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Amarna, Akhenaten’s capital, was razed to the ground, the royal tombs were destroyed and most of the calcareous bricks were used to make lime. “No sooner had he died, than the clergy of other religions, notably those of Amon who were very powerful, systematically erased all traces of his reign,” says Robert Vergnieux. Indeed, Akhenaten’s “whimsical” religious and architectural ideas had made him enemies. The main problem for the specialists was that nothing remains of these buildings in Karnak or Amarna.
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The technique was first tested at Karnak, the religious complex situated to the north of Thebes, before being used on a large scale in Amarna, the new capital built by Akhenaten. 2īecause the walls no longer had to support heavy, ten-to-twenty ton roof slabs, a new architectural standard was established: the huge blocks of stone previously used to erect temples and royal edifices were replaced by standard-sized stone bricks-Talatats -which had the advantage of being quicker to build with. “Because Aten, the sun disk, became the only God to converse with, temples were built without roofs, bathed by the ‘divine rays,’” explains Robert Vergnieux, former director of the Archéovision Laboratory 1 and steward of an ongoing Akhenaten exhibition in Bordeaux. Not only did he cause religious upheaval by imposing the monotheistic worship of the sun disk, Aten, versus the pantheon of deities worshiped by previous pharaohs, but he also brought about a true architectural and artistic revolution. Considered by some as a mystic and by others as a cunning politician, pharaoh Amenhotep IV, also known as Akhenaten, completely revolutionized New-Kingdom Egypt during his reign (1350-1334 BC).