Fig. 2.7 The royal names of Akhenaten
the royal family and numerous anonymous dignitaries were present to observe the ceremonies and enjoy the feasting but, very significantly, many of the great state gods, including the hitherto all-powerful ‘father of the gods’ Amen, were excluded and the shrines which would normally have housed these deities all contained depictions of the king beneath the Aten’s disc. Nefertiti played an obvious but not intrusive role in the celebrations – she supported her husband but never sought to usurp him. Dressed in a long-sleeved robe with two plumes on her head, she rode in a palanquin whose throne, the exact parallel of the king’s, was carved with sphinxes in Nefertiti’s own image. Even the rearing cobras fringing the palanquin had Nefertiti’s face and feathered crown.
The deliberate exclusion of the major state gods from the heb-sed should have served as a warning to the priests of Amen. By the end of Year 5 the Aten had risen from obscurity to become the dominant state god. Offerings which had traditionally been presented to the temple of Amen were now diverted to the Aten temples so that the cult of the Aten grew rich as the cult of Amen grew poor. Eventually the old temples were closed, and all building work ceased as the decision was taken to relocate the court to a new purpose-built capital city, Akhetaten (‘Horizon of the Aten’), now known as Amarna. Amen was now declared anathema and the king, rejecting the given name which linked him with the despised Amen, followed his wife in adopting a new name. Henceforth he was to be known as Akhenaten, or ‘Living Spirit of the Aten’.
3
The Aten Dazzles
Glorious, you rise on the horizon of heaven, O living Aten, creator of life. When you have arisen on the eastern horizon you fill every land with your beauty. You are gorgeous, great and radiant, high over every land. Your rays embrace all the lands that you have made.1
The kings of the 18th Dynasty openly acknowledged a great debt to the god Amen, for they well understood that it was Amen who had enabled the mighty Theban warrior Ahmose to unite Egypt after the civil unrest and foreign rule of the Second Intermediate Period. Amen’s protection of Ahmose soon proved to be a shrewd political move, and the devotion of successive 18th Dynasty kings allowed him to evolve from a relatively insignificant local god worshipped in and around Thebes into the patron god of the Egyptian empire. Amen, appearing as a man dressed in a kilt and wearing a distinctive head-dress of two tall plumes, was recognized both as king of the gods and father of the king. He became associated with the most important Old Kingdom deity in the compound sun god Amen-Re and linked with the ithyphallic fertility god Min. Amen’s mighty Karnak temple dominated the Theban skyline, and he was the presiding deity in each of the royal mortuary temples on the west bank of the River Nile. Within his temples, however, Amen was an aloof and secretive god; his name, which translates as ‘the hidden’, gives a clue to his character. Amen’s home was a dark and lonely shrine hidden deep within the sacred precincts, inaccessible to the ordinary people and visited only by the priests who attended to the daily rituals of washing and dressing the god and making offerings of food, drink and incense. Even when on festival days Amen sailed out into the sunlight his sacred boat became a miniature temple and he remained concealed behind the doors of his shrine. This hidden aspect of the god allowed his priests – those privy to his divine wishes – great power.
Fig. 3.1 The god Amen
As the 18th Dynasty developed into an era of unprecedented prosperity successive pharaohs were faced with an embarrassment of riches. Much of their new-found wealth was used to enhance the Karnak temple complex, home of Amen, Mut and Khonsu, and the stonemasons were kept busy as succeeding kings vied with each other to express their devotion in stone. Amen’s temple grew physically vast and, as royal endowments increased, developed into a significant semi-independent economic entity administered by an increasingly complex hierarchy of priests. Amen was now a major landowner in his own right with control over a variety of income-generating assets such as fields, herds, ships, vineyards and even beehives, some situated many miles away from Thebes. The revenue provided by these assets, plus taxes extracted in perpetuity from individual estates, were used to pay the priests and the temple servants; surpluses were hoarded, together with vast amounts of grain and the gold, precious stones and foreign loot donated by the king, in huge warehouses safe within the temple walls. Thus the king was able to convince all of his extreme piety and indifference to worldly goods, while the temple provided a convenient and secure bank for his treasures. If the annual inundation failed, or if the Nile rose too high and flooded the towns and villages, the temple stores could be requisitioned and their grain used to feed the people.
