Akhenaten's religious revolution and why it failed

Lesson A ended with Egypt reunited and turned into a military power. The kings of the early New Kingdom drove out the Hyksos, pushed south into Nubia, and marched armies into the Levant. Now we turn to the most famous crisis inside that empire. It did not come from a foreign army. It came from a king, and from his ideas about the gods. First, two words. A religion is a set of beliefs and practices about the divine. A heresy is a belief that an established religion treats as dangerous and wrong. In this lesson, the word needs care. Ancient Egyptians had no word exactly like our "heresy," and no church that judged correct belief. Yet the Egyptians later treated this king as an enemy of the right order of things. So the word is useful, as long as we remember it is our word, not theirs. The king is Akhenaten. He ruled in the 18th Dynasty, roughly from 1353 to 1336 BCE. Dates for this period vary by a few years, depending on which chronology a scholar uses. A chronology is a system for fixing events in time. He was born with the name Amenhotep, and for the first years of his reign he was called Amenhotep IV. His father was Amenhotep III, who ruled in a time of great wealth and peace. His mother was Queen Tiye. His chief wife was Nefertiti. To understand why he did what he did, we must look at the Egypt he inherited. Lesson A showed how war brought wealth. Egyptian kings gave a large share of their plunder and tribute to the gods, and above all to Amun. Amun was a god of Thebes, and by this time he was joined with the sun god Re as Amun-Re, "king of the gods." His great temple at Karnak, in Thebes, grew enormously. It received land, gold, cattle and workers. Its priests managed all of this. A priesthood is the organised body of people who serve a god and run his temples. The priesthood of Amun-Re had become one of the richest institutions in the country. Some older historians described this as a direct threat. In that story, the priests were a rival power, and the young king rebelled to break them. Many modern scholars think this is overstated. The priests were not plotting against the throne. The king appointed them, and the wealth of the temples was in a sense the king's own gift. Still, a political motive is plausible. A king who wished to create a new source of loyalty might want to weaken a great, independent centre of wealth. We should hold this as a possibility, not a proven fact. There is also a religious background, and it matters more than people often think. The Aten was not invented by Akhenaten. The Aten was the visible disk of the sun, the physical sun in the sky. The word appears in Egyptian texts long before him. Under Amenhotep III, solar religion was prominent. One royal barge was named "Radiance of Aten." So the new king was taking up something already present and making it central. Now we follow the reign. In his early years, Amenhotep IV built temples to the Aten at Karnak itself, just east of the great precinct of Amun. This was already bold. The buildings were made with talatat. A talatat is a small sandstone block, light enough for one worker to carry, which allowed fast building. Tens of thousands of these blocks survive, and we will see why. The king also set up colossal statues of himself in a strange new style. They show a long face, a narrow chin, thick lips, a thin neck and heavy hips. Nothing like this had been shown on a king before. Around year 5 of his reign, a major change came. He took a new name, Akhenaten. A common interpretation is "effective for the Aten," though translations of the name vary. Names mattered deeply in Egypt. To change your name was to declare a new identity. At the same time he founded a new capital, Akhetaten, meaning "Horizon of the Aten." Its ruins lie at a place now called Amarna, in Middle Egypt, about halfway between Thebes in the south and the Delta in the north. Nobody had built on this site before. Akhenaten chose empty ground, not tied to any older god. We know a great deal about this decision because of the boundary stelae. A stela is an upright carved stone slab with an inscription. Akhenaten had a series of these cut into the cliffs around the city. They record his oath to found the city and to never go beyond its limits. They describe the plan of the place. They are primary sources, and they are very valuable. Their limit is that they give the king's own voice. They tell us what he wished to say, not what others thought. The city was built at great speed, in mudbrick and stone. It had palaces, a great temple to the Aten, offices, houses for officials, a village for workers, and tombs for the elite cut into the eastern cliffs. The court and the administration moved there. This was a huge disruption. Officials had to leave their homes and families' tombs and relocate to a desert site. Its speed shows how strongly the king wished to begin again. What did the new religion teach? Here the evidence is rich, though it must be read with care. In the art, the Aten is shown as a disk with long rays. Each ray ends in a small hand. Some of the hands hold the ankh, the sign of life, to the nose of the king and queen. This image is the heart of the faith. The god gives life, and he gives it through the royal family. Ordinary people did not pray directly to the Aten in the same way as to older gods. The king and his family stood between the god and the people. That is a crucial point, and we will return to it. The temples were also different. Traditional Egyptian temples grew darker and more enclosed as one moved inward, until the statue of the god sat in a shadowy sanctuary. The Aten's temples were open to the sky. The sun itself was the god, so it was worshipped