The Cult of Aten

Yet Amenhotep III had overdone it. By the end of his reign, c.1350 bc, the temples were so rich that they had become his political and economic rivals. Even before his death, the king seems to have distanced himself from the influence of Thebes. He brought up his own son, also Amenhotep, in Memphis and is found patronizing other cults in northern Egypt—that of the sacred bulls at Saqqara and the sun god at Heliopolis, for instance. For the first time in Amenhotep’s reign a new cult

Appears, the worship of the sun in its physical form, Aten. Amenhotep’s son and successor, Amenhotep IV, better known as Akhenaten, ‘He who is beneficial to the Aten’ (1352-1336 Bc), was to attempt a religious and social revolution, installing Aten as a single god in place of the traditional gods of Egypt. (See, as a good study, Cyril Aldred, Akenaten, King of Egypt, London and New York, 1991.)

The worship of a sun god was well established in Egyptian religion. Each sunrise was seen as a symbolic re-enactment of the first creation and sun worship was also common among the cultures of the Middle East over which Egypt ruled. If Akhenaten had done no more than emphasize Aten among the other gods of Egypt he would probably have caused no stir. Whether inspired by his father or not, he set out on an unprecedented, even bizarre path of his own. He launched an attack on all other gods, in particular Amun, to install himself as a direct mediator between his people and Aten. Iconographically the shift is shown by depicting Aten as a disc with rays ending in hands that touch the king and his family. The family is emphasized by the elevation of Akhenaten’s wife Nefertiti so that the royal couple appear as the twin children of Aten.

Akhenaten’s motives for this religious revolution are not clear. He may have been under the influence of his father, with whom he had possibly been co-regent before he had died (not all scholars agree on this), or his mother, the formidable queen Tiye, who lived on into the new reign. He may simply have been trying to assert his own independence from the power of the temples or genuinely have developed his own religious beliefs. Whatever his motives he had set himself a massive task. Religious belief was so deeply embedded in the Egyptian world picture that Akhenaten was, in effect, challenging the intellectual structure of the state.

The impact was profound. Many temples were closed down and their goods were confiscated. The economic structure of the state was upset as lands were transferred directly to the king. The masses lost their festivals so that the rhythm of the year was disrupted. As the reign went on the persecution of Amun became more intense. His name and even any reference to ‘gods’ in the plural was erased from the temples. Such a dramatic revolution could never have been effected if Akhenaten had not kept the support of the army.

The earliest temple to Aten was built by Akhenaten at Thebes. It had a distinct precinct of its own and judging from the quality of its reliefs it was constructed in haste. It proved too close to the stronghold of Amun. Five years after his accession Akhenaten moved his capital downriver to a virgin site in Middle Egypt. It was named Akhetaten but is better known under its modern name Tell el-Amarna. The move presumably reflected the king’s desire to break free completely from the weight of Egyptian tradition, and the elite of officials from Thebes and Memphis, but there were other reasons. Among the cliffs of the east bank at Tell el-Amarna there was a natural opening into a valley and through this could be caught the first glimpse of the rising sun. The city’s impressive temple to Aten was aligned with the valley, and unlike the traditional closed sanctuaries of Amun was left open to the skies. Aten was always used to emphasize the positive aspects of life, day rather than night, rebirth rather than death, light rather than darkness. Most of the reliefs and

Paintings of Akhenaten show him directly under the sun, whose rays, each capped with a small hand, reach down to him.

A hymn to Aten survives, inscribed on a tomb in Amarna. One verse reads:

Earth brightens when you dawn in the horizon When you shine as Aten of daytime:

As you dispel the darkness,

As you cast your rays,

The Two Lands are in festivity.

Awake they stand on their feet,

As you have roused them.

Bodies are cleansed and clothed,

The arms held high in adoration of your appearance.

The entire land sets out to work,

All beasts browse on their herbs,

Trees and herbs are sprouting;

Birds fly from their nests,

Their wings greeting your ka;

All flocks frisk on their feet,

And all that fly up and alight,

They lived when you dawn for them.

Ships sail upstream and downstream,

The roads lie open when you rise;

The fish in the river leap before you,

And your rays are in the midst of the sea.

This exuberant paean to Aten was expressed in a vernacular very different from the elevated official language and it proved influential, not least as an inspiration to the psalmists of Israel who were themselves composing hymns of praise to a single god. However, in Egypt itself, the new religion did not catch on. For the mass of people there was no incentive to turn away from traditional religious practices that were so deeply integrated into everyday life. Egyptian religion was astonishingly flexible at a popular level. There was a plethora of gods that could take on different identities and attributes to meet different human and spiritual needs. They were grouped together or merged as composite gods in a rich mythology that covered creation and the afterlife. To replace them by a single physical entity, available only in one form, was a cultural shock far greater than the Egyptians could absorb. Even the workmen building at Tell el-Amarna stayed loyal to their traditional gods.