For many years the king and the priesthood of Amen existed side by side in symbiotic harmony. The priesthood, which owned substantial tracts of land in the south, assisted the vizier in the administration of Upper Egypt, thus freeing the royal court to reside at Memphis. The king in his turn supported the god financially, while making judicious use of their relationship to reinforce his own position as divine ruler. By the later 18th Dynasty, however, there are signs that the monarchy may have started to feel itself challenged by the ever-increasing power of Amen. Amenhotep II, Tuthmosis IV and Amenhotep III all attempted to maintain control over the cult by appointing their own loyal followers, natives of northern towns rather than southerners, as High Priest of Amen. Amenhotep III, ruling over a peaceful empire, must have seen little need for the protection of a mighty warrior god although he was certainly not averse to exploiting other aspects of Amen’s divinity. Amen was chosen to be his heavenly father, and the extensive programme of refurbishment at Karnak and Luxor which continued throughout his reign is a testament to the king’s loyalty.
Egypt’s unprecedented wealth meant that the king’s generosity need not be confined to a single cult. Amenhotep had always been interested in Egypt’s past, as evidenced by his revision of the heb-sed ceremony. Now he started to pay more attention to the other gods of the pantheon, partially reverting back to Old Kingdom solar theology. He developed a particular interest in one relatively obscure god, the Aten, whose name simply means ‘the disc’, and who since the Middle Kingdom had been recognized both as a physical manifestation of the sun god Re and as a symbol of divinity closely affiliated with the king. The Aten was represented either by a winged sun disc or by a hawk-headed god, and at this time had no cult centre or major temple. We now find the name of the Aten appearing with increasing regularity, so that even the royal barge which sailed on Queen Tiy’s pleasure lake was named ‘The Sun Disc [Aten] Dazzles’.
Egypt is a land of hot sunlit days and dark cool nights. The contrast between the two is both sudden and obvious, and it is therefore not surprising that both the sun and its light played an important part in Egyptian life and religion, the daily cycle of sunset followed by sunrise being interpreted as a certain guarantee of life after death. The sun god Re, represented either as a falcon-headed god or as a winged sun disc, is known from the time of the earliest pyramids when to spend the Afterlife with Re was one of the most important aspirations of the king. Indeed, the shape of the pyramid may well have been intended to represent the sun’s rays in solid form, a straight-sided ramp which would allow the king to climb up to heaven. Re, the sun god, was occasionally combined with Horus, god of the horizon, to produce the hybrid deity Re-Harakhty, a man with Horus’s falcon head.
Fig. 3.2 The god Re-Harakhty
The cult of the sun god was centred on the northern city of Heliopolis (ancient Iunu), one of the most magnificent cities of the dynastic age, which may well have provided vital archaeological clues to the development of the Aten cult. Here the original benben-stone, a pyramid or cone-shaped boulder, possibly a meteorite, took the place of a cult statue of Re as a focus for worship. Sadly, due to a fatal combination of ancient destruction and modern development, there is now almost nothing left of the ancient glories of Heliopolis. However, the 5th Dynasty sun temples of Abu Ghurab, only one of which now
survives, may well have been built to the same plan. Here the temple consisted of an open courtyard with a central alabaster altar and, to the west, a large obelisk which acted as a sun totem or benben.
Amenhotep III used the cult of the Aten as a means of developing a cult of the king, stressing his own personal divinity through the newly established Aten priesthood. Although tradition dictated that the king should become fully divine only at his death, the mortal Amenhotep was already recognized as the living embodiment of Ptah and worshipped at the ‘Temple of Nebmaatre-United-with-Ptah’, Memphis. In Egypt’s outlying regions Amenhotep was more obviously a god, and the Soleb temple included a relief showing the king making an offering to his own image, which bears the title ‘Nebmaatre Lord of Nubia’, a god who, judging from his head-dress, had lunar rather than solar connections. Later, after the king’s death, Amenhotep IV is shown worshipping his father at Soleb, while in the Theban tomb of Kheruef, where we are shown Amenhotep III and Tiy associated with a variety of solar deities, a small scene shows the king and queen being pulled along in the evening boat of Re, an image which seems intended to symbolize the union of the dead king with the living sun god.2 The Nubian cult of the deified Amenhotep survived the upheavals of the Amarna period and continued into the reign of Tutankhamen, while at Thebes it went on beyond the Ramesside period.
