Akhenaten

[fajrdrako]

Akhenaten: Egypt's False Prophet by Nicholas Reeves. I've been fascinated by Egyptology since I was twelve, and read The Lost Queen of Egypt, which was a novel about one of the daughters of Pharaoh Akhenaten - Ankhsenpaaten, who married Tutankhamun.


Akhenaten became famous as 'the heretic Pharaoh' soon after his capital city of Aketaten was discovered and excavated in the 1920s. Since then, he has been the subject of much debate and confusion. He created and imposed a monotheistic religion on Egypt, based on worship of the god Aten - this led many to romanticize him as a precursor of monotheism, and Vladimir Velikovsky even wrote a book hypothesizing that Akhenaten was Moses. Since I don't much like monotheism, I've never been impressed by this approach, but I am intrigued by Akhenaten, who stands out among all those Egyptian pharaohs as unique.

I was hoping this book would clear up some of my confusion about Akhenaten, since I've been reading some conflicting information lately - was Tutankhamen Akhenaten's son by his second wife Kiya? What happened to Nefertiti, Akhenaten's queen? Did he marry his own daughters? Who was Akhenaten's co-regent Smenkhkhare?

Well, this book didn't clear up anything, even if Nicholas Reeves thought it would, though it's nice to see more alternative views. Firstly, I didn't like his style of writing - a combination of dry exposition with outrageous statements. He had a tendency to foreshadow his conclusions and then baldly state his conclusions, without saying much to convince me of the reasoning behind them. His main thesis - that Akhenaten's religion was intended as a consolidation of power, and that preoccupation with his personal religion led to widespread hardship, tyranny and loss of parts of his empire - may be true enough, but I was unconvinced by the secondary information, most of it interpretation of the personal life of the King. The author believes that Smenkhkhare was Nefertiti under another name, that Kiya was a pretty monster who died in childbirth, that Tutankhamun was murdered or died young of heart disease - seems to me that last one was pretty much refuted last month, when studies of Tut's body showed that he died from gangrene after breaking his leg.

One interesting conclusion is that Akhenaten suffered from a genetic problem called Malfan's syndrome, which causes malformation of the body, weakness of the heart and body, and problems with eyesight. Reeves postulates that Akhenaten was blind, which explains the touchy-feely nature of the art at his court and his exclusive worship of the sun, the only god he could actually see. I am not convinced.

Comments

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

The trouble is, everybody is confused, and there is no certainty about the relationships.

The only way Marfan's syndrome could be confirmed would be by examination of the body, and even then it would probably need DNA to be sure.

Another complication is dates: if David Rohl and the revisionists are correct, then the Amarna period was contemporary with the time leading up to Saul becoming King and influences might have spread that way. Who knows, we know nothing about Nefertiti except that she was staggeringly beautiful: she could even have been Saul's sister or aunt for all we can tell, and she might have triggered the whole thing off.