Early in the eighteenth century an Arab tribe known as the Beni Amran settled in a semicircular plain about one hundred ninety miles south of Cairo. Here, clustered along the east bank of the Nile, they built the villages of El Till, El Hag Quandil, El Amariah and Hawata. When the Danish traveler F. L. Norden visited the area in 1773 he noted that the natives called it Beni Amran, or Omarne. The name Tell el Amarna, by which it is popularly known today, seems to have been coined by John Gardner Wilkinson, the amateur Egyptologist who did so much to popularize Egyptian studies in Victorian Britain. Wilkinson combined the name of the village El Till (altered to the more common word _tell_, which means “mound” in Arabic) with the tribal name El Amarna, from the Beni Amran. The name Tell el Amarna is not strictly correct, for the ancient city of Akhetaton which occupied the site of Amarna does not have a succession of levels indicating different periods of occupation, such as archaeologists identify in the mounds of Palestine and Mesopotamia. Akhetaton was built to be the capital of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, better known as Akhenaton, about 1365 B.C., and was abandoned half a century later. The Beginnings Egyptian archaeology gained impetus in modern times following Napoleon’s ill-fated Egyptian campaign. The savants who accompanied the army of Napoleon studied Egyptian antiquities and discovered the trilingual inscription known as the Rosetta Stone which provided scholars with the key to the decipherment of hieroglyphic writing. That, in turn, enabled modern students to get a firsthand view of life in ancient Egypt, instead of depending on references to Egypt in classical literature for basic information. A French scholar, Jean Francois Champollion, studied the Rosetta Stone in the light of his previous work in Coptic, a late form of the Egyptian language which used a modified Greek alphabet. After four years of research, in 1822 Champollion published his conclusions which provided a firm foundation for the science of Egyptology which was soon added to the curricula of the major universities of Europe. Scholars, both professional and amateur, began making their way to Egypt to copy inscriptions and study antiquities. The rock tombs beyond the Amarna plain did not escape these early travelers. During his explorations in Egypt from 1821 to 1831, John Gardner Wilkinson visited Amarna, and a more systematic study of the nearby tombs was made by a Prussian expedition directed by Karl Richard Lepsius from 1842 to 1845. Amarna art and inscriptions found a place in the twelve volume work of Lepsius, _Denkmaler aus Aegypten und Athiopien_ (in English, _The Monuments from Egypt and Ethiopia_). The Prussians traced the ground plan of Akhetaton, observing the lines of its ancient streets. They noted that some of the remains of the principal temple were still standing. The Amarna Tablets