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The plague of Akhetaten has long been cited as a possible explanation for the mysterious abandonment of ancient Egypt's short-lived capital city. However, a comprehensive new archaeological analysis by researchers Dr. Gretchen Dabbs and Dr. Anna Stevens, in the American Journal of Archaeology, analyzed the evidence for this plague and suggests it may never have affected Akhetaten at all.

Akhetaten, today known as Amarna, was built during the reign of Akhenaten, formerly known as Amonhotep IV. The pharaoh is known for his worship of a single deity, namely the sun god Aten.

In a possible attempt to distance himself from the old religion, he constructed a new royal residence and capital of the Egyptian kingdom called Akhetaten. However, the new capital was not occupied for long, lasting around 20 years before its near complete abandonment shortly after Akhenaten's death.

It has been postulated that Akhenaten's odd decisions during his reign and the rapid abandonment of the city may be attributed to an epidemic. Evidence of this epidemic comes mainly from textual sources. This is in part because archaeological evidence for epidemics is notoriously difficult to identify.

Among the textual evidence are Hittite plague prayers which claim an epidemic in the Hittite empire brought in by Egyptian war captives, as well as a cache of letters from Amarna that indicate the presence of a disease outbreak at Meggido, Byblos, and Sumur.

Critically, however, none of these textual sources indicate an epidemic in Akhetaten specifically. It is thus that Dr. Dabbs and Dr. Stevens conducted a systematic archaeological and bioarchaeological analysis of the city and its surrounding cemeteries to determine if a plague ever affected Akhetaten.

"This work reaches beyond Egyptological sources and focuses specifically on data from Amarna. Recent work in archaeology and bioarcheology has created a sort of scaffold of expectations for a city affected by an epidemic through the study of cities and cemeteries where epidemic diseases were historically recorded. We have been able to take these expectations and compare what we see at Amarna to what is expected of an epidemic city/cemetery," explains Dr. Dabbs.

"These studies showed epidemic disease affected all kinds of systems, from building and maintaining structures to burial patterns to demography and beyond.

"We pulled information from all of these different lines of evidence at Amarna to compare what we know from Amarna, using textual, archaeological, and bioarchaeological data, to what we would expect to see if the city was impacted by an epidemic disease with substantial mortality. And over and over, what we actually see doesn't fit the expected models."

Surrounding the city of Akhetaten are various cemeteries, including four intended for the general populace: the South Tombs, the North Cliffs, North Desert, and North Tombs Cemeteries, which contained between 11,350 and 12,950 burials. Excavations between 2005 and 2022 yielded 889 interments, which formed part of the current study.

It was found that while skeletal remains showed stress markers including low adult stature, spinal trauma, linear enamel hypoplasia (dental growth interruptions), and degenerative joint disease, these reflected economic and social hardships rather than epidemic disease.

Disease markers were generally rare, with tuberculosis only identified in seven individuals. Most bodies, which were not embalmed, were interred with grave goods, textiles, and mat coffins. In addition, burial positions were not generally disorderly or unusual, suggesting burial was not a hasty process, as may be expected if an epidemic caused a large death toll.

The most striking change, which may indicate an epidemic, was the unusually high number of multiple burials. However, demographic patterns suggested cultural intentionality, particularly the frequent pairing of adult females with children, indicating a culturally driven motivation for multiple burials rather than crisis management.

Crucially, paleodemographic modeling demonstrated that the total number of interments fell within the expected ranges, given the city's population. Life expectancy and time of occupation, which would unlikely be the case in the event of an epidemic.

Finally, the city's abandonment pattern does not fit an epidemic scenario, as it seems to have been systematically abandoned with orderly collection of possessions and continued, albeit lower, occupation, even after Akhenaten's death. Given this information, it is unlikely Akhetaten experienced an epidemic during Akhenaten's reign.

Though Dr. Dabbs explains why the theory may have persisted for as long as it did: "This is one of those cases where something makes logical sense if you don't look at it too critically. To be fair, though, until very recently, the data to critically assess the presence of an epidemic at Amarna were not available.

"Egyptological sources provide lots of different connections between Amarna and scary words like 'plague' and/or epidemic. Multiple Amarna Letters mention plague. The Hittite Plague Prayers connect an extreme mortality/disease event with the Egyptians. Members of the Royal family died at Amarna. Amenhotep III built a lot of statues to Sekhmet, a goddess of disease and pestilence in ancient Egypt.

"It creates this network of circumstantial evidence that links Amarna and Akhenaten/the Royal family with disease from, largely, textual records written in and about other places and/or times… Once the seed of that connection was planted, it became a 'fact' through repetition."

Dr. Dabbs also clarifies that while an epidemic could not be established in Akhetaten, this does not mean the Hittite epidemic did not occur. "The Hittite plague prayers could be an honest reflection of what happened in the Hittite kingdom. It is also possible that the source of the outbreak was a group of Egyptian prisoners.

"One of the points we wanted to emphasize with this article was that we must be careful in using data from temporally and geographically distinct locales to make arguments specific to Amarna, or any ancient location."

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