Akhenaten

The boy who would become Akhenaten was born as Prince Amenhotep, the younger son of Amenhotep III, a pharaoh so magnificent that his courtiers called him the Dazzling Sun Disk, and Queen Tiye, a common-born wife raised to be the most powerful woman in the land. His father's reign of nearly forty years was the golden afternoon of the Egyptian empire, an age when gold poured in from the mines of Nubia, the African land to the south, and tribute flowed from the vassal kings of Syria and Canaan. Amenhotep III covered Thebes, the southern capital, with temples, raised the two seated giants that travellers call the Colossi of Memnon, and filled the sanctuaries of Amun, the hidden king of the gods, with such wealth that the god's high priests had become a power to rival the throne. The young prince grew up in this glittering court, but he was not the heir. His elder brother Thutmose was groomed for kingship until the boy died young, and the crown fell to a second son who had spent his youth in the shadow of others, drawn already to a god his father had only begun to favour: the Aten, the visible disk of the sun itself.

Amenhotep IV took the throne around 1353 BCE, and within three years the court knew that something unprecedented was coming. At Karnak, the vast temple precinct of Amun on the east bank of Thebes, he raised an entire temple to the Aten called the Gempaaten, built not from great stone blocks but from talatat, small standardised stones that one man could carry, so that whole walls rose in months instead of years. There, in his third year, he celebrated a sed festival, the ancient jubilee that renewed a king's strength, but dedicated it not to Amun or any of the old gods, only to the Aten. In his fifth year he abandoned his own name. Amenhotep meant Amun is Satisfied, and the king would no longer carry the name of a god he had come to despise. He became Akhenaten, Effective for the Aten, and proclaimed that there was no other god but the sun disk, whose rays reach down to touch every land and every face. Then he struck at the old order. The temples of Amun were closed, their revenues seized, their priests scattered. Work gangs were sent across Egypt with chisels to hack the name of Amun from obelisks, statues, and coffins, and sometimes even the plural word gods was gouged out, as though the very idea of many gods had become an obscenity.

In that same fifth year, Akhenaten announced that the Aten had chosen a home. On an empty stretch of desert on the east bank of the Nile, halfway between Thebes, the southern religious capital, and Memphis, the ancient northern seat of kings, enclosed by a great arc of cliffs, he founded Akhetaten, the Horizon of the Aten, and swore by his god that he would never leave it. On massive stone slabs called stelae, carved into the cliff faces that ringed the plain, he recorded his proclamation: no other god had told him of this place, no king had claimed it before him, and he would build there a city that belonged to the Aten alone. The city rose with astonishing speed, laid out along a Royal Road where the king and queen rode in chariots of gold each morning, mirroring the journey of the sun across the sky. At its heart stood the Great Temple of the Aten, a temple unlike any Egypt had seen: open to the sky, with no dark sanctuary and no hidden statue, for the god was the sunlight itself, and its floor was crowded with hundreds of offering tables heaped with bread and flowers. Beside it stood the palace with its Window of Appearances, a balcony where the royal family leaned out to shower gold collars upon favoured courtiers. Nefertiti, the Great Royal Wife, stood beside her husband as a living partner in the cult, her own name lengthened to Neferneferuaten, Perfect is the Perfection of the Aten, and around them gathered their six daughters, the little princesses who appear in the art of the city clinging to their parents' knees.

The art of Akhetaten broke every rule that Egyptian artists had kept for fifteen centuries. Where pharaohs had always been carved as flawless, broad-shouldered conquerors, Akhenaten allowed himself to be shown with a long jaw, heavy-lidded eyes, full lips, a swelling belly, wide hips, and spindly limbs, a body so strange that later ages would argue over whether it recorded a disease, a deliberate symbol, or both. Stranger still were the scenes of his family: the king lifting a daughter to his lips for a kiss, the queen with a princess on her lap, the whole household bathed in the rays of the Aten, each ray ending in a little hand that touched their faces and offered the ankh, the looped cross of life. In the cliff tombs of his courtiers the king's faith found its voice in the Great Hymn to the Aten, a poem that praises the sun rising over the Two Lands, the ancient name for Upper and Lower Egypt, waking the sleeping, feeding the fish in the river and the chick breaking its shell, and declares that no one knows the god except the king, his son, whom the Aten has made wise. Yet while the court contemplated the sun, the empire strained. In a storeroom of the palace, later excavators found the Amarna Letters, hundreds of clay tablets written in the cuneiform script of Babylon: letters from the great kings of Assyria, Mitanni, and the Hittites, the rival superpowers of the age, and desperate pleas from the vassal princes of Canaan begging for gold, for troops, for any sign that Egypt still ruled. Rib-Hadda of Byblos, a loyal coastal prince, wrote dozens of times as his enemies closed in. The archive suggests a court that answered slowly, or not at all.

The final years of the reign darkened. Around the twelfth year the court celebrated a great durbar, a gathering of tribute from every corner of the empire, but deaths began to hollow out the royal house. Queen Tiye, the king's formidable mother, died, and so did Meketaten, the second daughter, whose burial scene in the royal tomb shows the king and queen bent over her small body while a nurse holds a newborn infant nearby, a detail that has led many to suspect she died in childbirth. Nefertiti fades from the record, and a shadowy figure named Smenkhkare appears as a brief co-regent, followed by Neferneferuaten, a ruler whose sex and identity are still argued over. In his seventeenth year, around 1336 BCE, Akhenaten died, no older than his late thirties, and was carried up a lonely wadi east of the city to a tomb cut in the cliffs, where his sarcophagus lay beneath carved rays of the sun. He was not left to rest. Within a few years the throne passed to a child, Tutankhaten, the Living Image of the Aten, who changed his name to Tutankhamun, abandoned Akhetaten, and issued a stela declaring that the temples had fallen to ruin and the gods had turned their backs on Egypt. Then came Horemheb, a general who seized the crown and set about annihilating the heresy. His crews dismantled the Aten temples and buried the talatat blocks inside the great pylons of Karnak as hidden fill. The names of Akhenaten and his heirs were cut out of the official king lists, so that later lists step straight from Amenhotep III to Horemheb as if thirty years had never happened. When later scribes needed to mention the heretic at all, they called him only the enemy of Akhetaten.

The city he had sworn never to leave crumbled into the sand, its bricks robbed for farms, its name forgotten for three thousand years. Then, in the nineteenth century, European travellers found the boundary stelae in the cliffs and began to copy their strange hymn. In the 1890s the English archaeologist Flinders Petrie excavated the ruined city and uncovered painted palace pavements where wild ducks still flew across plaster marshes under the feet of kings. In 1912 a German expedition under Ludwig Borchardt found the painted limestone bust of Nefertiti in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose, and the face of the queen became, almost overnight, the face of ancient Egypt itself. Five years earlier, a smashed coffin had been lifted from a ransacked tomb in the Valley of the Kings, catalogued as KV55, its golden face hacked away and its royal names cut out. The skeleton inside, tested generations later, proved to be the father of Tutankhamun, and many now believe those lonely bones are Akhenaten himself. The modern world has never stopped arguing about him. The American scholar James Henry Breasted called him the first individual in human history. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, built his last book around the claim that Moses had carried the Aten's single god out of Egypt. Others have seen a tyrant who bankrupted an empire for a private vision. All of them, friend and enemy alike, still speak his forbidden name.