Akhenaten: A 'Heretic' To His People, A Revolutionary Pioneer To All.

Akhenaten the 'Heretic' King, though born Amenhotep IV, he would later change his birth name which meant "the living spirit of Aten".

I have always been fascinated by Ancient Egyptian mythology and culture since a very early age. The sheer richness of it's mythology and the ingenious majesty of it's grand architecture, particularly The Great Pyramids at Giza was what piqued my interest in the beginning. However, it wasn't long before I became completely engrossed in it all and it inevitably led me to delve in deeper. It almost became an obsession of sorts, and I wanted to know everything, every conceivable little detail no matter how insignificant or mundane, there was no stone left unturned. In my relentless quest for knowledge, I stumbled upon Egypt's 'heretic' king Akhenaten, a man who abandoned the traditional polytheistic (belief in many gods) beliefs that the Egyptians had held for centuries in favor of only one god, the 'Aten' or sun disk. It struck me that he was in fact the very first who made this incredibly bold and radical shift from established and incontestable tradition, and yet we still know very little of him or what truly motivated him to forsake conventional polytheism in favor of unorthodox monotheism.  Now, I don't need to point out the obvious similarities here, but I will get round to that later.

What we do know about him is that he was a pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty and was the son of Amenhotep III, also known as Amenhotep the Magnificent. His reign of 39 years was a period of exceptional prosperity and artistic splendor at a time when Egypt reached the height of its power. He would be known as the pharaoh who 'beautified' Egypt. Amenhotep III put an emphasis on construction as opposed to conquering other lands like his predecessors, since times were abundant and there was no real danger or threat. He expanded on many existing cities and constructed many temples during his reign including Malkata on the West Bank of the Nile at Thebes, the then capital of the unified Egypt and it was a site dedicated to housing and official chambers. However, his greatest and most noted achievement was the Temple of Amun at Karnak, better known today as the Precinct of Amun-Re which is the largest of the precincts at the temple, and still remains a popular tourist attraction. Amenhotep III died approximately between 1353 or 1351 BC after a reign of nearly 40 years, and his son Amenhotep IV immediately succeeded him and was crowned in Thebes.

The ruins of Amarna or Akhetaten which meant "Horizon of the Aten."

During the early days of his reign, Amenhotep IV was based in Thebes with his wife Nefertiti and his six daughters. In the beginning he permitted the worship of Egypt's traditional gods, however at the Temple of Karnak he decreed several massive buildings including temples to the Aten. The Aten itself was depicted as a sun disc, and was previously unheard of in traditional Egyptian architecture. The relationship between him and the priests of Amun-Re or the established order started to gradually decline and during about year five of his reign, Amenhotep IV took decisive action and eventually took it upon himself to establish the Aten as the sole, monotheistic god of all Egypt as opposed to his early henotheism (belief in one god while still accepting the existence of others). He "disbanded the priesthoods of all the other gods and diverted income from these other cults to support the Aten". To declare his complete allegiance to the Aten, the pharaoh then officially changed his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten which meant the "Living Spirit of Aten." Akhenaten then soon commissioned the building of Akhetaten (known today as Amarna) which would serve as the new centralized hub for all religious practices in Egypt. 

The pharaoh Arkhenaten giving an offering to the Aten. Notice his rather 'feminine' characteristics which was present in almost all known inscriptions of him.

This radical change must have come as quite a shock to the populace, and no doubt it incited much hostility and widespread indignation across Egypt. The idea that the gods they once revered were now suddenly declared obsolete in favor of just one, this must have been nothing short of heresy. Arkhenaten even went to the extremes of personally ordering the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt, and in many instances he had the inscriptions of the other gods removed all together. To those who aren't as familiar with Egyptian mythology Amun was a patron deity so called 'King of the Gods' and was undoubtedly the most venerable of all the Egyptian gods, particularly in the New Kingdom where he was "greatest expression of transcendental deity In Egyptian theology". Initially, Akhenaten presented Aten as merely a variant of the familiar supreme deity Amun-Re (itself the result of an earlier rise to prominence of the cult of Amun, resulting in Amun becoming merged with the sun god Ra), in an attempt to put his ideas in a familiar Egyptian religious context. However by year nine of his reign, his sheer devotion and allegiance to the Aten became so resolute and immovable he finally declared that Aten was not just the supreme god but the only god, and that he was the sole mediator between the Aten and his people. 

