T
HE HERETIC PHARAOH
Religious visionary or fanatical zealot? Enlightened ruler or tyrannical despot? Inspirational hero or destructive heretic? No other individual from ancient Egypt, and few others from world history, inspires such passionate and contradictory reactions as Akhenaten. He has been called ‘the first individual in history’ and he certainly imposed his own personal beliefs on his country to an unprecedented extent. His break with the past – in art, religion, even the location of the capital city – changed Egypt utterly, but the revolution lasted a mere decade. It caused such revulsion that the whole episode, and the king who directed it, were excised from the official history by those who came afterwards. Akhenaten is an endlessly fascinating figure, made and remade by each new generation in its own image. It is sometimes difficult to disentangle truth from fiction, but the historical facts of his life bear repeating, since they help us enter into the mind of Egypt’s most radical pharaoh.
Virtually nothing is known about the young prince Amenhotep who was destined to rule as Akhenaten. His elder brother, Thutmose, was the heir apparent; so, for the early years of his life, Amenhotep could have had no expectation of succeeding to the throne. Thutmose’s premature death changed all that. Not only was Amenhotep the new Crown Prince, he was subsequently crowned at Karnak as his father’s co-regent, Amenhotep IV, to smooth the succession when the old king died. The younger Amenhotep would have witnessed, perhaps even taken a formal part in, his father’s dazzling jubilee celebrations at Thebes, involving boats covered in gold and electrum sailing in a specially constructed artificial harbour. The effect must have been mesmerizing, and when Amenhotep IV became sole ruler, he seems to have resolved to outshine even his father.
From the beginning of his sole reign, Amenhotep IV inaugurated a radically new style of representation, characterized above all by the physical exaggeration of the human figure: elongated and attenuated limbs, distended belly and broad hips, ovoid head. So different was this new canon of proportions that it must have been ordered by the king himself. By making such a decisive break with the past, Amenhotep IV had announced to the world that his reign marked a new beginning. It was both a promise and an omen.
The first large-scale project to bear the hallmarks of the new style was a shrine to the Aten, called Gempaaten, to the east of the main temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak. The sun-disc or Aten presented an appropriate metaphor for the dazzling pharaoh bringing light and life to his subjects. Amenhotep IV, however, did not just regard Aten as a metaphor, but as his personal god. It was to become his overriding obsession.
The Aten temple at east Karnak evidently struck Amenhotep as unsatisfactory: his god deserved a much grander edifice on a virgin site, not a subsidiary shrine tacked on to the cult centre of another deity. After a short time, therefore, all building work at Karnak was halted. Amenhotep (‘Amun is content’) changed his name to Akhenaten (‘effective for Aten’) to signal his devotion to the sun-disc above all other deities; and he resolved to find a site at which Aten could be properly worshipped. He alighted upon a natural embayment in the cliffs on the east bank of the Nile in Middle Egypt.
In late spring in the fifth year of his reign, Akhenaten made a formal visit to his chosen site. He appeared on his electrum-plated chariot, dazzling like Aten itself. In front of his assembled courtiers, he gave a decree establishing his new capital city, Akhetaten (‘horizon of Aten’, modern Amarna). He supervised a spectacular offering to Aten in front of the cliffs, and worshipped the sun-disc as it hovered over the scene. Next, the entire court was summoned and officials prostrated themselves at Akhenaten’s feet. He told them that Aten himself had instructed him to found the city at Amarna, since it ‘did not belong to a god nor a goddess’, and that it would belong to Aten forever as his monument ‘with an eternal and everlasting name’. The courtiers replied enthusiastically: they had little choice.
Just in case there were any doubters, the king made abundantly clear his resolution and single-mindedness to see his project through to completion. Not even his wife, Nefertiti, would be able to divert him from his chosen path: ‘Nor shall the King’s Great Wife say to me “Look, there is a nice place for Akhetaten somewhere else,” nor shall I listen to her.’ The king decreed that the city would contain a suite of principal buildings. Moreover, Amarna was not just to be the new royal residence, but the eternal resting-place for the king and his immediate family: ‘If I should die in any town of the north, the south, the west or the east in these millions of years, let me be brought back so that I may be buried in Akhetaten.’
