Akhenaten

father's serf-festival (see Figure 2.3). It is easy to look ideologically at these con­ventional images of Akhenaten, knowing that soon he is going to be dcpictcd in a strikingly different way on the Gem-pa-Aten monuments. But these representations make one think harder about a central feature of the Akhenaten legend - that his reign is an attempt to wipe out his father's memory and the god they were both named after. The cvidcncc suggests otherwise. Akhenaten portrays Amunhotep III positively at the new capital Akhet-aten, and seems to have taken carc over moving his funerary cult there and maintaining it. If anything, the anti-Oedipal picture is more plausible: that Akhenaten continued to hold his father in con­siderable esteem and was keen to acknowledge his dcsccnt from him and his ancestors. At Akhet-aten the 'houses' of other Eighteenth Dynasty rulers includ­ing Amunhotep were established, sometimes in association with temples which apparently provided them with offerings.

^+,) Akhenaten's respect for his father's memory affects how the rest of Akhenaten's reign is interpreted. How much were his religious reforms his own; what did they owe to Amunhotep Ill's interest in religious questions, or indeed to even older religious and political debates?

A break with the past?

At the time when he ascended the throne there was already such indescribable confusion on the Egyptian monuments that nobody could make head or tail of them. AKEN-ATEN decided that all this must go. Determined to smooth the path of Egyptology, he resolved to have one Sun-god with a new name — Aten, and make a clean sweep of all the rest.

'The Outline of Egyptology', satire in Punch,

28 February 1923

Akhenaten is often called a rebel pharaoh or a heretic pharaoh, and his reign a revolution or a reformation. Certainly great changes took place when he was pharaoh that had lasting consequences. In artistic representation, the conventions loosened (eventually resulting in imagery once limited to royalty filtering down socially); the language was destabilised; and most significantly there was a shift of emphasis in the relationship between god and king. Akhenaten certainly spon­sored these, but how far did he initiate them? I think that there are two inter­linked problems underlying any evaluation of Akhenaten as an innovator. These are the questions of what Akhenaten himself actually believed, and the ultimate purpose of his religious reforms. These have been seen cither as a genuine religious revelation or as a cynical way of exploiting religion to justify political despotism. But to separate motives out like this is rather simplistic and docs not address the complicated interplay between religion and politics in ancient Egypt. It also seems to be based on a western assumption that history is about a succes­sion of conflicts between church and state, most famously formulated by the nineteenth-century British historian Lord Acton. Again, this is something which may not apply to ancient Egypt and shows, as do epithets like 'heretic' or 'refor­mation', that inappropriate terminology easily leaches into writing about Amarna.

While discussing Akhenaten's changes, much ink has been spilt on whether Egyptian religion pre-Akhenaten was polytheistic, believing in many gods, or henotheistic, believing in one god who is not the only god. Whichever stance one takes, Akhenaten's religion was certainly different from what went before. His conception of the Aten as the unique and solitary god can easily seem to be a kind of monotheism. Akhenaten as originator of Judaeo-Christian monotheism has probably been the single most pervasive part of his myth: it is an idea which will come up often in subsequent chapters. Before considering the monotheism question, it's important to differentiate monolatry - the representation of a single god as an object of worship in religious contexts - from mono theism, which is the belief in a single god. It seems to mc that many discussions of Akhenaten's religion do not make this distinction clear enough. Akhenaten's religion was cer­tainly monolatrous; whether it was monotheistic is more difficult to answer, because ultimately we need to know what Akhenaten himself believed. Akhen­aten represented only one god, but this docs not ncccssarily imply that he did not believe in the existence of the others, just that he didn't want to give them official recognition at Akhet-aten. Representation is not the same thing as belief.