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The discovery of a 3,500-year-old city in Egypt has been hailed as the second most important archaeological find since Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 and will shed light on the lives of ancient Egyptians.
First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
Amenhotep III has not been among the most famous of the pharaohs. But that could all change after the recent discovery by Egyptian archaeologists of the vast city he built near Luxor in Upper Egypt more than 3,500 years ago.
The discovery, by a team led by Egyptologist Dr Zahi Hawass, a former minister of antiquities, is adding a new dimension to the understanding of ancient Egypt, throwing light on Egyptians’ ordinary life and not just their religious life and afterlife.
The Egyptian government believes this “Lost Golden City” – also called the “Rise of Aten”, will become a major new attraction for tourists, boosting the overall volume of foreign visits to Egypt, which the country relies on for much of its foreign exchange.
“So important was Amenhotep III that [the better-known] Ramesses II almost made it his business simply to take over his monuments, but Ramesses III did as well, filling Medinet Habu with statues and columns stolen from Kom el-Hettân,” Betsy Bryan, professor of Egyptology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US, told DM168.
Amenhotep III, probably Egypt’s wealthiest pharaoh, reigned from 1388 to 1351 BC, as the ninth king of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt.
Bryan told Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper that “the discovery of this lost city is the second most important archaeological discovery since the tomb of Tutankhamun” – in 1922.
“The discovery of the lost city not only will give us a rare glimpse into the life of the ancient Egyptians at the time when the empire was at its wealthiest, but will [also] help us shed light on one of history’s greatest mysteries: Why did Akhenaten and Nefertiti decide to move to Amarna?” Bryan added.
Akhenaten, Amenhotep III’s son and successor, and his queen Nefertiti, founded the...