The whole ceremony was recorded on two boundary stelae, cut into the cliffs at the northern and southern limits of Amarna. Exactly one year later, Akhenaten paid another visit to his city to inspect progress. He issued a second decree, defining the boundaries more precisely. Copies of this proclamation were similarly memorialized on boundary stelae around the perimeter of the site. By the eighth year of Akhenaten’s reign, the sacred precinct of Amarna was demarcated by fifteen such markers. The city itself grew as a linear development along the east bank of the Nile. The major ceremonial buildings specified by Akhenaten were linked by the Royal Road. This formed the processional avenue along which the king rode in his chariot each day from his residence to the seat of government. The royal progress mirrored the path of the sun-disc across the heavens, and formed the central daily ritual for the city and its inhabitants.
Indeed, Akhenaten’s new world order put himself and the royal family at the centre of public and religious life. The king’s affection for his wife and daughters was celebrated as a sign of Aten’s beneficence. However, the image of a strong and loving royal family masked a more complex reality. Akhenaten displayed a suffocating closeness to the female members of his family. When his mother Tiye died in the twelfth year of his reign, he had her buried in the royal tomb at Amarna, against her late husband’s (and probably her own) wishes. Nefertiti’s prominence in the official ideology was unprecedented, yet, for at least the first decade of his reign, Akhenaten also had a secondary wife, Kiya, who probably bore him at least one son (Tutankhuaten, later Tutankhamun, no. 62). Her eventual fall from grace and the systematic usurpation of her monuments may mirror Nefertiti’s remorseless rise to power.
The latter years of Akhenaten’s reign were marked by growing religious fanaticism. After eleven years on the throne, he decided to ‘purify’ the names of Aten – written in two cartouches to symbolize the joint rule of king and god – in order to eradicate all traces of the old religion. Throughout the country, on the king’s orders, the names of other deities, especially Amun, were systematically erased from monuments. Masons scaled obelisks and clambered up temple walls to obliterate all references to gods and goddesses other than Aten. There could be no other deity in Akhenaten’s universe. Everyone in Egypt was expected to follow the king’s ‘Teaching’, but only the upper echelons of society, dependent upon royal favour for their position, seem to have embraced the new religion, and probably with little real enthusiasm. Monotheism or simple egoism, it was radically different from orthodox Egyptian beliefs, and there is no doubt that it flowed from Akhenaten’s own mind.
Its ultimate expression was the Great Hymn to the Aten. The work’s authorship is not certain, but it was very probably written by the king himself, as the central element of his Teaching. Its message was clear and uncompromising: ‘There is none who knows thee except thy son Akhenaten. Thou hast made him wise in thy plans and thy power.’
Akhenaten died after seventeen years on the throne. He was buried in the royal tomb at Amarna. Despite his vehement antipathy towards traditional Egyptian religion, his sarcophagus of pink granite was nevertheless accompanied by all the usual funerary equipment: a canopic chest, magic bricks, even servant figurines to serve him in the next world. Before the heretic king was even cold in his grave, it seems, orthodox beliefs were reasserting themselves. Like all revolutions, Akhenaten’s was swift, dramatic, and ruthless. Like so many, it died with its instigator.
57 | Nefertiti
T
HE POWER BEHIND THE THRONE
Nefertiti has become synonymous with the extravagant, exotic court created at Akhetaten. She has inspired almost as many theories as her husband, yet comparatively little is known about her background and her ultimate fate remains shrouded in mystery. None the less, the evidence for her meteoric rise to power and her unrivalled place in her husband’s radical plans paints a portrait of an intelligent, ambitious and ruthless woman.
