Akhenaten

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A scribe working under a later king ran his chisel down a wall at Abydos, listing the rightful kings of Egypt back to the first. He set Amenhotep III, then skipped a generation, then cut Horemheb’s name next to it. Between the two cartouches, in the real order of years, four reigns had been lived and a god had been raised over all the others and put down again. The list does not mention them. The omission is deliberate, and it is the surest measure of how much one of those kings had tried to change.

That king began as Amenhotep IV and became Akhenaten. For roughly seventeen years in the fourteenth century BCE he held the throne of an empire at its height, and he used it to do something no Egyptian ruler had done before: to take a single aspect of the sun and set it above every other power in heaven and earth, to close the houses of the older gods, and to build, from bare ground, a city where the new god alone would be served. The experiment did not survive him. Its undoing was so deliberate that his own people preferred to remember him as nothing at all.

Colossal sandstone statue of Akhenaten from his Aten temple at Karnak, now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, showing the elongated face and body of the new style. Photo by Gérard Ducher, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5.

The son of Amenhotep

He was born into the eighteenth dynasty, the line that had driven out foreign rulers and turned Egypt into the dominant power of the eastern Mediterranean. His father was Amenhotep III, who reigned in a long age of gold and stone, building on a scale meant to outlast memory, and whose own self-presentation already leaned toward the sun and the solar disk. Tribute came up the Nile from Nubia and in from Syria. The temples of Thebes were rich, and the richest of them all belonged to Amun, the hidden god whose priesthood at Karnak had grown into a power beside the throne — a landholding, grain-storing, oracle-giving institution whose weight in the state any king would have felt. The relation of the crown to that priesthood is one of the standing questions of the period; whatever its exact temperature, the priests of Amun controlled wealth on a scale that made them the king’s natural rivals.

The prince took the throne as Amenhotep IV. The name means, roughly, “Amun is content” — a thoroughly orthodox name, declaring the king’s bond with the chief god of Thebes. For the first years of his reign he behaved, on the surface, like his predecessors. Then he stopped.

In his fifth regnal year he changed his name. Amenhotep, the name built on Amun, became Akhenaten — usually rendered “effective for the Aten” or “of service to the Aten.” The Aten was the visible disk of the sun, an old word and an old object of attention, one solar aspect among the many faces of Ra and Atum at Heliopolis. What the king did was lift it out of that company and make it the only one. The new name announced that the king’s whole person now stood in service of that single power, and the old name, with its allegiance to the god of Thebes, was simply set aside.

A new god and a new city

The same year, or close to it, he left Thebes. He chose a stretch of empty desert in Middle Egypt, on the east bank between Thebes and Memphis, where no town and no god had a prior claim, and there he founded a capital. He called it Akhetaten, “the horizon of the Aten” — the modern Tell el-Amarna, from which the whole period takes its name. Boundary stelae cut into the cliffs around the site recorded his vow not to extend the city beyond them and fixed the place as the Aten’s and no one else’s. Within a few years a city stood where there had been nothing: palaces, the open-roofed Great Temple of the Aten, magazines, the houses of officials, workmen’s quarters, all raised in haste from a standardized small block of stone — the talatat — that could be cut and carried by a single man, so that building went fast.

The god of this city had no body. The older Egyptian gods were shown as men, as women, as falcons and lionesses and ibises — Horus hawk-headed, Hathor horned, the powers of the world wearing recognizable faces. The Aten was shown as none of these. It was the disk itself, set in the sky, with long rays coming down from it, and at the end of each ray a small human hand. To the king and his family, and to no one else, those hands reached down the sign of life, the ankh. The god gave life directly to the royal house, and the people received it through the king. There were no cult statues to dress and feed in a dark sanctuary, as there were for Amun; the Aten was worshipped under the open sky, in courts flooded with the light that was the god.

