Aidan Dodson

It looks like it happens almost immediately afterwards.

And those cracks you see in the form of the deaths of half of Akhenaten's daughters within probably two or three years, and probably his mother as well.

So he's lost half of his young family almost overnight.

And I suspect that that is possibly seen as something of a bad omen to start with.

But also, by that time, probably people who don't share his vision are becoming more vociferous about it.

And also, there's a more real recognition of...

the dark underbelly of what's going on at Omana, in the sense that in the last few couple of decades, we've found the cemeteries of various workmen who clearly have been worked to death at a very young age.

Just simply that they're dying in their 20s with skeletal problems and all these sort of things.

Yeah.

So I think what we've got, though, is there's the superficial glamour, but the actual cost of that, the human cost of that was vast.

And I suspect that once they'd actually got to the point of having the big party, then people start looking at each other and say, you know, okay, this beautiful city, what's it actually done?

And it wouldn't surprise me as if that is when...

sort of real whispering against the king.

Yeah, so when you go to the workman's villages, which are on the outskirts of Amarna, yeah, you're finding all these traditional amulets

So it looks as though, really, that although, of course, nobility is shown being favourable to the art, I suspect that most people actually had in their bottom drawers the old amulets.

So I think most people, it was purely a show of a devotion to the regime.

And if one looks at history, that's a pretty good example where

As soon as the man who has been dictating effectively what people believe has gone, everybody then reverts as rapidly as possible to what they've always believed.

Well, in the royal tomb, there's a couple of side chambers which were intended for members of the royal family.

There's the king's main burial chamber and there's a number of side ones.