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AKHENATEN

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Bianca
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« Reply #75 on: September 09, 2007, 09:39:34 am »








A "SUNSET" FILLED WITH MYSTERY



The later years of Akhenaten are filled with puzzles and problems and none of the proposed recon-
structions of this period is entirely workable.

The supposed disappearance of Nefertitti, which has now again been called into question; the position
of Kiya, Akhenaten's favourite; his "marriages" to his older daughters, which served to elevate their status; the problem of a coregency with a female partner or with his son-in-law Smnkhakare; the
alleged brief sole rule of Merytaten after the death of her father; and the authorship of the above-
mentioned letter to Suppiluliumas - new reconstructions keep surfacing for these eventful, but poorly documented, years.  The lack of sources has proven favourable to a luxuriant overgrowth of specula-
tions.

To note some highlights from these later years, we can draw on inscriptions on the vessels found in
great abundance at Tell el-Amarna.  They give the exact year and, more rarely, the month, when they
were created and filled with perishable products such as wine, oil and honey.

Their distribution over the individual regnal years if quite uneven and indicates what are clearly high
points: year 9-10 (new titulary of the god and further changes?), year 12 (tribute of the foreign lands)
and year 14 (arrangements for the succession?). The origin of these deliveries is noted, but not their
purposes, so that it remains unclear what occasioned them.

Consumption of large quantities of products usually points to divine festivals, but there can have been no question of these at Amarna.

Jan Assmann has pointed to the impoverishment of social and religious life which this discontinuance of festivals entailed.  Previously, festivals continually afforded fresh opportunities to approach the divine
and beseech care and salvation from all sorts of afflictions.

Public rewards - the awarding of gold to meritorious officials - could be no substitute for this and
Akhenaten's expectations in this regard would prove to be of no avail: the worship of the traditional
deities would flower again in his immediate vicinity and even satire of the king and his "holy family"
would flourish.
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