Akhenaten: The Heretic Pharaoh

Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:

—

Just before we get started, some of you might know that I have another channel called MegaProjects, which is all about mega projects. I’ve mentioned it here before. If you don’t subscribe to that channel, please do! By popular demand, I wanted to cover topics that weren’t quite mega enough for that channel, so I started a new channel called Side Projects. You can see what we did there; it covers secret Soviet space weapons, World War II’s greatest airplanes, some of history’s lost treasures, and the movement of London Bridge from London to a town in America—stuff like that. New videos are released three times a week on that channel, so if you’re thinking, “Oh, Simon doesn’t make enough videos for me,” don’t worry! Head on over to Side Projects and subscribe. There is a link below, and now let’s get started.

Who was Akhenaten? For 3,300 years, this question would have yielded only puzzled expressions, as his deeds were considered so vile and outrageous that the man who was once Pharaoh of Egypt was condemned to damnatio memoriae—a process where others try to eliminate all mentions of him from history and make it look like he never existed. For thousands of years, this was the case. It wasn’t until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when modern archaeologists excavated the lost city of Amarna, that we were able to rediscover the reign of Akhenaten.

So what did he do that was so heinous? He was arguably ancient Egypt’s greatest heretic. Akhenaten abandoned the traditional gods who had been worshipped for thousands of years and instead instituted a new religion called Atenism, which centered around the worship of Aten, the sun disk. He also moved the capital of Egypt from Thebes to a new city that he built called Akhetaten, also known as Amarna. For this reason, the time span that covers his reign, as well as those that immediately followed, is referred to as the Amarna Period.

The extent to which Akhenaten suppressed the old forms of religious expression is still a matter of debate among scholars, but the people of ancient Egypt were definitely not happy with him. Almost immediately after he died, they got to work restoring the old ways, and the pharaohs who followed distanced themselves from his beliefs. Nowadays, we’re much more familiar with his son Tutankhamun, who realistically didn’t do anything of note in his lifetime, but today we seek to rectify this a bit by taking a look at Akhenaten, the heretical pharaoh who launched a religious revolution.

Akhenaten was born sometime in the first half of the 14th century BC, most likely during the 1370s. He was part of Egypt’s 18th dynasty, the first one of the New Kingdom, which arguably saw the Egyptian Empire reach the peak of its power. Most of the pharaohs we’ve covered so far, like Tutankhamun, Hatshepsut, and Ramses III, have all been part of the same dynasty, so it’s fair to say this was a crucial part of the history of Egypt.

Akhenaten’s father was Pharaoh Amenhotep III, also known as Amenhotep the Magnificent. He is generally considered one of ancient Egypt’s greatest rulers, presiding over a lengthy reign of almost 40 years marked by prosperity, peace, and stability. Akhenaten’s mother was Tiye, the pharaoh’s great royal wife. He was actually the second son that the two had together and was not originally planned to take over the throne. However, his older brother, Crown Prince Thutmose, died of unknown causes sometime during the second half of their father’s reign, and therefore Akhenaten became the next in line.

He was not called Akhenaten at the time; his name was roughly translated to “one who is serviceable to Aten,” and he only adopted it as pharaoh once he instituted his new religious policies. Up until that point, he was Amenhotep IV, but we’ll stick to Akhenaten to avoid confusion with his father. We cannot tell you almost anything about his early life. Some Egyptologists speculate that he may have served as a high priest before taking the throne because his brother had done the same, and maybe this is where he first developed his strong devotion to Aten.

Aten, this deity, actually predated Akhenaten by a long way; its first mentions date back to the Old Kingdom. Although back then, it seemed to be simply a word used to refer to the sun disk itself and wasn’t an actual deity but rather an element of the sun god. By the Middle Kingdom, though, there were already references to Aten as a creator, so at some point, centuries before Akhenaten came along, Aten had morphed into a sort of solar deity.

Another hotly debated aspect of Akhenaten’s life is when exactly he took over the throne. There are some scholars who assert that Amenhotep III made his son co-regent while he was still pharaoh. Many others argue strongly against this view, and even the length of the co-regency is heavily disputed. For our purposes, we’re going to assume that Akhenaten became the new pharaoh of Egypt after the death of his father. This happened around 1353 BC. Pharaoh Amenhotep III died in his late 40s or early 50s, in his 38th or 39th regnal year, and he was buried in the Valley of the Kings.

His son followed him to the throne still under the name Amenhotep IV. It was around this time that he married his great royal wife, Nefertiti. The first years of Akhenaten’s reign were traditional, where he followed the regular customs of the time and mainly continued policies and practices that had been set out by his father. He expressed his worship of Aten, but not in an unusual way. This wasn’t considered unusual because Amenhotep III also emphasized the worship of Aten as a callback to their ancestors.

Between the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom, there was a span of time dubbed the Second Intermediate Period. It was considered a dark time for Egypt, as parts of the land were not ruled by native Egyptians but rather by the Hyksos, a group of people from the Levant who arrived in the area and took over in the 17th century BCE. Eventually, the Hyksos were defeated and driven away permanently by Ahmose I, who founded the 18th dynasty, the one that we’re in right now.

