13
THE climate of hostility that surrounded Akhenaten all his life – and one may wonder what could have been the causes were they not ethnic and religious – had surfaced as early as two years after his appointment as coregent. The Memphite inscription of his father’s Year 30, as we saw in an earlier chapter, had sought to defend his action in ‘placing the male offspring [the heir] upon the throne’, suggesting that there had been opposition – undoubtedly from the Amun priesthood and the nobility – to his action in securing the inheritance for his son.
Further evidence of such opposition is found in the proclamation of Akhenaten on the boundary stelae, fixed before the start of the building of his new city of Amarna in his Year 4. Here he refers to what appears to be open opposition he had faced prior to that date: ‘For, as Father Hor-Aten liveth, … priests [?] more evil are they than those things which I heard unto Year 4, [more evil are they] than [those things] which I have heard in year … more evil are they than those things which King … [heard], more evil are they than those things which Menkheperure (Tuthmosis IV) heard.’1
Akhenaten is referring to hostile comments he heard about himself prior to Year 4. Not only that: two kings who preceded him had been subject to similar verbal criticism. The missing name here can only be that of his father, Amenhotep III, whose Memphite inscription, referred to above, points to opposition over the steps he took to ensure Akhenaten’s succession. But why should Tuthmosis IV have encountered similar hostility from the Establishment? We have no evidence on this point. I have argued in Stranger in the Valley of the Kings, however, that it was Tuthmosis IV who appointed Joseph (Yuya) as one of his ministers and the Old Testament indicates that, at the time, he was dissatisfied with his usual advisers, for which the Book of Genesis blames their failure to interpret Pharaoh’s dream about the seven good years that would be followed by seven lean years: ‘And it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled; and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof; and Pharaoh told them his dream; but there was none that could interpret them unto Pharaoh’ (Genesis, 41:8).
It would appear a reasonable deduction that priestly opposition to the king’s behaviour went back to the time of Tuthmosis IV’s appointment as his vizier of Joseph, one of the hated shepherds. Although the young Akhenaten would have known of the hostile comments directed at his father, he could have heard about criticisms of his grandfather, Tuthmosis IV, only through having been told about them, possibly by Yuya, his maternal grandfather, still alive when Akhenaten was born.
The criticisms levelled at Akhenaten himself included, according to other inscriptions on the boundary stelae at Amarna, the land the king had chosen for the building of a house for the Aten at Karnak: ‘Behold Pharaoh … found that it belonged not to a god, it belonged not to a goddess, it belonged not to a prince, it belonged not to a princess … [There is no right for] any man to act as owner of it.’2 The implication is that, as he made in Karnak and Luxor temples for his God, isolating the priests from running or taking part in any of the ceremonies of worship, they must have sought to remind him that the temples of Karnak and Luxor belonged to Amun and other traditional gods of Egypt and that he had no right to introduce there another God who would exclude their authority.
The building of his new city lasted from Akhenaten’s Year 4 to Year 8, but he and his family and officials began to live there from Year 6. A fine city it was. At this point the cliffs of the high desert recede from the river, leaving a great semi-circle about eight miles long and three miles broad. The clean yellow sand slopes gently down to the river.
The modern name of the site of Akhenaten’s city is Tell el-Amarna. In his book Tell el-Amarna, published in 1894, Petrie wrote: ‘The name … seems to be a European concoction. The northern village is known as Et Till – perhaps a form of Et Tell, the common name for a heap of ruins. The Beni Amran have given their name to the neighbourhood … But no such name as Tell el-Amarna is used by the natives and I retain it only as a convention …’
It was here that Akhenaten built his new capital, Akhetaten, The Horizon (or resting place) of the Aten, where he and his followers could be free to worship their monotheistic God. Huge boundary stelae, marking the limits of the city and recording the story of its foundation, were carved in the surrounding cliffs. The first of them date from about the fourth year of the coregency when Akhenaten had decided upon the site. A later set date from the sixth year and define both the city on the east bank and a large area of agricultural land on the bank opposite, apparently with a view to making the new capital self-supporting if it ever came under siege. The stela proclamation runs:
As my father the Aten lives, I shall make Akhetaten for the Aten my father in this place. I shall not make him Akhetaten south of it, north of it, west of it or east of it. And Akhetaten extends from the southern stela as far as the northern stela, measured between stela and stela on the eastern mountain, likewise from the south-west stela to the north-west stela on the western mountain of Akhetaten. And the area between these four stelae is Akhetaten itself; it belongs to Aten my father; mountains, deserts, meadows, islands, high ground and low ground, land, water, villages, men, beasts and all things which the Aten my father shall bring into existence eternally forever. I shall not forget this oath which I have made to the Aten my father eternally forever.
