Although the earliest stages of Akhenaten's life reveal few overt signs of the religious revolution on the horizon, there are several significant hints as to the radical changes about to sunburn Egypt. Even if the clarity of hindsight sometimes makes things look predictable when they're not, these omens are truly telling.
By all appearances, it was a smooth transition of power and, even though he had not always been the heir apparent—his older brother had been groomed for the kingship but had died several years earlier—the young Akhenaten was not unprepared to wield the crook-and-flail because, to judge from his last portraits , his father suffered a lingering malady of some sort which slowly killed him, so it would make sense that, as his health declined, he handed at least some of the reins of government to his chosen successor, even if one chosen largely by default.
None of that, however, would have helped Akhenaten feel part of or indebted to the traditional structures of Egyptian government and religion in the day. Almost as soon as Akhenaten became the sole ruler of Egypt, he began to alter the traditional presentation of the pharaoh and the ways state business was conducted. For instance, he took on a new title, "Prophet of Ra-Horakhte " "Ra of the Horizon" —note no Amun , the god of mysteries and hidden truth whose name appears in so many Egyptian appellations, e.
Amun hotep and Tutankh amun —"Prophet of Ra-Horakhte" hints at a certain degree of dissatisfaction with conventional religion, especially since by Akhenaten's day Amun had long been seen as the central deity in the extensive pantheon of Egyptian gods whose center of worship was Thebes , the capital city of Egypt.
But soon a new day would dawn and Akhenaten would change all that. Just two or three years into his reign, there is clear evidence that a major shift in Egyptian religion has begun.
By now the pharaoh had moved the court and capital away from Thebes to Akhetaten and had adopted a new title, the name we know him by, Akhenaten which means in Egyptian "he is agreeable Akhen - to the sun-disk - aten. And as if that weren't enough, archaeological evidence shows that around this time Akhenaten began closing down Amun temples across Egypt and even had the name Amun erased from some inscriptions.
Later, he went so far as to order the word "gods" removed and changed to "god," wherever it occurred in public inscriptions. Whether or not this is monotheism by theological standards, it's certainly grammatical monotheism. But what was Akhenaten's beef with Amun? Why did he dislike this god so intensely?
Scholars have suggested it was because Amun as the god of secrets was too obscure a deity, too inaccessible to the public. Indeed, shrines to Amun are invariably situated in the middle of temple complexes, roofed and dark, where priests alone may enter and then only on special occasions.
Perhaps Akhenaten wished to open up Egyptian religion to a wider clientele, not just the clergy, and so he constructed a capital which was the antithesis of Amun worship, exposed as much as possible to the full light of day, as the buildings of Akhetaten are: few roofed structures, little shade, and constant exposure to Akhenaten's true father as far as he was concerned, not Amunhotep III but the aten.
Indeed, a letter found among the remains of Akhetaten confirms exactly this. Writing to Akhenaten, the Assyrian king complains that the emissaries he sent to Egypt nearly died of sunstroke when they were attending some royal ceremony at the pharaoh's capital:.
Why are my messengers kept in the open sun? They will die in the open sun. If it does the king good to stand in the open sun, then let the king stand there and die in the open sun. The heat of the Egyptian midday is, in fact, torturous through much of the year, but standing in the sun and basking in its brilliance is also a natural extension of Akhenaten's religious revolution, something virtually all the art of Amarna culture demonstrates.
And this is very different from the way Amun was worshiped, surely an advantage in Akhenaten's mind. It may even help to explain Akhenaten's premature death: skin cancer? The religious iconography of Akhenaten's new belief system centered around the aten as a divine presence. Representing the life-giving force of the universe, the sun-disk is often depicted in either abstract or personified form, occasionally both at the same time. Though it's most often pictured as a mere circle with rays of light radiating downward, the aten also appears sometimes with little hands appended onto the ends of its solar beams holding out to worshipers the ankh , the Egyptian sign of life.
In a few instances, the hands are even shoving the ankh rather unceremoniously up the noses of the blessed, a figurative assertion, no doubt, that the sun offers the "breath of life. Humorous as it may be to some of us, the significance of this symbol is nevertheless profound, indeed probably revolutionary to an Egyptian of the day. The sun-worship Akhenaten was promoting surely reminded many of Old Kingdom theology, by now a millennium old, and its false but pervasive reputation for tyranny see above, Section 5.
More than one Egyptian at the time, particularly those in the Amun priesthood, must have asked themselves, "Sun disks? What's next? A pyramid? But Akhenaten's movement entailed features far stranger than anything which had happened in the Old Kingdom. In fact, it looked forward more than backwards in time, at least inasmuch as the new religion prefigured a very different conception of godhead.
Though the aten is sometimes depicted as having human or animal attributes, their frequent absence stands in strong contrast to standard Egyptian practice. The goddess Isis, for instance, is often shown as part-woman, part-cow, and the face of her deceased husband Osiris is sometimes painted green to demonstrate that he represents the rebirth of vegetation in the spring. But unlike either of them, Akhenaten's aten is the font of all being, which means by nature he cannot be restricted in form, and thus is almost always presented as the aptly universal and geometric solar circle.