The point is that after the Hyksos were gone, the pharaohs who followed were eager to get back to their roots. They wanted to do away with the traditions and culture of the Hyksos and bring back many customs and religious practices from their forefathers from the Middle Kingdom and beyond. That is how Aten entered the Egyptian public consciousness once more.

Amenhotep III might have worshipped Aten, but he never neglected Amun, who by that point had become one of the most important gods in the Egyptian pantheon and the patron deity of Thebes. In fact, Amun’s significance during the 18th dynasty grew so much that he began being identified alongside the sun god as a single entity named Amun-Ra.

The first indication that Akhenaten had plans of his own came a few years into his reign when he scheduled a Sed festival for himself. This was one of Egypt’s oldest traditions, a sort of jubilee with a grand feast meant to celebrate the original unification between Upper and Lower Egypt. Traditionally, a pharaoh organized his first Sed festival once he reigned for 30 years and in three-year increments from then on. Akhenaten did it after only two or three years. The reason for this has been widely speculated. Some scholars think he was mentally preparing himself for the more drastic steps he was about to take; others believe Akhenaten wanted to symbolically link his reign to that of his father, so he organized a Sed festival just three years after the previous one of Amenhotep III. Some concluded that the pharaoh simply saw it as a convenient excuse for him to build loads of new monuments and temples dedicated to Aten without anyone raising an eyebrow.

Indeed, the greatest one of all was a temple complex constructed right outside Karnak named Gempaaten, or “Aten is Found,” which went against Egyptian building conventions by having no roof so that sunlight could freely enter the complex. By the fifth year of his reign, the pharaoh decided it was time for a true revolution. He changed his royal title, officially adopting the name Akhenaten and instituting the worship of Aten throughout his kingdom. He expressed his devotion to the sun disk in several hymns and poems, the most famous of which is the Great Hymn to Aten, a composition of thirteen stanzas found inscribed on several rock tombs.

Unsurprisingly, many Egyptians were outraged by Akhenaten, particularly the priests who were about to lose the majority of their power, influence, and wealth. However, the pharaoh was not naive; he knew that he would not be able to pull off his religious reform without support from anyone, and he got that support from the army. The kingdom was coming off a period of prosperity, so the soldiers were already pretty content, but Akhenaten still made sure to praise and celebrate them whenever the opportunity arose, as well as maintain good relations with his military leaders. Clearly, this worked, as there were no major uprisings during his reign, and the disavowal of the cult of Aten only took place after his death.

Because of his actions, Akhenaten has been heralded by some modern scholars as the first monotheist in history, meaning the first person to express belief in a single god. Others reject this label and qualify his reign more as a henotheistic period of Egypt, meaning that while worship was focused on a single deity, he didn’t necessarily reject the possible existence of others. Either way, Akhenaten wanted nothing to do with the old gods of Egypt anymore, and he felt that his worship of Aten needed to be concentrated in a virgin site, one that was free from the touch and influence of the former pantheon.

As shocking as Akhenaten’s abandonment of the old gods was, so was his decision to leave Thebes, the city that had functioned as Egypt’s capital for the greater part of its history up until then. But the pharaoh wanted to found a new capital in pristine land. He chose an uninhabited site on the eastern bank of the Nile and took around twenty thousand people with him to his new settlement. He called it Akhetaten, or “Horizon of the Aten,” but it is better known by its later name, Amarna.

Building a new city from scratch in a short period of time was a huge undertaking, and there is grim evidence to suggest that the people in Amarna were worked to the bone. Once the largest cemetery in Amarna was excavated, modern archaeologists found the remains of 432 people. Of those whose ages were established, 70 died before the age of 35, while only 9 people lived past 50. Not only that, but the children had their growth stunted due to malnutrition, while many adults had spinal damage from being overworked. An even darker picture is painted by another cemetery, this time located near the royal limestone quarry, where a whopping 92 percent of the individuals buried there were under 25 years old, while half of them were under 15.

Amarna might have been the ideal city in the mind of Akhenaten, but all indications seem to suggest that he only cared about himself and his god while the people of Amarna lived in miserable conditions and were being worked to death in order to cope with the construction demands of the pharaoh. Builders created a new type of stone block called talatat, made out of limestone. They were much smaller than the blocks used in Egyptian construction, but they were also cut to a standard size, which was not typically done before. Theoretically, this made them more efficient, but they still did not catch on, and the usage of talatat ended shortly after the Amarna Period.

It probably would not surprise you to learn that the main structures in Amarna were the royal palaces for Akhenaten and temples for Aten. The main place of worship was the Great Temple of Aten in the center of the city, while a secondary small Aten temple was located near the royal palaces. Like all other Aten temples, they had two features that distinguished them from traditional Egyptian places of worship: they were open-air with no roof, and they also did not feature any cult images of Aten. This was, in fact, a recurring theme in Atenism. While the other gods were commonly depicted as having human bodies and human or animal heads, Akhenaten insisted that Aten was everywhere in everyone and thus transcended the need for any kind of physical form. Therefore, Aten was always depicted as only a disk emitting solar rays.

