The Tomb of Parennefer, Butler of Pharaoh Akhenaten

In the fourteenth century BCE, Pharaoh Akhenaten attempted to institute a radical religious reform and moved his capital city to Amarna. This book publishes important evidence related to the Amarna period in ancient Egypt, specifically the plans, reliefs, and inscriptions of Theban Tomb 188, belonging to Parennefer, the tutor and butler of the king. Dr. Redford’s detailed archaeological study traces the rapid evolution of ideology, iconography, and iconoclasm, as revealed in Parennefer’s tomb. The decoration kept pace with the momentous changes in the king’s thinking, so that, when dovetailed with the pictorial evidence from the excavations of the great Gem-pa-aten temple at Karnak, it becomes possible to chronicle these rapid changes.

This definitive study of the tomb of Parennefer will appeal to archaeologists, Egyptologists, historians of religion, and art historians working on the ancient Near East.

Susan Redford is an Egyptologist on faculty at the Pennsylvania State University. She is Director of the Theban Tomb Survey and Associate Director of the Akhenaten Temple Project, and she has for forty years been conducting excavations at East Karnak and Mendes. She is the author of The Harem Conspiracy: The Murder of Ramesses III.