The name Nefertiti means ‘the beautiful one is come’, an appropriate moniker for a king’s wife whose exquisite painted bust – excavated in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose and now one of the treasures of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum – is revered as an icon of ancient beauty. Just where Nefertiti came from, however, was never stated; it probably served her interests to keep it deliberately obscure. It was perhaps not seemly for the quasi-divine king’s wife to admit to an earthly, even a humble, origin. Although a foreign ancestry has been suggested – equating Nefertiti with the Mitannian princess Tadukhepa, known to have been sent to Egypt in the reign of Amenhotep III – it is more likely that she came from the same powerful provincial family that had already married into the royal family in the person of Tiye (no. 53). Indeed, Nefertiti may have been Tiye’s niece, and hence Akhenaten’s first cousin. She was certainly brought up as a baby in the household of Ay (no. 65), probably at Akhmim in Middle Egypt, with Ay’s wife Tey acting as her wet-nurse. Nefertiti’s only known relative was a sister, Mutbenret, with whom she probably shared her childhood.
Nefertiti married her husband when he was still a prince, or else very early in his reign when he was still known by his birth-name Amenhotep. When he changed his name to Akhenaten, signalling the start of his revolution, she responded in like fashion, adding the epithet Neferneferuaten ‘beautiful are the beauties of Aten’ to her name, to proclaim her devotion to the new god. From now on, husband and wife acted together, co-instigators of the changes that swept aside hallowed customs, co-beneficiaries of the new order which put the royal couple at the centre of popular worship. In the new religion, Aten was the creator while Akhenaten and Nefertiti were his children. Together they formed a divine triad – ironically, the unit at the heart of the traditional Egyptian pantheon – but theirs was an exclusive claim to divinity. To emphasize their roles, Akhenaten associated himself with Shu, son of the creator and god of light and air, while Nefertiti took the part of Tefnut, Shu’s sister-wife. She adopted Tefnut’s flat-topped headdress, and made it the very symbol of her authority, wearing little else in public after her husband’s fourth year on the throne.
On the rock-cut stelae marking the boundaries of the new capital city, Akhenaten lauded Nefertiti as ‘great in the palace, fair of face, beautiful in the double plumes, the mistress of joy, at the hearing of whose voice one rejoices, possessor of graciousness, great of love, whose arrangements please the Lord of the Two Lands’. Indeed, the intimacy of their relationship was made a central element of the new religion and was publicized for all to see. Reliefs from the city showed the King’s Great Wife ever present at her husband’s side. In one, Nefertiti was shown exchanging looks with Akhenaten as she sat on his lap and fastened a bead collar around his neck. On another, she was depicted glancing fondly towards him while the couple’s three eldest daughters played on their parents’ laps. There had never been a royal partnership quite like it.
In offering scenes, Nefertiti was shown equal in size to her husband. Indeed, in the Aten temple at Karnak, where she had her own shrine, reliefs depicted her offering directly to the Aten without the king’s presence. This represented a marked departure from previous usage. On a private stela from Akhetaten, both husband and wife were shown wearing crowns. Another block went one stage further, depicting Nefertiti in the act of smiting a (female) captive, echoing the quintessential pose of kingship. It was unprecedented for anyone other than the king himself to be shown performing this highly symbolic action, and it proclaimed Nefertiti’s exceptional role beside her husband.
More was to follow. In reliefs in the tomb of Meryra (no. 58), carved late in Akhenaten’s reign, the overlapping figures of Akhenaten and Nefertiti were almost joined into a single outline, suggesting the divine unity of the royal couple. Nefertiti added further epithets to her name, including ‘beloved of Aten’ and even ‘ruler’, hinting at a steady elevation of her status to that of co-regent with her husband. Then, at the zenith of her powers, she disappeared from view, following the burial of her second daughter Meketaten. Had she died or fallen from grace, or had she rather undergone an even more profound transformation? It is tempting to speculate that Nefertiti followed the logic of her own life, adopting a fully kingly titulary to match the iconography, and shedding her previous persona in the process.