Something else that came out of Amarna was a new art style dubbed simply the Amarna art style. Again, it did not last longer than Akhenaten’s reign, but some works have survived, and they create a stark contrast to traditional ancient Egyptian art. The most striking differences concern the ways humans were depicted in the Amarna style; they were taller and more slender, with elongated facial features. The chest, hands, and legs were thin, while the stomach and thighs were often bloated. The same skin color was used for men and women, and Akhenaten himself was depicted with feminine features. Some Egyptologists believe that this was actually a more realistic view of what the pharaoh really looked like because he might have suffered from one or more genetic disorders like Marfan syndrome, which caused elongated extremities, or Klinefelter syndrome, which led to male breast enlargement. It is speculated that other pharaohs from the 18th dynasty also suffered from these ailments, but this is yet to be proven conclusively.

Akhenaten ruled Egypt for approximately 17 years, and his reign was clearly dominated by his devotion to Aten, which became increasingly fanatical as the years went by. Not satisfied with simply building a new capital dedicated to his god, he later had older temples dismantled and their priests killed, as he ordered the names of the old gods to be chiseled out of all carvings, from giant stelae to small tablets. We don’t actually have a lot of detailed information about what happened in Egypt during the reign of Akhenaten because of the whole damnatio memoriae and having all mentions of him destroyed. But we do know a lot more about his international relations thanks to a treasure trove of information that somehow survived, known as the Amarna Letters. This consists of over 380 tablets written in the Akkadian language using cuneiform that mostly represent diplomatic correspondence from neighboring city administrators and kings to the pharaoh.

The tone used in the tablets changes depending on who the sender was. Some of them came from vassals of Egypt, so naturally, the tone was very deferential, addressing Akhenaten as “my lord” while referring to themselves as his servants. Others, while still cordial, came from rulers of similar rank, like the kings of Mitanni or Babylon, and the tone reflected their equal status. Regardless of the way they were written, many letters had similar content; they expressed displeasure, disappointment, concern, and uneasiness at Akhenaten for neglecting some of his international duties. Some of these were specific; for example, the king of Mitanni, Tushratta, complains in one tablet that Akhenaten seemingly reneged on a deal made by his father to give the king solid gold statues as dowry for a princess bride from Mitanni. It would seem that Akhenaten sent Tushratta gold-plated statues instead.

Many letters concerned the most pressing issue in the region at that time: the rise of a dangerous foe, the Hittites. They showed how little Akhenaten cared about matters that had nothing to do with Aten. It was during Akhenaten’s reign that the Hittites reached the peak of their power, and by the time Tutankhamun came to the throne, the Hittite Empire was just as strong as Egypt. First, the Mitanni asked Akhenaten for assistance in their war with the Hittites, but there was no help forthcoming. In fact, Egypt hoped to curry favor with the new regional power and withdrew all support to Mitanni, allowing the king there to assassinate Tushratta and sack his capital of Washukanni. Of course, this only served to show the rest of the world that Egypt was weak and vulnerable, so the Hittites pressed the attack and went into Syria, where there were city-states and kingdoms that were vassals of Egypt and theoretically under its protection. The city-states that weren’t conquered were angered by Egypt’s inaction, and they rebelled, prompting Akhenaten to lose the territory he used to have dominion over in Syria. As far as we can tell, he never attempted to get it back.

The last years of Akhenaten’s reign are one big question mark. The most confusing and controversial aspect was his succession and the couple of years in between the reigns of Akhenaten and his son Tutankhamun. The problem is that we know there were two other pharaohs with very short reigns between father and son: Smenkhkare and Neferneferuaten. However, that is pretty much all we know about who they were, how they were connected to Akhenaten, and why they became pharaohs. All of this is still a mystery that spurs debates among Egyptologists. We’re not sure if Smenkhkare was male or female, but some evidence may suggest that he served as co-regent during the last years of Akhenaten’s life. Some believe that the same can be said for Neferneferuaten, who was a woman and may have been one of the pharaoh’s daughters or, more likely, the new name of Nefertiti once she became pharaoh in her own right.

Akhenaten died circa 1336 BC of unknown causes. Afterwards, Smenkhkare and Neferneferuaten either ruled together as co-regents or one after the other, or both of them had individual reigns as pharaoh. We simply cannot say with any certainty, and it wasn’t until Tutankhamun took the throne circa 1334 BC that the historical record became clearer. This is because King Tut was still a young boy when he became pharaoh, and his advisors made most of the decisions for him. They realized that the cult of Aten had no chance of surviving without Akhenaten, so they steadily made changes to revert back to the old ways and the old gods, shunning everything done by the former pharaoh. This included Amarna itself, as the city was abandoned when the capital was reverted back to Thebes. It was still standing, though it wasn’t actually destroyed until later when a pharaoh called Horemheb came to power. He was more thorough when it came to wiping out the Amarna Period from history, so he had the temples and monuments built by Akhenaten dismantled