Tell el-Amarna

Amarna is a wide, flat desert plain on the east bank in Minya governorate, closed in by a horseshoe of cliffs. In about the fifth year of his reign Akhenaten declared this empty ground the site of a new capital, Akhetaten, and moved the court here.

Be clear about what you are going to see. Almost nothing stands. The city is a plan on the ground — foundations, marked-out walls, the outlines of temples and palaces — with rock-cut tombs in the cliffs at either end.

Because of what the absence gives you. Every other Egyptian city was lived in continuously and rebuilt for thousands of years. Amarna was founded on virgin ground, occupied for something like fifteen years, then abandoned and never properly reoccupied. What survives is a single moment: one city, one generation, laid out flat and readable. It is the closest thing Egyptian archaeology has to a fixed photograph.

The tombs in the cliffs carry the art of the Amarna period, which broke every convention of Egyptian representation — long skulls, heavy hips, the royal family shown embracing, eating and grieving, and the Aten's rays ending in small hands over them. The tombs of Meryre and Ay have the best-preserved scenes.

And this is where the Amarna Letters were found: a cache of clay tablets in cuneiform, the diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian court and the kings of Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni, Hatti and the city-states of the Levant. They are the single richest source for how the Late Bronze Age world actually talked to itself.

Akhenaten suppressed the cult of Amun, promoted the Aten — the visible disc of the sun — above all other gods, and moved his capital away from Thebes to a place with no existing history. Boundary stelae cut into the cliffs around the plain record the decision in his own words.

The city held a great and a small temple to the Aten, roofless and open to the sky rather than dark like a traditional sanctuary, along with palaces, a records office, suburbs and a separate workmen's village.

After his death the court returned to Thebes, the old gods were restored, and Amarna was stripped for building stone. In the ruins of the sculptor Thutmose's workshop here, a German expedition found the painted bust of Nefertiti in 1912.

• The marked-out plan of the Small Aten Temple and the Great Aten Temple
• The northern and southern tomb groups, with Amarna-style relief
• The boundary stelae cut into the cliffs around the plain
• The North Palace and the outlines of the central city
• The royal wadi and the royal tomb, deep in the cliffs east of the site