Professor Barry Kemp, who died the day after his 84th birthday, was an eminent Egyptologist who led the excavations at the site in central Egypt known as Amarna, the city conquered by the mysterious pharaoh Akhenaten around 1344 BC. founded and about which he wrote The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti – Amarna and its People (2012).
About 1353 B.C. a pharaoh named Amenhotep IV decided that everyone should worship one god, the Aten, represented as the solar disk, and changed his name to Akhenaten. He then moved his court from Thebes, the seat of pharaonic power for centuries, 175 miles north to a new capital, Akhetaten (called Amarna by 19th-century archaeologists), on a previously uninhabited desert plain above the eastern bank of the Nile River. .
Akhenaten ordered more than 20,000 people to move to the site from elsewhere in Egypt and began a massive construction program. Palaces, temples and government buildings were built at an astonishing pace. One place of worship, the Great Aten Temple, was half a mile long.
Within a few years, Akhenaten’s desert city became home to somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people. Ultimately, the pharaoh would ban the traditional gods altogether, making Isis, Osiris, and up to 2,000 other gods redundant.
Akhenaten’s revolution was not only religious, but also artistic. For more than a thousand years, representations of people in Egyptian art were rigid and idealized. Under Akhenaten they became more individualized and informal. In sculpted reliefs and paintings, the pharaoh was depicted together with his famously beautiful wife Nefertiti in unusually intimate and natural poses; One scene even shows the couple about to go to bed together. Portraits depicted them kissing and caressing their children.
But Amarna was occupied for less than twenty years. Not long after Akhenaten’s death, around 1336 BC, it was almost completely abandoned. Subsequently, images of Akhenaten – carved throughout Egypt – were systematically destroyed by his successors. The extermination campaign was so successful that Akhenaten disappeared from history for 31 centuries – until his name was rediscovered by archaeologists in the mid-19th century.
Egyptologists had traditionally focused on pharaohs, priests, and other elites, and Akhenaten proved particularly fascinating; some considered him a Christ-like figure, a philosopher and prophet of the true God before his time. By the time Kemp was a student at Liverpool University, however, there was a new emphasis on examining the lives of ordinary people.
Amarna, the best-preserved capital of ancient Egypt, was the perfect location for such a study because, as Kemp put it, it was “essentially a reconstructed mud village with a few isolated monuments.” And Kemp did much to dispel the sacred myth surrounding his founder.
An obvious reason why Amarna was abandoned so quickly was that the location was not suitable for a settlement in the first place. There was no easily available fresh water; crops could not grow there; local spring water would have been too salty to drink, so residents would have been forced to get water from sources further away or from the Nile. “The danger of being an absolute ruler,” Kemp noted dryly, “is that no one dares to tell you that what you just decreed is not a good idea.”
Although carvings and hieroglyphs from the site often emphasize themes of abundance and prosperity, cemetery excavations by Kemp and others tell a story of child labor, severe malnutrition, bone deformity, and early death.
They also tell a story about people alienated from Akhenaten’s cult of the Aten. In a cemetery where workers who built Akhenaten’s palaces and temples were buried in shallow graves, excavations found numerous amulets and votive objects depicting popular minor deities buried as grave goods, but not a single depiction of the Aten, nor mention of Akhenaten on finger rings or scarabs.
Beneath the surface, Kemp argued, people worshiped their old gods, despite official dictates demanding otherwise: “Atenism offered little to people who wanted the comfort of a god who could be approached by anyone, even in their own homes.” Akhenaten’s message was simply too austere to gain widespread support.” After Akhenaten’s death, there was no one to support his religious revolution.
Kemp was tall, softly spoken and with a full white beard. He spent many more years searching the city than Akhenaten had spent building it. During that time, he lived much of each winter and spring in a simple dig house on the southern edge of the site.
In 1996 he enjoyed an amusing diversion from the normal excavation routine when he and Delwen Samuel, an archaeobotanist, collaborated with brewers Scottish and Newcastle to brew a beer using a recipe derived from sediment from ancient pots found in a brewery located was in the building. Sun Temple of Nefertiti. The drink, the New York Times reported, was “slightly cloudy with a golden tinge” and, according to Delwen Samuel, was “very rich, very malty and has a taste somewhat reminiscent of chardonnay.”
Although his primary interest was in the common people of ancient Egypt, Kemp worked tirelessly to save the ‘elite’ temple and palace sites at Amarna from the pressures of environmental degradation and modern population growth, carrying out restoration work to restore them to protect against further erosion and decay. .
At the time of his death he was busy re-excavating the enormous Great Aten Temple, threatened by the expansion of a modern cemetery.
Barry John Kemp was born on May 14, 1940. After graduating in Egyptology from the University of Liverpool in 1962, he was appointed Assistant Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, where he rose to Professor of Egyptology in 2005, serving generations of Egyptologists and archaeologists trained. . From 1990 to 2007 he was a Fellow of Wolfson College.
From 1977 to 2008, Kemp led research and archaeological excavations at Amarna for the Egypt Exploration Society. In 2008 he was appointed senior fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge. From then on, he continued and expanded his work at Amarna, funded by private donations to the Amarna Project, which he founded in collaboration with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Kemp was a prolific writer. His Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (1989, now in its third edition) remains a core text of university courses. In Think Like an Egyptian: 100 Hieroglyphs (2005), he noted that, contrary to popular belief, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was not like “a piece of film or a comic strip”, with most hieroglyphics requiring the mental substitution of concepts which were very different from the image.
In How to Read the Egyptian Book of the Dead (2007), through an analysis of ancient Egyptian spells intended to overcome the dangers lurking in the Otherworld, he attempted to explore how the Egyptians opposed looked at the relationship between the individual and the divine.
Ancient Egypt: All That Matters (2015) was a vivid account of why and how ancient Egypt was able to thrive with such stability for so long.
Kemp was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992 and appointed CBE in 2011 for services to archaeology, education and international relations in Egypt.
Barry Kemp, born May 14, 1940, died May 15, 2024