in full light. The best-known text of the religion is the Great Hymn to the Aten. A hymn is a song or poem of praise to a god. This one survives in the tomb of Ay, a high official at Amarna, and shorter hymns appear in other tombs, such as that of Meryra. The Great Hymn praises the Aten as the creator and sustainer of all. It describes the world at night, when lions come out and snakes bite, and at dawn, when people rise and cattle graze. It says the Aten has made the lands of Syria and Nubia as well as Egypt, and has set each people in its place, with its own language and skin. This idea of a god who cares for foreign lands is striking. Scholars have long noticed parallels with Psalm 104 in the Hebrew Bible. Whether the psalm borrowed from the Egyptian hymn, or whether both drew on a shared tradition of praising a creator, is debated. We cannot prove direct borrowing. This leads to a famous question. Was this monotheism? Monotheism is the belief that only one god exists. Two related terms help. Monolatry is the worship of one god while not necessarily denying that others exist. Henotheism is devotion to one god above others, in a setting where many are accepted. Scholars disagree about which fits Akhenaten. Jan Assmann, a leading Egyptologist, stressed the exclusive character of the faith. He called it a "counter-religion," one defined by rejecting the old religion, in a way Egyptian tradition had never done. Other scholars point out that the king and the royal family were themselves worshipped in effect. The hymns often praise the king as the only one who truly knows the Aten. So the system was less a simple belief in one god than a belief in one god and his one son on earth. Because of this, many historians prefer to avoid the plain word "monotheism" or to use it with caution. You may also have heard that Moses learned his teaching from Akhenaten. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, proposed this in a book published in 1939. Mainstream historians do not accept it. There is no direct evidence linking the two, and the dates and sources do not support it. It is a famous idea, but not an established fact. Now to the harshest part of the story: the attack on other gods. In the early years, Akhenaten worshipped the Aten without openly banning others. Later, especially from around year 9, the name and images of Amun were attacked. Workers were sent to chisel Amun's name out of monuments across Egypt, even from tombs and from the cartouches of Akhenaten's own father. A cartouche is the oval ring around a king's name. In some places the plural word "gods" was also removed, and other deities were sometimes targeted. So the main target was Amun, but the attack at times went further. We must be careful about how far this went. Traditional temples were not all closed. Many ordinary priests and cults probably kept working in some form. How strictly the king enforced his wishes is debated. The evidence tells us about destruction on monuments, but less clearly about what happened in village shrines or homes. In fact, excavations at Amarna itself have found small figures of household gods, such as Bes and Taweret, who protected families, mothers and children. Even in the king's own city, ordinary people kept their old protective religion. Ancestor cults also appear to have continued. Next, the art. The Amarna style is among the most recognisable in the ancient world. Alongside the strange royal figures, we see scenes of intimate family life. The king and Nefertiti sit with their daughters. A daughter sits on her father's lap. The king kisses a child. Egyptian royal art had never shown such informal moments. Why did the style change? Some have suggested that Akhenaten had a medical condition, such as Marfan syndrome, and that the art shows his real body. Most scholars do not accept this. They lean toward a religious or ideological explanation. The king may have been shown as a being who combined male and female, a source of life like the Aten itself. Or the style may be a deliberate artistic convention that broke with the past. The truth is still debated, but medical diagnoses of ancient bodies from art are widely doubted. Beside religion, we must ask about foreign affairs. This is where the Amarna Letters matter. They are about 380 clay tablets, written in cuneiform, found at Amarna. Cuneiform is a script made by pressing a wedge-shaped tool into wet clay. It was the writing of Mesopotamia, and it was used across the Near East as the language of diplomacy. The Letters are messages between the Egyptian king and other rulers. Some are from great kings, such as the rulers of Babylon and Mitanni, who address Egypt as an equal and often ask for gold. Others come from vassals in Canaan and Syria. A vassal is a ruler who holds power under the authority of a stronger king and owes him loyalty. Many of these vassals write in fear. They report threats from the Hittites, from raiders, and from rivals such as Aziru, ruler of Amurru. They ask for troops, for grain, for gold. Egyptian replies were often weak or slow. Older historians read these letters and concluded that Akhenaten was so lost in religion that he let the empire crumble. This is now widely seen as exaggerated. Egypt kept most of its holdings. The letters show vassals who complained constantly, but complaint was normal, and each ruler had reasons to exaggerate his need. The collection is also incomplete. We have the letters that were kept at Amarna, not the full record of Egyptian replies and actions. So we should say that Egypt's hold in the north was under strain, but we cannot prove that Akhenaten simply abandoned it. Now to the central question. Why did the revolution fail? The first reason is that