It's no surprise that his death, which is also shrouded in much mystery and speculation, marked the gradual decline of the Aten cult he had originally founded and it was quickly repudiated and fell out of complete favor. His conviction in his monotheistic beliefs and the very concept of a sole god was just too radical for his people to accept or follow and it wasn't long before the order of the old gods was finally restored after his 17 year reign. His later successors, particularly Ay and Horemheb worked tirelessly to remove all trace of the 'heretic' king and his 'legacy' by disassembling temples and monuments that Akhenaten had built, including the one at Thebes. The city of Akhetaten was abandoned and left to ruin by his own son and eventual 'boy king' Tutankhamun, though he was originally born Tutankhaten which meant "Living Image of Aten," he would later change it to Tutankhamun "Living Image of Amun." Later pharaohs would not even acknowledge he existed at all and any depiction of him or the Aten was completely destroyed or its material reused for other monuments, it's like they wanted to erase him completely from history. 

To his people he was branded a 'heretic', but if you look at it in the wider scope of things it's clear that he was undoubtedly the precursor to monotheism. The foundation of three of the world's largest faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam are based on the concept of a single god, a concept that began with Arkhenaten himself almost two centuries prior to the first archaeological and written evidence for Judaism and Israelite culture was even discovered in the Levant. Many have speculated the idea that Akhenaten was the pioneer of a monotheistic religion that later became Judaism. Sigmund Freud himself mentioned in his book Moses and Monotheism, that Moses himself had been an Atenist priest who was forced to flee Egypt with his followers shortly after Arkhenaten's death. Freud argued that Arkhenaten was endeavoring to advance his monotheism further, something that Moses from the Bible was able to achieve. This was an utterly fascinating notion to me and even though I'm not the first to bring up the subject, yet if it managed to mystify and fascinate not only scholars but arguably one of the finest minds of the 20th Century then this was definitely something worth looking into further. I was immediately struck by how much of a debate it was and still is to this day, and there's no denying Arkhenaten's legacy which his people tried so desperately to expunge completely.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam, three of worlds largest faiths are all monotheistic religions, a concept originally established by Akhenaten almost two hundred years prior.

There is no denying Akhenaten's influence on later religions, in fact pottery that was discovered throughout Judea dated almost to the end of the 8th century BC has seals almost resembling a winged 'sun disk' engraved on it's handles. Is this merely a coincidence? Maybe, but I don't think so. Other scholars have even juxtaposed aspects of Arkhenaten's relationship with the Aten to the relationship Jesus Christ had with God - particularly in interpretations that emphasize a more monotheistic explication of Atenism than henotheistic. The Canadian Egyptologist and archaeologist Donald B. Redford added that many have viewed Arkhenaten as a harbinger of Jesus himself. This is certainly feasible since a majority of Jesus's life was completely fictionalized and romanticized in The Bible anyway and that the earliest scribes may have been influenced directly or indirectly by what this Egyptian pharaoh had been expounding to the extent that they plagiarized some elements. Did they essentially pick and choose what to add, what to discard and what to simply build upon? Possible, no one can really know for sure after all most great works of art or fiction take inspiration from earlier sources and Arkhenaten and his relationship with the Aten may have been the muse. Akhenaten even described himself as "thy son who came forth from thy limbs", "thy child", "the eternal son that came forth from the Sun-Disc", and "thine only son that came forth from thy body". Notice the distinct similarity here?

Redford concluded that: "Before much of the archaeological evidence from Thebes and from Tell el-Amarna became available, wishful thinking sometimes turned Akhenaten into a humane teacher of the true God, a mentor of Moses, a Christlike figure, a philosopher before his time. But these imaginary creatures are now fading away one by one as the historical reality gradually emerges. There is little or no evidence to support the notion that Akhenaten was a progenitor of the full-blown monotheism that we find in the Bible. The monotheism of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament had its own separate development—one that began more than half a millennium after the pharaoh's death." That maybe so but it's still a tantalizing prospect that Arkhenaten's legacy may have played a direct role in shaping later monotheistic religions. He has been called by the historian James Henry Breasted and rightfully so "the first individual in history," undoubtedly the first monotheist, by definition you could even say the first scientist and romantic. A man who was steadfast in his convictions, irregardless of what his people thought. He defied convention and tradition and brought about a radicalism that Egypt had never seen and consequently would never ever see again. A true revolutionary who was way ahead of his time.

The English Egyptogolist Flinders Petrie declared that:
If this were a new religion, invented to satisfy our modern scientific conceptions, we could not find a flaw in the correctness of this view of the energy of the solar system. How much Akhenaten understood, we cannot say, but he certainly bounded forward in his views and symbolism to a position which we cannot logically improve upon at the present day. Not a rag of superstition or of falsity can be found clinging to this new worship evolved out of the old Aten of Heliopolis, the sole Lord of the universe.