Akhénaton

Genealogy

First Titulature

Second Titulature

Reign

The possible corégence and first years

The possibility of a corégence of the young person Amenhotep V with his father remains dubious. Certain specialists make it begin about the year/from Amenhotep, others in/. A low-relief of the third pylon of the Amon-Re temple represents the crowned father and wire, taking part in the festivals jubilaires.

The distances taken between the king and the clergy of Amon are already attested under Amenhotep, the place of Re, the influence of solar theology héliopolitaine and the mentions with Aton are more present in the royal anthems and titulatures.

It is towards -1355/-1353 that Amenhotep V, crowned under the name of Néferkhéperouré, “the demonstrations of Re are perfect”, Ouâenrê, “the Single one of Re”, then old sixteen years, goes up on the throne of Egypt. Before the year V, he is already married with beautiful the Néfertiti ( the Beautiful one came ), at the dubious origins.

During the first three years of its reign, Amenhotep V is registered as a continuator, although moderate and already innovator, of the work of his fathers. Its constructions with Karnak attest this double tendency. It associates with the third pylon of Karnak a “hall”, on the wall of which a scene of the traditional imagery appears. But in same time, it makes build, apart from the enclosure of the temple, a sanctuary dedicated to Aton, Gematon ( Aton is found ). On the walls of its constructions, it continues to register its name, Amenhotep. But in the artistic field, these portraits evolve already to the so particular guns amarniens.

As of the year V, Akhénaton makes a surprising decision: it makes celebrate its first Festival-sed, ritual jubilaire of regeneration, which traditionally marks the thirty years of reign of a sovereign. Was the king weak or suffering? He is more conceivable to rather see there a stage of his religious reform: the celebrations take place in the temple of Aton in the east of Karnak, the Gematon , and Néfertiti occupies of it, with her husband, the central role.

One knows little the context in which the king marks his true “rupture”, between the year V and year VII.

Religious revolution

The young sovereign goes gradually initially, then more brutally then, to impose the first religion known henotheist of the history, privileging the worship of the solar disk Aton. For reasons still badly known, but probably ridges some with conservatism and with the hostility of the clergy thébain, Akhénaton decides to give up the worship of the dynastic god Amon, the “hidden god”.

In the year V of the reign, it makes its first visit at the place where its future capital will be founded, a virgin city of the presence of the god thébain. It chooses like site a desert place in Average-Egypt, on Eastern bank of the Nile, where, it makes build the city of Akhetaton (“the horizon of Aton”), current the Such el-Amarna, to some 300 km in the north of Thèbes. It starts work which will drain most of the incomes assigned to Thèbes.

Into year VII, it changes titulature, takes the name of Akhénaton, “That which is beneficial (or useful) in Aton”, and leaves finally the town of Amon, Thèbes. The large Néfertiti wife bears the name of Néfernéferouaton ( Belle is the perfection of Aton ). All the royal court and the administration move for the new still unfinished residence, whose temples, dedicated to the single god Aton, are built with open sky to make it possible its beneficial rays to penetrate there.

One often allots this Cultural revolution and religious to only Akhénaton, but it seems that he did nothing but impose one tendency born during the reign of his father, Amenhotep {{III}}. Nicolas Grimal speaks about a “solarization” of the principal gods under this king and the exclusive worship of the Solar disk would be the logical result.

Before Akhénaton, Aton was a minor god whose existence is attested as of the Moyen Empire. At the New Empire, Thoutmôsis {{III}} had been placed under its protection and Amenhotep {{III}}, of which one of the epithets was “Radiation of Aton”, had encouraged the worship of the god.

In the year of its reign, Akhénaton will go further, in an apparent toughening of its reform atonienne: it orders to destroy, in the principal neuralgic areas of the kingdom, the images of worship of the former divinities, except notable for Re, in order to conclude its " opération" magic, erasing the expression of the old principles to make place with the new function which it incarnated. By hammering the names of the gods, in a system of beliefs where the Verb is creator, it cancels their faculty to be incarnated and occults their influence. It thus turns into to Solar disk the universal god, the Single one “who does not have his similar”, the Démiurge which repeats its creative act with each rising of the sun. To underline the celestial royalty of Aton, the name of the god is registered in cartridges: it is “Re-Horakhty which is delighted in the horizon”, “the Sovereign (heka) of the two horizons”.

