Dynastic History|Boundary Stela A, Tuna el-Gebel — The Line Drawn Around the Farmland

In his fifth regnal year the king still called Amenhotep IV had a proclamation cut into the cliffs on both sides of the Nile, and took the name Akhenaten. The Amarna Project reads the earlier text as dated to year 5, fourth month of peret, day 13. Where that falls in absolute terms depends on which New Kingdom chronology is used: a reign of about 1353–1336 BCE puts it near 1349, the widely used alternative of about 1351–1334 puts it near 1347, and the gap is not a rounding error.

The stelae are lettered A to X. Most stand on the east bank, where the city of Akhetaten was laid out. Three of them, A, B and F, stand on the west, and that is the part usually left out of the story. The boundary did not enclose a temple precinct. It enclosed a stretch of floodplain and the settlements working it, on the bank opposite the city that the harvest would feed.

The text is the king's own account of the transaction, and it is the only account there is. The Aten, he says, "advised me concerning it." The ground was "not being the property of a god, not being the property of any people to lay claim to it", a formula asserting that no prior claim existed. Nothing survives from the cultivators of the west bank saying what they understood their claim to be.

The stela stands today under a modern shelter at the northern end of the Tuna el-Gebel necropolis: the disc above, the king, Nefertiti and their daughters at an offering table, and the proclamation in close-packed lines beneath.

📸 Cover: Amarna boundary stela A at Tuna el-Gebel, Roland Unger, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons