However well such a portrayal of the site might suit the romantic idea of an idyll blown away, it is misleading. On the east bank waterfront of Amarna, there has been some sort of occupation more or less continuously from the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Akhet-aten continued to be used throughout the reign of Tutankhamun and probably into the reign of Horemhcb, last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who left inscriptions at the great Aten temple. People living in the workmen's village may have guarded the tombs, and there was perhaps an expectation that the city would need protection until it was reinhabited. There seems to have been a partial rcoccupation of parts of the site in the reign of Ramesses III, c. 1194 1163 bce.'1 The stone parts of city buildings were taken away for reuse in monuments at Hermopolis and elsewhere, but their mud-brick components, and those buildings constructed entirely of mud-brick, remained standing to an appreciable extent. (When Napoleon's surveyors visited Amarna in 1798 or 1799, they marvelled at the exposed mud-brick pylon of the small Aten temple, still over 7 metres high.) Akhenaten's 'Royal Road' through the ancient city centre continued to be the main route connccting the villages of el- Till and el-Hagg Qandil. The site continued to attract visitors throughout the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, especially the northern group of tombs. Amarna may even have been a stop on the itineraries of tourists, who were evidently impressed with the physical remains, as I discuss in the next chapter. It is possible that memories of Akhenaten in some form lingered among the ruins of his city, perhaps as a vague but still powerful aura attached to the site. Something more than the prospcct of high mud-brick walls and a good view must have attracted visitors to this inacccssible spot.
Later, in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries ce, there was plenty of Christian activity at Amarna, much of it conccntrated in the south of the site around Kom el-Nana, and there were monastic buildings at the northern tombs. Some ostraca recently discovered at Amarna suggest that this area may have been known in Coptic as Teglooge, literally ' The Ladder', a name often associated with monastic sites in Egypt, and very appropriate for one loeated in a high, inacccssiblc place like the northern tombs. At about this time the tomb of Panehesy (number 6) was converted into a church. The reliefs of Akhenaten and Nefertiti offering to the Aten were plastered over and replaced with Christian monograms, images of saints and prayers in Coptic (see Figure 2.9). The tomb of Huya (number 1) was inscribed with religious texts, now too damaged to translate consecutively, though the words 'god', 'our lord' and 'pray' recur.'" Other Coptic documents from Amarna, though few in number, clearly point to involvement with sccular matters. Two of these texts seem to have been sent to the monks from an army camp at Pedjla near el-Hagg Qandil, and the nature of the texts (receipts and
acknowledgements of tax payments) shows that the monastic inhabitants of the site in late antiquity were still part of the bureaucratic world outside.73
