Exhibition: Ancient Egypt's City in the Sun Exhibition at Penn Museum

Suite101 (Stan Parchin)

Stan Parchin introduces the exhibition, offers background history to the Amarna period, and details about its organization and contents. The review is accompanied by photographs.

More than 100 works of art and objects from the capital city of the "heretic" pharaoh Akhenaten are expertly described in Amarna: Ancient Egypt's Place in the Sun. This long-term exhibition, on view at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia, is superbly organized by David P. Silverman, Jennifer Wegner and Joseph Wegner. Dr. Silverman is the national curator of the touring exhibition Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs.

In an attempt to break with polytheism, the visionary and enigmatic Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (r. 1353-1336 B.C.) shifted Egypt's capital and his court from Thebes to an uninhabited region in Middle Egypt.