However, when Akhenaten died a few years later, the next king to emerge was not Neferneferuaten but Smenkhkara. Had Nefertiti finally been eclipsed, or had she perhaps undergone yet another change of image and name to suit her sole reign? If she did rule independently, it was only for a very short time. The throne soon passed to a royal relative who was probably related only by marriage to Nefertiti, the boy-king Tutankhuaten. In the power-struggle surrounding the end of the Amarna Period, Nefertiti’s faction was the loser. What ultimately became of her is not known. Perhaps she was laid to rest in the royal tomb at Amarna, beside her husband: that would certainly have been his dying wish. For, in the ultimate gesture of affection, Akhenaten’s own sarcophagus was decorated at its four corners not with images of the traditional protector goddesses, but with figures of Nefertiti. It was perhaps an acknowledgment that his revolution would never have happened but for the extraordinary woman at his side and behind his throne.
58 | Meryra
Z
EALOT OF A NEW RELIGION
At the heart of Akhenaten’s ‘heresy’ was, of course, his religious doctrine. At the core of this was the Aten. And at the centre of Aten-worship was the Great Aten Temple at Amarna (ancient Akhetaten). The High Priest of the Aten was thus at the very nexus of the Amarna revolution, and for most of Akhenaten’s reign the office was held by a man called Meryra.
Besides the usual indicators of rank, Meryra’s principal title, in its full form, was Greatest of Seers of the Aten in the Temple of Aten in Akhetaten. Greatest of Seers was traditionally the designation for the High Priest of Ra at Heliopolis (ancient Iunu). Now that Ra had been supplanted by Aten as the sun god, the title was transferred to the head of the Aten priesthood. It was a particularly appropriate designation, since the Aten was explicitly the visible sun: Aten temples were dominated by great open courts, where the solar disc could be observed and worshipped in all its glory, unhindered and unmediated.
There was a further element in Atenism which differentiated it from the traditional cults of Egypt. According to the purest form of Akhenaten’s doctrine – ‘the Teaching’ – the king was the only one who knew the Aten, the only channel of communication between god and people. Official texts made it quite clear that Akhenaten and the Aten were co-regents, the sun-disc ruling in the heavens while the king ruled on earth. Moreover, Atenism was essentially a cult of the royal family, whereby ordinary people, if they wished to worship the Aten, were encouraged to do so via images of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their daughters. This all made a priesthood somewhat redundant, yet Akhenaten retained one. Perhaps the pattern was simply too ingrained in the Egyptian consciousness, or perhaps it was a matter of practicality, since the king could not be expected to officiate at every daily ceremony in the Great Aten Temple at Amarna, let alone at cult centres in other cities. So, there remained a need for a High Priest, even if his secondary titles, ‘fan-bearer on the king’s right hand’ and ‘greatly praised of the good ruler’, made it clear that his position was subordinate to the king himself.
Around Akhenaten’s ninth year on the throne, Meryra was promoted to the position of High Priest of the Aten, an office he was to hold for the next seven years. He carefully ensured that his previous career and background remained hidden; but, like many of Akhenaten’s inner circle, he probably came from nowhere and owed everything to the king’s favour. The investiture took place at the royal palace in the centre of Amarna. The king and queen, accompanied by their eldest daughter Meritaten, appeared at the balcony, leaning on a sumptuously embroidered cushion. Meryra, wearing a long white gown and a decorative sash, and attended by members of his household, entered into the royal presence and knelt before the king. Scribes were on hand to make an official record of the proceedings. Four sunshade bearers were in attendance to provide relief from the heat of the day. And, in the background, four policemen carrying batons stood ready in case of any sign of trouble. It was, after all, an autocratic regime, and the royal family never went anywhere without a security presence.
