The king most likely died during his 17th regnal year, as this is the highest date attested for him. But uncertainties surround his demise. The royal tomb intended for Akhenaten at Amarna did not contain a royal burial, which prompts the question of what happened to the body. Several scholars have suggested that a skeleton found in tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings could belong to Akhenaten, because the tomb contained numerous grave goods including the coffin in which the remains were found belonging to Akhenaten and other Amarna period figures.
However, like many topics pertaining to Akhenaten, this issue remains the subject of much scholarly debate. Montserrat, Dominic Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt. London: Psychology Press. Redford, Donald B Akhenaten: The Heretic King. Ancient Egyptian Literature Vol. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hornung, Erik Akhenaten and the religion of light. Montserrat notes that the axis of the new Aten complex was built facing to the east, toward the rising sun, whereas the rest of Karnak is oriented towards the west, where ancient Egyptians believed the underworld to be.
This coincided with the start of a campaign aimed at desecrating the names of the gods Amun and Mut, among other deities. Still Akhenaten appears not to have been able to convince all Egyptians to put their sole spiritual hopes in the Aten. Archaeologist Barry Kemp, who leads modern-day excavations at the site of Amarna, notes in his book "The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti" Thames and Hudson, that researchers have found figures depicting other deities, such as Bes and Thoth, at Amarna.
In addition to his radical religious changes, Akhenaten also unleashed a revolution in the way art was drawn. Before his time Egyptian art, especially those portraying royalty, tended to show a stiff, structured, formal style.
The royal family was even drawn in a way that conveyed intimate moments. This radical departure in art, particularly the distorted body shapes, has long left Egyptologists mystified. His chest is sunken, yet there is something feminine about its form. Why Akhenaten chose to depict himself and others this way is a mystery.
However recent study of a mummy found in KV 55, in the Valley of the Kings, which some believe is Akhenaten, show no signs of serious physical deformities. Kemp writes in his book that if it is true Akhenaten was not deformed then we have to look into the psyche of the man to find the answers to this mystery.
More than one-third were dead before they turned The growth patterns of children were delayed by as much as two years. Many adults had suffered spinal damage, which bioarchaeologists believe is evidence that people were being overworked, perhaps in order to build the new capital.
In the team proceeded to another cemetery, to the north of Amarna, where they excavated bodies. Anna Stevens, an Australian archaeologist who directs the cemetery fieldwork, told me that excavators soon noticed something different about these burials.
Many of the bodies appear to have been buried hastily, in graves that contain almost no goods or objects. They were young—92 percent of the individuals in this cemetery were no older than More than half died between the ages of seven and Is this a group of workers who are being conscripted on the basis of their youth—and effectively being worked to death? For Akhenaten, Amarna represented something pure and profoundly visionary. He chose the site, a broad stretch of virgin desert above the east bank of the Nile, because it was uncontaminated by the worship of any god.
He also may have been motivated by the example of his father, Amenhotep III, who was one of the greatest builders of monuments, temples, and palaces in Egyptian history. Both kings were part of the 18th dynasty, which came to power after defeating the Hyksos, a group from the eastern Mediterranean that had invaded northern Egypt. The forefathers of the 18th dynasty were based in southern Egypt, and in order to drive out the Hyksos, they incorporated key innovations from their enemy, including the horse-drawn chariot and the composite bow.
The Egyptians professionalized their military, and unlike most previous dynasties, the 18th maintained a standing army. They were also skilled at diplomacy, and the empire eventually stretched from current-day Sudan to Syria. Foreigners brought new wealth and skills to the Egyptian court, and the effects were profound. Even as Amenhotep III welcomed new ideas, he was also looking back to the distant past.
He studied the pyramids of kings who had lived more than a thousand years earlier, and he incorporated traditional elements into festivals, temples, and royal palaces. He continued to worship Amun, who was the patron god of the city of Thebes. But Amenhotep III also began to emphasize Aten, a form of the sun god Re, portrayed as a solar disk, that recalled older patterns of worship.
He changed his name to Akhenaten—Devoted to Aten—and he decided to move the capital to the site now known as Amarna. The king called his city Akhetaten, or Horizon of the Sun Disk, and soon this stretch of empty desert became home to an estimated 30, people. Meanwhile Egyptian art was also being revolutionized. For centuries strict traditions had defined the correct subject matter, proportions, and poses of paintings and sculptures.
Under Akhenaten, artisans were unleashed from these guidelines. They created lifelike, fluid scenes of the natural world, and they began to portray Akhenaten and his queen, Nefertiti, in unusually natural and intimate poses. Often the royal couple would be shown kissing and caressing their daughters; one scene even featured the king and queen about to get into bed together.
Egyptians worshipped as many as a thousand gods, but Akhenaten was loyal only to one. He and Nefertiti functioned as the sole intermediaries between the people and Aten, taking on the traditional role of the priesthood.
All of this must have threatened priests of the old order who served Amun. After a few years at Amarna, the pharaoh ordered work crews to gouge out all images of Amun in state temples. It was an act of unbelievable boldness: the first time in history that a king had attacked a god. I arrived at the site of the Great Aten Temple one day just as Barry Kemp found a piece of a broken statue of Akhenaten. He abandoned Amarna and returned to the old traditions.
Tutankhamun died unexpectedly, and soon the head of the army, Horemheb, declared himself pharaoh—possibly the first military coup in history. They destroyed statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and they omitted the names of the heretic king and his successors from official lists of Egyptian rulers. People simply forgot that it was there. They also forgot most details of Amarna life. The piece of statuary that he showed me dated to this event—it had been shattered at the command of the king himself, not his successors.
But other evidence is often remarkably intact. Ancient settlement sites were usually located in the Nile Valley, where millennia of floods and habitation destroyed original structures. In contrast, Amarna is situated in the desert above the river, where drinking water had to be hauled in.
Even today you can still see the original brick walls of Amarna houses, and broken pottery is everywhere. Kemp told me that he was originally attracted to Amarna by the intact city site, not the outsize figure of Akhenaten. Like most scholars nowadays, he does not describe Akhenaten as a monotheist.
At the Great Aten Temple, Kemp showed me traces of several large mud-brick offering tables that would have once been heaped with food and incense as part of rituals. The number of these tables is staggering—more than 1, This lack of accountability probably also inspired artistic freedom.
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