Would children have been used in the construction of the royal city of Akhenaten?
Indeed, in an ancient cemetery in Amarna, Egypt, and after recent discoveries. One wonders about the conditions in which the capital of'Akhenaten, Tutankhamun's father.
Pharaoh Akhenaten raised a complete city from the sands in just 15 years. Also in a cemetery of the northern group, we buried more than 90% of skeletons whose estimated age is between 7 and 25 years, mostly less than 15 years. In fact a veritable graveyard of teenagers.
Pharaoh Akhenaten is the son of Queen Tiyi and King Amenhotep III. While a controversial figure, sometimes considered one of the great mystics in history. As well as upsetting, the time of a reign, the history of ancient Egypt by accelerating the theological evolution begun by his predecessor and by wanting to impose the exclusive worship of Rê-Horakhty "who is in Aton", whose he is both the prophet and the incarnation.
Worship of Aten. The young sovereign goes gradually at first, then more brutally afterwards. Although he will impose a religion that some call henotheism and others the first exclusive monotheism (like the Abrahamic religions. Without any denomination in the plural of divinity) known to history. Also favoring the cult of the Aten solar disk. For reasons still poorly known, but probably in the face of conservatism and the hostility of the Theban clergy. However Akhenaten decides to abandon the cult of the dynastic god Amon, the "hidden god".
In Year IV of the reign, he made his first visit to the place where his future capital would be founded, a city untouched by the presence of the Theban god. He chose as a location a desert place in Middle Egypt, on the eastern bank of the Nile, where he built the city of Akhetaten ("the Horizon of Aten"), the current Amarna, some 300 km to the north of Thebes. He begins work that will drain a large part of the income allocated to Thebes.
