AKHENATEN/TUTANKHAMUN

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                         A M E N O P H I S   III - C O M M E M O R A T I V E   S C A R A B S






Everything suggests that these are not popular trends now making their appear-
ance at the official level, but rather that they represent an express policy of the
royal court.

Later, Akhenaten would deliberately steer a different course, just as he would
counteract the tendency to the colossal.

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                                T H E   R E L I G I O U S   B A C K G R O U N D




THE SEARCH FOR NEW INTERMEDIARIES                                                      continued



The renewal that the sed-festival was supposed to effect was urgently needed,
for the king was evdently seriously ill in his later years.

This was known abroad, and his son-in-law Tushratta, the king of Mitanni, sent
him a healing statue of the goddess Ishtar as a means to recovery.

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                                  T H E   R E L I G I O U S   B A C K G R O U N D



THE SEARCH FOR NEW INTERMEDIARIES                                                     continued





But the aged king set greater store by the Egyptian Sakhmet, the dangerous
lion-headed goddess who was able to dispense illness as well as its cure.







He had an apparent total of 730 statues of the goddess set up in various temples
at Thebes - a litany in stone, in which the mighty goddess was invoked in all her
names and cultic forms, to protect the king every day and every night of the year.



He died before the third repetition of his 'sed'-festival and his son, Amenophis IV,
began his rule.

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                        A K H E N A T E N   A N D  T H E   R E L I G I O N   O F   L I G H T



THE FIRST STEPS







...........There, at Karnak, arose the new king's first sanctuary. 

It was not dedicated, however, to the actual lord of the temple complex, Amun-Re,
King of the Gods, but to the sun god.

The latter was still represented with a falcon's head in the traditional manner, but in
addition to Re-Harakhty, he was also called ATEN, a designation that had previously
indicated the physical manifestation of the sun and only now enjoyed divine worship.

Early inscriptions of the new king in the sandstone quarries of Gebel el-Silsila, where
the blocks for Karnak were extracted, are concerned with the great construction pro-
ject for Re-Harakhty-Aten. 

There, the king still appears before Amun-Re in the traditional manner, even though
his building project was intended for Re-Harakhty.

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THE FIRST STEPS                                                                                              continued








              K A R N A K - R U I N S   O F  T H E   T E M P L E   O F   A M E N O P H I S   I V

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THE FIRST STEPS                                                                                    continued



Though the king is designated as the one "whom Amun-Re chose from among millions"
on a scarab in the BritishMuseum, his reign clearly betrays, from its very beginning,
a bias against this heretofore preeminent god.

And while Egyptian kings normally endeavored to effectuate a comprehensive program
for their reigns, immediately upon ascending the throne, showing themselves to be
creator gods by means of construction works and military campaigns, repelling enemies
and "lighting" the world with their monuments, in the case of Akhenaten, we note curious-
ly little activity aside from his building project at Karnak.

One senses that he was expending all his energy on the formulation of his "teaching,"
his attempt to remodel the world.

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                           A K H E N A T E N   A N D   T H E   R E L I G I O N   OF   L I G H T









THE ORIGIN OF A GOD


For the first time in history, we have a close-up view of how a deity originated.

It is as though the Aten suddenly emerged from the traditional form of the sun god
and then, quickly, shed the last vestiges of his origin.

At the beginning, he conformed to the traditional mixed form of a man with the
falcon's head of the solar deity  Re-Harkhty.

The falcon-headed god was at first still used as a hieroglyph in the throne name
of the king, and we can see that, in general, the king preferred the falcon as a
tutelary power.

From an altar to the sun at Karnak stems the first known representation of Pharaoh
in the company of the solar baboons and the animal-headed powers of Buto and
Hierakonpolis!

Later, however, the thriomorphic aspect of deities was discredited; only the uraeus
and the falcon continued to be tolerated, while the king remained a bull in his titu-
lary (every pharaoh of the New Kingdom was "a mighty bull" in his Horus name).
The ever-more dogmatic name of the god, which was enclosed in two cartouches,
clearly followed the model of the royal titulary, which also entailed two cartouches.

By the late Middle Kingdom, certain divine names could be highlited by placing them
in a cartouche, and in the New Kingdom, Amun-Ra was styled "king of the gods," but
until this time there had never been such a rigorous systematization of the royalty
of a god.

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THE ORIGIN OF A GOD                                                                            continued



Nefertiti's religious role surpassed that of Teye with Amenophis III.  In group statues
she appears striding at the king's right, which was highly unusual for a queen.

She assisted the king in all his cultic activities, even the smiting of enemies and she,
herself, was even depicted in this triumphal pose.

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                                             A K H E N A T E N   A S   A   S P H I N X







The Sphinx is an incarnation of Ra-Harakhty, the god of the rising sun.  It was an
appropriate image to use by Atenists.  Akhenaten was frequently depicted as a
Sphinx worshipping the Aten

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                    T A L A T A T   B L O C K S   F R O M   T H E   T E M P L E   A T   K A R N A K   






Akhenaten built several structures at Karnak (when he was still known as Amenhotep IV). The structures there include the Gempaaten which is a palace complex. It is believed that the royal family lived at the Gempaaten during the winter months (according to Aldred). A temple called the Rud-menu was erected (full name:Rud-menu-en-aten-er-neheh which means 'Enduring in monuments of Aten for eternity') . One of the structures within the Gempaaten complex is the Hut-benben ('Mansion of the Benben'). Aldred mentions that the Mansion of the Benben was a temple exclusively devoted to Nefertiti. Yet another structure was named the Teni-mehu (full name Teni-menu-en-aten-er-nehehwhich means 'Exalted is the monument of Aten for eternity')

 The remnants of these temples were found as filler in the 9th Pylon. The evidence shows that Horemheb broke down the temple of Aten at Karnak and useD the stones - called talatats - as filler. Horemheb may not have dismantled the entire complex. Some of the structures may have remained until the time of Ramses II.

