I recently added a book on the Amarna Period to my library and thought I'd review it here for folks.

Darnell, John, and Colleen Darnell. Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth. St. Martin's Press, 2022.

I'm ambivalent on this one, truth to tell. On the positive side, it's fairly readable and has quite a treasure trove of references along with a few illustrations that I hadn't encountered elsewhere. It has a very nice list of scholarly references to back up the material and the authors are adept enough at translation that they supply their own translations when they reference an inscription.

On the other hand, the writing's a bit uneven. Each chapter opens with a vignette to give the casual reader an idea of what life might have ben like at that time period -- and some of those did not seem realistic. For instance, they claimed that the extreme bowing position shown on talatats was one that the army also had to use when running alongside the royal chariots as they paraded through Amarna.

Now... I can't see people actually being able to run and function in that pose. I don' t know that my opinion here is correct -- it was just something very odd and I'm not certain it can be verified. (you can see the pose here: [www.ancient-egypt.co.uk])

They also imagined a scene where Meritaten is at a Karnak temple to worship the Aten, and the child skips and runs around the sphinxes. This scene doesn't work for me because children of prominent people are usually expected to act like miniature adults and skipping and running around sphinxes wouldn't be appropriate.

And then there was the scene where a scribe gives his son (a scribe in training) a new tablet -- and then asks the boy by way of a quiz "how do you know which direction to start reading the hieroglyphs. That's kind of like asking a nine year old "how do you write the letter 'a"

The other issue that bothers me is the positioning of Nefertiti as Tutankhamun's mother. I'm not sure WHY they are holding onto this belief, because as far as I know, Tut's mother was identified by genetic testing and is the "younger lady" found in the tomb KV35.

Those flaws aside, I found the material in the book useful, and the discussion of the social and political reasons for Akhenaten and Nefertiti establishing themselves as deities to be quite interesting. Other material that I've read did not really touch on the fifth year of Akhenaten's reigh, when he declares it was the worst year ever ("..worse than the things which any of the kings who ever assumed the White Crown had ever heard")

Overall, I'd give it a B-; flawed but useful.



NB: Others had much the same feelings as I did: [lnkd.in]

-- Byrd
Moderator, Hall of Ma'at