Innovation No. 33 of 77 in the book
The Planned Capital
Zoned urban planning built from a blank slate
- When
- c. 1348 BCE
- Dynasty
- 18th Dynasty
- Era
- New Kingdom
Most cities grow by accident. Akhetaten — modern Amarna — was designed. Around 1348 BCE the pharaoh Akhenaten raised an entire capital from scratch on empty desert.
It was zoned like a modern city: a central strip of temples and palaces, official districts, suburbs of villas and workers’ housing, all laid to a plan and linked by wide processional roads.
Built fast and abandoned fast, it froze a single moment of pure urban planning in the sand.
The idea of designing a whole city before laying a brick was first tried in Egypt.
Decades of survey by the Egypt Exploration Society, led by Barry Kemp, have mapped the city's complete footprint. Amarna is unusually legible because it was abandoned soon after Akhenaten's death and never built over again, leaving a full ground plan of a fourteenth-century BCE city rather than the usual tangle of later rebuilding.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do we know the plan came before the building?
Akhenaten cut sixteen monumental boundary stelae into the surrounding limestone cliffs, fixing the city's perimeter in law before construction started. The limits were defined first, then filled in.
Why is Amarna such good evidence?
Because nothing was built on top of it. Most ancient cities are layers of rebuilding stacked on each other, so the original plan is unrecoverable. Amarna was occupied for barely a generation and then left.