This paper takes a step towards understanding Amarna as a site with cemeteries, in which I seek to reintegrate the settlement and its burial grounds both as social datasets and part of a collective lived landscape. Of obvious importance for the study of health in the ancient world, this also brings opportunities to consider death as part of the experiential landscape of an ancient city, giving voice too to the population beyond the elite, still vastly understudied within Egyptology. The site is now one of few worldwide where we can match a population represented by a large sample of human remains to the precise urban environment they occupied. This fieldwork has added enormous breadth to the archaeological landscape of Amarna. Reference Kemp, Stevens, Dabbs, Zabecki and Rose2013 also multi-authored reports from 2005 in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology). Excavations at the latter began in 2006, and this work continues today (Kemp et al. The tombs of the royal family and the city's elite, large rock-cut monuments, were identified early on, but the main public burial grounds remained undiscovered until 2001/2003. For much of its excavation history, though, Amarna was known as a settlement site without cemeteries. Since the late nineteenth century, archaeologists have exposed large swathes of the urban landscape of Akhetaten (Kemp Reference Kemp2012), offering a remarkable snapshot of a city that underwent foundation, occupation and abandonment within a single generation. The people of Akhetaten faced an environment in which the royal family was promoted both as intermediaries to the Aten and divine figures and where-in what was a particularly radical change-there were no longer temples or state celebrations for gods other than the Aten. During its short occupation, Akhetaten served as home to the royal family and an estimated population of up to 50,000 people (Kemp Reference Kemp2012, 271–2) who relocated to the site from other parts of Egypt, bringing with them memories of past spaces, experiences and communities. Akhetaten, ‘horizon of the Aten’, was founded in Akhenaten's year 5 as the cult home for the Aten, and was famously short-lived, being largely abandoned in the years after the king's death in his year 17.

The reign of Akhenaten is considered a transformative phase of Egyptian social history, a key episode within a broader milieu from which developed changes in religion and personal expression (Assmann Reference Assmann, Strudwick and Taylor2003 Meskell Reference Meskell2002, 196–8).

1550–1069 bc) and the reign of the monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten, who promoted the cult of the sun god Aten above, and generally to the exclusion of, other state deities.

The ancient name of the city, from the Greek pelos, meaning mud or silt, reflects its location.Amarna (ancient Akhetaten) is our best preserved pharaonic city and of central importance for the study of ancient Egyptian urbanism (Kemp Reference Kemp2012). Pelusium, or Pelousion in Greek, was located on the easternmost mouth of the Nile River. Almost four miles long, the site is enveloped by soft, salt-covered mud and wetlands, the remains of two branches of the Nile that once surrounded the city. There are remains dating to the Christian and early Islamic periods, as well. Tell el-Farma, also known by its ancient name Pelusium, dates back to the late Pharaonic period and was also used during Greco-Roman and Byzantine times. In a statement, the Tourism and Antiquities Ministry said the temple ruins were found in the Tell el-Farma archaeological site in northwestern Sinai. Last week, archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a temple for the ancient Greek god Zeus in the Sinai Peninsula, authorities in Egypt said. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, Egypt

Temple of the ancient Greek god Zeus was unearthed in Sinai, Egypt An inscription in Greek at the Zeus temple was unearthed.

Death tomb kingdom of the dead