Akhenaten and the Amarna Pharaohs |
Por el Dr. Nicholas Reeves |
Conferencia impartida en Madrid, 30 de Mayo de 2002 |
(**1) In the north of Egypt, around 1370 BC, a child was born to the Egyptian queen Tiye, great royal wife of the powerful pharaoh Amenophis III. (**10)
The treatment meted out to Akhenaten by his successors was extreme—too
extreme, I feel, to have been provoked by the head-in-the-clouds and
essentially well-meaning hero of Breasted’s history. Indeed, it is
difficult to imagine any creature of good provoking a reaction as violent
as this, however unfortunate had been the consequences of his actions.
Clearly, Akhenaten was hated by his people—and it seems that this
hatred was inspired less by the inaction of a religious dreamer than the
pro-action of a political manipulator. (**11)
We tend today to assume that kingly power in Egypt was as constant as,
perhaps, its art appears, at first glance, to the uninitiated; but it was
not. Power ebbed and flowed, and since the apogee of kingly power during
the pyramid age things had changed. The recurrent theme in the history of
Egypt’s New Kingdom, 1200 years on from the pyramids, is a jostling for
earthly control between the throne and the priests of Egypt’s principal
god, Amun of Thebes. (**12) Thanks to Amun’s divine support, Akhenaten’s
predecessors had achieved a series of brilliant military victories in
Syria-Palestine; and from these victories an empire was built. But there
was a serious downside. The vast tribute which began to flow into Egypt to
be dedicated, in great part, to the country’s principal god made this
god’s servants rich and greedy for power. Eventually, Amun’s
priests controlled a virtual state within a state—and they aimed
higher still. (**13)
Crisis point had been reached around 1480 BC, a century before Akhenaten
was born. Tuthmosis II, the ruling king, died and the throne was seized by
his widow, the chief royal wife Hatshepsut, who blocked the accession of
the true heir, Tuthmosis III, for 15 years. (**14) Supporting the fiction
of the queen’s divine birth, and thus her right to rule, the Amun
priesthood was instrumental in keeping her in office. The reward?
Overriding temporal power and influence. With others pulling the strings,
however, royal prestige fell to an all time low. The
interlude is, for us, a significant one, revealing clearly the extent of
the Amun cult’s simmering ambitions—and its danger to the throne. (**15)
For a very brief moment the curtain of history lifts, to reveal series of
vulnerable, all too human rulers—and a kingship whose power, despite the
bombastic propaganda of Egypt’s temple walls, was in practice very much
limited. The graffito on the left, found above the queen’s famous
mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, says it all. In the wake of the
Hatshepsut episode, however, a determined if cautious reaction by the
royals may be discerned; what could be done by Hatshepsut’s
successors to prevent a repetition of such priestly meddling clearly was
done. The
danger would be averted by various means. (**16) From the thwarted heir,
Tuthmosis III, on, the existence and number of pharaoh’s heirs was
publicly emphasized for the first time, to ensure that the succession was
clear and legitimate; and, for some years after the Hatshepsut episode, no
queen of the ruling king would be elevated to the influential springboard-position
of chief wife. The
kings pulled other levers too. Ancient tribal loyalties were brought into
play, with (**17) a northern high priest, Ptahmose, appointed to head Amun’s
cult, neutralizing the power of that southern god’s priesthood. More
dramatically, the very basis of royal power began radically to be
reassessed. The aim, towards which each of Hatshepsut’s successors would
vigorously strive, was to re-establish the kingship on a sounder, stronger
theological footing: in ways both large and small there would be a
determined return to the values of the pyramid age, when the king’s
divine, all-powerful status was unchallenged—a time when (**18) the
principal power in the heavens was the sun-god Re, Amun’s more ancient
and less politicised rival at Heliopolis in the north. (**19)
By the reign of Tuthmosis IV, two kings after Hatshepsut, a quickening
growth may be discerned in pharaonic promotion of the sun cult. By the end
of the reign of Amenophis III, further dramatic change occurs. It was
traditionally believed that, in death, the Egyptian king’s soul would
join with the Aten, the solar god’s sentient energy; now—apparently at
the point Amenophis IV-Akhenaten is elevated to rule as junior king by his
father’s side—(**20) Amenophis III proclaims that he has joined with
this divine essence in life. Pharaoh is now a god. (**21)
With the death of Amenophis III comes further change: from this time on,
the Aten is consistently shown in a new and peculiarly disembodied form—as
a solar disc pouring its rays of light and life on Akhenaten and his
family, and on them alone; and, significantly, the hieroglyphs which spell
out the god’s name are now contained within two cartouches, or royal
ovals. How
are we to understand these changes? What do they signify? In fact, the conclusion is inescapable: pharaoh Amenophis III and his son’s increasingly powerful god, the Aten, had not only become one—the solar divinity of this elder king was now formalized in an abstract iconography which parallelled pharaoh’s own newly disembodied state in death. In other words, the Aten, focus of Akhenaten’s coming religion, seems from the very start to have been his father, Amenophis III. Akhenaten’s
first attempts to honour the Aten would be made at Thebes, the ancient
centre of the Amun cult. This old god’s city, as we learn from an
inscription, now received a new name—Akhetenaten, ‘Horizon of the
Aten’. (**22) And here, in the midst of Amun’s realm, within the
immense Karnak temple-complex, Akhenaten determined to erect a series of
enormous structures, open to the sky, for the worship of his new god. It
was a brave challenge: with the arrogance of youth, Akhenaten had called
the bluff of Amun’s troublesome priests. But it failed: opposition to
the king’s plans was evidently intense. What happened, (**23) the king
records in an obscure and badly damaged passage of his boundary stelae at
el-Amarna: ‘it was worse than those things heard by any kings who had
ever assumed the white crown [of Upper Egypt]’. Precisely what this
‘it’ was is never specified, but we may guess that a warning had been
sounded. Perhaps in fear of his life, Akhenaten decided to head for
friendlier territory further north. (**24)
Abandoning the old religious capital was a clever and immensely pragamatic
response, which Egyptian history had seen employed at least once before—by
Ammenemes I, founder of the 12th Dynasty 600 years earlier.
