The Rediscovery of Akhenaten and His Place in Religion

Author(s): Erik Hornung

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Source: Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Vol. 29 (1992), pp. 43-49
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 The Rediscovery of Akhenaten and His Place in Religion*
Erik Hornung
On his first and only journey to Egypt,
Champollion spent only a very short time in
Middle Egypt. In a hurry to reach Upper Egypt
with its wealth of tombs and temples, the rock
tombs of Beni Hassan offered far more than he
had anticipated. After staying there for two full
weeks, he proceeded in great haste on towards
Assiut, the largest city south of Cairo.
For Tell el-Amarna,which was on his wayand
which he called "Psinaula,"only a single day
was spared, in the beginning of November,
1828. On this spot, already the Jesuit Pater
Claude Sicard had made rather bizarre copies
of one of the boundary stelae in 1714; and
later, the scholars of the Napoleonic expedi-
tion had recognized the remains of an ancient
city at "El Till." Shortly before Champollion,
Wilkinson discovered the rock tombs of Akhen-
aten's officials in 1824 and prepared copies of
their decoration which were only published af-
ter Champollion's death.
He himself had no time for these remote
rock tombs. After a glance at the ruins of the
town, he noted some strange impressions in
front of the boundary stelae: "The king very fat,
with belly, feminine forms . . . grande morbi-
dezza. In his survey of the history of Egypt,
added as an annex to his LettersfromEgypt,he
passes directly from Amenhotep III to his son
"Horus"who continued the work of his father,
but was followed by two weak successors, until
Seti I brought new glory to Egypt.
* This paper was read at the ARCEsymposium"Akhen-
aten: Hero or Heretic?",New York, December 1, 1990. I
wish to thank David Warburtonfor correcting the English
text. An extended Germanversionwaspresented at the Era-
nos conference 1988 at Ascona.
1 B. van de Walle,ME 28
(1976), 12-20 with pl. 1.
1 Notices II 320; cf. his 6th letter from Beni
descriptives
Hassanand Manfalut.
43
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Thus, the founder of Egyptology had no
clear idea of Akhenaten or of his revolution,
apart from some impressions of the artistic
style of the Amarna Period diverging from the
traditional style. This was however an impor-
tant insight, because prior to 1826, there were
no objects of the Amarna Period in European
collections.
It was only in the middle of the 19th century
that Lepsius and Wilkinson laid the founda-
tions for our knowledge of that brief but fasci-
nating epoch, when Ancient Egyptian culture
and religion were radicallychanged, and even a
new stage of the written language introduced.
For the first time in history a new religion was
founded.
Lepsius arrivedat Tell el-Amarnawith the ex-
pedition financed by the Prussian king Fried-
rich Wilhelm IV on September 19, 1843, staying
there for three days; another seven days he
spent on his return journey from Upper Egypt
and Nubia in June, 1845. Like Wilkinson and
Hay before him, he was drawn by the rock
tombs; numerous drawings, paper squeezes,
and plaster casts were made on the spot. In his
letters from Egypt, Lepsius communicated the
first results of his work to the scholarlyworld. In
a letter to Alexander von Humboldt3 he was
able to state that "Bekh-en-Aten"was not a
woman, as he and others had hitherto believed.
The feminine forms of representation and a tra-
dition repeated by Manetho had been the root
of this error. Akhenaten still appears as a
woman in 1845, in the third volume of Bunsen's
fundamental AegyptensStelle in der Weltgeschichte;
3
Briefe aus Aegypten,Aethiopien und der Halbinsel des Sinai
(Berlin, 1852), 100; ibid., 415, n. 39, we find the equation
Amenhotep IV = Bekh-en-Aten. For Lepsius and Tell el-
Amarna,cf. M. Mode, DasAltertum30 (1984), 93-102.
44 JARCEXXIX (1992)
there we encounter, as a contemporaryNubian
usurpe, an "Amentuankh,"known to us today as
Tutankhamon. In the fourth volume, which ap-
peared in 1856, "Aakhenaten"is correctlycalled
a man.
