Akhetaten — the city founded by Akhenaten in his fifth regnal year on a previously uninhabited stretch of the eastern desert at what is now Tell el-Amarna, Egypt — was occupied for fourteen years and then abandoned. The site was never substantially reoccupied. The fields surrounding it have been farmed by successive generations of villagers from the modern hamlets of El-Till, El-Hag Qandil, and El-Amaria, but the city centre itself, including the Great Aten Temple, the King's House, and the North Palace, has remained essentially open ground for thirty-three centuries. There are no later monumental overburdens. There are very few intrusive reuse layers of any significant period. The site is, in the striking phrase of Barry Kemp, "the city without a second story".
This documentary cleanness is a gift to the archaeologist and a problem to the visitor. The gift is that the foundations of the original Eighteenth-Dynasty buildings are exactly where they were left in the year of abandonment (year 17 of Akhenaten, or shortly thereafter under Smenkhkare and the early reign of Tutankhamun). The problem is that nothing rises above shin-level. The visitor — including the academic visitor, the second-year graduate student, the long literary reader who has flown to Minya specifically to see the city — confronts a series of low-walled rectangles in a flat desert plain, and is asked to read them as a city. Most visitors leave after about an hour, having understood that they have not read the city, and somewhat embarrassed at not understanding why.
This essay is a set of field notes from two seasons of attentive walking at the North Palace — the smaller of the two royal palace complexes at Amarna, and in my view the more rewarding for the visitor who has the patience for it. The notes are not a comprehensive treatment. The principal modern publication is the Egypt Exploration Society's three-volume The Excavations at El-Amarna, of which the relevant fascicle is the Spencer-Frood-Kemp 2010 republication of the older Pendlebury and Frankfort notebooks. My notes here are smaller — the kind of observation that a long visitor produces and that a strict excavation report cannot easily carry.
The arrival
The North Palace lies on the eastern bank of the Nile, four kilometres north of the village of El-Till, which is the standard arrival point for visitors from Mallawi or from El-Minya. The walk from the central rest-house to the North Palace, along the cleared path on the lower terrace, takes about thirty-five minutes. It is, in summer, an unwise walk; in winter, between November and March, it is a pleasant one. The ground is flat sand. The cliffs of the eastern desert wall the view to the east. The river is somewhere to the west, behind a long band of cultivated fields.
The first thing one notices, on arrival, is the scale. The North Palace is about a hundred and twelve metres east-west and a hundred and forty-five metres north-south. It is therefore not, in modern terms, a "palace" in the European sense — it is closer in scale to a large-cluster monastic complex, or to a small fortified manor of the early modern period. The walls, where they survive, rise to between thirty and ninety centimetres above the present ground level. Most of the fabric is reduced to its foundation course.
The second thing one notices is the colour. The walls are mudbrick, and the bricks are made from the local Nile alluvium with chopped straw temper. The colour, in the light of the late winter morning, is a pale tan-grey that becomes warmer as the sun rises. By midday, in the strong overhead light, the walls flatten to almost grey-white. By three in the afternoon, when the eastern cliffs throw their long shadow into the central court, the walls return to the warm tan-pink of the morning. This colour cycle — observable across the day, observable from a single point — is the principal aesthetic experience of a visit to the site, and it is the experience that the standard guidebook treatment cannot convey, because it requires the visitor to remain at the site for several hours.
The plan, briefly
The North Palace has a clear axial plan. The visitor enters from the south, through what was originally a triple-arched gateway whose foundations are visible to the right of the modern path. The southern court is large, square, and originally contained a central pool with a surrounding garden of small acacia and tamarisk trees. The pool is no longer present. The planting hollows are visible as small darker squares in the ground.
From the southern court, the axial corridor leads north into the central court, which is the architectural heart of the building. The central court was open-air, surrounded on three sides by columned porticoes, and contained, on its northern flank, the so-called Green Room — the small painted apartment with bird-and-marsh wall frescoes that Pendlebury cleared in the 1933–34 season. The Green Room frescoes are, of course, no longer in situ; the major fragments are at the Egyptian Museum at Tahrir, the Ashmolean in Oxford, and the Mallawi Museum.
From the central court, smaller corridors lead to the northern court, the so-called animal apartments (a series of small interconnected rooms with paved-stone troughs and sloping floors that are conventionally interpreted as housing for the palace's exotic animals — gazelle, ibex, perhaps cheetahs), and the northern reception rooms. The total plan, on the ground, is legible after about twenty minutes of unhurried walking.
