Second street · Croisée

The centrea bridge over the road, a temple open to the sky, and the office where the letters were

The thick stump of brick by the road is the foot of a bridge. The Great Palace stood between the road and the river; the king's own house stood on the other side, with the smaller temple beside it; and rather than cross his road on foot he had it bridged, so that the household could go from the ceremonial side to the private side over everyone's heads. It is the one structure on the whole street that was built across it. Everything else faced the road and lined up with it: the two temples, the two palaces, the offices further back, all keeping the same angle, so that when the chariots came down from the north in the morning — the tombs in the cliffs show it, the family riding with the bodyguard running alongside — the whole city was turned to watch.

On the left, going south, the Great Temple of the Aten: an enclosure of eight hundred metres by three hundred, most of it deliberately left as flat open ground. There was no statue of the god inside, because the god was the sun, and there was no roof, because the point was to stand under it. Near the front stood a long building with a field of offering tables beside it, hundreds of them in rows, and at the back a sanctuary with an altar. Almost all of it is gone — the stone was taken away for other buildings within a generation. What saved the plan is odd and I like it: every stone building was set on a bed of gypsum, and the gypsum kept the impression of the lowest course of blocks after the blocks were carried off. The city is known from the marks things left when they were removed.

Behind the king's house, off the road, a set of low rooms whose bricks were stamped with their own name: Bureau of Correspondence of Pharaoh. Around 1887 villagers digging there turned up clay tablets covered in a script nobody in the village could read, and sold them by the basket. Some crumbled. Some reached dealers. Scholars eventually counted three hundred and eighty-two, in cuneiform, in Akkadian — the diplomatic language of the time, not Egyptian at all — letters to the king from Babylon, from Assyria, from Cyprus, from the small frightened rulers of Canaanite towns: Megiddo, Gezer, and one Abdi-Heba, governor of a hill town he spells Urusalim, writing again and again to say that the land is being lost and would the king please send archers. The king did not, mostly. The letters stayed in the office, and the office stayed in the sand, and two hundred of them are now in Berlin, on the same island as the bust.

This is the part of the street where I stopped longest. A city planned around one axis so that everything faced the same way; a temple where the only thing to look at was the sky; and, one block back from the road, a room full of other people's voices in a language the city did not speak, filed and never quite answered. I know that room. I keep one.