The little hands attached to his sun-rays run counter to this perception of the god and are, no doubt, a reflection of convention and popular taste. Even to say "he" of the aten is perhaps too restrictive for this universalist conception of deity—gender is clearly not relevant to sun-disks—and stranger yet, to say "he" of Akhenaten himself isn't always valid either. Male and female styles which are usually discrete in traditional Egyptian art blend together in peculiar fashion throughout Amarna culture, extending as far as royal portraiture.
Akhenaten, for instance, is shown in a series of colossi large statues; singular, colossus lacking male genitalia, and in general, his depiction is odd, to say the least. He's often portrayed as pot-bellied, slouching, thick-lipped, with a big chin and pointed head, which has led scholars to suppose he suffered from some sort of birth defect, resulting in eunuchoidism. But if so, how did he sire a family, for in art he appears with as many as six different daughters?
And those are only the ones he had by his principal wife. That raises another fascinating and enigmatic issue concerning Akhenaten's revolution, the centrality of his family in the public presentation of his regime.
Not only do we have many depictions of the beautiful Nefertiti , Akhenaten's principal wife—more, in fact, than of Akhenaten himself! Reliefs even show the royal couple playing with the girls. Like no pharaoh before or after him, Akhenaten was family-oriented. Thus, it seems unlikely he was a eunuch, but instead the real father of the children he professes, at least through his art, to adore so fondly. But the gender-bending portraits of him seem ill-suited for such a family man, by modern standards at least.
And Nefertiti's depictions are not immune to cross-gendering, either. She's shown at least once wearing the blue crown, the helmet kings don as they go into battle. She's the only Egyptian queen ever known to have been depicted that way, including Hatshepsut, the woman who ruled Egypt singlehandedly for two decades a century before see Section 9. There's something very odd, by any standard, about the way the Amarna rulers chose to portray themselves. Indeed, the entire family is depicted with elongated faces and skulls, wide hips and sagging bellies.
The tall hat Nefertiti wears in her famous bust is probably covering—perhaps even accentuating—her pointed head beneath, even though surely she was not congenitally deformed, and as the mother of six daughters, certainly not barren. Nor were the girls, which is all the more evidence Akhenaten also was not. Naturalistic portraiture seems a less likely explanation of the oddities inherent in this family than some sort of stylized rendering.
There's doubtless something abnormal about them, but what? And why? That the royal family was the only group ever portrayed this way is surely a clue. To depict Akhenaten's entire immediate family—and only them—in such an unusual manner must signify something. Perhaps their different look is meant to highlight exactly that , the fact that they're different.
Maybe the royal family is supposed to represent something alien, transcendental, not bound to human or earthly distinctions such as gender. It's easy to see why this would appeal to Akhenaten, nor is it hard to understand why Nefertiti might go along with being designated as super-special, and the children would, of course, have been too young to have a choice or even know the difference.
All this concurs well with Akhenaten's religion, where the pharaoh was said to serve as the conduit between humanity and the aten. In other words, it's through and because of him the sun-disk bestows life on the planet. In his own words, a hymn Akhenaten claims to have composed himself about the aten , "There is no other who knows you except your son, Akhenaten. One way or another, before Akhenaten's day the Egyptians had always considered the sun a god and the royal family was for the most part seen as divine, but as the only divine presence in the universe?
That, indeed, was something different. The imagery of Amarna culture with all of its strangeness has attracted not only scholars but a wide range of iconoclasts, revolutionaries and weirdos of every ilk, who have latched onto this radiant, unworldly, rebel pharaoh and more often than not caught the reflection of their own oddity in his slouching, fat-lipped silhouette. The many answers posited to the riddle of Akhenaten are, in any case, less important than the few, frail realities clinging to his reign and the questions they leave at our feet.
Among them, how did he sustain such a bizarre reordering of the celestial kingdom? For more than a decade, we must remember, Akhenaten kept his divine fantasies afloat even as he faced down the Amun priesthood, traditional cults in Egypt and a nation long nurtured on a pantheon of gods numbering by that day in the thousands.
Before we can ask why any of this happened or what happened to it, we must first try to understand how it happened at all. Akhenaten must have had some supporters, besides the usual lunatic fringe and sycophant wing who will follow any maniac into the wilderness.
A hint about their identity comes in one of the Amarna reliefs in which Nefertiti holds up the decapitated head of a foreign captive. That suggests some sort of military activity during Akhenaten's reign, an event history bears no evidence of otherwise. But that's not surprising really, given later pharaohs' destruction of records from this day. Any boast of victory in foreign wars the monomaniacal monotheist might have issued isn't likely to have survived their holocaust. So, if Akhenaten did have the support of the Egyptian army—and there's no real evidence to the contrary—his revolution would make much more sense.
