Who Was Akhenaten?
Who Was Akhenaten? During his reign, which spanned about 1360–1343 BCE, Akhenaten was king of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty. One of Akhenaten’s most noteworthy achievements was his brief attempt to consolidate all of Egypt’s gods into a single entity known as the Aten, which was essentially the physical incarnation of the sun. It is currently believed that the foundation of the religion was Amenhotep III’s deification as the “living Aten” while he was still alive.
This is because Amenhotep III was Akhenaten’s father. It is safe to say that the entire religion of the Aten revolved around the royal family, and the king was the only person who could worship the god because he was the god’s earthly representative. Amenhotep was Akhenaten’s given name at birth, and he retained that name throughout the first five years of his reign as the fourth monarch to have that name. During this time, he was known as Akhenaten.
It is probable that up to the first twelve years of his reign were spent reigning jointly with his father, with Egypt’s primary religious capital staying at Thebes. During this time, it is likely that Thebes was the location of the capital city. Behind the temple of Amun-Re of Karnak, which is considered to be the king of the gods, a huge temple dedicated to Aten was constructed here. However, during the fourth year of his reign, Amenhotep IV made the decision to look for a special cult center for the Aten.
He founded a new city called Akhetaten (modern Tell el-Amarna), which was located approximately in the middle of the distance between Thebes and Memphis, the civil capital. While he was doing this, he also changed his name from Amenhotep, which meant “Amun is satisfied,” to Akhenaten, which meant “Effective Spirit of the Aten.” It is commonly hypothesized that these shifts toward a more democratic form of religion were a reaction against the growing dominance of the Amun priesthood, with a move toward a more egalitarian religious structure.
On the other hand, this is, at best, an oversimplification and, at worst, an entirely erroneous representation of the situation. The close ties that existed between the monarch and the Aten, in particular if the latter was, for all intents and purposes, Amenhotep III, served to significantly bolster the position of the royal household at the epicenter of both political and religious authority in ancient Egypt.
However, the heavenly king had always played an important role, and one should be wary of drawing too many conclusions about the reasons why ancient people did the things they did because those records have not remained. The fact that the object of devotion in private household shrines at Amarna was a single stela depicting the royal family in the act of adoration is illustrative of the purportedly democratic nature of the cult.
This is a fact that should not be overlooked. This provides a strong suggestion that, at the absolute best, an average person’s access to God is restricted. It is known that Akhenaten had two wives. The elder of the two was Nefertiti, and while nothing is known about her background, it is possible that she was the daughter of an Egyptian general named Ay.
There was some speculation that she was a princess from the state of Mitanni, which is located in northern Syria, and that she had joined the king’s harem as part of a diplomatic union; however, this theory has almost totally been debunked at this point. Kiya was the younger of the two wives; her background is just as mysterious, and it is not out of the question to assume that she was the Mitannian lady.
Meryetaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Neferneferuatentasherit, Neferneferure, and Setpenre are the six known offspring that Nefertiti bore to her husband. All of these children were daughters. In addition, there is mention of a son by the name of Tutankhuaten in an inscription that was found in Amarna. On the other hand, nothing is known about his mother. On the east bank of the Nile, on a site that had never been inhabited before, the city of Akhetaten was established.
The palace, temples, and government offices were located in the central city, which was separated from the private residential suburbs that spread outward from it in all directions. The royal home was located at the northernmost tip of the region. The city borders, which were marked by a string of fifteen enormous boundary stelae, included not just the central business district but also a sizable portion of the west bank’s farmland.
The royal cemetery was located at the end of a five-kilometer-long wadi that ran into the eastern desert. The tomb chapels of the nobles were cut into the eastern cliffs behind the city. Since the 1890s, excavation work has been carried out at the site of the city, most frequently by teams from Germany and the United Kingdom. A significant number of clay tablets written in Mesopotamian cuneiform script were discovered at the site.
These tablets indicate communications received from other great countries as well as from vassals. It has been argued that these factors contributed to a loss of Egyptian dominance in Syria and Palestine during the reign of Akhenaten, which was made worse by the king’s deliberate neglect of the region. Because there were issues with the arranging of many of the letters and because this is the only archive of its kind that is still in existence and is known to have come from Egypt, one must exercise caution when reaching such conclusions.
The fact that ancient beliefs regarding Akhenaten’s claimed pacifism are problematic due to the survival of fragments depicting the king (and the queen) smiting Egypt’s enemies also makes old views difficult. The so-called “Hymn to the Aten,” which is engraved in a number of private tomb chapels, provides an excellent synopsis of the beliefs of the Aten religion. It has been compared to some of the Hebrew Psalms in terms of both its universalist stance and its form.
There is no evidence to suggest that these two writings are connected in any direct way; rather, they are expressions of a cultural milieu that was prevalent throughout the Near East throughout the latter part of the Bronze Age. Meketaten, Akhenaten’s daughter, passed away not long after the end of her father’s twelfth year as king, which may have been the same year that he took sole control of Egypt after Amenhotep III was put to death.
In addition to this, the monarch adopted a new coronet that was at first known as Smenkhkare and was eventually renamed Neferneferuaten. It has been hypothesized that one or both of these names refer to Nefertiti in her capacity as a female king. This is based on the fact that records of Nefertiti vanished about the same time. However, there is unmistakable proof that the name Smenkhkare was given to a man who was married to Princess Meryetaten.
In addition, a collection of inscriptions displaying a transitional titulary, which is halfway between those associated with the names Smenkhkare and Neferneferuaten, indicates that we actually have a single individual (probably Akhenaten’s eldest son) who subsequently changed his name. Smenkhkare/Neferneferuaten seems to have died before Akhenaten. Akhenaten’s assault on polytheistic monuments, which included the destruction of Amun’s names and images, whose ongoing worship had been supported by the dead coruler, should presumably be dated to the final months of his reign.
In the seventeenth year of Akhenaten’s reign, he passed away, and his successor was most likely his younger son, Tutankhaten, who was married to Akhenaten’s third daughter. By the middle of Tutankhamun’s reign, which spanned ten years, the religious status quo had been restored thanks to the guidance of the generals Ay and Horemheb, both of whom would go on to become kings (as he was renamed). It is most likely that immediately following Tutankhamun’s passing, the tomb of Akhenaten in Amarna was defiled, its furnishings were destroyed, and the king’s mummy was set ablaze.
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