Akhenaten spoke to Meryra, confirming his appointment with a formal speech. The crowd of onlookers, including a troupe of female dancers with tambourines, shouted their acclamation and, when the clamour had died down, Meryra replied. As was appropriate to the occasion, his words were brief and to the point: ‘Abundant are the rewards which Aten knows to give, pleasing his heart.’ His friends then raised him up on their hands, and he left the palace as one of the king’s inner circle.
A second milestone in Meryra’s career came some time later when he was rewarded for his ultra-loyalty to the king with the conferment of the ‘gold of honour’. This was the highest mark of esteem that could be bestowed on a commoner, and it consisted of heavy collars of gold beads that were placed around the recipient’s neck during the investiture. The ceremony took place between the storehouses, where much of the wealth of the Great Aten Temple was stockpiled, and the riverbank of Amarna. Meryra was decked out in all his finery, wearing earrings and a festal costume. His attendants included the usual fan-bearers, sunshade-bearers and scribes, as well as three members of his temple staff. He was received in the outer court of the granary by Akhenaten and Nefertiti, accompanied by two of their daughters and a large retinue. As soon as he beheld the pharaoh, Meryra raised his arms in salutation and worship. The king advanced, hung the gold collars around his neck, and addressed the assembled company. The speech was verbose, stilted, rather legalistic and anything but brief, like so many dictators’ speeches throughout history. Meryra seems not to have made a reply: perhaps he was simply overwhelmed by the occasion.
The whole episode was recorded in detail in Meryra’s tomb. Hewn into the northern cliffs of Amarna, it was the finest sepulchre in the whole necropolis, with an impressive façade nearly 30 m (100 ft) wide. It reflected his high status at court. His wife, Tenra, was depicted in the tomb reliefs, but there was no mention anywhere of the couple’s children. Indeed, scenes of the king, the royal family and their retinue dominated the monument. Each of the door jambs was carved with salutations to the Aten, Akhenaten and Nefertiti. The majority of the decoration was concerned with the activities of the king and queen. The tomb owner himself was relegated to an almost secondary position. There could be no stronger indication of the essence of Atenism – the centrality of the king in the lives (and deaths) of all his people.
Curiously, Meryra was never laid to rest in his splendid tomb; its burial-chamber was never finished. His end remains a mystery. For the High Priest of Akhenaten’s new religion, in which there was no afterlife, only earthly existence under the beneficent rays of the sun-disc, this seems entirely appropriate.
59 | Bak
S
CULPTOR WHO LED AN ARTISTIC REVOLUTION
Since the very beginnings of pharaonic civilization, Egypt’s rulers appreciated the power of art to express, reinforce and immortalize royal authority. The formal art of the Egyptian court symbolized the ordered universe over which the gods and their earthly representative, the Egyptian king, presided. This world-view found expression in two-dimensional reliefs and three-dimensional sculpture. Artists working in the official tradition – and there was little scope for anything else – were thus very much servants of the state. The close relationship between the king as head of state and the artists who glorified him is exemplified in the career of Bak, chief sculptor during the early years of Akhenaten’s reign.
Bak grew up in an artistic family. His father, Men, was chief sculptor in the reign of Amenhotep III, and had married a woman from Heliopolis (ancient Iunu) named Ry. Bak, in turn, entered the family profession, rising to the position of ‘chief sculptor in the great and mighty monuments of the king in the house of the Aten at Akhetaten (Amarna)’. Father and son had themselves depicted in an inscription in the granite quarries at Aswan (‘the Red Mountain’), source of some of the best sculptural stone. Men is shown in front of a colossal statue of his royal master, perhaps one of the Colossi of Memnon that stood before Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple at western Thebes. Bak, in turn, is shown worshipping a statue of his sovereign, Akhenaten. Particularly striking is the difference in style between the two scenes. While Men and Amenhotep III are depicted according to the traditional, hallowed canon of Egyptian court art, Bak and Akhenaten are shown in the revolutionary style introduced by the king as part of his decisive break with the past. Father and son must therefore have been well aware of the differences.