The king is the terrestrial image of Aton, his “perfect child”; with the Large royal wife, Néfertiti, it is the only intermediary between the divinity and the human ones. Following the example triad Amon - Must - Khonsou, the royal couple forms with Aton a divine triad adored in the residences of the dignitaries. The people as for him, perpetuate in a great majority the traditional private worships.

Artistic revolution

The Art amarnien is characterized by a style naturalist where the plants, the flowers and the birds abound, but also, in the most extreme cases, by a “academism of nightmare” (J. Leclant) pushing to the apparent caricature. Thus, the colossal statues discovered in the temple of Aton to Karnak are contrary to the classic art idealizing: they show the king with a body of androgyne to the exaggeratedly broad hips, the prominent belly, the lengthened head and the fleshy lips. Other statues show it apparently naked but asexual. On a low-relief, now preserved at the Ägyptisches Museum, Néfertiti and the small princesses are represented with the same face stretched in length, in any point identical to that of Akhénaton which faces them.

Certain archeologists estimate consequently that the iconography of Amarna did nothing but follow one requirement of Pharaon who wanted that was highlighted the exclusive bond which linked the royal family with creative single God of any life. Indeed, it should not be forgotten that art amarnien was an art of court which, just like traditional art and its figurative conventions, was to respect the standards that imposed a hierarchical prospect.

It may be however that Akhénaton had a very ungrateful physique, even a handicap. There is thus advanced the assumption according to which the king would have been reached of a rare and transmissible genetic disease to his descent: the Syndrome of Marfan, unless it is not the Syndrome of Froehlich. The artistic representation of certain members of the court amarnienne laying out, in less measurements, same deformations makes this theory not very plausible. It was still said that the king would have been reached of epilepsy, causing at his place long hallucinatory and painful crises.

One also lends to this mystic talents of poet, if it is true that it composed itself the Grand Anthem in Aton engraved in the tomb of Aÿ.

The heart of the reign

Akhénaton perpetuates the tradition of kings builders of its predecessors. It raises temples, which it calls Gematon , as in Karnak, Kawa and Sesebi, as well as a city strengthened downstream from the third cataract.

The year seems to be the apogee of the reign. An imposing festival is celebrated in the city where the envoys of the Palestinian kinglets and Nubie, of the country of Koush and the Pays of Pount, bring their present to the king and to the large royal wife, possibly in the presence of the queen Tiyi mother.

Perhaps the latter, whose importance as regards policy, interior like international, was proven in Thèbes under the preceding reign, made, according to certain representations, several stays in the new capital, and remained there. It seems to have preserved a certain influence on her son. Which role did she play in the upheavals imposed by her son? It is still impossible to determine it. She is often accompanied by her more young girl Baketaton, of which the age approaches that of his/her nieces, the girls of Akhénaton. At all events, the queen mother and her daughter junior die both, at the latest in the end of the year.

The deaths which strike the king, of which all the imagery shows - in addition to its ritual direction - the deep attachment with its family, do not stop there. The small princess Mâkhétaton, second girl of the king, dies in the year. The ritual scenes of mourning are represented, without hiding the sorrow of the royal couple.

Starting from this date, documentation rarefies, and it becomes extremely complex to decipher the succession of the events which marks the last part of the reign.

Black period?

Far from the idyllic image of a Pharaon poet and mystical dreamer, image perhaps exaggerated by the imaginary collective, the reign of Akhénaton is also regarded per many Egyptologists as one dark period in the history of ancient Egypt. The religious reform of Akhénaton involved a loss of important influence of the gods of the traditional Pantheon: suppression of certain worships, closing of temples, loss of goods of the clergy, degradation of the divine effigies, which will be worth with the king to be called - in a debatable way - the Pharaon heretic .

Yoyotte and Vernus do not believe in fanatic and intolerant Aton. The hammering of the names does not touch the kingdom in its entirety, and the name of certain gods is left intact. Fayoum even seems to have almost completely escaped with hammering.