A major alteration in Amenhotep’s status seems to follow the celebration of his first heb-sed;3 it is after this date that we find an increasing emphasis on solar iconography and this goes hand in hand with the development of statues intended to commemorate the deified king. The Colossi of Memnon, placed immediately outside the king’s mortuary temple, may well have served as an object of worship in their own right because, just as a cult statue was recognized as divine, a colossal statue of the king – particularly one which had been named – made an appropriate object of worship. By the time of Ramesses II, some sixty years later, colossal statues of the monarch were regularly named and worshipped and various cult temples included within their sanctuaries depictions of the divine Ramesses sitting alongside his fellow gods.
The king had always filled the role of an intermediary between the gods and mankind, a mortal born to a human mother who became semi-divine on the death of his predecessor. In his official persona the pharaoh was an ex officio god on earth, the only Egyptian who could speak directly to the gods and in consequence the chief priest of all religious cults, although he was forced to delegate his responsibilities to deputy priests, only stepping in to officiate at the major cult ceremonies. The king’s most important duty, a function of his semi-divine status, was the maintenance of maat throughout his land. Maat, a word which cannot be translated literally but can mean ‘justice’ or ‘truth’ though it is better understood as status quo, was an abstract concept representing the ideal state of the universe and everyone in it. This ideal state had been established at the time of creation and had to be maintained to placate the gods. However, maat was always under threat from malevolent outside influences seeking to bring chaos to Egypt. Throughout the dynastic age the concept of maat combined with the divine nature of the kingship to reinforce the power of the royal family. By ensuring that the pharaoh’s position could not be openly questioned without compromising Egypt’s security by threatening maat, the ruling élite remained securely at the top of the social pyramid.
During the Old Kingdom his semi-divine status made the king very different from his subjects, and only he could look forward to an afterlife in the presence of his fellow gods. Mere mortals could continue to exist beyond death, but they were confined to the precincts of the tomb. By the Middle Kingdom, however, the afterlife beyond the grave had been opened to all. In consequence the king’s perceived divinity on earth was weakened, although he still held sole responsibility for the preservation of maat. The New Kingdom saw an attempt to reverse this trend towards equality, with the introduction of the concept of the personal divinity of the king. This started during the reign of Hatchepsut who, in order to reinforce her right to the throne, claimed the god Amen as her bodily father. Theology had always recognized the reigning king as the theoretical son of the creator god, but Hatchepsut made it very clear that she was the fruit of a physical union between Amen and her mother, Queen Ahmose:
She smiled at his majesty. He went to her immediately, his penis erect before her. He gave his heart to her… She was filled with joy at the sight of his beauty. His love passed into her limbs. The palace was flooded with the god’s fragrance, and all his perfumes were from Punt.4
Hatchepsut, as the child of a human mother and a divine father, was a demi-god, but she did not exploit this aspect of her persona, choosing instead to use her filial relationship to Amen as a justification of her reign. Amenhotep III chose to reintroduce the legend of divine birth by copying Hatchepsut’s story, suitably amended, on to the wall of the Luxor Temple. Amenhotep III, the son of Tuthmosis IV, was a secure monarch with an incontestable right to inherit the throne; he used the story not as a means of justifying his rule, but as a means of confirming his own semi-divine status, promoting himself as personally divine rather than as a god through his office. It is no surprise that Amenhotep III chose to display this legend at the Luxor Temple, a temple dedicated to the celebration of the divine royal soul.
