The reign of Akhenaten

The story

A pharaoh who changes his name and his capital

Around 1353 BC a young king named Amenhotep IV came to the throne of Egypt, son of Amenhotep III, the richest and most powerful pharaoh of his time. For four years he seemed a king like the others. Then, in the fifth year of his reign, he took a decision that astonished the whole country: he changed his name to Akhenaten, usually translated “he who is useful to Aten”, and decided to build a new city, in an empty place in the desert, halfway between Memphis and Thebes, where nobody had lived before. He called it Akhetaten, “the horizon of Aten”. Today we call it Amarna.

Aten was the disc of the Sun, a very ancient form of the sun god, but until then he had been one god among many. Akhenaten wanted to put him first, and then, it seems, alone. He had great roofless temples built, into which the Sun shone directly, and had Aten shown as a disc from which many rays come down ending in little hands, which hold out the sign of life to the royal family. A famous hymn, the Great Hymn to the Aten, thanks him for light, for animals, for the river, for every creature.

What about all the other gods?

Before Akhenaten the Egyptians honoured many gods, and the most powerful was Amun, the god of Thebes, who had very rich and influential priests. Akhenaten closed the temples of Amun, had his name erased from monuments and reduced the worship of the other gods. Historians ask why. Some think he really wanted to change religion, others that he wanted to weaken the priests' power. Still others believe that his reform, however radical, involved above all the court and not the people.

Even the description “monotheist” is debated. Aten was the only god worshipped by the king, but the pharaoh himself was presented as his only son and intermediary: ordinary people were asked to pray to the king, who prayed to Aten. For this reason many scholars use more cautious words. In the twentieth century the question was taken up by various authors, among them Sigmund Freud, who suggested a link with Moses. It is a fascinating idea, but so far without evidence.

A city in a few years, a new art

Amarna was built in a hurry, with bricks and small blocks. It had a palace, great temples, houses of nobles, workshops and, at the edges, tombs cut into the rock. It lasted less than twenty years. Archaeologists digging it have found a district of houses where craftsmen and officials lived. In a workshop, in 1912, a German team led by Ludwig Borchardt discovered the painted limestone bust of Nefertiti, the queen, now in Berlin: one of the most famous faces of all antiquity.

Art changed too. Until then Egyptian kings had themselves shown young, strong and perfect. In the images of Amarna Akhenaten has a long face, an elongated chin, full lips, a soft belly and wide hips. The style has been explained in many ways: an illness of the king (there have been many theories, but none is proven), an artistic choice to show the god Aten as father and mother together, or a way of expressing the newness of the reign. For the first time scenes of family life appear: the king and queen seated with their daughters, the little girls in their parents' arms, playing with their father.

The Amarna letters

In 1887 a peasant woman discovered in the ruins of Amarna a heap of clay tablets. There were 382 letters, written in cuneiform and in Akkadian, the language of diplomacy of the time. They are letters exchanged between the pharaoh and the kings of Babylon, Mitanni and the Hittites, and with governors of cities in Syria and Canaan. The kings call one another “brothers” and complain that the gold has not been sent in sufficient quantity, ask for brides for their sons, describe wars and rivalries. They are a treasure of information on how international politics worked 3,400 years ago.

The end of an experiment

Akhenaten died around 1336 BC, after about seventeen years of reign. Where his body is, nobody knows: the tomb prepared for him at Amarna has not yielded the mummy, and the one found in tomb KV55, in the Valley of the Kings, has been attributed to him (the 2010 DNA analyses point to it as the father of Tutankhamun), but many scholars dispute the identification and some assign it to Smenkhkare. After him a mysterious pharaoh reigned briefly, and then a child, Tutankhaten, who a few years later changed his name to Tutankhamun. He was probably the son of Akhenaten. The young king reopened the temples of Amun and brought the capital back to Memphis and Thebes; Amarna was abandoned and its bricks reused elsewhere.

Later the pharaohs tried to erase even the memory of that age. Akhenaten does not appear in the official lists of kings, and is called “the enemy of Akhetaten”. For this reason he was almost forgotten until the 19th century, when excavations brought him back to light.