Several years after his return from Egypt,
Lepsius presented his insights to the Prussian
Academy of Sciences in Berlin, published with-
out delay shortly afterwards, still in 1851. In
his paper, he dealt with "an extremely strange
episode in the history of Egyptian mythology,"
in which Amenhotep IV (whose identity with
Akhenaten was now firmlyestablished) opposed
the traditional cult of Amun with his "pure
solar cult" in which the disk became the only
tolerated image. Moreover, he ordered the ob-
literation of all the names of the gods on public
monuments and even in private tombs, and the
destruction of their images wherever possible.
But the reaction on the part of the old national
hierarchy followed swiftlyafter a few years, and
the religious zealot was completely forgotten.
In addition, Lepsius pondered about the rea-
sons for which a legitimate pharaoh was led to
such a complete revolution of the deeply
rooted beliefs of a great and cultivated people.
He considered it possible that foreign influ-
ences actuallylay behind this phenomenon.
Lepsius himself was not fully aware of the
consequences of his discovery. It is only in ret-
rospect that he became the modern rediscov-
erer of Akhenaten and his religion. In his paper
of 1851, there is a new founder of a religion,
completely forgotten for millennia! Manetho,
who wrote a history of Egypt in the third cen-
tury B.C.,had no real knowledge of that far-off
epoch, allowing the Ramessidesto follow imme-
diately after Amenhotep III, as did Champol-
lion after him. Similarly,Herodotus, Diodorus,
Strabo, and all the other authors of antiquity
knew nothing of Akhenaten and his time.
How did the memory of this period totallydis-
appear? There was never a counter-revolution
against Akhenaten; most of his achievements
were simply forgotten, and the foundations
of traditional belief renewed. Until recently,
Horemheb was credited as being the "liquida-
tor" of the Amarna Period,4 but now we know
4 5 For
Against this view, cf. R. Hari, Horemheb
et la reineMout-
(Geneva, 1965).
nedjemet
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that it was only during the reign of Seti I and
the early years of that of his son, Ramesses II,
that the AmarnaPeriod was activelysuppressed.
The names of Akhenaten and his immediate
successors were obliterated from the king lists,
and the effaced names of the gods restored.
That here and there the straggling remnants
of a community of Aten-believers survived is a
favorite literary motive, but difficult to believe,
in view of the historical situation in the early
13th century B.C.There were no martyrsof the
new religion, there was even no need of a perse-
cution, as Akhenaten's creed survivedhim by no
more than a few years. What followed was total
neglect, after a vague initial memory of the
"rebelof Akhetaten."
It is thus a lasting achievement of modern
scholarship to have made us again conscious of
this founder of a new religion and of his time.
Today, we tend to consider the long neglected
AmarnaPeriod to be the most fascinating epoch
in Egyptian history. No history of the human
mind can afford to pass over the personality of
the "hereticking,"regardless of how he and his
Perestroika may be judged.
Returning however to Akhenaten's reception
in the last century, the memoir of the Prussian
Academy of Sciences, in which Lepsius pub-
lished his research into Akhenaten's time in
1851, bore the title Ueberden ersten dgyptischen
Ent-
Gotterkreisund seine geschichtlich-mythologische
stehung,nobody could suspect that such a title
concealed discoveries of great import! But the
proceedings of the main scientific academies
were read in the whole scholarlyworld, so that
neither Egyptology nor General History could
afford to neglect the discoveries of Lepsius. It
was however several years before we find the
first echo in general historical works.5
In brief, the first author of a universalhistory
familiar with Akhenaten and his significance is
Georg Weber in his Allgemeine Weltgeschichtemit
besondererBeriicksichtigung des Geistes- und Cul-
turlebensder Volkerund mit Benutzung der neueren
geschichtlichenForschungenfur die gebildetenStdnde
of which Vol. I ("Geschichtedes Mor-
bearbeitet,
genlandes") appeared in Leipzig in 1857, six
years after the publication of Lepsius' results.
bibliographicalhelp and for the following informa-
tion, I wish to thank my student Thomas Schneider.
