 (p. 13) Erased from history by his own people, Akhenaten was not an inspired messiah, suggests NICHOLAS REEVES, but a ruthless ruler seeking to consolidate his power.
In the north of Egypt, on an unspecified day in the ’seventies of the 14th century BC, a child was born to the great royal wife Tiye, consort of pharaoh Amenophis III.
A second son, oddly intense and of a somewhat sickly constitution, it was never envisaged that this child would rule.
For Egypt, it might have been better if he never had ...
In the modern world, Akhenaten is many things to many people - ranging, at the extremes of historical interpretation, from the gentle, monotheistic Christ-figure championed by James Henry Breasted a century ago, to the ruthless, Hitlerian dictator of more recent studies. Where historiography has been divided, the ancient sources are less ambivalent. Unlike Breasted, the Egyptians themselves saw little in this king to admire: for them, pharaoh was “the enemy of Akhetaten” - the city he had dedicated to his special god - responsible for the time “of the rebellion”.
So disruptive had Akhenaten’s reign been, so much were his ideas feared by certain elements within society, that he was erased from history - literally. His image was defaced, his names hacked-out, his monuments dismantled. Akhenaten ceased to exist; and, until the discovery two hundred years ago of his ruined city at el-Amarna, he remained totally forgotten.
Pharaoh’s “crime” was to have instigated revolution from above - in one of the most conservative countries in the ancient world. At a stroke, the beliefs of millennia had been overturned by the king’s peremptory denial of Egypt’s traditional gods; imposed in place of the many and varied cults of old was the unwished-for hegemony of a single divine essence - the Aten, or solar disc. Distracted by his new god, the empire disintegrated; destabilised by the closing of the temples, the economy faltered.
Why did Akhenaten do it?
(p. 14) There can be little doubt that Akhenaten was a man of powerful character and high intelligence - originator of the extraordinary art-style which characterizes the reign, and author one of the most sensitive literary compositions of antiquity: the Great Hymn to the Aten. Physically, however, all was not well - his appearance, indeed, was decidedly odd. The description offered by art historian Cyril Aldred of pharaoh in his more stylised images makes the point well: “The King was ... represented with a receding forehead, a lined and haggard face, a long nose, thick lips, slanting eyes, a hanging overgrown jaw, and hollow cheeks ... His neck was shown as lean and arching, emerging from pronounced collar-bones ... His breasts were prominent, his paunch pendulous, his buttocks large, and his thighs inflated above spindle shanks”
Akhenaten`s rare disorder
A creature of “sick ugliness and nervous decadence” was the verdict of German Egyptologist Walther Wolf. And quite possibly Akhenaten was ill - a sufferer from some rare, genetic disorder such as Marfan’s Syndrome, among the side-effects of which could be numbered blindness and sudden cardiovascular collapse.
Eccentric in appearance as well as in action, therefore, pharaoh has tended to be dismissed as a brilliant but unworldly bungler - fiddling, like Nero, while Rome burned.
But other readings of the evidence are possible. Perhaps Akhenaten was not acting irrationally at all, but following a cold-blooded, deliberate course.
Struggle
If this is so, then Akhenaten’s promotion of his new god was but the final phase of a strategy first set in train a century before; a struggle which drew not on some lunatic philosophy but on the perceived traditions of Egypt’s earliest rulers.
Since that distant time, things had changed. A recurring theme in the history of Egypt’s New Kingdom (1550-1070 BC) is a jostling for earthly control between the throne and the priests of Egypt’s principal god, Amun. Thanks to the Theban Amun’s support in the brilliantly successful campaigns waged by Tuthmosis I and his predecessors of the early 18th Dynasty, and the tribute which was to flow in from Egypt’s newly conquered “empire” as it developed, the influence of the god’s priesthood grew apace. Eventually controlling a virtual state within a state, Amun’s creatures were greedy for ever more power.
The extent of these simmering ambitions was first demonstrated 100 years before Akhenaten’s time - by Amun’s support for a pretender to the throne. Queen Hatshepsut’s wholly irregular assumption of power had blocked the elevation of the true heir, Tuthmosis III, for a decade and a half. During this time, it seems, the queen was Amun’s eager pawn - and a chief official’s eager lover.
The curtain lifts to reveal series of all too human rulers - and a kingship whose power, despite the bombastic propaganda of Egypt’s temple walls, was in practice very much prescribed. This state of affairs would continue for some time. Following the Queen Hatshepsut episode, however, a determined if cautious reaction to the situation may be discerned; what could be done by Hatsheput’s successors to prevent a repetition of such priestly meddling clearly was done. The danger was averted by various means: the existence and the number of pharaoh’s offspring was publicly emphasized for the first time; and, for some years, no queen of the ruling king would be elevated to the influential springboard-position of chief wife.
