Into the pharaoh’s chamber: how I fell in love with ancient Egypt

In the late third century, after Christianity had swept across Egypt, there were two famous instances in which a wealthy young Egyptian left his comfortable Nile valley home for a life of prayer and loneliness in the desert. About 1346 BC, in Upper Egypt, the pharaoh Akhenaten founded a new capital on a previously uninhabited shelf of desert above the river’s eastern bank. Major cities had always been situated in the river valley, and when kings built mortuary temples and monuments, they favoured desert sites that were already sanctified by graves of the ancients.

Source: www.theguardian.com