 THE REDISCOVERYOF AKHENATENAND HIS PLACEIN RELIGION
Others followed, such as Maximilian Dunck-
er in the third edition of his GeschichtedesAlter-
thums,1863 (in the 1855 edition, there is still
no mention of Akhenaten). These authors were
able to use not only Lepsius, but also the first
history of Pharaonic Egyptbased on contempo-
rary monuments and not on the authors of an-
tiquity. This important historywas published in
1859 by Heinrich Brugsch, initially in French,
and completely revised for the German edition
of 1877. In the French version, we find a sepa-
rate paragraph entitled "Tempsde la reforma-
tion religieuse," drawing mainly on Lepsius.
Brugsch refers to the religious reforms and to
Akhenaten's "dieu unique," placing Aton and
Adonis in parallel (like many after him), men-
tioning the "hymnsfull of poetic ideas" (not yet
published at that time!), and the unique, in-
deed extraordinary way of representing the
king already noticed by Champollion. He fol-
lows Lepsius in assuming that Akhenaten was a
priest of Re before his accession, and stresses
the fact that Teye, the reformer's mother, was
not a member of the dynastic family (her non-
royal parents Yuyaand Tyuyuwere known from
Amenhotep Ill's MarriageScarab). Aya figures
as the successor of Akhenaten, preceding Tut-
ankhamon, then known only from the tomb of
his Nubian viceroy Huya.
The German edition of 1877 has the correct
order of succession, but Brugsch stresses even
more the evil influence of the "daughterfrom
afar," namely Teye, who transmitted the doc-
trine of the one god of light to Akhenaten,
even in his early youth. The "heresy"and the
displeasing appearance of the king deepened
the antipathy against him; he was forced by the
priests and the people to leave Thebes and to
look for a new residence. But he found comfort
with his happy family relations.
Brugsch closes this rather negative passage
with some very positive remarks about Akhen-
aten and his religion, quite a new attitude in
comparison with Lepsius. Brugsch writes of the
depth of insight and the "innige Gottesan-
dacht" of the texts from Tell el-Amarna, being
fully inclined to applaud the doctrine taught by
the king. In his eyes, Akhenaten is a thoroughly
modern and enlightened monarch.
In that same year, 1877, Maspero'sHistoirean-
cienne des Peuples de VOrientwas translated into
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45
German, and similar notions are to be found
there, although Maspero follows Mariette in
assuming that Akhenaten had been castrated
during his father's Nubian war. Maspero criti-
cizes the negative opinion of modern scholars
about Akhenaten, and employs the GreatHymn
to the Aten, although he does not supply a com-
plete translation.
After the collective effort of Lepsius,Brugsch,
and Maspero, Akhenaten was no longer a
stranger to historians and the educated public.
Yet, he remained an ephemeral figure, and
Leopold von Ranke, the leading historian of his
time, does not lose one word about Akhenaten
in his Weltgeschichte of 1881, even though he
mentions Tutankhamon on account of the "ne-
gro queen" and the tribute scenes in the tomb
of Huya. Eduard Meyer severely criticized von
Ranke for ignoring half a century of scholarly
work, and in Meyer's Geschichtedes Altertums,
which began to appear in 1884, we find the most
detailed account of pharaonic history, includ-
ing the AmarnaPeriod, ever written. Yetwe are
obliged to wait until 1910 for the firstbiography
of the heretic king: Weigall's TheLifeand Times
of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt.
In the meantime, some important discoveries
had been made. In 1881/82, the royal tomb of
Amarna, only now completely published by
G. T. Martin, was found by the natives, who
likewise in 1887 discovered the famous archive
of diplomatic correspondence belonging to
Akhenaten and his father; about 380 tablets
are now known, first published by Knudtzon in
1915.6 This sensational find encouraged Petrie
to carry out the first systematic excavations at
the site in 1891/92. The year 1895 saw the pub-
lication of a Berlin thesis, written in Latin by
an American scholar: De Hymnis in Solemsub
Rege Amenophide TV conceptis by James Henry
Breasted- the first complete edition of the fa-
mous hymn to the Aten which had been copied
by Bouriant already in 1883/84, happily before
about a third of it was destroyed in 1890.
