Akhenaten: the criminal of Amarna.
–Ancient Egyptian Saying
Akhenaten–note the long face–Akhenaten’s reign ushered in a wave of realistic depictions of the pharaoh and his family–something that had never before happened in Egyptian art, where the pharaoh tended to be depicted as well-muscled and imposing.
Akhenaten, the unexpected heir to the Egyptian throne, unsettled his people by glorifying one god instead of a pantheon. In return, they tried to pretend he never existed.
The “criminal of Amarna” didn’t start out as a criminal, or even as a pharaoh. Likely suffering from Marfan Syndrome, a disorder of the connective tissue (which would explain the elongated facial features and long, thin fingers on the statues of him that have come down to us extant), Akhenaten began life as a younger son of the great pharaoh Amunhotep III, whose rule lasted thirty-nine years, one of the most prosperous periods in Egyptian history.
Named Amunhotep (translation: “Amun is pleased.”) after his father, the young boy was probably initially intended for the priesthood. But when his elder brother suddenly died, young Amunhotep became heir to the throne, and succeeded his father in 1351 b.c. as Amunhotep IV.
For five years his reign was fairly conventional. Then in 1346 b.c., everything changed.
Amunhotep IV changed his named to “Akhenaten” (which means “The servant of the Aten”), stating that there were no other gods, that the Aten (the Sun itself, as opposed to the sun-god Ra) was the sole holy being and that he himself, as pharaoh, was the Aten’s voice on earth. Then he shut down the temples of the other gods, declared their priesthoods dissolved and illegal, and made it clear how things were going to be in his new order: He would worship and serve his god, the Aten, and the people of Egypt would in turn worship and serve him.
Akhenaten and his queen (literally “King’s Great Wife”) Nefertiti with their children, basking in the rays of their god, the Aten.
This sort of radical change seems at first blush to have been a foolhardy move, needlessly alienating his subjects. Modern scholarship has advanced the more nuanced position that Akhenaten’s puzzling break with tradition was not just a religious experience, but also part of a broader attempt to break the power of ancient Egypt’s priesthood, especially those who served Amun-Ra, the chief god of the pantheon. As that god’s servants on earth (ranking only slightly below the pharaoh in this regard), these priests wielded immense power and accrued to their order massive wealth as well.
So shutting down their temples would have turned off the power/riches spigot, and in theory have redirected said power/lucre to the chief priest of the only god in town: the pharaoh. Can’t imagine the priesthood would have stood still for that.
Akhenaten even went so far as to clear out of the capital city of Memphis, taking his family and royal retinue with him, founding a new capital city in the desert, about 200 miles south of present-day Cairo. The ancient name of the city, Akhetaten, means “horizon of the Aten” or “horizon of the Sun.” The city was later given the name “Amarna” by Bedouin tribes who settled nearby.
The ruins of Amarna, named “Akhetaten” by the rebel pharaoh.
For the next decade, Akhenaten ignored his neighbors, didn’t bother with diplomacy, and showed not the slightest interest in doing anything other than glorifying the Aton in his new capital out in the desert, out of touch with everything earthbound, a veritable hermit in the midst of his own people. In the end, it cost him his very identity as king of Egypt.
So it will come as no surprise that after he died, Akhenaten’s subjects–(ed, no doubt by the very priesthood the rebel pharaoh had worked so hard to marginalize–rebelled against his very memory, smashing his idols, abandoning both his cult and his new city, returning to Memphis and to Thebes, and to the old gods and their temples. His very name was scratched out of every place in the country where it had been chiseled into stone, be it stele or monument.
Yep, Akhenaten was King Tut’s daddy!
And all of it occurred during the brief reign Akhenaten’s own son–aged barely nine years old when he took the throne–a minor, quickly forgotten pharaoh with a short, undistinguished reign, whose likely first official act was to change his name from “Tutankhaten” (translation: “Living image of the Aten”) to the more traditional “Tutaknhamun.”
Akhenaten himself faded from Egypt’s memory for millennia. Quite a comeuppance for such a religious rebel, royal blood or no.
In an interesting modern connection, present-day American presidents have made much of the fact that they live in a “bubble,” insulated from contact with most of the people in their country, and talk about how they try to pierce that bubble, to be able to understand their people, in order to better serve as their leader. Not so Akhenaten. He embraced the “bubble,” and if anything, made it harder to pierce. Not a very bright move for someone trying to make a sweeping fundamental change to a religious system that had flourished in the Nile Valley for millennia. In light of this, one of his homilies is oddly insightful, without demonstrating any actual insight on his part at all: “True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.”
A remark that serves as an effective, if unintentional, epitaph for this “rebel pharaoh.”
An unidentified pharaoh’s casket–likely that of Akhenaten–note the smashed face. The mummy within also resembled our received images of what Akhenaten himself probably looked like. Was this a final revenge taken on this iconoclast ruler by the priests of Amun Ra?