Everyone Thought This Ancient City Was Destroyed By Plague. A New Analysis Says It Never Happened

The tale of Akhetaten, the ancient Egyptian city that for a brief point in the 14th century BCE was the state’s capital and home of the god-king Akhenaten, is one of tragedy. It was founded in the middle of nowhere by a pharaoh who would go on to be all but stricken from the record; it was almost immediately hit by a devastating plague that left nine royals and many hundreds of commoners dead; finally, it was abandoned entirely, becoming once again as deserted as it had been just 20 years before.

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At least, that’s what we thought happened. There’s just one problem: according to a new analysis of the physical and written record of the city, most of it is completely incorrect.

The “plague” of Akhetaten – never happened?

“The question of whether the ancient Egyptian city of Akhetaten […] was affected by an epidemic has long been debated,” the paper begins – but, it concludes, “the balance of evidence suggests nonetheless that the city was not affected by an epidemic disease with considerable mortality.”

It’s a big claim – and it’s not the only one the authors are making. They also argue that the city, the remains of which are now contained with the archaeological site known as Amarna, was never really “abandoned” in the way it’s often presented today.

“The impression from the archaeological record is that the city was abandoned in an orderly manner that gave people time to collect and remove possessions,” the authors point out, “sometimes leaving behind items that may have been superfluous or difficult to transport, but with no sign of the mass abandonment of personal or household items.” Not, in other words, the fleeing of a plague-fearing populace.

Even the importance of the death toll has been overstated, the paper argues. Those royals whose deaths mark the period are pretty easily explicable: Queen Tiye, for example, “was likely around 50 years old,” the paper points out, “and could have died of conditions brought about by old age”; at the other end of the scale, the royal daughters Neferneferure and Setepenre “were both probably around 5 years of age or under when they died” – a tragedy today, but all-too-common in premodern societies. 

Heck, one of the bodies on the evidence list is Tutankhamun, of all people – the boy-king almost entirely famous for being frail and sick his entire life. A bad fall could have knocked him off his mortal coil, no city-wide plague necessary.

As for the common people – well, sure, some hundreds of burials have been found in the ancient city, some even in multiples, but none seem to have been hurried, or delayed, or purposefully sited some “safe” distance from the living. Most damningly of all, running the numbers to find the “expected number” of deaths in the community from some theoretical epidemic produces results wildly larger than the numbers actually discovered – hinting that, while people weren’t exactly healthy in ancient Akhetaten, they weren’t dropping like plague-infected flies.

Overall, it paints a picture of… not much at all, really. “We conclude that when the evidence is considered as a whole, there is little to currently suggest Akhetaten was affected by a mortal epidemic,” the authors write. Which rather raises the question: why did we ever think it was?

Well, aside from the evidence presented so far – which, apparently, nobody yet analyzed much further than “yeah, sounds convincing” – there’s one main reason: the Hittites.

The origin of the myth

In the 14th century BCE, the Hittite Empire was pretty much at its apex, with its southernmost point just butting up against the most northerly extent of Egypt’s New Kingdom. The two kingdoms swung between uneasy peace and intermittent war – and, at the time of Akhetaten, relations were frosty.

So, when some kind of deadly epidemic hit the Hittite capital Hattuša, the local historians knew who to blame.

“When [the Hittites] brought back […] the [Egyptian] prisoners which they had taken, a plague broke out among the prisoners and these began to die,” reports the Plague Prayers of the Hittite king Muršili. “When they moved the prisoners to the Hatti [Hittite] land, these prisoners carried the plague into the Hatti land. From that day on people have been dying in the Hatti land.”

In other words: they brought back some Egyptian prisoners of war, and the prisoners of war brought back a plague. But does that mean the same illness brought down Akhetaten?

Well, even with the most generous interpretation, no. First off, we’ll just point out that the two cities are separated by a minimum of around 1,145 kilometers (711 miles), and traversing such distances wasn’t the quick jaunt we’d enjoy today. There’s plenty of time and space for the soldiers to pick up an illness on the way to or from the site of the two armies’ meeting – which is lucky, since even if we take the Hittites’ word for it, there are huge time lags between that and the outbreak of illness.

“The Battle of Amka, for example, the tenuous origin of the Hittite outbreak, is usually thought to have occurred after the death of Tutankhamun,” the authors explain. “By the time of Tutankhamun’s death, Akhetaten had not been the seat of the royal family for several years, although it was not fully abandoned.”

And then, there’s the killer blow: despite the Hittites’ insistence that the Egyptians brought the illness across their borders, there’s actually no direct mention of said epidemic existing in Akhetaten itself.

“In positioning these records relative to Akhetaten, it is important to note that none speak directly of disease at this city,” the paper points out. “For Ancient Egypt […] no conclusive textual, archaeological, or paleopathological evidence has yet been identified for widespread epidemic outbreaks in the Late Bronze Age or at other times.”

Now, it’s not like that’s the only evidence that could speak to an epidemic in the city. “Egyptological sources provide lots of different connections between Amarna and scary words like 'plague' and/or epidemic,” agreed Gretchen Dabbs, professor of archeology at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and coauthor of the paper, in an interview with Phys.org. 

“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.”

The problem is, it’s circumstantial almost to the point of irrelevance. “It[’s] 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,” she said. “Once the seed of that connection was planted, it became a 'fact' through repetition.”

Lessons from history

So, was there really a “plague” at Akhetaten? Well, the authors are careful to point out that they haven’t proved it didn’t happen: “Looking forward, it is conceivable that infectious disease that can cause an epidemic may be identified at Amarna through molecular analysis,” they write, and it’s perfectly possible that the Hittite Plague Prayers reflect a genuine history of some illness that could be traced back to a population brought from Egypt.

But overall, the lesson here is one of conclusions, and a warning against jumping to them too quickly. Even if molecular analysis does reveal evidence of such a disease, “any results should be integrated with the factors presented here to assess whether they represent actual epidemic outbreaks, or simply presence of an ancient pathogen,” the paper cautions.

“Epidemic has sometimes been applied as a fairly blunt interpretive tool to explain aspects of the disrupted political and social history of Egypt in the late 14th century BCE,” the authors write. “The Amarna results demonstrate the value of combined bioarchaeological and archaeological perspectives in revealing something more of the complexity of ancient disease and its impacts, particularly when set against an urban backdrop.” 

“The wider challenge is to continue to situate disease – infectious, catastrophic, or otherwise – relative to cultural processes rather than as isolated phenomena,” they conclude, “and Amarna offers a prime opportunity to pursue this for the Bronze Age Mediterranean.”

The study is published in the American Journal of Archeology.