Through the translations of Breasted, Griffith,
Maspero and Erman, this text became very
popular early in this century, and was com-
pared with St. Francis of Assisi's hymn to the
sun, as well as with Psalm 104.
6 See nowW. L.
Moran, Les lettresd'el-Amarna(Paris, 1987).
46 JARCEXXIX (1992)
In 1901, Norman de Garis Davies began his
invaluable work in the rock tombs of El-
Amarna; his publication of these tombs, com-
pleted in 1908, is still the basis for all research
concerning this period. In 1907, Theodore
Davis discovered Tomb 55 in the Valley of the
Kings, with a mummy then believed to be that
of Akhenaten. The sensation of being in pos-
session of the mortal remains of the king led
Weigall to write the first biography of Akhen-
aten, which he formally dedicated to the "Dis-
coverer of the bones of Akhnaton."
Weigall's view of Akhenaten is strongly influ-
enced by Petrie and Breasted, both of whom
developed a positive image of the heretic as one
of the great teachers of humanity. Thus Petrie
wrote in his A HistoryofEgypt, "Ifthis were a new
religion, invented to satisfy our modern scien-
tific conceptions, we could not find a flaw in
the correctness of this view of the energy of the
solar system ... a position which we cannot log-
ically improve upon at the present day." For
Breasted, Akhenaten is "theworld's first idealist
and the world's first individual,"8his teaching
"anticipatesmuch of the later development in
religion even down to our own time. Weigall,
very similarly,makes Akhenaten "the first of all
human founders of religious doctrines," the
founder of a "religion so pure that one must
compare it with Christianityin order to discover
its faults." Comparing the rayed disk to the
Christian cross and the Aten hymn to that of
Saint Francis,Weigall is the firstto see in Akhen-
aten a predecessor of Christ, while Sigmund
Freud later saw him as the mentor of Moses and
the instigator of Jewish monotheism.11
Another important new aspect of Weigall's
book is the idyllic view of the Aten religion, of
Akhenaten's family life and of life in the new
residence in general, as contrasted with the
7 Vol. II, 214 of the 3rd edition
p. (London, 1899).
8A
Historyof Egypt(New York, 1905), 392; moreover,
Breasted calls Akhenaten "the first prophet of history"
(p. 377) and stresses the "notable similarity"of the Great
Hymn to Psalm 104 (p. 371). Similarly,ch. XV in his The
Dawn of Conscience(New York, 1933).
9 TheDawn
of Conscience,292.
10 The
Life and Times of Akhnaton, 62.
Der Mann Moses und die monotheistischeReligion (Amster-
dam, 1939).
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dangerous developments in Syriaand Palestine
which could be reconstructed from the ar-
chives. Akhenaten as a pacifist who brought the
Egyptian empire to ruin, indulging himself in
the unreal world of his new capital, absorbed in
his teaching and his search for god - those be-
came effective stereotypes up to the present
day. Ribaddi, the Prince of Byblos,was similarly
stereotyped as the most loyal vassall, appealing
to the king time and again, without receiving
any help. For Weigall, it all ended in complete
failure: the doctrine of the king is not accepted,
the empire wrecked, the loyal vassalsleft in the
lurch; in short, Akhenaten as a tragic figure,
too early for his time.
Others, especially the leading German egyp-
tologists of the day, were more critical in their
view of the Amarna Period. Erman stresses the
fanaticism of Akhenaten; the new art and the
new religion are unsound in his eyes, not able
to live. For Sethe, Weigall's biography is "ro-
manhaft," novel-like, and the fanatic aspect
of the heretic king is stressed by Gardiner and
others.
The German finds at Tell al-Amarnabefore
the FirstWorld War, then the discovery of Tut-
ankhamon's tomb in 1922, brought new and in-
creased popularity for Akhenaten; tragedies
were written about him;14 Franz Werfel imi-
tated the Great Hymn to the Aten; and Thomas
Mann made him a hero in his Josephromance.
