I was a child when I learned about an unusual Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten. He worshipped a single god, Aten, the sun god. And unlike previous pharaohs, he brought to Egypt a more natural style of carving and sculpture, so different from the rigid, flat poses typical of Egypt’s past. (The carving above is of his wife, Nefertiti.) To many Americans in the 1950s, Akhenaten represented a foreshadowing of the monotheism to come, with perhaps a forewarning of Martin Luther as well, as Akhenaten was a rebel against the priestly establishment of 1350 B.C.
I have become reacquainted with Akhenaten while auditing a course in ancient Mediterranean civilizations at North Carolina State. It turns out that while Akhenaten’s impact on Egypt was fleeting, he has fascinated people, especially Europeans, for the past two hundred years. “The Akhenaten myth . . . is a unique barometer exploring the fascination of the West with ancient Egypt,” writes a historian Dominic Montserrat. [1] Even Sigmund Freud was fascinated by Akhenaten.
Akhenaten’s “cultural after-life” illustrates the adage that “all history is contemporary history.” [2] That is, people read into history what is meaningful to them. And they have read a lot into Akhenaten’s effort to overturn the old religion.
First, a summary of what we know about Akhenaten.
Akhenaten, born Amenhotep IV, was part of the New Kingdom of Egypt (c. 1500–1150 BC), a time when Egypt was united and prosperous. When Amenhotep became pharaoh, he changed his name to honor Aten, the sun god.
He forced out the priestly class at Thebes that worshipped the god Amun (whom he and his father had been named after). He removed all references to all gods but Aten and then created a new city, Akhetaten, with a temple dedicated to Aten. The new city, now El-Amarna, was almost completely open to the sun (with some places set aside for shade).
Akhenaten overhauled the Egyptian style of art, making it highly personal and sometimes depicting humans with exaggerated features (unlike the stylized figures of the past). The art emphasized his family and their friendly relationships, and sometimes portrayed Aten as a sun disk (a circle, not a face), with rays reaching out and hands that touched the family.
We don’t know why Akhenaten took such measures, most of which did not continue long after his death. (Just as he had erased images of Amun, his successors erased images of Aten). Lack of knowledge about his motivations has opened the door to much speculation.
Dominic Monserrat outlines some of the interpretations. For some in the nineteenth century he reflected a “new spirit”of progress that rose above the polytheism of his native land. Yet he also espoused “bourgeois values,” indicated by the domestic scenes with Nefertiti and his children. [3] In sum, he was modern.
In the early twentieth century, James Henry Breasted studied what he called hymns written in Akhenaten’s tomb and contended that Psalm 104 was based on them.[4] For Breasted, a Protestant Christian, Akhenaten was, in Montserrat’s words, “the first individual, the first prophet of an exalted religion and the first idealist in recorded history.”[5]
But to Sigmund Freud, he illustrated the Oedipus complex—a man who tried to erase the memory of his father and adopt a new “fantasy father.” (Akhenaten did refer to the sun god as his father.) In contrast, Freud’s colleague Gustav Jung saw him as a “creative and profoundly religious man who honoured his father’s memory and had no hostile impulse toward him.” [6]
Then there’s a pragmatic view of Akhenaten. Historian Donald Redford named Akhenaten the “heretic king” whose chief aim was to destroy (or downgrade) the priests (and their families) involved in the worship of Amun. Akhenaten, wrote Redford, “aimed at reasserting the pharaoh’s absolute authority over the elite, which had eroded over the centuries.” Thus Redford called his actions “conservative” and suggested that his “theology” (which Redford put into quotes, implying doubt) was more of a political tactic than anything spiritual.[7]
But there may have been other reasons. We can speculate, too.
He does seem to have been a rebel. We know that his father’s reign was “long and prosperous.”[8] He may have wanted to distinguish himself somehow. Or he may have been like the young people of the 1960s (AD), children of prosperity, who wanted to overturn the establishment and replace it with something more spiritual.
Indeed, perhaps there was disappointment with the god Amun, the chief god at Thebes. Perhaps Akhenaten felt that the life-giving sun—as essential to Egypt’s well-being as the annual flooding of the Nile—was being neglected and he set out to right that wrong. But of course, we’ll never know.
[1] Dominic Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1.
[2] This topic is discussed in David Cannadine, “The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution 1880-1980.” Past & Present, no. 103 (1984):131-72. Cannadine credits Benedetto Croce as the source of the adage.
[2] Donald. B. Redford, Akhenaten the Heretic King (Princeton, 1984), 142-149, at 146-147.
[3] Montserrat, 3.
[4] Psalm 104 contains these lines: “The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;/ he stretches out the heavens like a tent/ and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.”
[5] Montserrat, 101.
[6] Montserrat, 95.
[7]] D. B. Redford (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, s. v. Akhenaten , 48-51, at 50.
[9] Kate Spence, “Akenhaten and the Amarna Period” (BBC publication), 1, https://media.gradebuddy.com/documents/2359992/7a1665df-9961-4e11-898f-9572345f04f2.pdf.
The image of a limestone fragment depicting Queen Nefertiti offering a bouquet to Aten is by mharrsch and licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Westerners seem to assume that monotheism is better than polytheism, perhaps because it accompanies the rise of western culture. Is anything about monotheism inherently more beneficial to believers than polytheism of the Romans, Greeks, and many Asians, not to mention cultures of the Americas?
If Akhenaten replaced many with one, it may well have been to eliminate claims of prophecies and favors bestowed by other gods on rival powers.
There seems to be a deep commitment, among Americans and Europeans, to the idea of progress. Partly because material progress since 1800 or so is irrefutable, we tend to assume that everything is getting better. Indeed, I probably studied history because I thought that way. The story of the 20th century tends to challenge that view, however. And today’s cancel culture may reflect the view that nothing was ever good and nothing is good now, either. Sad!