the faith depended on one man. It had no deep popular base. Egyptian religion was woven into daily life through festivals, local gods, family rites and a calendar of celebrations. The new faith offered little of this. Since ordinary access to the god ran through the king, the religion had few institutions beyond the royal court. When the king was gone, there was little to hold it up. Think of a building with one pillar. When the pillar falls, the whole thing falls. The second reason is that the old interests survived. The priesthood of Amun and the wider temple economy kept resources, local influence and the loyalty of many officials. The old religion was embedded in how people understood the world. Akhenaten could chisel names off stone, but he could not remove a way of life. The third reason is dynastic weakness. A dynasty is a line of rulers from one family. After Akhenaten died, around 1336 BCE, the succession was murky. Several figures appear briefly. One is Smenkhkare. Another is a ruler called Neferneferuaten. Who these people were, and how they were related to Akhenaten, is debated. Some scholars propose that Neferneferuaten was Nefertiti herself ruling as king, but this is a proposal, not a certainty. Then came Tutankhamun, who was a child. He was born Tutankhaten, "living image of the Aten." Within his first few years he changed his name to Tutankhamun, "living image of Amun." He restored the old temples and returned to the traditional centres of Thebes and Memphis. Real power was held by senior advisers. Two stand out. Ay, who had been an official at Amarna, and Horemheb, a military commander. A key source is the Restoration Stela of Tutankhamun. It describes the temples as fallen into ruin, the shrines overgrown, and the gods turned away from the land. If the gods were not called on, it says, they would not hear. We must remember this is a political text. It was written by the new regime, which had every reason to paint the recent past as a disaster and itself as the cure. Its picture may be true in part, but it is not neutral. The fourth reason is reversal and erasure. Tutankhamun, Ay and above all Horemheb took apart the Amarna temples. The talatat blocks were light and easy to carry, so they were reused as fill inside new buildings. Horemheb used huge numbers of them inside pylons at Karnak. A pylon is the great sloping gateway of an Egyptian temple. This is why we have so many talatat today. Later builders hid the king's temples inside their own walls, and modern archaeologists have taken them out. The king's name also vanished from official memory. Later king lists, such as the Abydos list and the Saqqara list, leave out Akhenaten and his immediate successors. A king list is a record of rulers in order. Some texts refer to him not by name but as "the enemy" or "that criminal of Akhetaten." The city itself was abandoned. How systematic was this? Here historians add nuance. The Latin phrase damnatio memoriae means "condemnation of memory," the deliberate erasing of someone from the record. Some see exactly this. Others point out that much of the destruction is dated to Horemheb and to the Ramesside era, the time of the 19th Dynasty, rather than to the immediate aftermath. That suggests a process that ran over decades, mixing deliberate punishment with neglect and practical reuse of stone. A fifth possible reason is social strain. Excavations of the Amarna cemetery suggest hard conditions for some workers, with signs of heavy labour and poor health. Hittite texts also mention a plague in the Near East in this period. But whether it struck Egypt, and whether it helped end Amarna, is speculative. We should say plainly that this is a possibility, not a conclusion. Some other debates are worth knowing. One is whether Akhenaten shared the throne with his father. A coregency is a period when two kings rule together. Scholars have argued for anything from none to as long as twelve years. William Murnane and Cyril Aldred argued for one. Kenneth Kitchen and Donald Redford argued against a long one. The evidence is ambiguous, and recent opinion leans toward none or a short one. Another is the king's body. His tomb at Amarna was damaged, and the fate of his body is unknown. A mummy found in tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings has been identified by many as Akhenaten, or perhaps Smenkhkare. DNA studies suggested it was the father of Tutankhamun, but interpretations remain contested. Finally, the rediscovery. Amarna was explored by Flinders Petrie in 1891 and 1892. In 1912 a German team under Ludwig Borchardt found the famous painted bust of Nefertiti. Since then, views of Akhenaten have varied widely. Some have called him the first individual in history, a visionary of religion. Others see a practical political reformer who used religion to strengthen the crown. Scholars such as Redford, Assmann, Aldred, Nicholas Reeves and Dominic Montserrat each offer different views, and the debate continues. The best way to see the lesson is this. Akhenaten had the power of a god-king, and he used it to try to change the beliefs of an entire land. For a time, it worked on the surface. But a religion cannot rest on one person's command. It needs habit, community and shared meaning, and Egypt already had these in the old gods. After his death, the system he built was dismantled within a generation or two. This leads us to what comes next. The restored Egypt was ruled by Horemheb, and then by a new dynasty, the 19th, whose kings were soldiers. Having seen how weak the empire looked in the Amarna Letters, they would work to rebuild it. Our next lessons follow the Ramesside kings, above all Ramesses II, and the great clash with the Hittites in the north.