In the 14th century BCE, the united Kingdoms of Egypt were the most powerful state in the Western world, ruled by Pharaohs who claimed divine descent from the gods. But then a Pharaoh named Akhenaton took the throne—and attempted to change the very fabric of Egyptian religion.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
By the time the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep III died in the 14th century BCE, Egypt was at the height of its power. From his capitol in Thebes, the Pharaoh served as the intermediary between his people and the gods, and a small army of priests, housed at state expense in magnificent temples, insured that all the proper sacred rituals and ceremonies were performed which kept favor with the gods and produced continuing prosperity. Upon his death Amenhotep III, like all the Pharaohs before him, would himself become a god, ascending into heaven to join them among the stars.
Although there were well over a hundred different Egyptian gods and goddesses, the priests of Amun were particularly significant. The temples of Amun were tremendously wealthy; they held more land in Egypt than even the Royal Family did. Their fortune in land and grain, along with their religious role, gave them important political influence.
Akhenaton was never expected to become Pharaoh. Born with the name Amenhotep, after his father, he was the youngest of the King’s two sons, and it was expected that the oldest, Thutmoses, would rule after Amenhotep III’s death. So the younger son was neglected and ignored, excluded from the rituals and religious festivals which the royal heir was expected to oversee. But then Thutmoses suddenly died. There were other older sons from what were euphemistically called “minor wives”, but the Pharaoh’s Queen, named Ti, succeeded in having her own son, the younger Amenhotep, named as the new heir to the throne.
When Amenhotep III died in 1352 BCE, his son took the throne under the name Amenhotep IV. At first, all was well. The Pharaoh began construction of a new temple, to be dedicated to himself, at the huge religious complex in Karnack inside the traditional capitol city of Thebes.
But then something odd happened. Traditionally, Pharaohs had depicted themselves in their temple art as young robust figures, fit to be the representative of the gods. But in his new temple at Karnack, Amenhotep IV had himself portrayed with a peculiar elongated head, long toes, long fingers, and a prominent potbelly. Even more bizarrely, he also had his wife, Queen Nefertiti, depicted with the same strange features. Some Egyptologists have concluded that the new Pharaoh was attempting to depict himself in his actual appearance rather than the idealized versions used by previous rulers—leading some to seriously propose that he suffered from some sort of genetic deformity, perhaps Marfan’s Syndrome. (In 1907, when a mummy was found inside a hasty tomb in the Valley of the Kings which was presumed by many to be Akhenaton’s, it did indeed have an unusually elongated skull.) Other “authorities”, not to be taken seriously, argued that the temple depictions proved that the Pharaoh was a space alien or a hybrid.
The temple art was filled with depictions of the Aten, the disc of the Sun. This had always been associated in Egyptian mythology as the holy symbol of the Sun God Amun Ra, and by itself this was not all that unusual. But then, just a few years into his reign, Pharaoh Amenhotep IV made an announcement that shook the society of ancient Egypt to its very core.
First, there was a name change: Amenhotep IV now took the new name Akhenaton (“Son of the Sun Disc”). Next, he declared that he would not merely become a god upon his death and resurrection, like every other Pharaoh before him had—but as the son of the heavenly Aten he was already divine, and so was his wife Nefertiti. And finally, in the most dramatic proclamation of all, Akhenaton announced that there was only one real god—the sun disk Aten—and that no others in the vast Egyptian pantheon were to be worshipped within Egypt any longer. “There is only one god, my father the Aten,” he declared. “I can approach him by day, by night.”
Archaeologists still debate why he did it. Perhaps it was a political ploy to break the power of the priesthood and return religious authority to the Pharaoh as a god-king. Perhaps it was a truly-believed idealistic religious experience that motivated the young Akhenaton. Or perhaps it just an attempt by a neglected child who now unexpectedly had obtained the virtually unlimited power to punish those who had treated him as a misfit and had excluded him from their ceremonies and rites.
The effect, however, was shattering. In one stroke, Akhenaton had destroyed the power of the entire immense Egyptian priesthood, making their temples irrelevant and cutting off their livelihoods. Akhenaton launched a systematic campaign to remove all references to other gods in the state’s documents and inscriptions, and to close down the temples. Priests began frantically gathering up whatever scrolls and statues they could and hide them for safe-keeping. Meanwhile, statues of the “false gods” were broken, and their names were chiseled off the walls of temples and tombs.
To further emphasize his break with the past, Akhenaton decreed that he would depart the traditional capitol in the religious center of Thebes and construct an entirely new capitol city he called Akhetaton (“City of the Sun”) in an area now known as Amarna, in the middle of the desert several hundred miles away. The entire massive government bureaucracy, with all its scribes, archives, granaries and petty officials, was uprooted and moved to the new city. New temples were built to the Aten, facing east so they would be illuminated by the rising sun. The now-deposed Egyptian priesthood was left behind at Thebes, far from the new center of power. It was Akhenaton’s way of telling them that they no longer mattered.
But even though Akhenaton, as Pharaoh, was an autocratic god-king whose word was literally law, his sudden overturning of thousands of years of traditional Egyptian religion had provoked a massive wave of resistance among the people of Egypt, led by the old priests. By destroying the old gods, not only was Akhenaton, in the view of many, provoking their divine wrath and terrible retribution upon the country, but he was endangering the afterlife of every person—which depended completely upon the proper funerary rites and ceremonial burials at the very core of Egyptian religion for thousands of years.
There was also unrest in the Egyptian Army. As the state poured all its wealth into building the new city at Akhetaton, the Army shrank, its resources were cut, and overseas allies were neglected. Tribute payments from vassal kings stopped. The generals saw a real threat that some enemy might take advantage of Egypt’s internal chaos and invade. Akhenaton, wrapped up in his religious revolution, barely noticed.
There are no records of any overt moves against the Pharaoh, but it seems certain that there were at least plots and plans. Both the priesthood and the military had every reason to want the new King and his new religion to be gone.
Then, Mother Nature stepped in and did what the old guard would not or could not do. Akhenaton died in 1336 BCE. He was buried in a tomb in remote Amarna (then reportedly exhumed later and moved to the Valley of the Kings). The son that would succeed him was Tutankhamon, who was destined 3,000 years later to be the most famous of all the Egyptian Pharaohs.
As Pharaoh, Tutankhamon renounced his father’s new monotheistic religion and denounced him as a heretic. Moving his capitol back to Thebes, Tut abandoned the city of Akhetaton and renewed the royal ties with the priesthood and temples, returning to the traditional polytheistic religion of Egypt. The priests systematically erased all traces of the memory of the heretic Pharaoh—Akhenaton’s name and image was chipped off the temple walls. Even his presumed coffin had all its identifications removed. Rather than embrace Akhenaton’s monotheism, the ancient Egyptians did their best to pretend that it had never existed at all.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)