The first way Akhenaten showed his new faith was by changing his name. When he first took the throne, he was named Amenhotep like his father, but changed it to Akhenaten during his fifth year as pharaoh. For thousands of years, the Egyptians worshipped a respected collective of gods: for example, Bast, Isis, Osiris, Horus, Thoth, and Anubis.
What is certain is that the ancient Hebrews were not the only nor even the first people on record to adopt the notion of a single cosmic entity overseeing everything. We know both little and much about Akhenaten—that is to say, we know enough to wish we knew much more—but at least the general contours of his biography are clear. While there is no record of his death nor have any material remains from his burial as yet come to light, it is safe to assume he died in middle age.
The cause of his death is not known. The unique and peculiar phase of Egyptian history he represents is known today as the Amarna Period —the modern Egyptian village of El-Amarna lies near the site that was once Akhenaten's capital city—although the Amarna Period extends beyond his reign, including not only Akhenaten's regency but several of his successors':.
By the time the next series of pharaohs held the throne—Horemheb BCE and the Ramessids , a dynasty that included the famous Ramses II —the site near Amarna had been abandoned and destroyed, along with the memory of Akhenaten's religion in the general conscience of the ancient Egyptian public.
This deliberate attempt to eradicate all reference in the Egyptian record to the Amarna period was nearly successful, but not quite. We do know about Akhenaten, in fact, probably quite a bit more than the ancient Egyptians who lived even just a few generations after the monotheist's rule.
In spite of the fact that virtually no reference remains in later historical records to Akhenaten's existence, or that of his immediate successors'—it's hard to find even hints of his religion in subsequent Egyptian culture—archaeology has brought Amarna culture back to light with astounding clarity and depth.
Just like Pompeii see above, Section 1 , because of its near-total obliteration more is now known about Akhenaten's regime than almost any other period during the New Kingdom of Egypt, a fact Ramses would, no doubt, not be very happy to learn.
To a large extent, our knowledge of Akhenaten's life and times begins in Akhetaten , the city he built for himself and his religion, not that the site is particularly well preserved. In fact, it's not. Later rulers antagonistic to Amarna culture , the social and religious institutions Akhenaten imposed on Egypt, intentionally destroyed Akhetaten along with the records of Akhenaten's reign.
Ironically, however, that program of destruction saved the city and its founder's name for posterity, and for the most part its preservation depends on the fact that the city rose and fell very quickly. The reason for that stems from the enormous scope of change which Akhenaten attempted—a dramatic shift in religious, political and social traditions—and that meant he had to have an entirely new, fully functioning capital from which he could run the country without the weight of tradition bearing down on him and holding him back.
Revolutions often have to "seize the day" and proceed quickly or else they don't get off the ground at all. In order to build Akhenaten's city and shrines at such breakneck speed, relatively small blocks were used, stones which are now called talatat —it's easier and faster to raise a structure by using many small pieces rather than fewer large ones—and, to date, more than 45, talatat from Akhenaten's buildings have come to light.
Indeed, so many have been recovered that today talatat can be found in museums around the world and are a regular item sold on the black market. But small-sized blocks are also easy to de construct.
One of the reasons the Great Pyramid still stands is the enormous size of the individual stones used to build it, and in part because of that it couldn't be rapidly demolished the way Amarna culture was. It's often the case that what goes up fast comes down the same way. Other factors played a role in the ready destruction—and preservation! The demolitionists who sought to obliterate any memory of Akhenaten by eradicating all traces of Amarna culture used his talatat , as fill in their own construction projects.
But by hiding the talatat within the body of other buildings, they inadvertently protected and preserved them for modern archaeologists to find. Because of that, much of Akhenaten's architecture and artwork can be reconstructed.
So it also works the other way around: what goes down easily comes back up the same way, too. Akhetaten, this new hub of Aten worship, was situated along the eastern shore of the Nile in a spot which had never before been settled. That was, no doubt, part of its charm to Akhenaten—it lent the site a sense of austerity and religious purity, the very sort of newness he sought in his own regime—and unlike even the remotest Egyptian village, this locale had not as yet been connected with any cult or deity.
Theologically, it was a "clean slate," so to speak. Before Akhenaten's arrival, the place had no name even, allowing the king to dub it as he liked, and the name he chose, Akhetaten, means in Egyptian "the Horizon of the Sun-disk. And there's a good reason people had never attempted to settle this area before. Its location is near the desert, a place where it's virtually impossible to feed and house a self-sustaining populace of any real size—certainly not one large enough to govern a nation like ancient Egypt—so, maintaining the army of bureaucrats and office-workers needed to run Akhenaten's realm depended on the collection of taxes and importation of food stuffs, an expensive and labor-intensive investment of resources.
But Akhenaten didn't have to worry about that. He was the pharaoh, both god and king, and as long as he lived, his will was law. If he wanted to build a castle in the sand, city hall followed. Nor is it hard to understand why he should want a city like this, if one looks at things from his perspective.
To start with, desolate locations like el-Amarna have a long history of attracting religious sectarians of Akhenaten's sort—environments like that certainly appealed to the desert fathers of early Christianity and various groups of American pioneers—all of whom have also felt at home in places distant from traditional communities and accepted practices of government and worship. Furthermore, from Akhenaten's viewpoint, Akhetaten was not without certain charms. Lodged in a recess in the highlands flanking the Nile, the site provides spectacular dawns, and indeed, at certain times of year the sun appears to rise from a yoke in the mountains which embodies beautifully the solar iconography seen in much of the artwork created during the Amarna period.
All in all, it's not hard to imagine the morning Akhenaten awoke on his royal barge as he was sailing down the Nile, looking for a place to build a new city, and saw this sight, a site so suited to his solitary nature and obsession with the sun. How that obsession developed and, in general, the path which led to this point in his career are not difficult to reconstruct, either. 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. Montserrat notes that the axis of the new Aten complex was built facing to the east, toward the rising sun, whereas the rest of Karnak is oriented towards the west, where ancient Egyptians believed the underworld to be.
This coincided with the start of a campaign aimed at desecrating the names of the gods Amun and Mut, among other deities. Still Akhenaten appears not to have been able to convince all Egyptians to put their sole spiritual hopes in the Aten. Archaeologist Barry Kemp, who leads modern-day excavations at the site of Amarna, notes in his book "The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti" Thames and Hudson, that researchers have found figures depicting other deities, such as Bes and Thoth, at Amarna.
In addition to his radical religious changes, Akhenaten also unleashed a revolution in the way art was drawn. Before his time Egyptian art, especially those portraying royalty, tended to show a stiff, structured, formal style. The royal family was even drawn in a way that conveyed intimate moments. This radical departure in art, particularly the distorted body shapes, has long left Egyptologists mystified. His chest is sunken, yet there is something feminine about its form.
In the process of this religious revolution, Akhenaton placed him self as the intermediary between Aten and the people. This helped eliminate the need for the priesthood. As the only one with access to the god, Akhenaten established himself as a god-king and became the first king to be called Pharoah. In a move to further distance he created a new capital at Akhenaton now known as el-Armana.
This sacred city had never been occupied prior to Akhenaton's moving his capital nor did it outlast Akhenaton's reign. After Akhenaton's death the backlash forced his son, Tutankhamen to reverse the move to monotheism and return to the worship of many gods. During his reign it appears likely that only the nobles embraced the Aten cult but even much of that may have been just to stay in favor with the king.
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