Barry Kemp, Egyptologist who dispelled myths about the ‘Christ-like’ pharaoh Akhenaten – obituary

Professor Barry Kemp: he spent many more years digging through the quickly abandoned city of Amarna than Akhenaten had spent building it - BBC

Professor Barry Kemp, who has died the day after his 84th birthday, was an eminent Egyptologist who directed the excavations at the site in Middle Egypt known as Amarna, the city founded by the mysterious pharaoh Akhenaten in around 1344 BC, and about which he wrote The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti – Amarna and its people (2012).

In about 1353 BC a pharaoh called Amenhotep IV decided that everyone should worship one god, the Aten, represented as the sun’s disk, and changed his name to Akhenaten. Then he moved his court from Thebes, for centuries the seat of pharaonic power, 175 miles north to a new capital, Akhetaten (named Amarna by 19th-century archaeologists), on a previously uninhabited shelf of desert above the eastern bank of the river Nile.

Akhenaten ordered more than 20,000 people to move to the site from elsewhere in Egypt and embarked on a massive building programme. Palaces, temples and government buildings were constructed at an astonishing pace. One place of worship, the Great Aten Temple, was half a mile long.

Within a few years, Akhenaten’s desert city became home to somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people. Eventually the pharaoh would ban the traditional gods altogether, making Isis, Osiris and up to 2,000 other deities redundant.

Akhenaten’s revolution was not only religious but artistic. For more than a thousand years, representations of people in Egyptian art had been rigid and idealised. Under Akhenaten they became more individualised and informal. In sculptured reliefs and paintings the pharaoh was portrayed with his famously beautiful wife, Nefertiti, in unusually intimate and natural poses; one scene even features the couple about to get into bed together. In portraits they were depicted kissing and caressing their children.

Akhenaten and Nefertiti depicted with their children under the solar disc of Aten - Alamy

But Amarna was occupied for less than two decades. Not long after Akhenaten’s death in about 1336 BC it was almost completely abandoned. Subsequently, images of Akhenaten – carved all over Egypt – were systematically destroyed by his successors. The campaign of obliteration was so successful that Akhenaten disappeared from history for 31 centuries – until his name was rediscovered by archaeologists in the mid-19th century.

Egyptologists had traditionally focused on pharaohs, priests and other elites, and Akhenaten proved particularly fascinating, some viewing him as a Christ-like figure, a philosopher and prophet of the true God before his time. By the time Kemp was a student at the University of Liverpool, however, there was a new emphasis on investigating the lives of ordinary people.

Amarna, the best-preserved capital from ancient Egypt, was the perfect site for such a study, being, as Kemp put it, “essentially a replicated mud village containing a few isolated monuments”. And Kemp did much to dispel the saintly myth around its founder.

One obvious reason why Amarna was abandoned so quickly was that the site was ill-suited for a settlement in the first place. There was no easily available fresh water; crops could not grow there; local well water would have been too saline for drinking, so residents would have been forced to haul water from wells further away or from the Nile. “The danger of being an absolute ruler,” Kemp observed drily, “is that no one dares tell you that what you have just decreed is not a good idea.”

Meanwhile, although carvings and hieroglyphs from the site often emphasise themes of abundance and prosperity, excavations of burial sites by Kemp and others tell a story of child labour, severe malnutrition, bone malformation and early death.

Akhenaten: his message of 'Atenism offered little to people who wanted the comfort of a god who could be approached by anyone, even in their own home', thought Kemp - Alamy

They also tell a story of people alienated from Akhenaten’s cult of the Aten. At a cemetery where workers who erected Akhenaten’s palaces and temples were buried in shallow graves, excavations found numerous amulets and votive objects depicting popular minor deities interred as grave goods, but not a single representation of the Aten, nor mention of Akhenaten on finger rings or scarabs.

Beneath the surface, Kemp argued, the people worshipped their old gods, in spite of official diktats demanding otherwise: “Atenism offered little to people who wanted the comfort of a god who could be approached by anyone, even in their own home. Akhenaten’s message was just too austere to gather widespread support.” After Akhenaten’s death there was nobody to uphold his religious revolution.

Tall and softly spoken, with a full white beard, Kemp spent many more years digging through the city than Akhenaten had spent building it. During that time he lived for much of every winter and spring in a basic dig house located on the southern edge of the site.

In 1996 he enjoyed an amusing diversion from the normal routine of excavation when he and Delwen Samuel, an archaeobotanist, worked with the brewers Scottish and Newcastle to brew an ale according to a recipe inferred from sediment from old jars found in a brewery housed inside the Sun Temple of Nefertiti. The beverage, reported the New York Times, was “slightly cloudy with a golden hue” and according to Delwen Samuel, was “very rich, very malty and has a flavour that reminds you a little of chardonnay”.

Although his main interest was in the ordinary people of ancient Egypt, Kemp worked tirelessly to save the “elite” temple and palace sites at Amarna from pressures of environmental degradation and modern population growth, carrying out restoration work to protect them from further erosion and decay.

At the time of his death he was tackling the re-excavation of the enormous Great Aten Temple, threatened by the expansion of a modern cemetery.

Kemp's Ancient Egypt remains a core text of university courses

Barry John Kemp was born on May 14 1940. After graduating in Egyptology from the University of Liverpool in 1962, he was appointed an assistant lecturer at the University of Cambridge, where he rose to Professor of Egyptology in 2005 and trained generations of Egyptologists and archaeologists. He was a Fellow of Wolfson College from 1990 to 2007.

From 1977 to 2008 Kemp directed the survey and archaeological excavations at Amarna for the Egypt Exploration Society. In 2008 he was appointed a senior fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge. From then on he continued and expanded his work at Amarna, funded by private donations to the Amarna Project, which he had established, working in association with the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt.

Kemp was a prolific writer. His Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilisation (1989, now in its third edition) remains a core text of university courses. In Think Like an Egyptian: 100 Hieroglyphs (2005), he observed that, contrary to popular belief, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was not like “a piece of cinefilm or a strip cartoon”, most hieroglyphs requiring the mental substitution of concepts quite different from the image.

In How to Read the Egyptian Book of the Dead (2007), he sought to explore, through an analysis of ancient Egyptian spells designed to overcome the dangers lurking in the Otherworld, how the Egyptians viewed the relationship between the individual and the divine.

Ancient Egypt: All That Matters (2015) was a lively account of why and how ancient Egypt was able to thrive with such stability for such a long time.

Kemp was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992 and was appointed CBE in 2011 for services to archaeology, education and international relations in Egypt.

Barry Kemp, born May 14 1940, died May 15 2024

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