Pharaoh Akhenaten
Pharaoh Akhenaten who’s name means “successful for” or “of great use to” the god Aten, was king of Egypt during the Eighteenth Dynasty and reigned from 1353 to 1336 BC. He was the son of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and his wife Queen Tiye, and husband of Queen Nefertit. He was also the father of Tutankhamen (the famous King Tut). He moved the capital of Egypt from the traditional site at Thebes to the city he founded, which came to be known as Tell el-Amarna. The time of Akhenaten’s rule over Egypt would later be referred to as the Amarna Period. In addition to founding a new capitol for his reign, he created a new religion for Egypt. The cult he founded broke with Egypt’s traditional polytheism and focused its worship on a single deity, the sun god Aten. As a result of this schism Akhenaten has gone down in history as the “rebel pharaoh.”
Akhenaten “discovered” the Aten by means of observation and intuition – that is, he discerned the world’s dependence on light and believed it could be understood as the central principal from which all life originated. But with light, he committed himself to the visible and was led to deny everything that did not belong to the visible world: darkness, the afterlife, and the deities of the pantheon, especially Amun, the “hidden one.”
Amun, the chief god who suffered so much persecution, still appeared on early monuments of Tell el-Amarna; but from the very beginning there was a striking absence of Osiris, the ruler of the dead and of the netherworld. This points to a profound change in beliefs regarding the afterlife, one in which there was no longer room for Osiris. At Amarna, even the title “Osiris” disappeared. This system of thought, which made light its absolute reference point, had great difficulty with the dark side of the world. Night-time eliminated the Aten and signified death. The total dependence of all existence on light, which is the Aten, was now a given. Previously, the night had also been filled with life, and traditional solar belief had pictured the nightly journey of the sun through the netherworld in poetic detail. But now, the nocturnal phase no longer meant the regeneration of light in the darkness, but merely its absence. Where the sun goes at night is never stated; the Aten simply disappears though his normal location is “in the sky.” The moment of his return is the critical one, which all creation jubilantly greets and which ends his nightly absence.
Aten ruled the world as king, and his universal rule was indicated pictorially by the many hands of the god, to which everything was accessible. The Aten was not actually the sun disk, but rather the light that is in the sun, and which, radiating from it, calls the world to life and keeps it alive. Aten’s coexistence with the other deities lasted for only a short time. The Aten with his rays would be the only permissible icon of the god. The mixed form of a human body and an animal’s head would vanish, and only the hands emanating from the sun would serve as a reminder of his former human form. Also in the art of the Amarna period Akhenaten is depicted differently than other pharaohs, and could be a literal representation. His form appears somewhat deformed. For instance Akhenaten is represented in wall carvings and statues with a long neck, a sunken chest, a slack belly and fat thighs. The style in which we are accustomed to in Egyptian sculpture was set aside.
The king died in the prime of life, around the year 1336 BC. Akhenaten had founded no congregation; he had no disciples or apostles to carry on his work after his death. There was only one small circle of followers, who were now left without a leader. Akhenaten had concentrated his teaching so exclusively upon himself as the only one who knew the Aten that it was doomed to perish along with him.
References:
Hornung, E. Akhenaten and the Religion of Light. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).