A reiteration of his vows, made to his new capital, was added in his eighth year, which is thought the most likely time that the king, Queen Nefertiti and their six daughters – Merytaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpa-aten, Neferneferuaten the younger, Neferneferure and Setepenre, all born before Year 9 of the king’s reign – took up residence.
Akhetaten was a capital city possessed of both dignity and architectural harmony. Its main streets ran parallel to the Nile with the most important of them, known even today as Sikket es-Sultan, the King’s Way, connecting all the city’s most prominent buildings, including the King’s House where Pharaoh and his family lived their private family life. Its plan was similar to that of a high official’s villa, but on a grander scale and surrounded by a spacious garden. To the south of the house was the king’s private Temple to the Aten. The Great Temple of the Aten, a huge building constructed on an east-west axis, lay less than a quarter of a mile to the north along the King’s Way. It was entered through a pylon from the highway and a second entrance gave access to a hypostyle hall called The House of Rejoicing of the Aten. Six rectangular courts, known as Gem-Aten, lay along a processional way and were filled with tables for offerings to the Aten. At the eastern end of the enclosure there was a sanctuary equipped with a great altar and more offering tables. Abreast the northern wall of the enclosure lay the pavilion where a great reception for foreign princes bearing tribute was held in Year 12, thought probably to have been the high point of Akhenaten’s reign. The house of the high priest Panehesy lay outside the enclosure’s south-east corner.
It was not just the form of worship that was new in Akhetaten. Queen Nefertiti, like her mother-in-law Queen Tiye, enjoyed a prominence that had not existed in the past. On one of his new city’s boundary stelae her husband had her described flatteringly as: ‘Fair of Face, Joyous with the Double Plume, Mistress of Happiness, Endowed with Favour, at hearing whose voice one rejoices, Lady of Grace, Great of Love, whose disposition cheers the Lord of the Two Lands.’ The king gave tombs, gouged out of the face of surrounding cliffs, to those nobles who had rallied to him. In the reliefs which the nobles had carved for themselves in these tombs – showing Akhenaten with his queen and family dispensing honours and largesse, worshipping in the temple, driving in his chariot, dining and drinking – Nefertiti is depicted as having equal stature with the king and her names are enclosed in a cartouche.
Throughout this period changes took place in the nature of Akhenaten’s belief. As we saw earlier, when he was shown in his Year 1 worshipping at the quarry of Gebel Silsila in Nubia, he called himself the ‘first prophet’ of ‘Re-Harakhti, Rejoicing-in-the Horizon, in his name the light (Shu) which is in the Aten’. Soon afterwards the name of the Aten was placed inside two cartouches so as to be represented as a ruling king. At this early stage the God was represented as a human shape, either with the head of a falcon surmounted with the sun disc or as a winged disc. These early representations were made in the conventional artistic style of the Egypt of the time.
Between the king’s Year 4 and Year 5 a new style of art started to appear, part of it realistic, part distinguished by an exaggeration of expression. There was also a new representation of the God. A disc at the top of royal scenes extended its rays towards the king and queen, and the rays end in their hands, which sometimes hold the Ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life, to the noses of the king and queen, a privilege which only they enjoy. The disc and its rays are not to be seen, for example, in scenes showing officials in the doorways of their tombs, reciting the famous hymns to Aten found inscribed on Aye’s tomb. The king and his queen are the major figures in the Aten cult: it is their colossal statues that surround the open courts of the temples, which contained no images of the gods although the walls were probably covered with scenes depicting the worship of the Aten. Pharaoh was Aten’s channel of communication and only he had the power to interpret the divine will. In the longer hymn to Aten, thought to have been composed by the king himself, a long poetic passage credits Aten with the creation of all the phenomena of the universe and asserts that all creatures exist only by virtue of the sun’s rising and infusing them with life each morning.
In Year 6 the Aten was given a new epithet, ‘Celebrator of Jubilees’, jubilees which coincided, significantly, with those of the king. Then, towards the end of Year 9 the name of the Aten received its new form to rid it of any therio-anthropomorphic and panetheistic ideas that may have clung to it. The falcon symbol that had been used to spell the word ‘Re-Harakhti’ was changed to abstract signs giving an equivalent ‘Re, Ruler of the Horizon’ while a phrase in the second cartouche was also altered, ridding it of the word for light, ‘Shu’, which was also a representation of the old Egyptian god of the void. This was replaced by other signs. The new form of the God’s name read: ‘Re, the living Ruler of the Horizon, in his name (aspect) of the light which is in the Aten’.