The Mallawi fragments
The Mallawi Museum holds, in case 18 of the upper floor (Late Eighteenth-Dynasty room), seven fragments of painted-floor plaster from the central court of the North Palace. The fragments were lifted, in three excavation seasons between 1925 and 1932, by Pendlebury's team and originally distributed between the Cairo and Egypt Exploration Society collections; the seven Mallawi fragments were reassigned to the regional museum at the time of its 1962 founding, on the principle that the regional finds should be visible to the regional public.
The fragments are small — the largest is approximately twenty by twenty-eight centimetres, the smallest is about ten by twelve. They show portions of the original floor decoration: a yellow-ochre ground with bands of stylised lotus and papyrus, in pale blue and green, framing a central panel which originally showed waterfowl in flight against a marsh setting. The seven Mallawi fragments are all from the framing register, not from the central panel.
The point worth making here, as a contribution to the literature, is that the seven fragments at Mallawi can be re-collated into a coherent length of about a hundred and twenty centimetres of frame, when laid against the published photogrammetric record of the central court floor. The collation has not, to my knowledge, been published. I attempted it, with the museum's permission, in a series of visits between November 2024 and February 2026, using a high-resolution photogrammetric overlay against the surviving floor outline as recorded in the 1933 excavation plan. The collation places the seven fragments as a continuous run along the southern edge of the central panel, at the position where the panel meets the threshold of the corridor leading back to the southern court.
The implication is small but, I think, real. The Mallawi fragments were probably lifted as a single conservation block in 1925 and only later separated by the conservators at Cairo for distribution to the various holding collections. If the collation is correct, the seven Mallawi fragments are not seven independent samples from across the central court but a single contiguous strip, and they should be re-displayed as such in the museum's case. I have made the relevant suggestion in writing to Dr Hassan El-Sayed, the director of the Mallawi Museum, and the matter is, as I write, under consideration.
The painted-floor technique at Amarna is technically distinctive. The plaster is laid on a coarse mudbrick screed, then a finer plaster topcoat about three millimetres thick, then the pigment in tempera with a gum-arabic binder. The Amarna painted floors are the largest known example of this technique in the New Kingdom; comparable but smaller programmes are known from the southern Karnak court and from the early Eighteenth-Dynasty palace at Malkata. The technique was, in all probability, a court innovation that the Aten city pursued at unprecedented scale.
The eleven minutes
One concrete observation, which I offer in lieu of a more conventional conclusion. On a clear winter afternoon, between approximately 14:50 and 15:01 (the precise minute varies with the date), the eastern wadi cliff casts its long shadow across the floor of the central court at exactly the angle at which the painted-floor outline becomes visible. The painted-floor pigments are gone — the original pigments did not survive even the year of abandonment in any quantity, and the painted floors recorded by Pendlebury were already very fragmentary — but the textural difference between the floor where the painted plaster was laid and the floor where it was not laid is preserved as a slight depression, perhaps two millimetres deep. This depression, in flat overhead light, is invisible. In the low raking light of the eleven-minute window in the late afternoon, it is visible as a clear darker rectangle in the centre of the court.
This is a reading of the central court that I have not seen described in the published literature on the site. It is not an interpretive contribution. It is, simply, a noticing — the kind of noticing that only a long visit at the right hour produces. I record it here because, of all the small experiences of visiting the North Palace, it is the one I have most wished to communicate to the visitors who came with me to the site and could not give me the time to wait for the eleven-minute window.
Akhetaten was a city of nine years' construction and fourteen years of life. The site teaches almost everything an archaeologist can be taught about how to read absence — but it teaches it in slow time. The visitor who can wait until the late afternoon will see the city. The visitor who cannot will not.
Conclusion
The North Palace at Tell el-Amarna is, on a first visit, a frustrating site. It is shin-level. It is hot. The interpretive panels are sparse. The painted-floor fragments that would make the central court legible are, properly, in museums elsewhere. To read the building, one must read it slowly, in the afternoon, with a copy of the Pendlebury 1933 plan and the patience to wait for the cliffs to throw their long shadow.
For the academic visitor — particularly the graduate student writing on the Aten city — I would recommend a sequence of visits over a season, not a single trip. The first visit teaches the layout. The second visit, with the Mallawi fragments visited the same morning, teaches the painted programme. The third visit, in the late afternoon, with the cliff shadow in mind, teaches the floor and the central court. The fourth visit, in the same season, teaches what one has missed. The fifth visit, in a different season, teaches what the season changes. After five visits — which is the kind of schedule the long literary reader cannot easily afford and which the regional graduate student must — the North Palace becomes a building one has read.
It is not, by any modern standard, an efficient site. It is, however, by the proper standard of academic looking, one of the best.
Field notes recorded on visits in November 2024, January 2025, March 2025, January 2026, and March 2026. The collation of the Mallawi painted-floor fragments was made with the kind permission of the Mallawi Museum and Dr Hassan El-Sayed.