University of Pennsylvania Museum features Amarna, a city credited to Tut's dad
By ROBERT STRAUSS For the Daily News - Tutankhamun, the legendary King Tut, owes his fame in large part to a good find in 1922, when Egyptologist Howard Carter discovered Tut's tomb virtually intact.
The time around Tut's reign in the middle 1300s B.C. has long been a focus for those studying the ancient world, and over the next several months, Philadelphia will be the home to spectacular exhibitions highlighting that period.
The first of them, "Amarna, Ancient Egypt's Place in the Sun," opens Sunday at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, one of the world's great centers of ancient Egyptology and ancient Egyptian artifacts.
Amarna was the new capital created in central Egypt by the man generally believed to be Tut's father, Pharaoh Akhenaten. Akhenaten - one of whose wives was the purported magnificent beauty Queen Nefertiti - changed his people's religious habits, claiming that instead of the many gods the kingdom had worshipped, there was but one god - the disk of the sun, known as the Aten.
"We believe that Akhenaten built his city in central Egypt near this wadi, a break in the cliff east of the Nile River, because it was a dramatic setting," said Josef William Wegner, an associate professor of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, and a co-curator of the exhibit. "He must have thought it was a magical place, and that the sun god could be magically born out of this horizon."
To be sure, Akhenaten had ulterior motives in steering his subjects to this new religious belief. According to Wegner, Akhenaten said that he was the sole prophet of the new sun god, the only one who could interpret the sun's life-giving force.
"The common people were then charged with worshipping the royal family as gods on earth," said Wegner. Still, the idea of having a sole god instead of dozens was a radical and liberating departure from the past, he said. It gave rise to different styles of art and architecture and generally served to liberate at least those disciplines from their somewhat duller pasts.
The museum has similarly liberated some of its cache of stored artifacts from the era for the new exhibit, which also spotlights some of those artifacts already on display. The exhibit, more than 100 pieces strong, will center on a huge wall relief that shows Aten, the solar god, hovering above Akhenaten and a female, presumably one of his queens. It is believed, Wegner said, that the relief was cut down and reused as the base for a statue, so, ironically, even after Akhenaten's demise and the restoration of the multi-god culture, it was preserved through recycling.
Akhenaten reigned for about 17 years, and after a short period Tutankhamun took over, probably when he was 6 or 8 years old, said Wegner. Though he reigned for a little more than a decade, dying at age 19, he may well have been under the influence of older counselors who were still enamored of the former multi-god ways. In any event, the practice of worshipping many gods returned during his time.
"The short, 12-year period of Amarna's existence makes it even more of a curiosity to study," said Wegner. "It is unusual to see a period like that, when a charismatic leader is able to re-engineer society, and then when he is gone, it is quickly reversed."
Besides the Amarna exhibition, the museum's Upper and Lower Egyptian galleries have gotten a face-lift, so the continuing exhibits of mummies and the like have upgraded space and interpretation.
The Amarna exhibition is an appetizer for the highly anticipated show "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs," coming in February from Egypt to the Franklin Institute Science Museum. Meanwhile, said Wegner, visitors can get in touch with Tut's precursors at the Penn Museum.
"For me, it is the mysteries of ancient times that unlock things in our own era," said Wegner. "It may be thousands of years removed, but there are many mysteries still to be solved." *
"Amarna, Ancient Egypt's Place in the Sun," University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 3260 South St., 215-898-4000, www.museum.upenn.edu. Opens Sunday and runs through October 2007. Museum hours are 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Admission donation is $8 adults, $5 seniors and students, free children 6 and under. Free to all Sundays through May 21.
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