Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten
by Hinde LiepmannsohnAkhenaten was an enigmatic pharaoh of Ancient Egypt who was viewed by some as a visionary, and branded by others as heretic and criminal. Akhenaten is believed to have been born between 1362 BC and 1379 BC and became king between 1351 BC and 1336 BC.
Akhenaten and His Family
Akhenaten married and made the beautiful Nefertiti his wife and Queen of Egypt. The exact dates of the marriage and when she became Queen are uncertain. Nefertiti was one of the most beautiful women of the ancient world and also one of the most powerful. She is portrayed in Egyptian art doing things in ways that other queens never are, such as wearing a pharaoh’s crown. They reportedly had six daughters and ruled Egypt in the middle of the 14th century B.C. for just twenty years.
Pharaoh Akhenaten and Nefertiti first made a name for themselves in Thebes, the capitol of Egypt during the 14th century B.C. The conquest of foreign lands from Sudan in the south to present day Syria in the north proved very successful. They had brought untold power and riches to the Ancient Egyptian Empire. Thebes, modern day Luxor, was its capitol, and Karnak its main temple. Larger than the Vatican, Karnak was built more than 3,000 years ago when Egypt’s religion was polytheism, belief in many gods. The king with his priests prayed to these gods on behalf of his people. Yet, in a startling move, Akhenaten started promoting another god to rival status.
The Reign of Akhenaten and His Religious Reforms
At the surprise of the Egyptians, Akhenaten abandoned the Egyptian god Amun in favor of a different god, the Aten or sun disk. His father, the previous King Amenhoteph III, was already leaning towards sun worship. There are colossal statues of Amenhoteph III, Akhenaten’s father, himself positioned to catch the first beam of light from the rising sun. Such overt homage to the sun god was unusual at the time but that is as far as this pharaoh dared to go. His son, Akhenaten and his religious reforms, believed the sun deserved its own full blown cult. The sun god was as old as ancient Egypt. He had been worshipped by the first dynasties one thousand years earlier during the time of the pyramids.
Akhenaten’s decision shocked the influential army of Amun worshipping priests. They expected their pharaoh to worship Amun, god of fertility and creation above all other gods. The god was symbolized by his two feathered crown. Each year the Amun cult staged a popular procession along the river Nile of floating shrines with statues of the gods.
Five years into his reign, pharaoh Akhenaten unleashed another shockwave. Thebes, he announced, was too closely linked to Amun and unsuitable for the Aten. The sun disk needed its own holy city. After scouring the length of the Nile, he came upon a site in the middle of Egypt. This location was exactly half way between Thebes and Memphis, about 170 miles from each.
The shores where Akhenaten landed were in a region now called Amarna. It was desolate and remote, but it was still where King Akhenaten decided to build his new capitol. The king gave his reasons in writing, and they can still be read today on top of the cliffs overlooking the city. A symbol of the Aten has been carved into the rock as a boundary maker.
In Egyptian belief, the horizon where the sun rose was called the Aket and was symbolized by two mountain peaks with the sun disk rising between them. The hills that surround the Amarna plane are suddenly interrupted by a break in the cliffs, a sight to behold especially at dawn. The king must have thought he’d found the sacred birth place of the sun god. He named his city Aketaten, horizon of the sun disk. Akhenaten charged Thutmosis his best artist and favorite sculptor, with the job of turning his dream into reality.
How and When Akhenaten Died
In his late thirties and after seventeen years of absolute rule, Pharaoh Akhenaten disappears from the records. No one knows what happened. The royal tomb was found empty. Some believe he was a victim of a plague; others claim he died a natural death. A new theory suggests he may have been the victim of a conspiracy. The name of Akhenaten is not present on a list of pharaoh found in Egypt. It is believed there was an active campaign to erase Akhenaten’s reign from ancient Egyptian history.
Whoever succeeded when Pharaoh Akhenaten died had a short lived reign. What is known is the identity of the next pharaoh, a boy of nine who ruled Egypt for a decade, Tutankhamun, better known as King Tut. Tutankhamun’s parents are a mystery. Many think he was Akhenaten’s only son, born to him by a lesser wife.
Akhenaten’s Tomb
Pharaoh Akhenaten’s ultimate ambition is revealed in a radically new view of the afterlife. Traditionally, the spirit of the dead was believed to set in the west with the dying sun where it would meet Osiris the god of resurrection and receive the power of rebirth. In the morning as the sun rose in the east so to the spirit would rise from the door of its tomb and come out to live among the living.
The Aket, in ancient Egyptian belief, was a place in which the sun spent perhaps as much as an hour before rising in the morning. It was seen as a period of transition between the netherworld and the world of the day. It was a place also where the sun received the final effective form that it needed to come to life again in the morning. It has been argued that the tomb was position there for his soul to rise as one with the Aten, when Akhenaten died. As a result, his soul would be bypassing the journey to the underworld to meet Osiris the god of resurrection. This heresy must have frightened Egyptians of the day.
An inside into his thinking can be gleaned from his tomb. Like all pharaohs Akhenaten built his tomb while he was still alive. The noble’s tombs in the Amarna plane were cut into the surrounding cliffs, but not his. He built his four miles further east deep into a valley that winds its way through the desert. It has always been a mystery why the royal tomb is so remote. The highlight of the tomb is a religious text carved on one of the walls. It is a hymn dedicated to the sun god Aten. It has been compared to a song found in the Bible. This hymn is the very first recorded expression of monotheism, the belief that there is only on true god.
The Legacy of King Akhenaten
Because of his monotheism, Pharaoh Akhenaten comes across as a religious visionary ahead of his time, a forerunner of the great prophets of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
As in other cults ordinary people were kept out of the temple. Only the king and his priest could enter the inner sanctuary. But Akhenaten came up with a new idea for including the people in the worship of the Aten.
Akhenaten soon began to provoke greater controversy by changing the status of the king himself. The ancient Egyptians saw their kings as a vital link between the gods and humankind. It seems that Akhenaten was aspiring to a much more exalted position. He surprisingly depicted and informal scenes. These scenes showed the members of the royal family itself, and not the gods are the center of attention. In one of the scenes, the king and queen are shown mourning the death of a daughter. In another, Akhenaten is seen dining with his mother, or exchanging affectionate glances with Nefertiti.
It is believed that the pharaoh wished to convey to the ancient Egyptians that all life flew from himself and his queen just as it originally did from the gods. No pharaoh had ever associated himself with a god as closely as Akhenaten, and yet there are signs that he was aiming higher still.