Ancient tribal loyalties were also brought into play. To neutralize the power of the Amun priesthood, a northern high priest was appointed to head the southern god’s cult. More dramatically, the very basis of royal power began radically to be reassessed, and on similar lines. The aim, towards which each of Hatshepsut’s successors would strive, was to re-establish the kingship on a sounder, stronger theological footing: there would be a determined return to the values of the pyramid age, when the king’s divine status was (p. 15) unchallenged and the principal power in the heavens was the sun-god Re - Amun’s more ancient rival in the north.
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The Aten revealed
By the time of Tuthmosis IV, two reigns after Hatshepsut, a quickening growth is apparent in kingly adherence to this solar cult; and, by the end of the reign of Amenophis III (the son of Tuthmosis IV and Akhenaten’s father), further dramatic change occurs. In the beyond, it was believed, the Egyptian king’s soul joined with the Aten, Re’s sentient energy; now - apparently at the point Akhenaten is elevated to rule as co-regent by his father’s side - Amenophis III achieves that status in life.
When the old king dies, there is further change: the Aten is shown in a new and peculiarly disembodied form - not as a falcon-headed human, but as a solar disc pouring its rays of light and life on Akhenaten and his family and the hieroglyphs which spell out the god’s name contained within two cartouches, or royal ovals.
The conclusion is inescapable: Amenophis III and his son’s revolutionary god were one and the same - with the elder king’s solar divinity formalized in death in an abstract iconography appropriate to his newly disembodied state. With Akhenaten now his father’s sole representative on earth, their co-regency was set to continue.
Thebes
Akhenaten’s first attempts to honour his father, the Aten, would take place at Thebes, centre of the Amun cult. The old god’s city, as we learn from an inscription, received a new name - Akhetenaten, “Horizon of the Aten”. And here, in the midst of Amun’s realm within the immense Karnak temple-complex, the king determined to erect a series of enormous structures, open to the sky, for the worship of his new god.
(p. 16) But the challenge failed: opposition to Akhenaten’s plans was evidently intense. “It was worse,” records the king in the foundation decree on his boundary stelae at el-Amarna, “than those things heard by any kings who had ever assumed the white crown [of Upper Egypt]”. “It” is never specified, but we may guess that a warning had been sounded - in consequence of which Akhenaten decided to up sticks, and head for friendlier territory further north.
It was clever ruse which, in extremis, had been employed before - notably by Ammenemes I, founder of the 12th Dynasty; seeking to by-pass vested interests within the regime he had recently toppled, that king had established a new capital at Itjtawy in the Faiyum - shortly before he was murdered. By abandoning Thebes to Amun’s priests, Akhenaten was similarly seeking to lose his principal opposition; any residual rumblings, he hoped, would be silenced by the opportunities afforded by the construction of his god’s new city.
El-Amarna
The site of Akhenaten’s new city was to be a virgin plain in Middle Egypt: el-Amarna. It bore a version of a familiar name - Akhetaten, “Horizon of the Aten”; what the king had been unable to achieve in Thebes, he determined to carry through at the heart of his realm. This second Akhetaten was to be a veritable oasis of culture - and control.
Abandoned shortly after Akhenaten’s death, and never seriously reoccupied, much of the ancient city still remains - the ruins of its houses and temples, the empty shells of its exquisitely decorated tombs; and, of course, the series of great boundary stelae which demarcate the limits of the foundation.
Each of these stelae is inscribed with a version of the foundation decree from which most of our knowledge of events at this time comes. As revealing as their texts, however, is the physical disposition of the monuments: for, connected up, they echo on a massive scale the ground-plan of el-Amarna’s principal religious structure - the Great Temple of the Aten. Akhenaten’s new city, we see, was conceived as one vast religious edifice. More startling still, this “temple’s” focus was the royal tomb itself - located beyond the break in the eastern cliffs through which the Aten was reborn every day.
With the royal tomb as raison d’etre of Akhenaten’s architectural scheme, the discerned basis of Amarna religion finds extraordinary confirmation - and more. In this new theology, the royal tomb was to be the sepulchre not only of Akhenaten himself: as the place of the Aten’s rebirth, it represented the point of daily resurrection of every king of Egypt, past, present and future, who had or would ultimately become one with the solar essence.
The cult of the Aten is revealed as the cult of kingship itself. Akhenaten’s religion was ancestor-worship writ large - the final act in that reassertion of kingly power sparked by Hatshepsut’s abasement, a century earlier, to Amun’s opportunistic priests.
The terror
New religion, new art, new city, new dreams - these were clearly heady days. But as the initial excitement passed, the populace will have found itself in a daze, adrift in a sea of spiritual uncertainty. The old religion had permeated and directed every aspect of Egyptian life, and death; now it was gone. Akhenaten’s was a distant god, vague in its promises, visible to all in the sky above but accessible only through the king as its prophet; pharaoh worshipped the god, and the populace worshipped pharaoh. Kept firmly in check by a club-wielding soldiery, ordinary Egyptians can have harboured little hope of change.
