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| Akhenaten |
Akhenaten, father of the famous Tutankhamen,
husband of the beautiful Nefertiti, and son of the magnificent Amenhotep III of
the 18th dynasty, was a Pharaoh like no others. Born during the apex
of Egyptian Golden Age as Amenhotep IV, Akhenaten was never expected to take
the throne. He had an elder brother who
was his father’s favourite. With his brother’s untimely death, the then malformed
“Amenhotep IV” could finally make a bid to change the Egyptian world.
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| The Aten |
Before the time of Amenhotel IV, the
Egyptians worshipped the Sun God Amun as the supreme deity whose main temple
was at Karnak, as well as a myriad of traditional gods and goddesses. Due to
the supreme position of their god, the priests of Amun at Karnak posed a very
powerful group exercising enormous influence over the society and in the royal
court itself. However, little did they know that all these would utterly be changed with the ascension of Amenhotep IV to the throne. Indeed, about five
years into his reign, the Pharaoh and his queen, Nefertiti, began to turn their
interest toward their new kind of Sun God, Aten, which represented the visible
sun. To demonstrate their piety and strong conviction in his new Sun God, Amenhotep
IV changed his own name to Akhenaten (Beneficial to the Aten). Within the
Karnak temple complex, a new temple was added. This new temple, in contrast to Amun’s
dark and mystical chamber, lay exposed to the sun. Yet, all this was still not
enough for Akhenaten, who went further as to declare that his god Aten was the
only true god. The first monotheism in history was thus born. To the
discontentment and protest from the priests of Amun, Akhenaten decided that his
true god could not exist alongside other “false gods”, and proceeded to have
their names erased on a wide scale and divert funding away from the traditional
temples, although his religious policy remained largely tolerant.
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| Akhenaten and his family worshiping the Aten |
Akhenaten’s revolutionary scheme which
altered the landscape of Egyptian religion and social fabric earned him the
name “the Heretic Pharaoh”. In a bid to further entrench his religious scheme, Akhenaten
moved his entire court to a desolate location in the middle of Egypt, near the
modern city of Tel Amarna, where no towns or temples to other deities existed
to interfere with Akhenaten’s building programme. There the Pharaoh built the
new capital city from scratch, Akhetaten (the Horizon of Aten), complete with
government buildings, temples and palace.
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| Temple of Aten at Akhetaten |
Why did Akhenaten carry out such a
revolutionary reform? After all, the traditional religion has existed for more
than 2,000 years since the Old Kingdom. Did Akhenaten like breaking away from
the past and leaving his footprints for posterity? Certainly his reform did not
fare well against the overwhelming wave of conservatism. Although Aten was
exclusively worshipped in Akhetaten, Egyptians elsewhere continued to worship
the traditional deities. Most were forced underground after Akhenaten
obliterated the names of their deities and closed their temples. Priests to the
traditional gods were unhappy when they suddenly found themselves unemployed.
Armies were idle as Egypt’s vassal states rebelled while the Heretic Pharaoh
preached his message of love and peace. The message could not have been
clearer. Akhetaten’s reform was doomed to failure, and after Akhenaten’s death
in the seventeenth year of his reign, his religious reform died with him.
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