The general feeling of the 1920s was expressed
by Rudolf Anthes writing in 1952:
Vor etwa30 Jahren sahen wirwohl alle, unter
Fuhrung von J. H. Breasted, sie (die Religion
von Amarna)etwafolgendermassenan. Sie war
die hochste und reinste Bliite agyptischer
Gotteserkenntnis. Echnaton hatte sich be-
freit von den unverstandlichen Phrasen der
traditionellen Religion. Er hatte den unmit-
telbaren Weg von Mensch zu Gott gefunden.
Er verwarf Mythen und Symbole und alle
12A Erman,Die
aegyptische Religion(Berlin, 1905), 71. In
the 3rd edition (1934), his attitude is much more positive.
K. Sethe, "Beitragezur Geschichte Amenophis' IV,"
Nachr. der K Ges. der Wiss. zu Gottingen,Philolog-histor.Klasse,
1921, 128 n. 2.
Thus, W. E. Schafer, Echnaton.Trauerspiel
(Stuttgart,
1925).
 THE REDISCOVERYOF AKHENATENAND HIS PLACEIN RELIGION
Vielgotterei. Da ihm eine OffenbarungGottes
nicht zuteil geworden war, sah er Gott in der
Sonne; aber Licht, Leben, Wahrheit leiteten
ihn, wie er selbst scheinbarbezeugt- auf einer
noch unentwickelten Erkenntnisstufe waren
Grundgedanken des Johannesevangeliums
vorweggenommen.Echnaton erschien uns als
Prophet einer Religion, fur die seine Zeit noch
nicht reif war.15
When Anthes wrote this, the mood was
changing. Cyril Aldred's biography (1968) is
highly critical, stressing Akhenaten's pathology
and reducing him to a mere co-regent for most
of his reign. For Aldred, this religion is not so
modern as it seems; but even more Eberhard
Otto in his Agypten.Der Wegdes Pharaonenreiches
(1953) views Akhenaten as an apolitic, egocen-
tric man, ugly and infirm, ambitious and des-
potic. His physical nature equally unsuitable for
warfare and sport, he cultivated extreme ideas,
which Otto did not regard as being new, apart
from the intolerance of this king.
To quote just one last and more recent state-
ment, "Akhenatendestroyed much, he created
little . . . Akhenaten, whatever else he may have
been, was no intellectual heavyweight." This
fits the fact, that those great reconstructors of
world history, Oswald Spengler and Karl Jas-
pers, with his "Achsenzeit,"do not mention
Akhenaten at all, whereas Toynbee is very posi-
tive in his judgment, and Eric Voegelin in his
monumental Orderand Historyspeaks of the
"extraordinarypersonality of Akhenaten," em-
bracing all humanity, a cosmopolitan and "the
first religious reformer clearly distinguishable
as an individual, not in the history of Egyptonly
but of mankind."
Before turning from this controversy, which
is still alive, we must stress one decisive differ-
ence between Akhenaten and all the other
founders of religions known to us. Whereas we
can be certain that our knowledge about Jesus,
Buddha, or Muhammad is unlikely to be in-
15R. Anthes, "Die Maat des Echnaton von Amarna,"
Suppl. to/AOS14 (1952), 1.
D. B. Redford, "Monotheismof a Heretic,"BiblicalAr-
chaeologyReview13/3 (1987), 16-32, quote from p. 28.
u Orderand
HistoryIV (1974), 283; I (1956), 101-10.
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creased by newly discovered original sources,
the documentation concerning Akhenaten is
enriched almost everyyear. Since the great dis-
coveries of the 1920's (including the colossal
statues at Karnakin 1925/26, and the rich har-
vest of talatat-hlocksfrom his early buildings),
we have learnt much more about the Heretic.
His influential second wife Kiyawas completely
unknown 30 years ago, and he himself grows
and changes before our very eyes, as well as the
religion he taught; perhaps both belong more
to the future than to the past.
I want to add just a few remarks concerning
his religion, without going into detail.