What followed was an attack on the rest of the pantheon, and it fell hardest on Amun. The temples were closed, their revenues diverted, their priesthoods dispersed. Workmen went through the monuments of Egypt hacking out the name of Amun wherever it was carved — even, in places, the plural word “gods” — chiseling it from obelisks and tomb walls and from the very name of the dead Amenhotep III. The reach of the erasure is one of the hard facts of the reign: it was not a quiet preference for one god but a campaign against the others, carried into stone across the country.

Limestone relief of Akhenaten and Nefertiti with three daughters beneath the Aten, whose rays end in hands; Egyptian Museum, Berlin. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Whether this amounts to monotheism is the question on which the modern reading turns, and it should be marked as contested rather than settled. The Aten was raised over all rivals and the rivals were suppressed; in that sense the program tends toward the worship of one. But the king himself remained divine, the intermediary without whom the god gave nothing, and devotion at Amarna ran as much to the royal family as to the disk. Egyptologists divide over the right word — whether to call the reform monotheism, or monolatry, the exclusive service of one god without denying that others exist, or henotheism, or a syncretism collapsed toward a single solar power. The disagreement is not idle. It decides whether Akhenaten stands at the head of a line that runs to the later monotheisms, or whether he is a separate event, a court religion that died with its court.

The teaching of the disk

The fullest statement of the new faith survives carved into the rock tomb of the courtier Ay at Amarna: the Great Hymn to the Aten, a long poem attributed to Akhenaten himself or to those close to him. It is the closest thing the Amarna religion has to scripture, and it is remarkable for what it leaves out and what it keeps.

It is a hymn of one maker. The Aten rises and the world wakes; it sets and the world lies as if dead. The god made the Nile in the sky to rain on foreign lands and the Nile in the underworld for Egypt. It made the child in the womb and the chick in the egg and gave it breath. And it made the differences between peoples on purpose: the hymn praises a god who “settest every man in his place” and provides for each, and observes that “their tongues are separate in speech, and their natures as well.” This is a universal god, lighting Nubia and Syria and Egypt alike, not the local lord of one nation. What the hymn does not contain is as telling: there is almost nothing of the underworld, of Osiris and the judgment of the dead, of the long apparatus of the afterlife that fills the older funerary texts. The dead at Amarna were to wake with the sunrise like the living, not to be weighed in the hall of Maat before Osiris.

For more than a century readers have set the Great Hymn beside Psalm 104 of the Hebrew Bible, where God too clothes the world in light, sends springs into the valleys, gives the beasts their food, and is praised as the maker who set the bounds of all things. The likeness in sequence and image is genuine and has persuaded serious scholars — Jan Assmann among them — that something of the Egyptian hymn reached the Hebrew tradition. Others read the resemblance as the common stock of ancient Near Eastern sun-hymnody, a shared way of praising a creator rather than a borrowed text. The honest position holds the parallel as a motif worth tracing and stops short of a proven line of descent; no chain of transmission has been demonstrated, and several centuries and a closed archive lie between the two poems.

The art of the city is as distinctive as its theology, and as deliberate. The older Egyptian style had held the human figure to an ideal: the king eternally young, balanced, frontal, outside time. The art of Amarna broke that ideal on purpose. Bodies grew long and strange — narrow heads on thin necks, sloping skulls, heavy hips and thighs and bellies, spindly arms, slitted eyes, hanging jaws. The earliest colossal statues of the king push this almost to caricature. What it means is debated — a real physical peculiarity of the king, a theology of the king as both father and mother of his people, a style invented to mark the new order as a clean break — but its intent to look unlike everything before it is plain. And it admitted a new subject. The king is shown again and again with his wife and daughters, kissing them, dandling them, eating with them, all of it bathed in the descending rays. The queen is Nefertiti, whose painted limestone bust, found in a sculptor’s workshop at Amarna, has become the single most recognized face of ancient Egypt. She appears at the king’s side and sometimes in poses of worship and even kingship usually reserved for the pharaoh, a prominence without close parallel.

