispersed to many museums). It had been divided into a series of rectangular panels, each of which depicted plants and shrubs from which birds fly aloft, painted in the same style as that found in the pavements of the Great Palace.

To the south and evidently linked by a pathway through the garden was a further body of water, over twenty metres square, largely occupied by an island on which stood a stone platform of the kind commonly used in the worship of the sun, and two small stone enclosures. A modest stone temple, originally provided with offering-tables, lay just to the south of the island and its moat. The recovered fragments of the stonework show the same richness in transferring natural forms to stone that is met with at the Great Palace: pilasters and door jambs carved as reed thickets; composite columns with reeded stems, painted green, and, towards the top, carved grape clusters and leaves painted red and green, and pendent ducks, painted in their natural tints on a yellow background; cornice mouldings wreathed in leaves. The fragments of carved wall blocks that were recovered continued the theme of nature more consistently than is found elsewhere (Figs. 4e and 4f, 6b): trees and plants, heifers plunging amongst water plants, ducks and (reminiscent of the scene of predation in the North Harim pavement at the Great Palace) lions. As at the Great Palace, glazed tiles figured with flowering plants were used, the context implying that they were set into stone and not mud-brick.

A further brick building (MIV) reproduced in miniature a throne room and garden court, although, in reverse of the orientation of the equivalents in the Great Palace and North Palace, the throne dais looked outwards from the building, with its back to the tiny garden. Many of the surviving surfaces were painted with plain colours: red, white, and blue on the steps and balustrade of the throne dais, for example. No painted gypsum floors were found, and in at least one room (the bedroom) we are told by the excavators that the floor had been simply whitewashed. Some of the walls also had been whitewashed, but what makes this building particularly distinctive is that others had been faced with gypsum plaster on which (so the excavators, one of them a trained artist, claimed) paint had been applied in tempera. Over a black line came yellow and (apparently) broad bands of red and blue; a few fragments from higher up showed traces of more elaborate designs (but what they were we are not told; presumably geometric rather than figured). In another place the yellow served as a ground on which spot-and-bar patterns were painted in blue, black and red, and with grape and pomegranate designs and rectilinear panels. In the rear room the cemented walls included a vine pattern with green leaves, red stems, tendrils and black fruit on a yellow ground; also pomegranate or pumpkin motifs recur. None of the walls was preserved to a height of more than a few courses of bricks, but, even so, the absence of traces of dados that, in the Great Palace and North Palace, ran beneath paintings of humans, birds and water-bank life is noteworthy. Bright colours and simple designs seem to have sufficed.

The Maru-Aten enclosures strove to create the sense of being enclosed within a world of bright colour and of nature tamed. Art and living forms were combined in a remarkably full expression of the symbol-laden dreamworld which was appropriate to settings of divine and royal authority.

PRIVATE HOUSING

It is only when we look at the evidence for the interior decoration of houses that the full significance of palace art emerges. Some of the larger houses at Amarna possessed, when first excavated, a comparable degree of preservation to that of the palaces, and there is no reason why the original interior decoration should have suffered any more acutely. Yet the contrast with palaces is striking. The house of the vizier Nakht (K50.1; Peet and Woolley 1923, 5-9) is one such, and is a particularly valuable guide on account of the high position held by the owner, which is reflected in the size and elaboration of his house. The surrounds to doorways and door niches ('false doors') were painted with bands of colour, with columns of hieroglyphs giving the names, titles and some of the virtues of the owner, and with yellow painted panels showing the King worshipping the Aten on a red ground which filled the door niches. The walls, however, even of the principal reception rooms, were whitewashed to near the ceiling, where ran a frieze of blue lotus petals on a green ground interrupted at intervals by pendent festoons of lotus leaves between bands of red and blue. In one room, it was reported, the ceiling itself had been of a "brilliant blue". The floors had been whitewashed, too, although the intriguing observation was made that one of them had subsequently been replastered with mud and "had been painted in bright colours, of which only traces of red and yellow remained" (Peet and Woolley 1923, 6). (In another house, R44.1, there was evidence of several layers of paint on the floor, at least one of which was blue: Frankfort 1929, 56). Nonetheless, neither figured scenes nor designs from nature occupied any large space on the walls. The absence from within this or any house of a trace of a painted dado, particularly of the panelled type, which would point to the likely presence of a painted scene above, is even more telling.

This picture of rarity of figured decoration and absence of large scenes within houses was repeated in the excavation of extensive residential areas by both the German and British excavations of nearly two decades (see especially Frankfort 1929; Borchardt and Ricke 1980). Some quite large panels of fallen wall plaster were recovered from several houses, but the designs never go beyond either geometric patterns or large garlands or floral collars (from a metre to a metre and a half wide at the top) from which hang the bodies of ducks and lotus plants. A wooden panel found in a bathroom (house Q46.1), on which is painted a papyrus plant, introduces an additional medium for decoration which is very rarely preserved, but this was quite small (and could have come from a piece of furniture; Borchardt 1913, 22-23, Abb. 6; Borchardt and Ricke 1980, 24, 27, no. 12/13.1323).

There is one telling exception. In a relatively small number of cases the larger houses possessed chapels, mostly outside the houses and ideally in a garden, occasionally inside (Ikram 1989). In rare instances where they were built of stone, figured decoration is to be expected, and is confirmed by the parts from the shrine in the northern house of the high priest Panehsy (Pendlebury 1951, 27, pl. XXXI). Most chapels were built of