And, at some point between Years eight and 12 of his reign, it was to get worse. Secure in his new city, the king unleashed a ruthless persecution against Amun and his consort, the goddess Mut, issuing orders to hack out their images and names wherever they occurred throughout Egypt’s length and breadth. It generated real and tangible fear among the Egyptian people, for not only were the offending hieroglyphs of Amun’s name removed from Egypt’s public monuments: as archaeology shows, small, personal objects such as cosmetic pots and scarabs were dealt with in the same ruthless fashion. (p. 17) Fearful of being found in possession of such seditious items, the owners themselves had gouged- or ground-out the offending signs which articulated Amun’s name - even within the tiniest cartouche-ovals containing the old king’s birth-name.
Such displays of frightened self-censorship and toadying loyalty are ominous indicators of the paranoia gripping the country. Not only were the streets filled with pharaoh’s bully-boys - Nubians and Asiatics armed with clubs, seen everywhere in the reliefs of the period; it seems the population now had to contend with the danger of malicious informers.
Death and oblivion
And then - anticlimax: virtual silence. Of the course of events in these last years we know virtually nothing; the period draws to a close with less of a bang than a whimper. By Year 17 of the reign, it was over: Akhenaten was dead and soon to be buried, power in the hands of his wife and co-regent, the beautiful Nefertiti; and she, in a desperate attempt to hold on to power, was in negotiation with the Hittites for a new husband to share her throne. It was hardly worth the effort: as inscriptions of Tutankhamun - his son and successor - record, Akhenaten had bequeathed a country in economic and spiritual ruin. Even before the heretic’s death, the Aten was finished; and soon, as Tutankhamun’s traditionalist burial reveals, Amun and the gods of old were again in the ascendant.
Two decades after Akhenaten’s passing, Horemheb ushered in the Nineteenth Dynasty and the first of Egypt’s Ramessid pharaohs. Soon, the reaction to Amarna began in earnest, and all trace of its king and his reign was obliterated.
The fears which had driven his revolution were forgotten; too late, they would be remembered. Under Ramesses XI, around 1100 BC, the militaristic high-priest of Amun’s pampered cult, Herihor, declared himself ruler. In a matter of years, the only real king of Egypt was Amun himself.
Akhenaten revealed - or not?
When Napoleon Bonaparte’s celebrated company of soldiers and savants stumbled upon the ruins of Akhenaten’s abandoned city at el-Amarna in 1798-99, the modern world knew nothing of the heretic king and his tempestuous reign. But, within fifty years, following the decipherment of Egypt’s mysterious hieroglyphic script, the pieces of the historical jig-saw had begun to drop into place. “Through the monuments”, Karl Richard Lepsius was able to write following his return from Egypt with the Prussian expedition of 1842-45, “we became acquainted with several kings ... who were not afterwards admitted in the legitimate lists ... Among these is Amenophis IV.[-Akhenaten] ... who ... aimed at no less a thing than to abolish the whole religious system of the Egyptians ... and to place in its stead the single worship of the Sun”.
Further discoveries at el-Amarna and elsewhere over the next century and beyond have helped gradually to fill in the gaps; the digging has continued with hardly a break, and the scholarly yield has been immense. The Great Hymn to the Aten, with its comforting echoes of Psalm 104; the portrait-bust of Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s queen, with its extraordinarily pale, western face; the rich tomb of Tutankhamun, pharaoh’s son, with its sophisticated array of funerary treasures—to mention only a few. But how to interpret such evidence? Are these glorious finds, in the extraordinary Amarna style of literature and art, a clear manifestation of gentle, sensitive, high-minded rule, as earlier historians believed—or the velvet glove concealing a fist of unyielding, dictatorial iron?
Figs 1-2 One god: relief showing the royal family making offering to Akhenaten`s sole god: the Aten - who Akhenaten believed would lead him to supreme power in Egypt.
Fig. 3 Top god: Amun was Egypt`s principal deity until challenged by Akhenaten.
Fig. 4 Egypt - Akhenaten`s realm, gift of the Nile`s annual flood. Pharaoh`s intellectual roots were in the north, in Heliopolis, city of the solar-god Re; his inheritance was Thebes in the south, city of Amun, upon which his father, Amenophis III, had lavished enormous attention during over three decades of rule. By Year 5 of his reign, Akhenaten had abandoned Thebes to found a new capital - Akhetaten (el-Amarna) - located in the very centre of the traditional Egyptian homeland, bordered by the Mediterranean in the north and Aswan, gateway to Africa, to the south.
Fig. 5 Rebellion in ruins: thid "talatat" is a wall carving from the Aten temple at Karnak built by Akhenaten. Succeeding pharaohs sought to eradicate traces of the "heretic king" and the walls were broken up and used as foundation material for later buildings.
Fig. 6 Hidden from history: one of the reasons we know so little about Akhenaten and his era of rebellion is because the Egyptian people were so assiduous in their efforts to deface the monuments, writings and images of the king and his family.
Fig. 7 Abandoned and ruined after Akhenaten`s death, el-Amarna was only properly excavated after 1914.
Nicholas Reeves is Curator of Egyptian and Classical Art at Eton College and Director of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project excavating in the Valley of the Kings.
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