The painted limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti, found in the Amarna workshop of the sculptor Thutmose, now in the Neues Museum, Berlin. Photo by Philip Pikart, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The unraveling

The reign ended in obscurity, and what came after it is mostly reconstruction from broken evidence. Akhenaten died around 1336 BCE. He was followed, briefly and confusingly, by one or two short-lived figures — a king named Smenkhkare, and possibly a female ruler under another name, the identities and order still argued over. Then the throne passed to a boy.

The boy had been born at Amarna and named Tutankhaten, “living image of the Aten.” Within a few years of his accession the name was changed: Tutankhaten became Tutankhamun, “living image of Amun,” and the change is the whole history of the counter-reformation in two words. The court left Amarna and returned to Thebes. The temples of Amun were reopened, their priesthoods and estates restored, their gods set back in their sanctuaries. A long inscription set up in the boy-king’s name describes the land as having fallen into ruin, the gods having turned their backs, the temples fallen into weeds — and the young king as the one who set it right. The Aten was abandoned. Akhetaten, the city built from nothing for the one god, emptied out and was left to the desert within a generation of its founding.

Then came the erasure. Under the later kings of the dynasty, above all the general-turned-pharaoh Horemheb, the monuments of Amarna were pulled down. The talatat blocks of the Aten temples at Karnak were carted off and packed as rubble fill inside Horemheb’s own pylons — some forty thousand of them, recovered by archaeologists only in the twentieth century, each carrying a fragment of a sunlit Amarna scene now used as hidden ballast. The names of Akhenaten and his successors were cut out of the records. When the official king-lists were compiled — the one at Abydos in the temple of Seti I is the clearest case — the Amarna kings were simply left out, the sequence running straight from Amenhotep III to Horemheb as if the intervening reigns had never happened. In documents that could not avoid him, Akhenaten is named not by his name but as “that criminal” or “the enemy of Akhetaten.” The man who had erased Amun was erased in turn, and more thoroughly.

Afterlife of a forgotten king

The erasure worked for three thousand years. Akhenaten dropped out of the Egyptian record so completely that the historian Manetho, compiling the king-lists in Greek long after, preserved only garbled traces, and the classical world that built so much on Egyptian wisdom — the tradition that drew Pythagoras and Plato to the Nile and that the Hermetica would later claim — knew nothing of the heretic king. He returned only when the spade reached Amarna. The site drew excavators from the late nineteenth century onward; the boundary stelae, the talatat, the sculptor’s workshop with the Nefertiti bust, and above all the diplomatic archive known as the Amarna Letters — cuneiform tablets of the king’s correspondence with the rulers of the Near East — pulled the lost reign back into history.

What modern readers made of it was something the ancient record never intended. A king who had set one god over all the rest, in the same corner of the world and not so many centuries before Moses, was almost irresistible to anyone tracing the roots of monotheism. The boldest version is Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, completed in 1939 in the last year of his life. Freud argued that Moses was not a Hebrew but an Egyptian, a follower of the Aten faith who, after Akhenaten’s religion was crushed at home, carried its monotheism out to a Semitic people and made it theirs. The thesis rests on a chain of conjecture that the evidence does not bear, and few historians accept it; but it captures the pull the figure exerts. The same pull produces the recurring portrait of Akhenaten as a prophet born too soon, a visionary of the one God, a romantic ahead of his age.

That portrait flatters more than it explains, and it should be held at the third remove of an attributed reading. The documentary Akhenaten is harder and stranger. He worshipped a god with no afterlife and reserved that god’s life-giving touch for his own family. He did not free a people or write an ethics; he closed temples, broke a priesthood, and put his own name where the gods’ had been, and his subjects undid all of it the moment he was gone and then refused to say he had lived. Within the frame of Egypt, his reign reads less as a dawn than as a wound in the order of maat — the rightness that holds the world together — which the kings who followed him hurried to close. He matters not because he was the first to be right but because, for one generation, an entire civilization was bent to the worship of one, and then chose, with its chisels, to forget.

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