No evidence of burial, or even of sarcophagi, have been found in any of the nobles’ tombs and their main interest remains in the vivid picture they give – in a manner previously unknown in Egypt – of life in the new city and of the intimate family life of Pharaoh himself. Pendlebury, who worked at the site in the 1930s, later had this to say, in his book Tell el-Amarna, published in 1935, of the tomb paintings and sketches: ‘Carelessly and hastily carved as many of them are, the new spirit of realism is strikingly evident. The incidental groups of spectators are so alive, the princesses turn to one another with their bouquets so naturally. Almost more important, however, are the religious texts from which we can read the hymns to the sun written by Akhenaten and giving the theology and philosophy of the new religion.’
The ruling Pharaoh was regarded as being head of the priesthood, head of the army and head of the administration of the Two Lands of Egypt. By rejecting the gods of Egypt, Akhenaten ceased to be head of the priesthood and the temples of Egypt were no longer under his control. He also had no control over the running of the country while his father was still alive. But, from the time he moved to Amarna, Akhenaten relied completely on the army’s support for protection and, possibly, as a future safeguard against the confrontation that would be inevitable once his father died and he became sole ruler.
Alan R. Schulman, the American Egyptologist, was able to demonstrate that although, because of his physical weakness, Akhenaten alone of the Tuthmosside House is not represented as an active participant in horsemanship, archery and seamanship – in which his forebears excelled – he seems to have been at pains to emphasize his military authority. In the vast majority of the representations, he is shown wearing either the Blue Crown or the short Nubian wig, both belonging to the king’s military head-dress, rather than the traditional ceremonial crowns of Lower and Upper Egypt. Akhenaten’s use of these two types of headgear on almost every possible public and private occasion may then have been intended to identify him constantly in the minds of his people as a military leader: ‘Scenes of soldiers and military activity abound in both the private and royal art of Amarna. If we may take the reliefs from the tombs of the nobles at face value, then the city was virtually an armed camp. Everywhere we see parades and processions of soldiers, infantry and chariotry with their massed standards. There are soldiers under arms standing guard in front of the palaces, the temples and in the watchtowers that bordered the city, scenes of troops, unarmed or equipped with staves, carrying out combat exercises in the presence of the king.’3
The military garrison of Amarna had detachments of foreign auxiliaries in addition to Egyptian units. Schulman goes on to say: ‘Just as Amarna had its own military garrison which stood ready to enforce the will of the king, so the other cities of Egypt must also have had their garrisons and the army, loyal to the throne, carried out its will. That the army was so loyal to the throne and to the dynasty was almost assured by the person of its commander, the god’s-father Aye, who somehow was related to the royal family. Though he does not give them great prominence in his inscriptions as a private individual, Aye held posts among the highest in the infantry and the chariotry, posts also held by Yuya, the father of Queen Tiye and possibly also the father of Aye.’4 (The precise relationship of the four Amarna kings will be discussed later.)
It was again the loyalty of the army, controlled by Aye, that kept Akhenaten in power in the uneasy years that followed his coming to the throne as sole ruler in his Year 12 upon the death of his father. By that time Akhenaten had developed his monotheistic ideas to a great extent. If the Aten was the only God, Akhenaten, as his sole son and prophet, could not allow other gods to be worshipped at the same time in his dominion. As a response to his rejection by the Amun priests as a legitimate ruler, he had already snubbed Amun and abolished his name from the walls and inscriptions of temples and tombs. Now he took his ideas to their logical conclusion by abolishing worship of any gods throughout Egypt except the Aten. During the Amarna rule of Akhenaten his subjects were totally committed by the king to the worship of a monotheistic God, although at this time only the Levites among the Hebrews were involved in his new religion.5 Akhenaten closed all the temples, except those of Aten, dispersed the priests and gave orders that the names of other deities should be expunged from monuments and temple inscriptions throughout the country. Units were despatched to excise the names of the ancient gods wherever they were found written or engraved, a course that can only have created mounting new opposition to his already rejected authority:
‘The persecution of first Amun and then the other gods, which must have been exceedingly hateful to the majority of the Egyptians, would certainly also be hateful to the individual members of the army. This persecution, which entailed the closing of the temples, the despatch of artisans who entered everywhere to hack out his name from inscriptions, the presumed banishment of the clergy, the excommunication of his very name, could not have been carried out without the army’s active support. Granting the fact that the theoretical fiction of the divine kingship was accepted by the mass of the Egyptian people, it is, nevertheless, hardly credible that they would just sit by and acquiesce silently to the persecution of Amun. Some strong backing had to support the royal dicta. Each time a squad of workmen entered a temple or tomb to destroy the name of Amun, it must have been supported by a squad of soldiers who came to see that the royal decree was carried out without opposition. Ultimately the harshness of the persecution must have had a certain reaction even upon the soldiers who, themselves, certainly had been raised in the old beliefs, and rather than risk a wholesale defection and perhaps even a civil war, the army, through the agency of Aye, probably put pressure upon Akhenaten, not only to cease the persecution, but to compromise with the old order by the elevation of Semenkhkare to the coregency.’6 In fact, when even this compromise failed, the clamour grew, as we shall see, for the king’s abdication.
