39. Relief with Bowing Figures

This fragmentary sunk relief, once richly painted, was found in the Weben Aten, a chapel in the State Apartments of the Great Palace of Amarna. Amarna was a city in Middle Egypt founded by the pharaoh Akhenaten. He built the city to serve as his new, utopian capital when he abolished polytheism in favor of a single solar deity, the Aten. The piece was part of a composition that likely depicted the royal family engaging in Atenist worship. Crowd scenes were included to convey the idea of public performance. These figures pay witness to and bow before Akhenaten and Nefertiti, the living manifestation of the Aten, and have been interpreted by some as Asiatic and Nubian envoys, but the scene is too fragmentary to be certain. While scenes of captive, tribute-bearing, or adoring  ‘foreigners’  were common in New Kingdom art, in Amarna art the entire administration is represented in bowing or prostrate positions. This relief was found with a large number of others, many found in fragments, likely shattered after Akhenaten’s death and society’s return to orthodoxy. Scan the brown QR code below to see how this relief may have looked like originally.