SHARE:
A team of excavators led by Egyptologist Zahi Hawass has uncovered the city where the people who worked in the temples of ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom–era spiritual center at Luxor lived. The city’s ancient name was “the dazzling Aten,” a reference to a newly ascendant solar god. The team found a large bakery that may have been used to feed workers, as well as an administrative and residential district that was surrounded by a zigzag wall, a rare architectural style for the time. The walls’ mud bricks bear the seal of the pharaoh Amenhotep III (r. ca. 1390–1352 B.C.), who conducted an ambitious building program at Luxor.
