AKHENATEN

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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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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.

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THE GROTESQUE PHARAOH                                                                      continued



The repose to which we are accustomed in Egyptian sculpture is here set aside
in a manner that can even be called frightful; movement, expression, emotion,
and disregard for reality are now the rule.

The essence of this art, which was at first designated despairingly as merely "ugly"
or even "sick," can be understood by comparing it with schools of modern art that
deal freely with the human form.

As early as 1926, Schafer called Amarna art "expressionistic," as did Alexander Scharff,
and it is doubtless more apt to employ this designation than to speak of "realism," on
the assumption that Akhenaten actually looked like his depictions.

This art is a manneristic distortion of reality, a rebellion against the classical ideal of
beauty established earlier in Dynasty 18.



Everything that had been static, fixed in place for eternity, is now set in motion.  Vert-
ical axes become diagonal, stressed by receding foreheads and elongated crowns.   The
countours of the human figure swell and recede, creating the rhythmic play of the over-
ly swollen thighs and the scrawny, "chicken-like" calves (as Thomas Mann called them),
and even the chin and lips are swollen.

We also encounter new motion in the king's meeting the rays beamind down from the
solar disk.  And, finally, movement characterizes the playful, caressing intimacy of the
royal family, which is depicted in lively group scenes, and the fluttering bands of cloth
that dangle from clothes, crowns and articles of furniture.

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THE GROTESQUE PHARAOH                                                                   continued



Akhenaten introduced the chariot drawn by a pair of horses as a means of
expressing this new motion and he might well have intended it to imitate the
swift course of his god across the sky.



In no other period did Egyptian art contain so many representations of char-
iots, and no longer just in battle or the hunt, but as the means of rapid trans-
portation evidently employed by the king on a regular basis.



Only in the temple did he still tread respectfully.

An ecstasy of speed pervades the chariot scenes.  On one of the blocks from
Hermopolis, a team of horses races into an enormous open space; nothing
halts their rapid movement, and one of the horses turns its head, resulting in a
rare frontal view.


TUTANKHAMEN'S GOLDEN CHARIOT

This movement also characterizes the representations of PROSKYNESIS so pop-
ular at this time; like the faithful praying in a mosque, whole rows of officials bow
down to the ground in prayerful adoration of the king, just as Akhenaten is, from
time to time, depicted lying outstretched on the ground before his god.





   The upper part of the stela from Hermopolis depicts the royal family on their knees
beneath the radiant Aten while, in the lower part, they are lying flat on the ground
"kissing the earth", as the Egyptians put it.

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NO FEAR OF EMOTION



Along with movement, there is emotion: the obligatory kissing, embracing and
caressing among the royal family, the mourning of the royal couple at the bier
of their daughter Meketaten, Nefertiti as a nursing mother and all the scenes of
intimacy that occur only in the art of Amarna.

All these are intended to depict how the love that emanated from the Aten de-
termined the togetherness of his creatures, as exemplified in Pharaoh's imme-
diate surroundings.  And with that, any inhibitions against depicting and empha-
sizing emotion has vanished.



'HOLDING HANDS' -fragment of Akhenaten and Nefertiti Statue



A breath of previously unknown freedom seems to blow through this art and one has
the feeling that the artists must have done their work free of all former conventions.

But this is only one aspect, which was complemented by a strong commitment to the
principles, newly established by Akhenaten, as obligatory.

Even the "expressionism" of this art does not signify freedom, but rather represents
a binding obligation. 

It is constantly stressed in the texts that the king himself established the guidelines
for artistic production.

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NO FEAR OF EMOTION                                                                               continued


Akhenaten did not shy from questioning even the basic principles of Egyptian
art.  His artists tried their hand at bold turns and frontal views, and on the re-
constructed temple wall in the Luxor Museum, it can be seen how even the
convention of scale was no longer binding; in the two lower registers the king,
making offerings in the temple, is depicted as smaller in size than the men walk-
ing to the temple behind him, carrying offerings and cult implements!

 

This entails the annulment of a strict rule that had determined pictorial composi-
tion since the beginnings of Egyptian art: the size of the individuals represented,
whether deities, humans,or animals, did not depend on the accident of their
appearance, but on their relative importance within the scene.

Akhenaten's artists otherwise adhered to this principle, especially representing the
Royal Family.

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ONLY ONE GOD



Aten's coexistence with the other deities lasted for only a short time.

The traditional divine multipicity was still fully present at the king's 'sed'-festival,
for their temples and domains were obliged to contribute to the financing of the
great festival and the new construction projects; the exclusivity of the Aten was
thus at first only a relative one - like many an Egyptian deity, he was UNIQUE, but
not EXCLUSIVE.

But in the representations, only the radiant Aten appears in the divine chapels of
the 'sed'-festival, while in a highly fragmentary inscription from the Ninth Pylon,
which reproduces a speech by the king, the new god is emphatically contrasted to
the other deities.



