Early in the fifth year of his reign, Amenhotep IV decided to sever all links with the traditional religious capital of Egypt and its god Amun, and to build an entirely new city on virgin soil that would be devoted solely to the cult of the Aten and his children. At the same time he changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning ‘he who acts effectively on behalf of the Aten’ or perhaps ‘creative manifestation of the Aten’. The new city, nowadays known as Amarna, was called Akhetaten, ‘Horizon of the Aten’—that is, the place where the Aten manifests himself and where he acts through his son, the king, who is ‘the perfect child of the living Aten’. Whether there were political as well as religious motifs for this drastic decision remains unknown, although the king appears to hint at opposition to his religious reforms in the decree inscribed on a series of‘boundary stelae’ defining the territory of Akhetaten. Opposition there must have been, especially among the dispossessed priestly establishment of the great temples of Amun at Thebes and probably elsewhere as well. Even before the move to Akhetaten some of the revenues of the established cults had been diverted to the cult of the Aten, and the situation must have deteriorated even further when the king abandoned the city of Amun for his new capital.
Before we examine this city, its inhabitants, and the new Atenist religion as it was practised there, we must briefly summarize the main political events of the reign of Akhenaten. We do not know when exactly he took up residence in Akhetaten, but presumably it was within a year or two of its foundation: the oaths sworn on that occasion by the king regarding the boundaries of the city’s territory were renewed in regnal year 8. As soon as the decision to move had been made, all building activities at Thebes ceased, although the king’s original name was removed from the inscriptions and replaced by the new one.
Once Akhenaten was firmly settled in his new residence, a further radicalization of his religious reforms took place. In year 9, the official name formula of the Aten was changed to 'the living one, Ra, ruler of the horizon who rejoices in the horizon in his identity of Ra the father who has returned as the sun-disc’. Although this new formula removed the name of the god Homs (which smacked too much of traditional concepts), it clearly put even more emphasis on the father-son relationship between the Aten and the king. Probably at the same time as this name change took place, the traditional gods were banned completely and a campaign was begun to remove their names and effigies (particularly those of Amun) from the monuments, a Herculean task that can only have been carried out with the support of the army. The traditional state temples were closed down and the cults of their gods came to a standstill. Perhaps most important of all, the religious festivals with their processions and public holidays were no longer celebrated either.
The role of the military during the Amama Period has long been imderestimated, partly because Akhenaten was thought to have been a pacifist. More recently, however, it has been recognized not only that the king’s programme of political and religious reform could never have succeeded without active military support, but also that Akhenaten sent his army abroad to quash a rebellion in Nubia in year
12. It has even been suggested that he may have been involved in a confrontation with the Hittites, who during Akhenaten’s reign defeated the Hurrian empire of Mitanni, Egypt’s ally, thus destroying the carefully maintained balance of power that had existed for several decades, although the diplomatic archive from Akhetaten (the ‘ Amarna letters’) shows that Egyptian military activity in northern Syria usually took the form of limited police actions, the main goal of which was to prevent the volatile vassal states in the area from switching sides. It was also in year 12 that a great ceremony took place, during which the king received the tribute from ‘all foreign countries gathered together as one’, an event that may well be connected with the Nubian campaign of the same year.
World History