This forebear, similarly anxious to by-pass hostile vested interests
within the regime he had recently inherited, decided to establish a new
capital at Itjtawy in the Faiyum—shortly, and significantly, just before
he was murdered. By abandoning Thebes to Amun’s priests, Akhenaten, we
may guess, was attempting to shake off his principal opposition in a
similar way. Any residual rumblings to the changes pharaoh wished to
impose, he hoped would be silenced by the opportunities afforded to his
people by the construction of his god’s new city. (**25)
The site of Akhenaten’s new city was to be a virgin plain in Middle
Egypt: el-Amarna. In antiquity it bore a version of a familiar name—Akhetaten,
a second ‘Horizon of the Aten’; what the king had failed to achieve in
Thebes, here at Amarna he determined to carry through. The city would be a
veritable oasis of culture—and control. (**26)
Abandoned shortly after Akhenaten’s death, and never seriously
reoccupied, much of the foundation still remains—the ruins of its houses
and temples, the empty shells of its exquisitely decorated tombs; and, of
course, the series of great, battered stelae which demarcate the limits of
the foundation. (**27)
As I previously mentioned, each of these stelae is inscribed with the king’s
foundation decree from which most of our knowledge of events at this time
comes. But as revealing as their texts, it now seems, is the physical
disposition of the monuments. (**28) For, connected up, the stelae
astonishingly reproduce, on a massive scale, the ground-plan of
el-Amarna’s principal religious structure—the Great Temple of the
Aten. Akhenaten’s new city, evidently, had been conceived and designed
with immense care as one vast religious edifice. And, like all temples,
this one had its focus. This, revealingly, was the royal tomb itself,
located beyond the break in the eastern cliffs through which the Aten was
reborn every day. (**29)
The significance of this discovery cannot be emphasized strongly enough.
For, with the royal tomb as focus of Akhenaten’s architectural scheme,
the nature of the king’s enterprise stands clearly revealed. For, in the
new theology, the royal tomb was the sepulchre not only of Akhenaten
himself: as the place of the Aten’s rebirth, it represented the point of
daily resurrection of his father and every king of Egypt, past,
present and future, who had or would ultimately become one with the solar
essence. (**30)
The cult of the Aten, in short, is revealed not simply as the worship of
the father by his son, but as the cult of kingship itself. Akhenaten’s
religion was ancestor-worship writ large. And it was the final act, in
that reassertion of kingly power sparked by Hatshepsut’s abasement a
century earlier, to Amun’s greedy and opportunistic priests. (**31)
New religion, new art, new city, new dreams—these were clearly heady
days. Interesting times, as the Chinese would say. But as the initial
excitement passed, the busy populace of el-Amarna will have found itself
in an emotional daze, adrift in a sea of spiritual uncertainty. For the
Egyptian people, the old religion had permeated and directed every aspect
of life, and death; now, with the king’s proscription of the old
religion, it was gone. The
Aten was a distant god, vague in its promises. Worse still, though it was
visible to everyone in the sky above, the divinity was accessible only
through the king as its prophet; (**32) pharaoh worshipped the god, and
the populace worshipped pharaoh. It was another element of the king’s
sinister determination to reassert kingly control—and ordinary Egyptians
can have harboured little hope of change. At
some point between Years 8 and 12 of Akhenaten’s reign, things were to
get very much worse. Secure in his new city, the king unleashed a ruthless,
vindictive persecution of Amun and his consort, the goddess Mut: (**33)
orders were issued to hack out the deities’ images and names wherever
they occurred, throughout the length and breadth of the country. It was
intended as an insult and final humiliation to Amun’s ambitious priests.