REPRODUCTION OF THE MURAL IN THE TOMB OF PARENNEFER AT THEBES

In the Theban tomb of Parennefer ( who was still "overseer of the prophets of all
the gods'!) a text stresses that "one measures the payments to every (other) god



REPRODUCTION OF THE MURAL IN THE TOMB OF PARENNEFER AT THEBES

with a level measure, but for the Aten one measures so that it overflows" - this in
contrast to the warning in the popular "Story of the Eloquent Peasant" not to fill to
overflowing, or not to overdo Maat, as the sage Ptahhotpe had quite similarly advised.



In the future, the Aten with his rays would be the only permissible icon of the god.  The
mixed form of a human body and an animal's head would vanish, and only the hands ema-
nating from the sun would serve as a reminder of his former human form.

At an early stage, these hands could still hold any sort of objects; thus, in smiting scenes,
they even held weapons that they extended to Pharaoh!

In connection with the 'sed'-festival, they held the hieroglyph designating this festival by
way of a wish for many repetitions of it.  But in the final form of the "radiant Aten" only
the ANKH sign, the hieroglyph for "life", remained, extended to the noses of the king and
the queen. 

The rays depicted in the art are mentioned again and again in the hymns to the "Aten", as
a token of the proximity of this "distant" god.

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AKHENATEN'S "PERESTROIKA"



From the third to the fifth year of his reign, Akhenaten carried out a "perestroika"
that affected every area of life and which cannot be compared to any phase in
Egyptian history.

The vast extent of the reorganization was unique - religion, art, language and lite-
rature were affected, and surely also the administration and the economy, for a
little later the temples of the traditional deities would be closed and their priests dis-
missed from state sevice or "reindoctrinated."

But there was no persecution at this time though, in year 4, the high priest of Amun
was sent literally "into the desert" on a quarrying expedition.

Only a few weeks before the founding of the new Residence, the administrator Ipi re-
ported to the king from Memphis that all was in order in the temple of Ptah and that
all the deities were receiving their prescribed offerings.




INSIDE ONE OF THE TOMBS AT AMARNA


Though his measures were considered and gradual, there was certainly opposition.  In the
text of his boundary stelae, the king himself speaks of "bad things" he had heard in his
fourth and preceding regnal years, though without identifying the opposition by name; in
the highly damaged continuation of the text, he seems to be precluding future opposition.

Indicative is the military presence that we encounter already on the Theban TALATAT and
then later in the rock-cut tombs at Amarna.  Scurrying soldiers, predominantly a guard of
Asiatics and blacks, surround the king and prevent any resistance.

Indeed, Akhenaten was the only founder of a religion to have all the instruments of state
power at his disposal, and we should assume that he employed them ruthlessly to realize
his ideas.

Only underground opposition was possible, and "lamentations" gave expression to a wide-
spread sentiment among the common people and the former elite.

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AKHENATEN'S "PERESTROIKA"                                                             continued



It cannot be said how widespread approval of the new reorganization was, but
it probably was not crucial for the reformer's further course.

His next step brought a new royal titulary, from which were removed not only
the name of the hated Amun, but also references to his locales of Thebes and
Karnak; in his new NEBTY name, Karnak was replaced by the newly founded Re-
sidence of Akhetaten.



INSIDE OF ONE OF THE TOMBS AT AMARNA


Akhenaten could keep his former throne name NEFERKHEPRURE, just as he remained
"the sole one of Re" (WAENRE), but he changed his personal name Amenophis into
the name by which the world today knows him, and which in Egyptian sounded some-
thing like AKHANYATI - "He who is useful to Aten," or perhaps "Radiance of Aten";
the rendering "Soul of Aten" is less suitable because AKH actually denotes only the
soul of a deceased person, while Akhenaten's formulation "I am your son who is use-
ful to you and elevates your name" speaks in favour of the meaning "to be useful".

The exact nuance of the name escapes us, and in this volume we employ the con-
ventional form Akhenaten, rather than the more accurate Akhanyati - the precise
vocalization of ancient Egyptian is problematic, since the hieroglyphic writing system
did not indicate the vowels.

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" T H E   B E A U T I F U L   C H I L D   O F   T H E   L I V I N G   A T E N "



The traditional titles of Pharaoh remained unaltered, but the king was often pleased to style himself
"The Beautiful Child Of The Living Aten"; representations of the king as a child were popular at this
time and also served as amulets, replacements for the proscribed divine amulets of prior times.  The
Aten, Akhenaten's god, did not change his own royal titulary until some years later.

The assumption of the new titulary coincided with the solemn foundation of a new Residence; both
occurred in the fifth regnal year.  Akhenaten finally decided no longer to adorn Thebes with temples
for his new god Aten, and he sought out a place where he would not be hampered by monuments
constructed in the traditional style or dedicated to the traditional  deities.  He found this place in a
remote locale in Middle Egypt, where he would not be obliged to destroy anything but could simply
build.

In moving the Royal Residence, he could find a precedent in Amenemhet I, who inaugurated Dyna-
sty 12 in the 20th century BC and abandoned Thebes to found a new Residence just over 37 miles
south of Cairo, near the modern town of el-Lisht.  But this was done solely for political reasons, not
religious ones, whereas here the move was above all a religiously motivated HEGIRA on the part of
the religious reformer, one that did not take him to any of the old centers, but to this remote locale.