Akhenaten

Akhenaten, then, certainly redefined the relationship of king and god to his own advantage. Whether this was an innovation of his own has been much debated. Current orthodoxy, which owes much to the work of Jan Assmann, tends to regard Akhenaten as having refined and extended ideas that had been around in Egypt for some time. Jan Assmann believes that Akhenaten's religion was one component of what he calls the 'crisis of polytheism'. '² Some aspects of this can be traced back as far as the Twelfth Dynasty,

c. 1938-1759 bce, which was also the first time that the Aten was mentioned as a divinity. The 'crisis' developed during the reign of Amunhotep III, who started to express theologic­ally the ruling dynasty's wealth and power, and found its most extreme form under Akhenaten. One important issue in the 'crisis of polytheism' was the unknowableness of the god, something that obviously attracted Akhenaten. Dur­ing his reign Akhenaten can be said have to developed his own version of other trends in the presentation of kingship that can be traced back to his father. When Amunhotep III sailed in his barge Aten dazzles,

he was analogising his own journey with the sun-god's progression across the sky and through the under­world. Akhenaten took this one step further in his chariot rides through Akhet- aten. The prominence of Akhenaten's mother Tiye prefigured that of Nefertiti, especially in Tiye's relationship to solar cults at the Nubian temples Tiye, like Nefertiti, may have been identified with the goddess Tcfnut.

It is a similar case with both pharaohs' use of the past. Amunhotep Ill's inter­est seems almost antiquarian, scrutinising ancient monuments in order to get the period details right for his own re-enactments of historic rituals like the sed- festival.Under Akhenaten, however, it seems possible to see a different motiv­ation behind the ways in which ancient objects or architectural types were used. For Amunhotep III, this can be seen as part of the religious pluralism of his reign, and for Akhenaten as part of his larger project of getting rid of any intermediaries between heaven and earth other than himself and his family. There are many hints of this at Akhet-aten, such as the open-air temples whose architecture and decoration have similarities with some Old Kingdom temples. Even the placement of the tombs at Akhet-aten, with those of the courtiers clustering round the king's, recalls the layout of the Old Kingdom necropolis at Saqqara and Giza. And among the wreckage of Akhenaten's funerary furniture is a fragmentary bowl inscribed with the names of Khaefre (= Chcphren), one of the pyramid-building pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty,

c. 2520-2495 bce.''¹

The inclusion of this object might suggest more than Akhenaten's wish to locate him­self within the lineage of esteemed ancestors. It could imply that desirable models of kingship were to be found a thousand years earlier in the pyramid age, when the pharaoh was supposed to have had an uncontested status as living god with no competitors. There are other hints of the conservative nature of

Akhenaten's revolution. The texts that were used to teach scribes were the trad­itional ones, dating from the Middle Kingdom. While certain parts of these texts were altered to remove unacceptable elements, such as the writings of divine names, it is still significant that old texts with a link to the past were retained, rather than replaced by new ones which conformed to the new orthodoxy.⁵³ Such conservatism is particularly striking in an educational context. Teaching materials are often the first targets for an ideological overhaul when new political regimes come into power. Among the texts used at Akhet-aten was The Teaching of King Amunemhat I, from the Twelfth Dynasty, and so already over five hundred years old. The name Amunemhat means 'Amun-is-forcmost': one wonders how the scribes were instructed to write this politically unacceptable name. In some ways, then, Akhenaten's reign and its changes may be seen as looking back at a more distant past rather than a break with it.