The character and deeds of Akhenaten, who for seventeen years directed the
fate of Egypt and the civilized world in the fourteenth century BC, continue to
engross and mystify the historians. From being one whom his people did their
best to forget, he has become, thirty centuries later, the celebrated subject of
novels, operas and other works of the imagination.
In essence his doctrine rejected the universal concept of idolatry. He taught that the graven images in which Egyptian gods revealed themselves had been invented by man and made by the skill of artisans. He proclaimed a new god, unique, mysterious, whose forms could not be known and which were not fashioned by human hands.
The single-minded zealotry with which Akhenaten promoted the worship of a spirit, self-created daily, and transcendental, in place of a tangible repository of numinous power, reveals a self-assurance which has
provoked modern critics to class him and his chief queen Nefertiti, as religious fanatics; just as their subjects
in their day recognized their exceptional charisma with backs bent low in adoration. Nevertheless, although the royal pair share in the divinity of their god, they recognize itssupremacy and prostrate themselves abjectly in its presence.
