In Fact, It Is Better To Not To Judge What Should And Should Not Be Regarded

In fact, it is better to not to judge what should and should not be regarded as typical and to examine what exist the very existence of Amarna demands investigation.
The city is bounded by stelae set in a rough circle stretching from one horizon to the other and contains a wide variety of buildings and areas (Watterson 1999, 79). The city seems to have begun by the river in the middle of the plain with construction in the area known as the Central City, which contained the palaces and temples. The palaces and temples were connected by a 40m wide processional way, giving some indication of the grandeur of the rituals suggested also by reliefs such as that of the Window of Appearances (Watterson 1999, 81). The Main City, or south suburb, to the south of the Central City, contained the houses of high officials and courtiers and was one of three residential areas. These areas are characterised by a more organic or haphazard layout, contrasting with the carefully planned Central City (Shaw & Nicholson 1995, 26). A planned rectangular walled settlement is believed to have been a workmen's village. The site of Amarna, apart from revealing fine objects and the so-called Amarna letters, in itself can reveal divisions of function by location, as well as a difference in emphasis in planning certain areas carefully while leaving other areas to develop organically. Without this site our knowledge and understanding of this period and part of ancient Egypt would inestimably poorer.
If Amarna represents a working capital city, the workmen's town of Deir el-Medina with its seventy houses stands as 'the best documented community in the whole ancient world' (Manley 1996, 86). Like Amarna, Deir el-Medina is both an archaeological site and has produced thousands of texts. Meskell has commented of the relationship between the texts and the archaeology that 'the archaeological remains may not always reveal the specificities of social interactions, yet they can offer more concrete evidence and social inequalities and differences, for example, which may be smoothed over in textual accounts' and quotes Baines as saying that 'archaeology and writing complement each other's silence' (Meskell 1999, 5). She has used mortuary data from the site to attempt a social archaeology focusing on the individuals of Deir el-Medina (1999). As well as exploring ranking through the spatial distribution of tombs and the scaling of tomb construction and expenditure, she also suggests that the archaeological sources imply that the villagers came from different parts of Egypt (Meskell 1999, 143, 154).
Egyptology has been criticised for producing masses of data through archaeology but only infrequently moving forward in its uses of that data its theory (Shaw 2004, 26).