Aidan Dodson

But yeah, they are heavily distorted.

Although somebody has pointed out that if you're standing directly below them and looking up, they're less distorted.

Interesting.

The artist has actually adjusted things so that when you're at their feet, because these things are, what, about 10, 12 foot tall, if you're standing sort of looking up at them, everything isn't quite as out of line as... I love that.

Yeah.

And as you said, in some other colossal statues from Egypt of other periods, the ears appear to be a bit too high.

But when you're sort of at the right, at the optimum viewing distance, they're okay.

Yeah, and the term is simply borrowed from the Indian Empire, whereby you've got the Durbars of George V and people like that.

It's one of those cases where we've sort of picked up a word from another culture, and it just seems to be the most appropriate thing for this major event, with everybody coming to bring gifts to the king.

Yeah, and I think that was sort of the concept of building this entire new city, was to start from the idea of the art possibly representing a year zero, but also the idea of building a completely new capital city from scratch on a completely virgin site as well, because all the other cities in Egypt go back thousands of years to... Were already incredibly ancient.

Yeah, whereas this was taken, and in the texts which Akhenaten provides relating to its foundation, he makes that point.

This belonged to no god or goddess.

So he's starting from a clean sheet of paper, and in doing so, he then produces what presumably the city planners of the time thought was the optimum...

What a capital city should be like.

So in many ways, you could argue it being sort of an ancient Egyptian Brasilia or Canberra, or perhaps less kindly Milton Keynes.

It's what was thought to be it.

Yeah.

But it seems to me the idea is that clearly this is the opportunity for his engineers, his town planners, to build what they believed would work as a capital city.

And it's also important to note it's not just simply the urban area.

They've also taken over a whole slice of the Nile Valley on the other bank, which has got lots of fields.