Why Akhetaten and Memphis?

TL;DR: In brief

The Poisoner’s Throne moves between Akhetaten and Memphis but never visits Thebes. This is not a simplification of the geography; it reflects what the evidence actually says about where power lay during Tutankhamun’s early reign. Ring bezels confirm the young king was still at Akhetaten at his accession; by his Year 3 the court had moved north to Memphis, not south to Thebes.

Readers familiar with ancient Egypt may notice something about The Poisoner’s Throne: the story moves between Akhetaten (modern Amarna) and Memphis, but never visits Thebes. Given that Thebes was the great religious capital of the New Kingdom, home to Karnak and the Valley of the Kings, its absence might seem surprising.

It was a deliberate choice, grounded in what the historical and archaeological evidence actually tells us about where power resided during Tutankhamun’s early reign.

Where Was the Court?

When Tutankhamun came to the throne around 1332 BCE, the royal court was still at Akhetaten, the city Akhenaten had built in the desert of Middle Egypt as the center of his religious revolution — in a bay of eastern cliffs that seems to write the city’s name in the landscape. The Berlin stele (ÄM14197), which shows the young king still bearing his birth name Tutankhaten while offering to Amun and Mut, is consistent with a coronation held before the court left Amarna. Marc Gabolde has noted that evidence for Tutankhamun as king at Amarna is limited to ring bezels; there are no stamped bricks, reliefs, or paintings, and he is not mentioned in any private tombs there. The court left the city within his first few years, and its abandonment followed over the years after.

The question of where the court went next has occupied scholars for over a century. Multiple lines of evidence point to Memphis emerging as the primary royal residence quite early in the reign. Aidan Dodson observes in Amarna Sunset that Memphis became “much more of an equal partner with Thebes” under Tutankhamun, and that the Restoration Stela, though erected at Karnak, appears to have been issued from Memphis. The significant number of high-status private tombs built at Saqqara during this period, rather than at Thebes, reinforces the picture of a northward shift in political gravity.

In the novel I take a rapid timeline of my own: the court keeps its residence at Akhetaten through the growing season of Year 1 and moves to Memphis for good early in the harvest season that follows, a choice within a range the scholarship still debates. Military considerations also favored Memphis. From there, it was far easier to organize expeditions to Western Asia, where Egypt was attempting to recover territory lost during Akhenaten’s reign while the Hittite threat grew.

The Name Change

The shift from “Tutankhaten” to “Tutankhamun” is one of the most symbolically charged moments of the reign. In The Poisoner’s Throne, I place this event at Memphis during the Nehebkau Festival, the festival of binding that marked the first day of Peret (the growing season). This is earlier than the Restoration Stela, whose damaged date Dodson takes to be almost certainly Year 4, but there is genuine scholarly disagreement about the precise timing of the name change. What is clear is that it was a political and religious act of enormous significance, one that Ay, among the boy king’s chief advisers, may have helped to stage for maximum impact before the northern priesthoods.

The Restoration Stela itself was erected at Karnak, but there is no requirement that the decree it published was proclaimed there. The stela’s own text places the king, at the time of the decree, residing in the old palace of Thutmose I at Memphis. Copies of royal decrees were routinely sent to temples throughout Egypt for inscription. The decree could be sent south to Thebes for carving and proclaimed aloud in that palace at Memphis, which is how I handle it in the novel.

The Monuments Mislead

Tutankhamun’s most visible monuments stand at Thebes: the Restoration Stela at Karnak, the great Opet festival reliefs in the Luxor Temple colonnade, rows of ram-headed sphinxes bearing a small figure of the king between their paws. It is natural to picture him living among them. But the Theban building program was executed the way pharaonic building was always executed: by decree, through the Treasury and overseers like Maya, and through the temple hierarchies. The king himself never needed to leave Memphis — and sometimes the economy of the work was brutal. On Claude Traunecker’s reading, the famous ram-headed sphinxes at Karnak, on the avenue running south from the Tenth Pylon toward the precinct of Mut, were not new commissions but sphinxes of Akhenaten and Nefertiti; Dodson describes them as decapitated, given rams’ heads, and adorned with the young king’s figure. If so, the restoration recarved the Amarna family in stone.

The series follows this evidence. Tutankhamun governs from Memphis, and the restoration reaches him as paperwork.

A River Runs One Way (at a Time)

There is also a practical geographic point that fiction sometimes overlooks. Amarna sits in Middle Egypt. Memphis lies roughly 300 kilometers to the north, downstream. Thebes lies roughly 400 kilometers to the south, upstream. A royal flotilla departing Amarna for Memphis would travel north with the current. Thebes is in the opposite direction entirely. The idea of a “stopover” at Thebes on the way to Memphis makes no geographic sense; it would mean sailing south against the current for days, then doubling back past Amarna before the long run north.

This matters for the narrative. When the court relocates in the novel, it moves decisively northward toward a city where Ay has forty years of established relationships and the support of the Ptah priesthood. The urgency and political logic of that choice would be undermined by an implausible detour of several weeks in the wrong direction.

A City Held in Reserve

Thebes does appear in The Amarna Mysteries. By the final book, The Dakhamunzu Affair, the story demands it. (The full scope of the four-book arc is described in the series overview.) Thebes is where the Valley of the Kings lies. I wanted the reader’s first encounter with that landscape to carry everything the story has built toward across four novels, not to arrive as a sightseeing waypoint in Book One.

The geographic structure of the series mirrors the political reality of the period. Akhetaten is the dying revolutionary city where the story begins. Memphis is the traditional capital where power is consolidated and where the central investigations unfold. Thebes is the ancestral necropolis, held in reserve for the moments when it matters most.

Akhenaten and the Aten Revolution — The upheaval that created Akhetaten and abandoned Thebes.

Naming Ancient Egypt for Modern Readers — Why the series uses “Akhetaten” rather than “Amarna” in the narrative.

Succession and Aftermath — The political transition that drove the court from Akhetaten to Memphis.

Evidence and Power in the Amarna Period — The administrative machinery that ran Egypt from these two capitals.

The Amarna Period: Overview — The broader historical context of both cities.

The Amarna Mysteries — The four-book series built on this history.

How The Amarna Mysteries Are Made — The creative and research process behind the series.