Barry Kemp spent his career digging up Akhenaten’s abandoned city

For more than four decades Barry Kemp lectured and taught at Cambridge University. But for almost all that time his mind, and preferably his body too, were elsewhere. Cambridge is a well-watered place of meadows and college greens; Professor Kemp, with the tan, full beard and far-seeing eyes of an explorer, was walking in the pale red sand of Egypt’s eastern desert. In Cambridge, noble old buildings surrounded him. In the city that filled his thoughts, Amarna, 200 miles south of Cairo, little was left but low mounds and remnants of walls. In between writing the core text for Egyptology courses, a primer on hieroglyphs and a guide to “The Book of the Dead”, he ceaselessly searched that tract of land for what had once been there.