The failure of Aten does not make the reign of Akhenaten any less interesting. He was a strong king who focused the kingdom on himself as the only mediator with his god. By confiscating the goods of the temples he strengthened his political position and he appears to have been well in control of the administration. He was one of those rare Egyptians who introduced important cultural changes. He was represented with his wife Nefertiti and his family in much more informal and realistic poses than was conventional. It was as if the royal family now replaced the mythological families of the gods. Some portraits even show him with a unique physiognomy including a bloated stomach, an extraordinary departure from the accepted

Portraiture of a king. He also moved away from the classical language conventionally used in texts to introduce his own artificial language, half classical, half in the popular idiom, to further emphasize his own identity. In short, there was a loosening of Egyptian traditions to allow a much more freely expressed style of art.

Tell el-Amarna was situated well away from the flood line of the Nile and its abandonment after Akhenaten’s death meant that much has been learned from excavation (carried out since 1977 by the English archaeologist Barry Kemp and now described in detail in his The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and its People, London, 2012). It was carefully planned out within an area defined by fourteen boundary steles. Enough remains to plot out the royal palaces, the adjoining harems, the Great Temple to Aten, and the administrative offices. There is a set of gardens, and suburbs containing the homes of the administrators. A workmen’s village, complete with walls that enclosed its inhabitants at night, is reminiscent of that further south at Deir el-Medina. (See Chapter 5.)

The plan of Tell el-Amarna has much to tell about the nature of royal administration. The king and his family had their private residence set well apart from the rest of the city in the north and easy to defend. The ceremonial centre of the city was connected to the residential palace by a processional route along which the king would parade each day, his golden chariot followed by an entourage with the populace applauding him as he passed. He eventually reached a second, even grander, palace designed for the king’s public appearances and his reception of foreign envoys. Its core was an enormous courtyard with colossal statues of the king surrounding it. Its pavement was decorated with images of foreign peoples over which the royal chariot would clatter in a perpetual reminder that Akhenaten held sway over an empire. The king and queen handed out honours to officials from a ‘Window of Appearances’, in effect a balcony from which they could display themselves. Amarna may have been the home of a particularly forceful and independent king, but its layout shows how carefully the power of a ruler could be stage managed for effect and linked closely to control of its officials.

When Akhenaten died in about 1336 Bc the country was left in some confusion. His successor (who may have been Nefertiti ‘disguised’ with a male name, Smenkhara) lived only a few months and it was a boy, Tutankhaten, the son of Akhenaten by another wife, who succeeded. His name suggests that the worship of Aten was still officially practised, but within a year the king’s name had been changed to Tut-ankhamun and the city at Tell el-Amarna had been abandoned. A ‘Restoration Decree’ issued in the young king’s name bemoaned the decay of the temples and the abandonment of Egypt by the gods. There was a major reaction to the cult of Aten. Nobles, for instance, now built their tombs as small temples as if to reassert public control of religion and filled them with wall paintings and statues of the traditional gods. (Osiris quickly reasserted his position as the most important funerary god.) With Akhenaten now being presented as having betrayed his people and the cosmic order, it is possible that no pharaoh was ever given the same degree of respect as his predecessors. The god Amun becomes a universal transcendent god manifested through the other gods of Egypt but approachable by those who believe in him. ‘Far

Away he is as one who sees, near he is as one who hears,’ as one text put it, and Amun is seen as able to intervene directly in believers’ lives.

Tutankhamun never emerged as ruler in his own right. By the age of 19 he was dead, possibly from a cerebral haemorrhage, or from an infection in a leg that had been broken. It is also possible that his death was deliberate, to remove him before he assumed full power for himself. Whatever the cause, he was treated as a king deserved and honoured with the full rituals of death. It was by sheer chance, probably because the site of the tomb was forgotten and blocked by the debris from later tunnelling, that his tomb in the Valley of the Kings survived intact until rediscovered in 1922 by the British archaeologist Howard Carter. The completeness of the finds, the rich array of grave goods, and the poignant story of the king who had died so young led to a wave of ‘Tutmania’ that swept across the world in the 1920s. (For the excavation and contents of the tomb see Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun: The King, the Tomb, the Royal Treasure, London and New York, 1995.)