Akhenaten

Akhenaten was a pharaoh of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty who reigned for about seventeen years, around 1353 to 1336 BCE (some chronologies place it two years later). Born Amenhotep, he abandoned the worship of Egypt's many gods in favour of a single deity, the Aten or sun disc, built a new capital at Amarna, and encouraged a strikingly new style of art. His reforms were reversed soon after his death and his name was erased by later kings, but modern archaeology has made him one of the most discussed rulers of the ancient world.

He was a younger son of Amenhotep III, one of the wealthiest and most powerful kings of the New Kingdom, and his chief wife Tiye. An elder brother, the crown prince Thutmose, died young, leaving Amenhotep as heir. Almost nothing is known of his early life, and even his date of birth is an estimate, probably in the 1360s BCE. Some Egyptologists once argued that he shared the throne with his father for many years, but the case for a long co-regency has weakened, and most now think he succeeded Amenhotep III directly or after only a brief overlap.

He came to the throne as Amenhotep IV, with Nefertiti as his great royal wife. From the start he favoured the Aten, a form of the sun god previously of modest importance. At Karnak, the great temple complex of Amun at Thebes, he built several temples to the Aten, decorated in a new style and open to the sky so that the sun's rays could reach the altars. In about his fifth year he took the name Akhenaten, "effective for the Aten", and announced the founding of a new city.

The city, called Akhetaten, "horizon of the Aten", was laid out on an empty stretch of the Nile's east bank roughly halfway between Thebes and Memphis, at the site now known as Amarna. Boundary stelae carved into the cliffs marked its limits and recorded the king's vow never to leave them. Within a few years it held palaces, open-air temples, government offices, workshops and houses for tens of thousands of people.

What Akhenaten's religion amounted to is still argued over. The Aten was presented as the sole creator, a light-giving force without human or animal form, shown as a disc whose rays end in small hands offering life to the royal family. Over time the cult became more exclusive: the name of Amun was hacked out of monuments across the country, the word "gods" in the plural was sometimes removed, and the temples of other deities lost royal support. Some scholars call this the first known monotheism; others prefer terms such as henotheism or monolatry, the worship of one god without necessarily denying others, and point out that ordinary people at Amarna kept household images of traditional gods. The king and queen stood at the centre of the system as the only true intermediaries with the Aten. The Great Hymn to the Aten, found in the Amarna tomb of the official Ay and possibly composed by the king, praises the sun as maker and sustainer of all living things; its resemblance to Psalm 104 in the Hebrew Bible has often been noted, though whether there is any direct link is uncertain.

The art of the period broke with centuries of convention. The king was shown with a long face, narrow shoulders, a swollen belly and wide hips, and the royal family appeared in intimate scenes, kissing and playing with their daughters. Earlier theories that these images reflect a medical disorder have mostly been set aside, since examinations of the KV55 skeleton found no such condition, and the style is now usually read as religious symbolism. Written texts also began to use the everyday language of the time, Late Egyptian, more than before.

The Amarna letters, a cache of over 380 clay tablets found at the site from 1887 onwards and written mostly in Akkadian, preserve part of the court's diplomatic correspondence. They include letters from the kings of Babylonia, Assyria, Mitanni and the Hittites, and many from Egypt's vassal rulers in Canaan and Syria complaining of local wars and asking for troops. Older writers concluded that Akhenaten, absorbed in religion, neglected the empire. Most historians now think that picture is too simple: Egyptian control of its Levantine provinces was largely maintained, though the rise of the Hittites under Suppiluliuma I cost Egypt influence in northern Syria.

Akhenaten had at least six daughters with Nefertiti, and another child with a secondary wife, Kiya. One daughter, Meketaten, died around year 13 or 14 and is shown being mourned in the royal tomb. Nefertiti was once thought to have vanished or fallen from favour around year 12, but an inscription found in 2012 in a quarry at Dayr Abu Hinnis shows she was still queen in year 16. Near the end of the reign a co-ruler appears, known as Smenkhkare and also under the name Neferneferuaten; whether these were one or two people, and whether one of them was Nefertiti, is unresolved.

Akhenaten died in his seventeenth regnal year and was buried in the royal tomb at Amarna. His remains were probably moved to Thebes when the city was abandoned. A male mummy from tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings, found in 1907, has been identified by DNA work as the father of Tutankhamun, and many scholars believe it is Akhenaten, but others argue it is Smenkhkare, and the question remains open.

Within a few years of his death, the court left Amarna and the young Tutankhamun restored the old gods. Under Horemheb and the kings of the following dynasty, Akhenaten's temples were dismantled and their blocks reused as filling in other buildings, his statues were smashed, and he was left out of the official lists of kings. Later records refer to him only as "the enemy" or "that criminal".

He re-emerged in the nineteenth century, when travellers and then archaeologists such as Flinders Petrie began to study Amarna's ruins and the reused blocks. The figure of a lone religious visionary drew writers, artists and thinkers; Sigmund Freud, in Moses and Monotheism, speculated that Moses had been an Egyptian follower of the Aten, a theory without support among historians. Opinion on the king remains divided between those who see a bold thinker and those who see an autocrat who used religion to concentrate power in his own person. His reign is a key chapter in the story of ancient Egypt told on the History of Egypt page.