Still, an army backing an effeminate, secluded, family-loving, pointy-headed sun freak seems highly improbable by the standards of today. Then again, how much can we rely on our modern sensibilities here where so little else seems logical? Yet, strange times often make strange bedfellows. If both the pharaoh and the military were seeking the same thing—for instance, to undercut the power of the Amun priesthood which by then was siphoning off a hefty percentage of the taxes collected in Egypt—the aten and the army might have made common cause.
Or so some scholars suggest. All the same, it must have been an interesting meeting between the slouching sun - lover and the hardened desert troopers who defended Egypt's frontier. How did they find enough in common even to have a conversation, much less foment a revolution together? Akhenaten died sometime after the fourteenth year of his reign.
Initially he was buried near Akhetaten, but later his tomb was desecrated and his body moved to Thebes and reburied in the Valley of the Kings , the traditional resting place for New Kingdom pharaohs. Some scholars believe a badly damaged male mummy found there is Akhenaten's.
If so, it shows that he did in fact have an unusually elongated skull, but little else can be gleaned from this body, not even the cause of death.
What killed him? He was still in his thirties or forties, so it can't have been old age. Disease is always a possibility, and there is evidence that a plague struck Egypt around this time.
The historical record, however, contains not a single hint of foul play in his death, all of which leaves us to guess its cause. Mono- theistic -nucleosis? Aten -tion deficit disorder? Above all, what happened in downtown Akhetaten on that gloomy day when the reason the sun-disk shines on the earth, the pharaoh of light and life, departed this world, and the next morning the sun still rose?
That must have been a disconcerting moment for the aten -faithful. Archaeology has, however, made one thing very clear. Akhetaten was not abandoned immediately upon Akhenaten's death. Building continued, at least for a while. How the government continued is less clear. Akhenaten's successor, for instance, is all but a complete mystery. Named Smenkhare , which is close to all we know about him, this pharaoh appears suddenly in the historical record two years before Akhenaten's death.
A late relief depicting Smenkhare with Akhenaten is about all there is to track this most cryptic of Egyptian pharaohs, along with a few documents showing that he married one of Akhenaten's daughters, surely an attempt to secure his claim to the throne after Akhenaten's death.
Curiously, Smenkhare's rise coincides almost exactly with another mysterious event, the all-but-complete disappearance of Nefertiti from the art of El-Amarna. Only once in the final two years of Akhenaten's reign is she shown, in a funerary tableau recording the death of one of her and Akhenaten's daughters. One theory is that Akhenaten sensing the approach of death—but how? In fact, he had little choice but to do this because Nefertiti had never given him a son—six daughters but no male heir—and Egyptian tradition demanded some sort of "son of the pharaoh" succeed.
Thus in the absence of a crown prince, the son of a secondary wife usually stepped in as successor. But this is not the only explanation that's been offered. Another theory proposes—and in light of the unusual circumstances surrounding the aten -cult at Akhetaten, it's not nearly as unlikely as it might seem at first glance—that Smenkhare was Nefertiti!
Knowing his death was imminent and seeing no clear and obvious heir on the horizon since he'd had no sons by Nefertiti and so there was no pointy-headed male to stem the family's aten -uation, Akhenaten created a "son" for himself out of the most obvious candidate there was, not a secondary son but his primary wife. Family was, after all, of utmost importance in this new world order, and she had held the power of Egypt in her hands—had even worn the blue crown!
So, like any social-climbing secondary son, Nefertiti "married" her own daughter and took the throne as a man, assuming as was traditional a new name, Smenkhare. That would help to explain why she disappears at the very moment Akhenaten's successor enters the picture. Like many ingenious solutions—and this age does seem to attract them—it didn't work. For whatever reason, Nefertiti couldn't cut it as "king," not that there hadn't been woman kings in Egypt who had taken male guise before.
Hatshepsut, for instance, had portrayed herself with masculine attributes in more than one work of art see above, Section 9. She had maintained herself on the throne with the support of the army, but perhaps the army in this day was willing to back an effeminate male but not a masculinized woman as king.
Or perhaps Nefertiti was simply more beautiful than savvy. Despite all their protestations of hope for world peace, beauty pageant winners rarely achieve that aim. In any case, the elusive Smenkhare disappears two years into "his" reign. No tomb for Smenkhare has ever been located nor have any of his burial goods been found. There is simply no further mention of him at all in Egyptian history.
How did the religion of the ancient Israelites differ from the religion of ancient Mesopotamians? The ancient Israelites believed in only one God. The ancient Israelites gave their god political and religious power. The ancient Israelites built fancy buildings for their gods in the afterlife. God gave Moses a set of ten laws that they should follow in order to please him. God told Moses that if these rules were not followed, God would punish people who disobeyed them. Thou knowest the commandments: Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor thy father and mother.
We expect Jesus to recite the entire Decalogue.
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