Boundary Stelae of Akhenaten

The Boundary Stelae of Akhenaten are a group of royal monuments in Upper Egypt. They are carved into the cliffs surrounding the area of Akhetaten, or Horizon of Aten, that demarcate the limits of the site. The Pharaoh Akhenaten commissioned the construction of Akhetaten in year five of his reign during the New Kingdom. It served as a sacred space for the god Aten in an uninhabited location roughly halfway between Memphis and Thebes at today’s Tell El-Amarna. The boundary stelae include the foundation decree of Akhetaten along with later additions to the text, which delineate the boundaries and describe the purpose of the site and its founding by the Pharaoh. Total of sixteen stelae have been discovered around the area. According to Barry Kemp, the Pharaoh Akhenaten did not “conceive of Akhetaten as a city, but as a tract of sacred land”.

Sixteen boundary stelae have so far been discovered at Tell El-Amarna. The French Jesuit Claude Sicard was the first European to call attention to the stelae. He published a sketch of Stela A and a description of the site after visiting it in 1714. Stela U was discovered by A. C. Harris and George Gliddon in 1840 and, also in the early 1840s, another stela was discovered by George Lloyd of Brynestyn. Lloyd made a copy of Stela P, which was published along with a new copy of Stela A and a copy of Stela U made by Émile Prisse d'Avennes. Prisse was the first one to realize, based on the inscriptions on the stelae, that there must be at least six stelae that demarcate the area of the site. In 1843 and 1845, Karl Richard Lepsius travelled to the site with a Prussian expedition and discovered four new stelae, later named stelae K, M, N, and R. The practice of referring to the stelae with a discontinuous series of letters, in order to leave space for possible further discoveries, was begun by W. M. Flinders Petrie whose survey of Amarna was published in 1894. In 1892, Petrie found six new stelae at the site: stelae B and F on the western side of the Nile River, and stelae J, L, P, and V on the eastern side. From the previously found stelae, only Stela A is located in the western side. In 1893, Percy E. Newberry found Stela Q on the east bank. Jean Daressy published the earliest printed translation of the legible parts of the text, also in 1893, based on copies of stelae S and R, using variants found on stelae A and U. In 1898, stelae J, K, M, N, Q, R, S, and U were copied by Georg Steindorff who also photographed the sites of the stelae and took some loose fragments with him to Germany. Steindorff subsequently made his materials available for the Egypt Exploration Fund. In 1901, Norman de Garis Davies was shown the northernmost stela on the east bank, which led him to include the boundary stelae in his publication of the Rock Tombs of El Amarna in 1908. Davies’s publication included a translation of the two different sets of stelae, which Davies named the “Earlier Proclamation” and the “Later Proclamation”, as well as of the texts that were added to the stelae bearing the Later Proclamation in the year eight of Akhenaten’s reign. The latest addition to stelae A and B was termed the “Colophon” by Davies. A partial translation of the stelae had also appeared in James Henry Breasted’s Ancient Records published in 1906. An additional stela was discovered by the archeological survey of the Egypt Exploration Society in the season 2005-2006 and it was labeled Stela H.

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