Within five years of his succession Akhenaten had radically simplified Egypt’s polytheistic religion by abolishing most of the established pantheon, replacing a multitude of deities with one god, the Aten. The object of his worship was the light of the sun, rather than the sun itself. Two blocks containing the badly damaged and sadly disjointed text of a royal pronouncement – perhaps a justification of his unprecedented rejection of the old gods – hint at Akhenaten’s perception of the traditional gods as worn-out and ineffective:
The king says… their temples fallen to ruin… they have ceased one after the other, whether of precious stones…5
At first the cult of the Aten was able to coexist with the old order. Then, perhaps because Akhenaten encountered opposition to his views, or became more entrenched in his beliefs, this peaceful coexistence became unacceptable. The Egyptian pantheon had always been willing to absorb fresh deities, and more traditional gods had simply faded in importance as they were gently displaced by the new. Akhenaten, however, demanded, and got, a rapid and somewhat ruthless rejection of the
Fig. 3.3 Worshipping in the temple
old order. Most of the traditional gods and goddesses could simply be ignored; it was as if they had never been. But from Year 5 onwards Amen, and to a lesser extent his divine family, was subjected to a persecution which was to increase in intensity as the new reign progressed. Amen’s name and, more rarely, his image were erased or defaced wherever they were found. This persecution occurred throughout the length and breadth of Egypt although it is at Karnak that its true extent is felt. Here someone even took the trouble to remove Amen’s name from the very tip of Hatchepsut’s obelisk where, as obelisks are primarily associated with the solar cults, it had probably caused great offence. Throughout the rest of Egypt the desecration was somewhat haphazard and unsystematic, possibly because many of those charged with erasing the name of the god could not themselves read. Nevertheless, those prominent individuals unfortunate enough to bear personal names including the element ‘Amen’ found it wise to rename themselves at once.
As far as we can tell there had been no great quarrel with the old priesthood to precipitate this extreme reaction, although the Amarna boundary stelae drop dark and regrettably unspecific hints that the king had taken exception to something – possibly traditional cult practices – which had been repeated during both his reign and those of his forebears:
… it shall be worse than what I heard in Year 4; it shall be worse than what I heard in Year 3; it shall be worse than what I heard in Year 1; it shall be worse than what Nebmaatre [Amenhotep III] heard; it shall be worse than what Menkheperure [Tuthmosis IV] heard…6
Nor was there any apparent resist
ance to the imposition of the new state religion, although it is of course unlikely that any such resistance would have been recorded in official documents. By stopping all royal offerings Akhenaten ensured that the old temples were quickly and efficiently closed down and that their wealth was diverted to the Aten making this cult and its chief devotee, the king, extremely wealthy. The property confiscated from Amen was to be administered by centralized government officials rather than local priests.
Service of the state gods was at all times seen as a lucrative career rather than a religious vocation. It is therefore possible that many of Amen’s priests, now redundant, may have changed allegiance and sought
Fig. 3.4 The old names of the Aten
positions serving the Aten. Given the size of the Aten’s endowments, their administrative experience would have proved invaluable. It is noticeable, though, that the Amarna court contained few members of the traditional ruling élite. The courtiers most prominent in the service of the king were men of more humble origins who owed their position to the king’s patronage rather than to birth. The army now played a conspicuous role in daily life, lending their silent support to the king and his innovations. Although we know of no battles during Akhenaten’s reign, the talatat blocks have revealed that the king, often viewed as a pacifist, chose to surround himself with soldiers and armed civilians. Even the ‘Agents of the Harem Ladies’ were armed and ready for action. This heavy military presence may, of course, explain why there was no open opposition to any of Akhenaten’s reforms.
The old iconography of a falcon-headed god was abandoned and the Aten took the form of a faceless sun disc wearing the cobra or uraeus which signified kingship, whose long rays were tipped with miniature hands which could hold the ankh, symbol of life. Unlike Egypt’s other gods the Aten was highly visible, yet at the same time very impersonal – an abstract symbol whose lack of a human body prevented him from appearing in the traditional religious scenes so that he was invariably depicted above the royal family, an observer rather than a participant in the tableaux below. This elevation of the god, and his relatively small size, allowed the king to become the most prominent figure in any religious scene: all eyes were now focused on Akhenaten himself. The Aten required little mystery, no hidden sanctuary and of course no physical host-statue as the sun was his own image, visible to king and commoner alike. We might have expected Akhenaten to extend this reasoning to its logical conclusion. The Aten, a democratic god, had no obvious need of a temple as he was accessible for anyone to worship at any time during the day. But Akhenaten needed his temples as a means of controlling access to his god, and so Aten worship followed the traditional pattern. Only the chief priest or his deputy could address the god, and it was only in the temple that the correct rituals of worship, including offerings, could be performed. The new temples were, however, a direct contrast to the gloomy precincts of Amen and the other traditional gods. Modelled on the solar temples of Re, they were in essence simple open courtyards which allowed the sun to shine down on the worship of the faithful.
Nefertiti Page 9
