The Heretic Pharaoh
By replacing a pantheon of gods with the Aten, himself and his queen, this Egyptian king threw his nation into turmoil
Akhenaten, the king who tried to make Egypt monotheistic
The pharaoh Akhenaten ruled Egypt during in the 18th dynasty and is one of the most written about rulers of ancient Egypt. This infamy is due to his religious overhaul where he replaced the rich pantheon of deities with the Aten – the sundisc. However, despite this post-mortem fame, Akhenaten was not an important king in the grand scheme of Egyptian history and he ruled for a mere 17 years (1350-34 BCE). This period of Egyptian history is known as the Amarna period,
named for the new capital city during his reign, Tell el Amarna in Middle Egypt.
Throughout the modern era he has been referred to as the world’s first monotheist, a pacifist, an alien and the heretic king. Additionally he has been compared to Moses, Martin
Luther, Oliver Cromwell, Adolf Hitler, Stalin and Christ. Eminent Egyptologist, Margaret Murray commented in 1949, “The Tell el Amarna period has had more nonsense written about it than any other period in Egyptian history … in the
case of Akhenaten the facts do not bear the construction often put on them.”
So many theories abound about this king due to the lack of tangible archaeological evidence about his reign and we can thank the ancient Egyptians themselves for this fragmentary survival rate. Following his reign, Akhenaten’s contemporaries tried to erase his very existence from history. His name was erased from the monuments and his temples, his city was razed to the ground and the stones reused as building material.
So who was Akhenaten? Peaceful, religious activist or a heretic?
Akhenaten was the second son of Amenhotep
III and queen Tiye. He was born with the name Amenhotep, which he changed during the early years of his reign to Akhenaten, in honour of his newly revered god, the Aten.
As a second son, young Amenhotep was never expected to be king, but between year 16 and 27 of his father’s reign, his older brother Thutmosis died leaving him as sole heir to the throne.
Just before Amenhotep IV, as he was crowned, came to the throne he married an unknown woman named Nefertiti. Her parentage is one of the many things about the Amarna period that is hotly debated. One prominent theory is that she was a cousin of Amenhotep IV.
Her father is thought to be Ay, the brother of queen Tiye and the king who followed Tutankhamun onto the throne.
Together they had six children, all girls: Meritaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenepaten (the future wife of Tutankhamun), Neferneferuaten, Neferneferure and Setepenre.
Nefertiti however was not the only wife of Akhenaten, and written evidence shows he had at least four wives: Nefertiti, Kiya (the mother of Tutankhamun), Tadukhipa, a Babylonian princess, and his own daughter Ankhesenepaaten, who later married Smenkhkare and Tutankhamun.
Akhenaten and Ankhesenepaaten also possibly had a child together called Ankhesenepaaten Tasherit (The Younger).
The Aten
There was nothing remarkable about Amenhotep before he became king – nothing to suggest he would utterly reject traditional religion and culture. He grew up at Memphis and was raised within the traditional religious culture that comprised a rich pantheon of gods. However, once he became king, Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) abandoned all of these deities, replacing them with the Aten – the solar disc.
The Aten, however, was not a new god. Aten was already part of the traditional Egyptian pantheon and was recorded as early as the twelfth dynasty (1991 – 1782 BCE) in the Coffin Texts.
Aten was traditionally depicted as a man with the head of a falcon surmounted by a sun disc, very similar to images of Re-horakhty. Akhenaten abandoned this imagery and depicted the god as
“The Tell el Amarna period has had more nonsense written about it than any other period in Egyptian history”
a solar disc with sun rays emanating from it, each ending in hands holding ankhs to the mouths and noses of the royal family.
However, even this imagery is not new and is depicted on Amenhotep II’S stela at Giza (1453-1419 BCE). Akhenaten didn’t even start the reverence of the deity. This was started by his father Amenhotep III, as part of a campaign to restrict the ever-growing power of the priesthood of Amun located at Karnak temple. Akhenaten simply continued his father’s work but with more fervour.
Many modern writers believe that Akhenaten’s religion was monotheistic but this does not seem to be the case. One of the first acts of Akhenaten after he became king was, in year three, to write Aten’s name in a pair of cartouches.
This presented the divine name as part of a royal titulary and Aten was also given regnal years that were in line with those of the king. The king and the god were therefore closely intertwined, to the extent that the royal heb-sed festival showing the prowess of the king, was celebrated together as two gods/two kings.
It could be questioned whether Akhenaten was elevating his position to that of a god, or reducing the god’s position to that of king.
Either way, they were equal.
This equality was further emphasised with Akhenaten’s control over the personal religion of the Egyptian people. The only people able to worship Aten directly were the royal family. Everyone else in Egypt was expected to worship Akhenaten, who would converse with the Aten on their behalf. This suggests there were in fact two gods of equal divinity – Akhenaten and Aten.
It wasn’t until year nine of his reign that Akhenaten’s religious fanaticism went to extremes. He closed all other temples in Egypt and diverted all their revenue to the temples of the Aten at
Tell el Amarna. Some years later he started a hate