One majorproblem is that we still lack a clear
and concise demonstration of the religion in
which Akhenaten was raised, the religion of his
father Amenhotep III, giving due consideration
to the extraordinaryreligious (i.e., not only po-
litical) role of Akhenaten's mother, Teye. Was
Amenhotep Re, with Teye his Hathor? In any
case, Akhenaten was confronted with the "New
Solar Theology," as Jan Assmann has called it.
At the center of this theology stood the daily
motion of the sun, guaranteeing the existence
of the world. The Sun God renews his creation
every morning, but during the night he too has
to pass through the netherworld, the utmost
depth of the world, bearing his light into the
realm of the dead. While all the world depends
upon light, light itself must seek daily regenera-
tion in darkness.
The New Solar Theology reflects a deep trust
in the reliabilityof the sun and the sun's move-
ment. The dangers are there, personified in the
huge Apophis serpent, repeatedly trying to stop
this movement; but this threat is always over-
come by Re, the sun god. This god is the cre-
ator par excellence, he has created all the gods
and shows the tendency to become a god above
and behind all the gods, hidden in the form of
Amun and inscrutable. It would appear that
Amenhotep III had earlier opposed this ten-
dency, stressing the importance of the multi-
plicity of all the gods in a series of statues
erected on the occasion of his first Sed-festival
and proclaiming the king beloved by this or
that deity; in a parallel series of large scarabs,
the names of the most diverse deities of the
48 JARCE XXIX (1992)
land are included. Moreover, Amenhotep III
tried to place himself and his consort Teye as
venerated mediators between the divine and
the human world.
This tendency, stressing the universal impor-
tance of the King and Queen, was likewise
adopted by Akhenaten, but not Amenhotep's
attitude towards the multitude of gods. Admit-
tedly, in his early years, other deities are still
visible beside the Aten, but step by step the
unique god becomes the sole god; Akhenaten,
as Assmann has so aptly formulated it, created a
new religion out of the New Solar Theology.
This effort became the main occupation and
center of gravity of his reign, at the cost of
other responsibilities of a pharaoh.
For a pharaoh of the New Kingdom, Akhen-
aten has left surprisingly little written evidence.
There are some early stelae, there are the
boundary stelae of his new residence, but prac-
tically no other official texts; while we owe the
records of the Nubian war to his viceroy. Simi-
larly, his new religion is a religion without texts,
without any holy scriptures: we can only draw
upon the few hymns to the Aten to learn of its
essence. There is no word of god (a main differ-
ence to the religions we are used to), the Aten
communicating only with his penetrating rays.
Apart from the hymns, only the decoration of
tombs and temples remains as a source for the
religious beliefs of Akhenaten and his followers.
It is a testimony to the clarity and simplicity of
this religion that these sources are sufficient to
form an image of it. The doctrine and the in-
struction of the king were conveyed to his sub-
jects, not by official texts and proclamations (as
later employed by Tutankhamon and Horem-
heb), but by means of the new official, restrictive
iconography, and by certain formulations in the
texts used. Instead of the multitude of names
and forms of the traditional deities, we are now
restricted to only one dogmatic name, and one
dogmatic image of the Aten. The many hands,
the life-sign, and the Uraeus remain the sole at-
tributes of the Aten: no crowns, no scepters, and
no other possible forms of representing him.
Such a fixation on one name and one image
is quite alien to Egyptian religion, as otherwise
manifest in its long history. This new, but totally
un-Egyptian religion thus gained a clarity and
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simplicity that surpasses even much later beliefs
of the so-called High Religions. To add to this
clarity, all mythical allusions are eliminated: the
years of Atum wished to pharaoh are replaced
by the sand of the shores, and even the bound-
aries of his realm no longer extend to darkness,
but rather as far as the sun (Aten) shines, be-
cause the word "darkness" is too heavily loaded
with notions of the netherworld, of the enemy
(who no longer exists), of the world before
creation (which has likewise ceased to exist).
