In his final years, Akhenaten seems to have shared the throne with one or more family members. Smenkhkare appears only briefly in the historical record. Nefertiti also seems to have taken the throne under the name Neferneferuaten. Details of her rule are also frustratingly scarce.
In any case, her time on the throne lasted just a few years. A young Tutankhaten later Tutankhamun next assumed the throne. He was likely Akhenaten's son. Within a few years, probably led by influential officials, he shut down Akhetaten, relocated the royal court to Memphis and announced the restoration of traditional cults. Around this time, the Amarna royal burials were moved to Thebes. Akhenaten left a complicated legacy. To later Egyptian kings, he was a heretic whose name and family were excluded from official king lists.
Today, views of him are more diverse and sometimes more sympathetic. The Amarna Project. Metropolitan Museum of Art. AUC Press. Freed, Y. Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Thames and Hudson. Even to say "he" of the aten is perhaps too restrictive for this universalist conception of deity—gender is clearly not relevant to sun-disks—and stranger yet, to say "he" of Akhenaten himself isn't always valid either.
Male and female styles which are usually discrete in traditional Egyptian art blend together in peculiar fashion throughout Amarna culture, extending as far as royal portraiture.
Akhenaten, for instance, is shown in a series of colossi large statues; singular, colossus lacking male genitalia, and in general, his depiction is odd, to say the least. He's often portrayed as pot-bellied, slouching, thick-lipped, with a big chin and pointed head, which has led scholars to suppose he suffered from some sort of birth defect, resulting in eunuchoidism.
But if so, how did he sire a family, for in art he appears with as many as six different daughters? And those are only the ones he had by his principal wife. That raises another fascinating and enigmatic issue concerning Akhenaten's revolution, the centrality of his family in the public presentation of his regime. Not only do we have many depictions of the beautiful Nefertiti , Akhenaten's principal wife—more, in fact, than of Akhenaten himself!
Reliefs even show the royal couple playing with the girls. Like no pharaoh before or after him, Akhenaten was family-oriented. Thus, it seems unlikely he was a eunuch, but instead the real father of the children he professes, at least through his art, to adore so fondly. But the gender-bending portraits of him seem ill-suited for such a family man, by modern standards at least. And Nefertiti's depictions are not immune to cross-gendering, either.
She's shown at least once wearing the blue crown, the helmet kings don as they go into battle. She's the only Egyptian queen ever known to have been depicted that way, including Hatshepsut, the woman who ruled Egypt singlehandedly for two decades a century before see Section 9.
There's something very odd, by any standard, about the way the Amarna rulers chose to portray themselves. Indeed, the entire family is depicted with elongated faces and skulls, wide hips and sagging bellies. The tall hat Nefertiti wears in her famous bust is probably covering—perhaps even accentuating—her pointed head beneath, even though surely she was not congenitally deformed, and as the mother of six daughters, certainly not barren.
Nor were the girls, which is all the more evidence Akhenaten also was not. Naturalistic portraiture seems a less likely explanation of the oddities inherent in this family than some sort of stylized rendering. There's doubtless something abnormal about them, but what? And why? That the royal family was the only group ever portrayed this way is surely a clue. To depict Akhenaten's entire immediate family—and only them—in such an unusual manner must signify something.
Perhaps their different look is meant to highlight exactly that , the fact that they're different. Maybe the royal family is supposed to represent something alien, transcendental, not bound to human or earthly distinctions such as gender.
It's easy to see why this would appeal to Akhenaten, nor is it hard to understand why Nefertiti might go along with being designated as super-special, and the children would, of course, have been too young to have a choice or even know the difference.
All this concurs well with Akhenaten's religion, where the pharaoh was said to serve as the conduit between humanity and the aten. In other words, it's through and because of him the sun-disk bestows life on the planet. In his own words, a hymn Akhenaten claims to have composed himself about the aten , "There is no other who knows you except your son, Akhenaten.
