Akhenaten

On the level of folklore, the kind of religious, political and human turmoil that characterised the latter part of Akhenaten's reign is often mythologised.⁷¹

Pas­sages in some Greek and Roman writers suggest that this is exactly what hap­pened, and that Akhenaten was still remembered nearly a millennium after his death. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the mid-fifth century bce, men­tions a king who 'first closed all the temples so that nobody could make their sacrifices, then forced all the Egyptians to work for him' in stone-quarries. This may preserve some memory of Akhenaten transformed into the paradigmatic bad king of Egypt, but the parallel is tenuous.⁷⁵

A more probable echo of Akhen­aten's story is in the third-century bce author Manetho, whose work has only survived in resumes, quotations and translations by other ancient writers. Manetho had some knowledge of Akhenaten's reign, perhaps derived from Egyptian-language chronicles in temple libraries, and oral histories which called Akhenaten 'Osarseph'. He related a story about a certain King Amenophis (i.e. Amunhotep III), who wanted to see a vision of the gods and asked the seer Amenophis son of Paapis to help him do so. The seer predicted that there would be disaster in Egypt for thirteen years, and then committed suicide at the pro­spect.⁷¹

' Manetho also refers to great physical upheaval being involved in the story. He says that there was a movement of 80,000 people to a remote area east of the Nile, which was later abandoned. Could this be some memory of the move to Akhet-aten, the thirteen or so years Akhenaten lived there, and its eventual destruction? Historically there is not much to go on here, especially given the confusion of Manetho's text. The anecdote may just show that the end of Amunhotep Ill's reign was somehow connected with a vague memory of troubled times ahead. The surviving resumes of Manetho ascribe various succes­sors to Amunhotep III, some of them with names superficially similar to Akhen­aten, such as Akcncheres and Akencherscs. Other versions of the events of Akhenaten's reign were circulating as late as the second century ce, though it is not clear to what extent these depend on Manetho's history.⁷⁷

These versions share a strong tradition of connecting Moses with a period of religious icono- clasm and political brutality in Egypt lasting thirteen years. One of them, Against Apion (an apologia for Judaism by the Jewish author Flavius Josephus), is the first to link a folklore version of Akhenaten with the biblical Moses, another idea which will rccur throughout this book.

In spite of all this confusion among the ancient historians, they do seem to hint that some events of the Amarna period lived on in Egypt's collective memory. And once recorded in important classical authors like Josephus, the story was set to live on for the educated elites in the west who read Greek and Latin - which was exactly what happened. In the ancient authorities like Manetho one could read about battles, conspiracies and struggles in ancient Egypt that gave insight into human character and were a guide to moral behaviour. In this oblique way, Akhenaten went on to be rediscovered by seventeenth- and eighteenth- century writers, who created allegories set in Egypt that prefigure the Akhen­aten myth.