Akhenaten chose a broad bay of desert on the eastern bank of the Nile, framed by cliffs and dry valleys. In his royal proclamations, the king presented this ground as a place that belonged to no other god or existing estate, making it suitable for a new city dedicated to the Aten. The pharaoh had begun his reign as Amenhotep IV before taking the name Akhenaten, signalling the importance of his new religious direction. Boundary stelae carved into the surrounding cliffs recorded the foundation and defined the sacred territory. They were not all a single set erected in one year: the principal proclamations belong to the fifth and sixth years of his reign, with a reaffirmation in the eighth. The monuments turned the landscape itself into a declaration of royal purpose.

The city rose rapidly, but its construction was not the work of one material or a single completed plan. Mud brick formed houses and substantial parts of the palaces, while the temples used small, standardised limestone blocks now called talatat. These manageable blocks helped builders assemble and alter walls more readily than the enormous stones familiar from other Egyptian monuments. The Central City brought together the Great Aten Temple, the Small Aten Temple, the main state palace and administrative buildings. Offering courts exposed worshippers and offerings to the sunlight, while housing and workshops spread north and south along the river. The North Palace formed another part of the royal landscape. Beyond the city, tombs were cut into the cliffs for officials and into a desert valley for the royal family.

The defining drama of Amarna was not simply its building but its faith. Akhenaten reduced the standing of Amun and made the Aten central to royal worship; attacks on the names and images of older gods marked the intensity of the change. Yet official religion was not identical to every inhabitant's private beliefs. Objects from Amarna show continued attachment to protective deities, including Bes and Taweret, so it is misleading to say that no god except the Aten was worshipped anywhere in the city. Royal art also changed, giving the king and his family elongated features, fuller bodies and a new prominence in scenes beneath the sun disk. Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their daughters appear in unusually intimate compositions. These images express a distinctive royal vision, not a reliable medical diagnosis of the people they portray.

Among Amarna's most important survivals are its written voices. Tablets found from 1887 onwards preserve diplomatic correspondence involving Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni and the city-states of the Levant. Most of the letters were written in Akkadian using cuneiform, a script pressed into clay with a stylus. Abimilki of Tyre praised the pharaoh in the language of solar kingship, while Rib-Addi of Byblos repeatedly sought support against his enemies. Such letters reveal local conflicts, appeals for protection, gift exchanges and the careful language of international rank. They should not be treated as a simple eyewitness account of the later Bronze Age collapse. The wider archive also contains scribal and literary texts, not only diplomatic letters. Accounts of the first discovery differ, so the familiar story of a single woman finding the tablets cannot be presented as certain.

Amarna's position depended on the royal court. After Akhenaten's death, the succession involving Smenkhkare, Neferneferuaten and the young Tutankhaten remains difficult to reconstruct in detail. Under Tutankhaten, who adopted the name Tutankhamun, the court left Akhetaten for Memphis and the traditional cults regained royal support. The city lost its role as Egypt's capital, rather than disappearing in one clearly documented act of destruction. Horemheb began dismantling Akhenaten's monuments, and later rulers continued the process; blocks from Amarna were reused in other buildings. The surviving town is therefore not an untouched city preserved exactly as its inhabitants left it. Its ruined walls, foundations and scattered objects are the remains of occupation, abandonment, dismantling and later activity. Reading those layers is part of what makes the site so valuable.

Amarna became known to modern scholarship through successive surveys and excavations, not one accidental rediscovery. Flinders Petrie investigated the site in 1891-1892 and recorded its boundary stelae, buildings and finds. The sculptor Thutmose's workshop, however, was excavated later by the team led by Ludwig Borchardt. It was during that excavation, on 6 December 1912, that the painted bust of Nefertiti was found. This distinction matters: Petrie helped establish the archaeological study of the city, but the famous workshop discovery belongs to Borchardt's expedition and its Egyptian workforce. Continuing research has widened attention beyond the royal family to houses, workshops and burial grounds. Amarna is not Egypt's only surviving ancient settlement, but it offers an exceptional opportunity to investigate how a short-lived royal capital was built, inhabited and eventually left behind.