If the king attacks the worships of the traditional divinities of the kingdom, there is no persecution of the people of Egypt, which continues to preserve its beliefs. The names théophores within the people remain unchanged, and in Akhetaton even, the discovery of small traditional idols in certain dwellings plead for the continuity of the usual beliefs polytheists.

The largest specialists still being very divided on the question, it is thus advisable to take all the facts in consideration in order to have a synthetic idea of the upheavals brought by Akhénaton.

It is however obvious also that, because of a centralization excessive, and apparently ineffective, like with the diminution of the credits and the confiscation of the fields of the temples, Egypt underwent an economic crisis. Indeed, in the absence of any cash, the economic system and social was based on barter and the distribution of the resources stored in the attics of the State and the temples, so that the confiscation of the “divine fields” by the crown ruined “ a whole system of production and of redistribution which no new structure comes to replace ”.

Foreign policy

In Syria and Country of Canaan, the Hittites and the Amorrites nibble gradually the conquests of Thoutmôsis {{III}}. Thus, the king of Qadesh, entered alliance hittite, conquers Syria of the North, while Suppiluliuma (-1382/-1342) and Assur-uballit {{Ier}} attacks the Mitanni, combined of Egypt. On his side, the king of Amourrou makes main several fortified towns of the coast Phénicie. Akhénaton omits to come to assistance of its vassal, in spite of their urgent calls, so that his inertia causes the loss of Sidon, of Tyr and Byblos. During this time, bands of plundering nomads, the Apirou, seize Megiddo and Jerusalem.

The diplomatic correspondence found between the various great states of the East underlines the negligence still more (or awkwardness?) of the Pharaon, which worsens the weakening of Egypt in its Asian possessions and its influence in the courses foreign. Gold is then an element of first importance in the international policy, and Egypt, thrives, is famous to have some with profusion. Whereas large part of prestige moral of kingdom, and of its influence outside, rests on its prodigality (what Amenhotep had included/understood perfectly), Akhénaton is much less generous than his/her father, and the gold sendings are thinned down considerably. The kings of Assyrie, Babylon and the Mitanni complain some in the letters which they address to their “brother” of Egypt, on tons less and less friendly.

At the end of the reign, there remains almost nothing the Asian empire of first Thoutmosides.

End of the reign

The death of Akhénaton is surrounded by mystery. One knows neither when nor how he dies, his successors having done everything to erase the traces of the king heretic. At most can one date from the year/the last inscription which mentions it.

Smenkhkarê, son-in-law and successor of Akhénaton after a probable corégence, dies after a transitory reign. The capacity returns then to a nine year old child, Toutânkhaton, which had married the third girl of Akhénaton. We do not know anything precis about the ascent of the young sovereign. There exists however an assumption which affirms that Kiya, the “Large Wife, loved of the King”, would be his mother, after the disgrace or the death of Néfertiti, since another woman that Néfertiti is represented on a mural in a palate of Akhetaton, in the room of Pharaon more precisely. What is sure on the other hand, it is that the worship of Aton practically dies out with the disappearance of Akhénaton. At the end of three years, Toutânkhaton leaves Such el-Amarna; it adopts the name of Toutânkhamon, restores the worship of the traditional gods and restores the clergy in the goods of which had stripped it the “poor wretch of Akhétaton”.

Burial

Influences at the later times

The reign of Akhnaton and the Atonisme exerted important influences at the later times. Freud is the most known author who studied them (see: Moïse and Monothéisme ), but even its disciples preferred to classify in the kind romantic or esoteric what was the most complete work of its life (begun about 1910 and published in its death). One of the authors most inspired by Atonisme was the writer esoteric Nazi Savitri Devi, ( Akhnaton Fils of the Sun ). Other authors - as Immanuel Velikovsky ( Oedipus and Akhnaton ) which found the history of Akhnaton under the features of Oedipus - were very notably proscribed by the scientific company for other extravagant ideas. Agatha Christie made of it the topic of one of its novels ( Akhnaton ). The remainder is a magma esoteric.

Photographs

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