Akhenaten

After Neferneferuaten, a short-reigned pharaoh called Smenkhkare' Ankhkheperure' is then attested. Because they share the name Ankhkheperure' ('Living-one-of-the-manifestations-of Re''), it was once believed that Smenkhkare' was identical to 'Neferneferuaten Ankhkheperure', beloved of Akhenaten', and the dates perhaps fit in with this person being a renamed Nefertiti ruling alone after Akhenaten's death. Alternatively, Smenkhkare' may have been somehow related to Akhenaten and married to one of his daughters, though the evidence for this is suppositious. At any rate, mass-produced commemorative rings and other items found at Amarna show that some effort was made to mark the acces­sion of this pharaoh in the usual ways. Objects prepared for his tomb were eventually recycled in the burial of his successor Tutankhatcn, a child of unknown relationship to Akhenaten.²⁷ Tutankhaten's ideologically correct name ('Living-image-of-Aten') certainly suggests a connection with Akhenaten's immediate circle, if not a blood relationship. It might also, however, reflect the long-standing Egyptian practice of naming people after the local god, since Akhet-aten was the Aten's home territory.

Tutankhaten and those who ruled in his name extended Neferneferuaten's concessions to the gods Akhenaten had opposed. Eventually the symbols of Atcn- worship were removed. Names were changed back to forms celebrating Amun. The royal residence had relocated to Thebes by year 2 of the renamed Tutankhamun, c. 1330 bce, although Akhet-aten remained inhabited and was even partially resettled some time later. Efforts to deny Akhenaten's existence by omitting him from some official records begin at this time. An inscription raised by Tutankhamun in the Hypostylc Hall at Karnak Temple gives a rather allusive version of Akhenaten's reign, never mentioning his name, and saying that neglect of the gods had led to disaster abroad:

The gods were ignoring this land: if an army was sent ... to extend the frontiers of Egypt, it met with no success; if one prayed to a god to ask something from him, he did not come at all.'"

Religious upheaval in Egypt and political confusion in the empire were con­venient weapons for Akhenaten's opponents. Before or shortly after Tutankha- mun's death in c. 1323 bce, the vandalism and destruction of Akhenaten's monuments began. Efforts were stepped up during the reign of Ramesses II (reg c.

1290-1224 bce) when buildings at Akhet-aten were dismantled and reused. Yet Akhenaten and the upheavals of his reign were not forgotten.Towards the end of Ramesses II's reign, more than a century after Akhenaten's death, euphem­isms such as '"the rebel" (sebiu) or "the criminal" (kheru) of Akhet-aten' were used to avoid speaking his name.

²⁹ The word kheru usually describes the defeated rulers of Egypt's foreign enemies. Using kheru

to execrate Akhenaten dissociates him from the official lineage of approved kings, setting him apart as aberrant though still royal. But Akhenaten was not erased from every kind of record. It seems likely that chronicles or annals in temple archives preserved some record of him and his reign. These chronicles were perhaps still extant in the third ccntury bce when they were consulted by historians writing in Greek, and a rather garbled version of Akhenaten's story was transmitted into the classical tradition.

In the rest of this chapter I look critically at what I regard to be the parts of Akhenaten's history that have spawned the most important aspects of his myth. This is intended to help set the scene for the elaborate sets of appropriations I turn to in the rest of this book. I start off by examining his family background. Akhenaten is often subjected to amateur 'psychoanalysis' via the Readers' Digest redaction of Freud, and his reign is seen as a result of the psychological effects on him of his upbringing. Here I suggest that the evidence is so scrappy and ambiguous, and so frequently misrepresented, that such reconstructions are pointless. I then consider the extent to which Akhenaten's religious policy was innovatory, or whether it is more useful to see it within a larger pattern of religious speculation that started before him and continued after his death. This is followed by a discussion of the ideological role of Amarna art (usually mis­represented in terms of naturalism and verismo), and I finally consider the erasure of Akhenaten's name and destruction of his city.

Akhenaten's family