Head of an Amarna King (Akhenaten?)

Around the fifth year of his reign, Akhenaten left the old royal cities behind and built a new capital for his god, the sun disc Aten, on an empty stretch of the Nile's east bank. The site is known today as Tell el-Amarna. Within a few years of his death the city was abandoned, and much of what its sculptors had made was left behind in pieces. The museum thinks this small limestone head, just 10 centimetres tall, may have come from there, and it marks that guess with a question mark.

It marks the king's name the same way. He wears the khepresh, the blue crown of the pharaohs, with the cobra rearing at his brow, and the style is the one of the Amarna years, which carried on into the short reigns of the kings who followed Akhenaten. Without an inscription, a face in that style is hard to tie to a single ruler. Traces of the original paint survive, red above all on the lips, and the ear lobes are pierced for earrings, a fashion the museum notes in statues of men and women alike from the reign of Amenhotep III onward.