 

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At the outset of the reign relatively large blocks were used in the Sun Temple of
Re-Harakhty, but later the new sanctuaries of the Aten were erected from small,
easily carried sandstone blocks, called TALATAT ("three"-blocks) in the scholarly
literature, because they are one handbreadth in height and two in width.

Isolated blocks were already visible in the vicinity of the temples at Karnak and
Luxor in the nineteenth century, but since the beginning of the twentieth ex-
tensive restoration efforts by French and Egyptian Egyptologists have recovered
such 'taltat' by the tens of thousands from a great variety of structural elements.



A SMALL PIECE OF 'TALATAT' WITH THE 'ATEN' CLEARLY VISIBLE

Besides the temple complex of Karnak, the temples of Luxor, Tod, Nag el-Madamud
and Armant have yielded up still more blocks.  Together with those still in the Tenth
Pylon at Karnak, we must reckon with more than fifty thousand decorated blocks
that once constituted whole temple walls: a gigantic jigsaw puzzle to be reconstruct-
ed into scenes of the cult!

There was an early attempt to do this by computer, but the results were rather
disappointing.

Since 1965, when Ray Smith took on the project, only a small selection has been
published, and these are marked by dubious combinations and reconstructions.

Still, work on the blocks has brought to light a host of iconographic treasures that
enrich our knowledge of the early years of Akhenaten.

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Akhenaten elevated the spoken language of the New Kingdom, which we call
Late Egyptian, into a new written language.

It was supposed to replace Middle Egyptian, which had developed at the end
of the Old Kingdom.

This reform outlasted Akhenaten, and a rich Late Egyptian Literature developed
soon after his reign, though Middle Egyptian remained the language of religious
texts and official royal inscriptions

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THE FIRST STEPS                                                                                    continued



                                O N C E   A G A I N,   T H E   S E D    F E S T I V A L



On these blocks, an important role is played by the Sed-Festival that Akhenaten
celebrated together with his god Aten.

We have already mentioned this festival of royal renewal in connection with its
celebration by Amenophis III.  But, while the father endeavoured to gather all the
deities of the land for this festival and to perform its ceremonies in front of shrines
containing various divine images, his son strode from one shrine to another, each
containing only the Aten, depicted as the sun disk with its rays.  Along with tradi-
tional motifs like the dances for Hathor, there are novel and unusual scenes; one
depicts the king with a hammer in his hand.                           
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Therepresentation of the festival cannot itself attest to its celebration, for the
Egyptians always created reality through pictures alone.  Even Akhenaten had
himself and Nefertiti represented as felling enemies without having undertaken a
military campaign.

Yet, there is reason to think that Akhenaten inaugurated the royal status of his
god Aten with the celebration of a SED-festival.  Whether he celebrated his own
thirtieth birthday at the same time, as some have supposed, remains highly un-
certain.


             FAIENCE AMULET FROM AKHENATEN'S 'SED'-FESTIVAL

Though the king planned "millions" of sed-festivals in the text of the earlier bound-
ary stelae of his new capital and obliged himself to celebrate them there and no-
where else, he evidently did not celebrate any festival of renewal at Akhetaten;
at the least, there is no evidence for one.

An actual SED-Festival should have left traces in a great number of inscriptions
preserved on vessels.  Instead, there is only a single wish for the celebration of
sed-festivals, carved on a door-frame from the house of the officer Nekhuenpaaten.

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                         A K H E N A T E N   A N D   T H E   R E L I G I O N   O F   L I G H T




THE GROTESQUE PHARAOH



The reliefs carved on the 'talatat' and the colossal statues in the Gempaaten temple
are the earliest evidence for the realization of an entirely new artistic style on Akh-
enaten's part.

Heinrich Schaafer described the impression it makes on modern beholders in the follow-
ing words in 1931:  "Anyone who steps in front of certain of these representations for
the first time, recoils from this epitome of physical repulsiveness.......



His head seems to float atop his long, thin neck.  His chest is sunken, yet there is some-
thing feminine about its form.

Below his bloated paunch and his fat thighs, his skinny calves are a match for his spin-
dly arms.  His face is deeply lined, and he has a sharply receding forehead and a weak
chin."

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THE GROTESQUE PHARAOH                                                                        continued



Champollion had already employed the Italian term MORBIDEZZA (softness).

According to Alfred Wiedemann, these representations of the king "in a frightfully,
ugly form, with distorted features and a pendulous belly, are a complete caricature."

Walther Wolf invoked "sick ugliness and nervous decadence" in reference to the
colossal statues at Karnak, and many others have echoed this theme of caricature.

Naturally enough, modern writers have assumed that the contemporaries of the king
shared the horror that Schafer conjures up, and many have felt that Akhetaten want-
ed to shock, setting his repulsive ugliness in deliberate contrast to the beauty of tra-
ditional art. 



We shall not enter into a stylistic analysis of Amarna art here, but rather lay stress on
some criteria that can yield, over and above his artistic taste, an insight into the over-
all mentality of this reformer.