Archaeologists have unearthed an ancient cemetery at the Egyptian city of Amarna. The cemetery held the commoners, rather than the elites, of the city.
Image: The Amarna Project
While an Egyptian pharaoh built majestic temples filled with sparkling treasures, the lower classes performed backbreaking work on meager diets, new evidence suggests.
An analysis of more than 150 skeletons from a 3,300-year-old cemetery at the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna reveals fractures, wear and tear from heavy lifting, and rampant malnutrition amongst the city's commoners.
The discovery, detailed in the March issue of the journal Antiquity, could shed light on how the non-elites of ancient Egyptian society lived.
Overnight city
For a brief, 17-year period, the center of Egypt was Amarna, a small city on the banks of the Nile, about 218 miles (350 kilometers) south of Cairo.
The pharaoh Akhenaten relocated his capital city to Amarna to build a pure, uncontaminated cult of worship dedicated to the sun god Aten. [Gallery: Sun Gods and Goddesses]
In a few years, temples, court buildings and housing complexes sprung up. At one time, 20,000 to 30,000 court officials, soldiers, builders and servants lived in the city.
But after Akhenaten's death, the next pharaoh, Tutankhamun, promptly rolled up the experiment. The city, which lacked good agricultural land, was soon abandoned.
Because the Egyptians occupied Amarna for such a short time, the city provides archaeologists with an unprecedented insight into what people's lives looked like at a specific moment in history, said study co-author Anna Stevens, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge.
Hard life
About 10 years ago, a surveyor investigating a region in the desert near Amarna discovered an ancient cemetery. The site contained hundreds of skeletons and skeletal fragments from lower-class Egyptians. [See Photos of the Ancient Egyptian Cemetery ]
To see what these everyday Egyptians' daily lives were like, Stevens and her colleagues analyzed 159 skeletons that were found mostly intact.
The researchers' conclusions: Life was hard at Amarna. The children had stunted growth, and many of the bones were porous due to nutritional deficiency, probably because the commoners lived on a diet of mostly bread and beer, Stevens told LiveScience.
More than three-quarters of the adults had degenerative joint disease, likely from hauling heavy loads, and about two-thirds of these adults had at least one broken bone.
The findings suggest that the rapid construction of Amarna may have been especially hard on the commoners. Based on the size of the bricks found in nearby structures, each worker likely carried a limestone brick weighing 154 pounds (70 kilograms) in assembly-line fashion. Erecting the city's structures so quickly would have required workers to repeatedly carry out such heavy lifting. That could have caused the joint disease the skeletons revealed.
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9 Comments
Add CommentDon't look now but some of the "commoners" (my self included) of our present time may be recording modern tough times and poor nutrition in their skeletons as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome things never change, eh?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA tough time or poor nutrition here and now would be considered luxury back then.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSadly...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's not belaboring the point to note that this
harsh reality is ages old. The elitist vulture
Marie Antoinette was not the first to coin the
"Let them eat cake!" mentality, nor will she
be the last, as witness today's relentless drive
to disenfranchise democracy, science and even
the most timid attempts at universal health-care
and social security. In this light, a certain conservative's heartless "47 percent"calumny
is simply the latest reflection of ancient
hierarchy and contemptuous, self-adoring
privilege. The battle continues.
Nicely said, stargene.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery true Traveler007, although there remain many who remain ignorant of that, even when faced with evidence such as in the article above.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree 100%!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree with parts of your comment, but you failed to mention the wannabe dictator in charge. His principle political tactic is to promote class warfare and we could end up with a much larger poor class before he is done.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisbecome an immigrant, go where the jobs go.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this