Posted on 03/28/2008 8:20:26 PM PDT by blam
Study shows life was tough for ancient Egyptians
By Alaa Shahine
Fri Mar 28, 10:12 AM ET
Reuters Photo: The Giza pyramids in a file photo. New evidence of a sick, deprived population working...
CAIRO (Reuters) - New evidence of a sick, deprived population working under harsh conditions contradicts earlier images of wealth and abundance from the art records of the ancient Egyptian city of Tell el-Amarna, a study has found.
Tell el-Amarna was briefly the capital of ancient Egypt during the reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who abandoned most of Egypt's old gods in favor of the Aten sun disk and brought in a new and more expressive style of art.
Akhenaten, who ruled Egypt between 1379 and 1362 BC, built and lived in Tell el-Amarna in central Egypt for 15 years. The city was largely abandoned shortly after his death and the ascendance of the famous boy king Tutankhamen to the throne.
Studies on the remains of ordinary ancient Egyptians in a cemetery in Tell el-Amarna showed that many of them suffered from anemia, fractured bones, stunted growth and high juvenile mortality rates, according to professors Barry Kemp and Gerome Rose, who led the research.
Rose, a professor of anthropology in the University of Arkansas in the United States, said adults buried in the cemetery were probably brought there from other parts of Egypt.
"This means that we have a period of deprivation in Egypt prior to the Amarna phase," he told an audience of archaeologists and Egyptologists in Cairo on Thursday evening.
"So maybe things were not so good for the average Egyptian and maybe Akhenaten said we have to change to make things better," he said.
Kemp, director of the Amarna Project which seeks in part to increase public knowledge of Tell el-Amarna and surrounding region, said little attention has been given to the cemeteries of ordinary ancient Egyptians.
"A very large number of ordinary cemeteries have been excavated but just for the objects and very little attention has been paid for the human remain," he told Reuters.
"The idea of treating the human remains ... to study the overall health of the population is relatively new."
Paintings in the tombs of the nobles show an abundance of offerings, but the remains of ordinary people tell a different story.
Rose displayed pictures showing spinal injuries among teenagers, probably because of accidents during construction work to build the city.
The study showed that anemia ran at 74 percent among children and teenagers, and at 44 percent among adults, Rose said. The average height of men was 159 cm (5 feet 2 inches) and 153 cm among women.
"Adult heights are used as a proxy for overall standard of living," he said. "Short statures reflect a diet deficient in protein. ... People were not growing to their full potential."
Kemp said he believed further excavations in Tell el-Amarna would "firm-up" the conclusions of his team.
"We are seeing a more realistic picture of what life was like," he told Reuters. "It has nothing to do with the intentions of Akhenaten, which may have been good and paternal toward his people."
(Writing by Alaa Shahine, editing by Mary Gabriel)
Life was even tougher at this time here:
Disaster That Struck The Ancients
" The hieroglyphs there reported "all of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone had come to eating their children".
You find stealth Obama plugs in the oddest places.
Now they have to deal with Cairo traffic jams.
"...there is no new thing under the sun." Ecc 1:9
So true, so true.
Worked pretty well.
Maybe that's why they walked that way.
Some, more than others.
"No more Botox!"
Anemia may be an interesting indicator here, because it could imply several possibilities, both in its cause and effects.
The assumption that the anemia was caused by malnutrition, and associated with protein deficiency may be correct, or it could be hereditary, or even caused by a disease or huge swarms of blood sucking parasites. Or a combination of the above.
In turn, the idea that this was a new city, yet was abandoned after this one pharaoh, also implies some interesting things. Leaving a previously inhabited area needs a strong motivation.
Perhaps something bad befell the old city, and was so awful that it resulted in the traditional gods being temporarily abandoned as ineffectual.
The Exodus dates to around this time, which would give good reason to abandon the Gods of old.
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And it caused a whole new culture to sprout in Amarna which then was stamped out under King Tut.
Or John Edwards plugs. Obviously there were two Egypts.
Didn’t Egyptian Pyramid workers get loads of beer and meat everyday? For all their work they got to pay fewer taxes and—the big pay off—eternal life for building the god-kings tomb.
Well, at least they had beer.
Herodotus tells us that 100,000 men labored for twenty years to build the Great Pyramid of Giza which is one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. A common saying of the ancient Egyptians was “man fears time but time fears the pyramids.” The pharoah was literally believed to be a god incarnate and to most Egyptians this life was merely a time of preparation for the next life - eternity with the gods.
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