One way or another, before Akhenaten's day the Egyptians had always considered the sun a god and the royal family was for the most part seen as divine, but as the only divine presence in the universe?
That, indeed, was something different. The imagery of Amarna culture with all of its strangeness has attracted not only scholars but a wide range of iconoclasts, revolutionaries and weirdos of every ilk, who have latched onto this radiant, unworldly, rebel pharaoh and more often than not caught the reflection of their own oddity in his slouching, fat-lipped silhouette.
The many answers posited to the riddle of Akhenaten are, in any case, less important than the few, frail realities clinging to his reign and the questions they leave at our feet. Among them, how did he sustain such a bizarre reordering of the celestial kingdom? For more than a decade, we must remember, Akhenaten kept his divine fantasies afloat even as he faced down the Amun priesthood, traditional cults in Egypt and a nation long nurtured on a pantheon of gods numbering by that day in the thousands.
Before we can ask why any of this happened or what happened to it, we must first try to understand how it happened at all. Akhenaten must have had some supporters, besides the usual lunatic fringe and sycophant wing who will follow any maniac into the wilderness. A hint about their identity comes in one of the Amarna reliefs in which Nefertiti holds up the decapitated head of a foreign captive.
That suggests some sort of military activity during Akhenaten's reign, an event history bears no evidence of otherwise. But that's not surprising really, given later pharaohs' destruction of records from this day.
Any boast of victory in foreign wars the monomaniacal monotheist might have issued isn't likely to have survived their holocaust. So, if Akhenaten did have the support of the Egyptian army—and there's no real evidence to the contrary—his revolution would make much more sense.
Still, an army backing an effeminate, secluded, family-loving, pointy-headed sun freak seems highly improbable by the standards of today. Then again, how much can we rely on our modern sensibilities here where so little else seems logical? Yet, strange times often make strange bedfellows. If both the pharaoh and the military were seeking the same thing—for instance, to undercut the power of the Amun priesthood which by then was siphoning off a hefty percentage of the taxes collected in Egypt—the aten and the army might have made common cause.
Or so some scholars suggest. All the same, it must have been an interesting meeting between the slouching sun - lover and the hardened desert troopers who defended Egypt's frontier. How did they find enough in common even to have a conversation, much less foment a revolution together? Akhenaten died sometime after the fourteenth year of his reign. Initially he was buried near Akhetaten, but later his tomb was desecrated and his body moved to Thebes and reburied in the Valley of the Kings , the traditional resting place for New Kingdom pharaohs.
Some scholars believe a badly damaged male mummy found there is Akhenaten's. If so, it shows that he did in fact have an unusually elongated skull, but little else can be gleaned from this body, not even the cause of death. What killed him? He was still in his thirties or forties, so it can't have been old age. Disease is always a possibility, and there is evidence that a plague struck Egypt around this time. The historical record, however, contains not a single hint of foul play in his death, all of which leaves us to guess its cause.
Mono- theistic -nucleosis? Aten -tion deficit disorder? Above all, what happened in downtown Akhetaten on that gloomy day when the reason the sun-disk shines on the earth, the pharaoh of light and life, departed this world, and the next morning the sun still rose?
That must have been a disconcerting moment for the aten -faithful. Archaeology has, however, made one thing very clear. Akhetaten was not abandoned immediately upon Akhenaten's death.
Building continued, at least for a while. How the government continued is less clear. Akhenaten's successor, for instance, is all but a complete mystery. Named Smenkhare , which is close to all we know about him, this pharaoh appears suddenly in the historical record two years before Akhenaten's death.
A late relief depicting Smenkhare with Akhenaten is about all there is to track this most cryptic of Egyptian pharaohs, along with a few documents showing that he married one of Akhenaten's daughters, surely an attempt to secure his claim to the throne after Akhenaten's death.
Curiously, Smenkhare's rise coincides almost exactly with another mysterious event, the all-but-complete disappearance of Nefertiti from the art of El-Amarna. Only once in the final two years of Akhenaten's reign is she shown, in a funerary tableau recording the death of one of her and Akhenaten's daughters.