This simplicity is taken to its extreme in
Akhenaten's belief in a hereafter; it simply does
not exist any more. It has always been evident
that Akhenaten suppressed all the richness and
complexity of the Osirian netherworld, of the
nocturnal journey of the sun so elaborately pre-
sented in the Amduat and the Litany of Re (to
mention only compositions probably known to
Akhenaten). But, it is only now that we can be-
gin to grasp the true meaning of life after death
in the frame of this new religion of light. When
the sun rises in the morning, all the living in
their houses and all the dead in their tombs are
awakened from out of their deep sleep. All the
world is thus oriented to the East, while the
West, the realm of the dead since time imme-
morial, has fallen into oblivion. The king com-
mands that his tomb be constructed "where the
sun rises," and the plan of his funerary temple
was laid out according to a specific sunrise.18
The tombs play an important role in the texts of
the boundary stelae, but they are only a shelter
for the protection of the body, like the mummy.
The deceased remain on earth, as there is no
longer a netherworld existing, a hereafter or a
realm of the dead apart from the living. When
the Aten appears in his temple each morning,
all the ba-souls of the deceased approach to re-
ceive their share of the offerings. The Beyond is
before our eyes, it is the temple of the Aten at
Akhetaten! Therefore the chief of the Harim,
Merire, is called maa-kheru em Akhetaten, "blessed
in Akhetaten." But what of people living or
18 R. A.
Wells, Studien zur altdgyptischenKultur 14 (1987),
313-33, with corrections by R. Krauss, GottingerMiszellen
103 (1988), 39-44; Wells, ibid. 108 (1989), 87-90; Krauss,
ibid.109 (1989), 33-36.
19N. de G. Davies, TheRockTombs
ofElAmarnaII, pl. 36.
 THE REDISCOVERYOF AKHENATENAND HIS PLACEIN RELIGION
dying outside Akhetaten? We have the answer
from the tomb of Akhenaten's vizir Abd-El at
Saqqara: this official and his wife are called
"blessed in the west of Memphis, and thus
bereft of any connection with the Aten or the
royal residence. We must thus face the surpris-
ing fact that this universal religion (universal
insofar as the Aten was a god for all humanity)
is in many respects a local belief restricted to
the residents of the royal city!
Akhenaten himself is Osiris' successor as god
of the dead. His palace and temple are the
Elysian fields where offerings are tended. In-
stead of appearing before Osiris and facing
the judgment of the dead, the deceased must
stand before the pharaoh and his queen at their
window of appearance;life and afterlife depen-
dent on the royal grace which loyaltydeserves.
Symptomatic of the speed with which this
new religion developed is the royal chariot
driven by horses, of which Akhenaten avails
himself at every opportunity, as soon as he
leaves his palace or temple. The solemn proces-
sion of the god has become a swift cavalcade of
chariots and horses, dashing along the avenues
of Akhetaten. He established the chariot as an
instrument of peace, as a symbol of the motion
20A.-P. Zivie, BSFE84 (1979), 28 with
fig. 3. Their burial
equipment contains manytraditionalitems.
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49
dominating the new religion and the new art,
and becoming emotion in the scenes depicting
the royal family, with all their mutual kissing
and embracing.
But, behind this happy family life lay the cen-
tral problem. In a certain fashion, we have be-
fore our eyes the first world religion in history,
since the Aten is not a national, but a universal
god; he could be accepted by all humanity, car-
ing for all the nations of the world and for all
living creatures, giving breath even to the chick
in the egg. But Akhenaten remains an Egyptian
pharaoh, not a prophet for all the world. He is
the Nile of Egypt, all his officials are totally de-
pendent upon him, in life and in death. No one
but he, the beloved son, can communicate with
the Aten. The new religion of the Aten thus
stands and falls with Akhenaten, its founder. It
died with him as he left no son to continue this
specific role of pharaoh. Whoever it was that he
associated with himself in his final years (a
problem which is far from being solved), his
Perestroikahad no future. But, Akhenaten him-
self, forgotten for so long, now appears before
us as one of the great founders of religion, and
the first one whom we can grasp. "Hero" or
"Heretic"- he definitely belongs not just to An-
cient Egypt,but to human history.
Universityof Basel