But it also generated real and tangible fear among the ordinary people—for
not only were the offending hieroglyphs of Amun’s name removed from
Egypt’s public monuments. (**34) As archaeology shows, small, personal
objects were dealt with in the same ruthless fashion. Fearful of being
found in possession of such seditious items, the owners themselves
had gouged- or ground-out the offending signs of Amun’s name—even
within the tiniest cartouche-ovals on the scarab amulet we see here Such
displays of frightened self-censorship and toadying loyalty are ominous
indicators of the paranoia which was now beginning to grip the country.
(**35) Not only were the streets filled with pharaoh’s bully-boys—Nubians
and Asiatics armed with clubs, seen everywhere in the reliefs of the
period; it seems the population now had to contend with the danger of
malicious informers. And
then—anticlimax: from the records, virtual silence. Of the king’s last
years we know virtually nothing; the period draws to a close with less of
a bang than a whimper. By Year 17 of the reign, it was all over: Akhenaten
was dead and soon to be buried; (**36) power was in the hands of his wife,
the beautiful Nefertiti, recently elevated to the status of junior pharaoh
under the successive throne-names Nefernefruaten and Smenkhkare. And
Nefertiti, in a desperate attempt to hold on to power, we find in
negotiation with a neighbouring great power, the Hittites, for a prince to
share the Egyptian throne. (**37) ‘My husband has died. A son I have not,
but your sons are many’. The queen’s letter ended ominously: ‘I am
afraid’. Nefertiti-Smenkhkare was obviously holding on to power by her
fingertips, and indeed would soon fall. But perhaps it had hardly been
worth the effort. As inscriptions of Tutankhamun—Akhenaten’s son and
legitimate successor—record, the heretic king had bequeathed a country
in economic and spiritual ruin. Even before Akhenaten’s death, as a
power for change the Aten was effectively finished; (**38) and soon, as
Tutankhamun’s monuments reveal, Amun and the gods of old were again in
the ascendant—able to re-establish their hold on the monarchy, and to
write, or ignore, history as they chose. (**39)
Two decades after Akhenaten’s passing, in 1319 BC, Horemheb ushered in
the Nineteenth Dynasty and the start of the Ramessid royal line. Soon,
under Amun’s guidance, the reaction to Amarna began in earnest, and all
trace of the Atenist king and his reign was obliterated. With this obliteration, the fears which had driven Akhenaten’s revolution were forgotten; too late, they would be remembered. (**40) Under Ramesses XI, around 1100 BC, the militaristic high-priest of Amun’s again-pampered cult, Herihor, declared himself pharaoh. Akhenaten’s nightmare was soon to become a reality: within a matter of years, the only real king of Egypt was Amun himself. (**41) The Amarna era is a subject of never-ending fascination, upon the varied aspects of which there has, this evening, been time barely to touch upon. Pharaoh’s extraordinary art style, seen here in its most appealing aspect; Akhenaten’s possible illness; the sophistication of the king’s new city at el-Amarna; the eternal mystery of Tomb 55; and the current star of the period, Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s beautiful wife—a woman who, elevated to the status of junior pharaoh by her husband, clearly harboured Hatshepsut-like ambitions of her own. Each is a lecture in its own right. (**44) Yet, it would be wrong to fool ourselves into believing that the last word on Akhenaten and his time has now been said. Even if we are beginning to advance in our understanding of Amarna history, there remains a long way still to go. We must bear in mind always the scant materials from which, as Egyptologists, we are obliged to work—remembering that hard facts relating to this extraordinary time are depressingly few, and that our documentation remains terribly piecemeal. In attempting to reconstruct the history of this time we are, in effect, dealing with a jigsaw puzzle to which we not only lack a pictorial key but for which most of the pieces are still missing. Before an Egyptologist can claim absolute validity for any of the scenarios he or she puts forward, there will have to be more evidence from which to work. (**45) Which is why the search for fresh data is still ongoing—under Barry Kemp and the Egypt Exploration Society, at el-Amarna; (**46) but also, for the later Amarna period, by myself, Geoffrey Martin and the Amarna Royal Tombs Project in the Valley of the Kings—the site where Akhenaten and his family were finally reburied during Tutankhamun’s reign. (**47) In the Valley of the Kings, only one of the Amarna reburials is identified—the much-discussed KV55, which I believe to have been the tomb of Akhenaten and his mother Tiye. Both of these individuals had originally been buried in the great royal tomb at el-Amarna itself, where with them were interred Akhenaten’s secondary wife, Kiya, and the king’s second daughter, Meketaten. The Valley reburials of Kiya and Meketaten, intriguingly, are still unknown. (**48) And, of course, there is Nefertiti herself—the powerful queen around whom so much of the Amarna period is now seen to revolve. Where was she buried? Also, I believe, in the Valley of the Kings. Thank you.
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