One theory is that Akhenaten sensing the approach of death—but how? In fact, he had little choice but to do this because Nefertiti had never given him a son—six daughters but no male heir—and Egyptian tradition demanded some sort of "son of the pharaoh" succeed.
Thus in the absence of a crown prince, the son of a secondary wife usually stepped in as successor. But this is not the only explanation that's been offered. Another theory proposes—and in light of the unusual circumstances surrounding the aten -cult at Akhetaten, it's not nearly as unlikely as it might seem at first glance—that Smenkhare was Nefertiti! Knowing his death was imminent and seeing no clear and obvious heir on the horizon since he'd had no sons by Nefertiti and so there was no pointy-headed male to stem the family's aten -uation, Akhenaten created a "son" for himself out of the most obvious candidate there was, not a secondary son but his primary wife.
Family was, after all, of utmost importance in this new world order, and she had held the power of Egypt in her hands—had even worn the blue crown! So, like any social-climbing secondary son, Nefertiti "married" her own daughter and took the throne as a man, assuming as was traditional a new name, Smenkhare.
That would help to explain why she disappears at the very moment Akhenaten's successor enters the picture. Like many ingenious solutions—and this age does seem to attract them—it didn't work. For whatever reason, Nefertiti couldn't cut it as "king," not that there hadn't been woman kings in Egypt who had taken male guise before.
Hatshepsut, for instance, had portrayed herself with masculine attributes in more than one work of art see above, Section 9. She had maintained herself on the throne with the support of the army, but perhaps the army in this day was willing to back an effeminate male but not a masculinized woman as king.
Or perhaps Nefertiti was simply more beautiful than savvy. Despite all their protestations of hope for world peace, beauty pageant winners rarely achieve that aim. In any case, the elusive Smenkhare disappears two years into "his" reign.
Nevertheless, some kind of theophany might explain Amenhotep IV's "conversion" to Aten; yet, does it also explain the monotheistic exclusivity? There are many stories of theopha-nies in polytheistic religions but the mere fact that someone has some kind of encounter with a certain deity does in polytheistic thinking usually not lead to a turn to monotheism.
Thus, on the basis of the sources we have, the monotheistic turn in Atenism remains a mystery. Beside these two main theses, Hoffmeier's book provides many materials regarding the evidence of Atenism, for example in ch. Tell el-Borg gains more attention than the other sites, since it is Hoffmeier's own site of excavation and thus, these pages largely profit from his profound knowledge. For OT scholars, the most interesting chapter might be the last one where Hoffmeier investigates the question of a possible influence of Atenism in ancient Israelite monotheism.
This influence has mainly been argued due to several parallels between the Great Aten Hymn and Psalm Hoffmeier points on the one hand to several serious problems that arise by the suggestion of direct literary dependence: not only would the respective verses be randomly extracted and used in different order, but also would the time gap be a problem since "the decade-long capital of Akhenaten where the texts were recorded, was abandoned shortly after the king's death" p.
On the other hand, Hoffmeier gives a convincing alternative explanation for the similarities of Psalm and the Great Aten Hymn by showing that solar hymns with traditional solar language and motifs continue after the Amarna period down to the Greco-Roman period: "This means that later Egyptian solar literature and hymns may have influenced the Hebrew Psalmist, but likely not the Aten hymns themselves" p.
Apart from the relationship between these Egyptian and Israelite psalms, Hoffmeier concludes with regard to the development of Biblical monotheism that. Atenism does demonstrate that a long evolution from animism to monotheism, as early anthropologists of religion of the 19th century maintained and some biblical scholars still advocate, is not a viable model to explain the origins of monotheism pp.
In sum, this book gives a good overview on many aspects of Akhenaten's Atenism and it provides stimulating suggestions about the historical and religious backgrounds of this outstanding epoch of ancient Egypt. Nevertheless, one remains with the insight that, after all, we still do not really understand why and how Atenism has emerged in this short period of ancient Egypt's history.
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