More information about the extent to which Akhenaten went in trying to eliminate the old forms of worship, as well as the consequent sense of complete loss felt by Egyptians, can be gathered from Tutankhamun’s Restoration Stela, which he erected in the Temple of Amun at Karnak and which was later usurped by Horemheb: ‘… The good ruler, performing benefactions for his father (Amun) and all the gods, for he has made what was ruined to endure as a monument for the ages of eternity … Now when his majesty appeared as king, the temples of the gods and goddesses from Elephantine [down] to marshes of the Delta [had … and] gone to pieces. Their shrines had become desolate, had become mounds overgrown with [weeds]. Their sanctuaries were as if they had never been. Their halls were footpaths. The land was topsy-turvy, and the gods turned their backs upon this land. If [the army was] sent to Djahi (Palestine-Syria) to extend the frontiers of Egypt, no success of theirs came at all. If one prayed to a god to seek counsel from him, he would never come [at all]. If one made supplication to a goddess similarly, she would never come at all.’7
It is certain that it was the strength of opposition to Akhenaten’s religious reforms, and his own unwillingness to change his attitude, that forced him to appoint Semenkhkare as his coregent around Year 15 after giving him his eldest daughter, Merytaten, as his wife. The precise identity of Semenkhkare has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate. Suffice to say for the moment that it has been suggested that he might have been the son of Amenhotep III or of Akhenaten himself. They are shown together on some monuments and inscriptions have been found, including some on the pleasure pavilion at the south of Amarna, the Maruaten, in which the name of Nefertiti had been erased and the name of Merytaten inscribed in its place. One curious feature of the period is that, soon after his accession, Semenkhkare was given Nefertiti’s official name – Neferneferuaten, beloved of Waenre (Akhenaten).
Initially, Semenkhkare and his queen lived with Akhenaten in the royal palace at Amarna. In face of the continuing hostility throughout the country, however, Semenkhkare left Amarna for Thebes where he reversed the trend of the religious revolution, at least in the capital, by establishing a temple to Amun, an action by his coregent and son-in-law that indicates the extent to which Akhenaten was isolated in his attempt to force his religious ideas upon his country. A hieratic document found in the Theban tomb of Pere, the Theban nobleman, indicates that the Amun temple existed in Year 3 of Semenkhkare and that the young king was in the old capital at the time.
At around the time that Semenkhkare became coregent, Nefertiti also disappeared mysteriously from the palace. There is no evidence that she was buried in the royal tomb to suggest, as some scholars believe, that she must have died around that time. On the contrary, there is evidence that she lived for a period after that date in the North City of Amarna where Tutankhamun was also resident and where objects inscribed with the queen’s name have been found. This suggests that she may have disagreed with her husband over his religious policy on the grounds that it endangered the whole dynasty and wished him to agree to a compromise that would allow the old gods to be worshipped alongside the Aten. If this is the correct interpretation, her views proved to be right. In his Year 17 Akhenaten suddenly disappeared, followed shortly afterwards – perhaps only a few days afterwards – by the equally sudden death of Semenkhkare, both of them to be succeeded by the boy prince, Tutankhamun, after his marriage to Akhenaten’s third daughter, Ankhsenpa-aten. The parentage of Tutankhamun will be discussed in Chapter Fourteen. (Akhenaten’s second daughter had already died – around Year 12 of her father – and been buried in the royal tomb at Amarna. No trace of her remains have been found, but that may be because her mummy was transferred to Thebes after Amarna was abandoned.)
There remains one further important question to be asked about Akhenaten: did his life as well as his reign come to an end when he fell from power?