And the archaeological record has always been thin enough to allow for excavations of the imagination. Dominic Montserrat, whose Akhenaten book is subtitled History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt, noted that we often take scattered evidence from ancient times and organize it into narratives that make sense in our world. That modern mirror of Akhenaten has reflected almost every identity imaginable.
The king has been portrayed as a proto-Christian, a peace-loving environmentalist, an out-and-proud homosexual, and a totalitarian dictator. His image was embraced with equal enthusiasm by both the Nazis and the Afrocentrist movement.
When Philip Glass wrote three operas about visionary thinkers, his trinity consisted of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, and Akhenaten. Sigmund Freud once fainted during a heated argument with Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung about whether the Egyptian king had suffered from excessive love of his mother.
Archaeologists always tried to resist such interpretations, but key pieces of the puzzle were missing. Much study of Amarna has focused on elite culture: royal sculpture and architecture, and inscriptions from the tombs of high officials. After the discovery, archaeologists and bioarchaeologists spent nearly a decade excavating and analyzing the largest of these cemeteries. They collected a sample of skeletons from at least people, and their findings were grim.
Of the burials where age at death was known, 70 percent of the individuals had died before reaching 35, and only nine appear to have lived beyond More than one-third were dead before they turned The growth patterns of children were delayed by as much as two years. Many adults had suffered spinal damage, which bioarchaeologists believe is evidence that people were being overworked, perhaps in order to build the new capital.
In the team proceeded to another cemetery, to the north of Amarna, where they excavated bodies. Anna Stevens, an Australian archaeologist who directs the cemetery fieldwork, told me that excavators soon noticed something different about these burials.
Many of the bodies appear to have been buried hastily, in graves that contain almost no goods or objects. They were young—92 percent of the individuals in this cemetery were no older than More than half died between the ages of seven and Is this a group of workers who are being conscripted on the basis of their youth—and effectively being worked to death? For Akhenaten, Amarna represented something pure and profoundly visionary.
He chose the site, a broad stretch of virgin desert above the east bank of the Nile, because it was uncontaminated by the worship of any god. He also may have been motivated by the example of his father, Amenhotep III, who was one of the greatest builders of monuments, temples, and palaces in Egyptian history.
Both kings were part of the 18th dynasty, which came to power after defeating the Hyksos, a group from the eastern Mediterranean that had invaded northern Egypt. The forefathers of the 18th dynasty were based in southern Egypt, and in order to drive out the Hyksos, they incorporated key innovations from their enemy, including the horse-drawn chariot and the composite bow.
The Egyptians professionalized their military, and unlike most previous dynasties, the 18th maintained a standing army. They were also skilled at diplomacy, and the empire eventually stretched from current-day Sudan to Syria. Foreigners brought new wealth and skills to the Egyptian court, and the effects were profound. Even as Amenhotep III welcomed new ideas, he was also looking back to the distant past.
He studied the pyramids of kings who had lived more than a thousand years earlier, and he incorporated traditional elements into festivals, temples, and royal palaces. He continued to worship Amun, who was the patron god of the city of Thebes.
But Amenhotep III also began to emphasize Aten, a form of the sun god Re, portrayed as a solar disk, that recalled older patterns of worship. He changed his name to Akhenaten—Devoted to Aten—and he decided to move the capital to the site now known as Amarna. The king called his city Akhetaten, or Horizon of the Sun Disk, and soon this stretch of empty desert became home to an estimated 30, people.
Meanwhile Egyptian art was also being revolutionized. For centuries strict traditions had defined the correct subject matter, proportions, and poses of paintings and sculptures. Under Akhenaten, artisans were unleashed from these guidelines. They created lifelike, fluid scenes of the natural world, and they began to portray Akhenaten and his queen, Nefertiti, in unusually natural and intimate poses. Often the royal couple would be shown kissing and caressing their daughters; one scene even featured the king and queen about to get into bed together.
Egyptians worshipped as many as a thousand gods, but Akhenaten was loyal only to one. He and Nefertiti functioned as the sole intermediaries between the people and Aten, taking on the traditional role of the priesthood.
All of this must have threatened priests of the old order who served Amun. After a few years at Amarna, the pharaoh ordered work crews to gouge out all images of Amun in state temples.
It was an act of unbelievable boldness: the first time in history that a king had attacked a god. I arrived at the site of the Great Aten Temple one day just as Barry Kemp found a piece of a broken statue of Akhenaten.
He abandoned Amarna and returned to the old traditions. Tutankhamun died unexpectedly, and soon the head of the army, Horemheb, declared himself pharaoh—possibly the first military coup in history. They destroyed statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and they omitted the names of the heretic king and his successors from official lists of Egyptian rulers. People simply forgot that it was there.
However, as he implemented new religious ideas, royal art evolved to reflect the concepts of Atenism. The most striking changes are seen in the appearance of the royal family. Heads became larger than in the traditional style and were supported by elongated and slender necks.
The royal family took on a more androgynous appearance that sometimes even obscured the difference between Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti. Their faces were characterized by large lips, long noses and squinting eyes, and their bodies displayed narrow shoulders and waists, small and somewhat concave torsos and large thighs, buttocks and bellies. The king proclaimed that the Aten had manifested itself for the first time on the site and that the Aten had chosen this site for the king alone.
Most of the township and administration buildings were completed roughly three years later. The king most likely died during his 17th regnal year, as this is the highest date attested for him. But uncertainties surround his demise.
The royal tomb intended for Akhenaten at Amarna did not contain a royal burial, which prompts the question of what happened to the body. Several scholars have suggested that a skeleton found in tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings could belong to Akhenaten, because the tomb contained numerous grave goods including the coffin in which the remains were found belonging to Akhenaten and other Amarna period figures.
However, like many topics pertaining to Akhenaten, this issue remains the subject of much scholarly debate. Montserrat, Dominic Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt. Aside from his changes to the Egyptian religion, Akhenaten also ordered a transformation in Egyptian art. Before his reign, Egyptian art was characterized by its lack of realism; people were often drawn with their heads facing the wrong way, for example, in case they came alive and attacked their creators.
Nefertiti ruled alongside Akhenaten as the second-in-command of Egypt and was renowned for her wisdom and good looks. The enmity held towards him might be why his body was never discovered — some historians believe that it was destroyed shortly after its burial.
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