Quick questions on The historical context for Akhenaten: HSC Ancient History

Akhenaten's builders at Karnak and later at Amarna used talatat, small, standardised sandstone blocks roughly one cubit (about 52 cm) long, light enough for a single worker to carry, which let enormous temple complexes rise in only a few years. After Akhenaten's fall, tens of thousands of talatat were dismantled and reused as rubble fill inside later Ramesside pylons at Karnak, especially Horemheb's ninth and tenth pylons. From the 1960s, the Akhenaten Temple Project, founded by Ray Winfield Smith and later directed by Donald Redford, used systematic photography and, eventually, computer matching to reassemble scattered talatat into their original wall scenes.

At least fourteen massive stelae were cut into the cliffs ringing the Amarna plain, recording Akhenaten's sworn foundation oath for Akhetaten: the site belonged to no other god or goddess, and he would never move its boundary beyond the markers he had set (some stelae were re-carved to restate the oath in a later year). One stela records the king declaring that "Akhetaten belongs to the Aten...

The rock-cut tombs of Akhenaten's officials, in the northern and southern cliffs at Amarna, were left unfinished when the court abandoned the city, and several were later damaged or robbed. Even so, their relief scenes and inscriptions, including the fullest surviving copy of the Great Hymn to the Aten in the tomb of the courtier Ay, are essential evidence for royal ideology and court life, though they show only the perspective of the religious and administrative elite closest to the king, not that of ordinary Egyptians.

Around 380 cuneiform tablets, written in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the day, were discovered at Amarna in 1887. They record correspondence between the Egyptian court, spanning the end of Amenhotep III's reign into Akhenaten's, and both Levantine vassal rulers and the Great Powers Mitanni, Babylon, Assyria and Hatti. In one especially plaintive letter, a Levantine vassal ruler warns that his city will "join the Habiru" unless Egypt sends archers (trans.

Much of what survives about the period immediately after Akhenaten comes from sources written to justify reversing his changes: Tutankhamun's Restoration Stela at Karnak, which blames an unnamed predecessor for the gods' neglect, and later king lists, the Abydos King List of Seti I and the Turin Canon, which omit Akhenaten (and Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Ay) entirely, jumping straight from Amenhotep III to Horemheb. These texts are essential for tracing the counter-revolution, but as products of the very regimes that erased Akhenaten's memory, they must be treated as hostile and retrospective, not as neutral history.