Although Akhenaten set out to reform and simplify state religion he had no intention of weakening the position of the monarchy which, until his reign, had been closely linked with accepted theology. Indeed, he followed the example set by his semi-divine father and exploited his new god in order to emphasize the divine role of the king. Amenhotep III had already been linked with Re-Harakhty in the tomb of Kheruef. Now Akhenaten was the son of Re and, as the Aten was the visible, physical aspect of Re, Akhenaten became the earthly or human manifestation of the sun god. As the ‘Beautiful Child of the Disc’ he was effectively an interpreter standing between the god and his people. He alone could recognize and proclaim the will of his father. In many ways this was a continuation of the old theology, and the ‘ordinary’ middle- and lower-class Egyptians would have experienced little challenge to their personal beliefs. The biggest change was felt by Akhenaten’s courtiers who, denied access to their official god yet needing to ingratiate themselves with the new regime, were compelled to worship via Akhenaten and Nefertiti.
Akhenaten’s subjects, accustomed to a wide range of official deities, must have found it hard to understand the austerity of one simple abstract symbol. In the past there had been not one national creed but a series of overlapping religious spheres. These included what in modern terms may be classed as the ‘major tradition’ represented by the universally acknowledged state gods such as Amen, Isis and Osiris, the ‘minor tradition’ which included magic, superstition and witchcraft, and a whole series of local cults which fell somewhere between the two extremes.
Fig. 3.5 The royal family worship the Aten
Most Egyptians worshipped a highly personal mixture of regional deities and family-based cults, with a heavy emphasis on the spirits responsible for pregnancy and childbirth, supplemented with strong doses of superstition and magic. The absence of the great state gods may therefore not have been a problem for the majority of the population, although they would certainly have missed the great festivals and processions which had so far provided regular breaks in their otherwise monotonous lives. There is no evidence that Akhenaten ever sought to develop national Aten festivals, and his intention seems to have been to replace public religious celebrations with semi-secular events such as the procession of the royal family through the streets, or the distribution of rewards to his loyal servants. This somewhat short-sighted policy must surely have contributed to the general lack of enthusiasm for the new, remote state god.
What obviously was a problem was the essential nature of the Aten itself. Like other creator gods the Aten combined male and female elements so that he could become the ‘father and mother’ of all things created. He was both asexual and androgynous, had no anthropomorphic association and, by his very nature as sole creator, could have no spouse. This in itself was neither unique to the Aten nor to Egypt.7 In Egypt asexual gods had been known to create life single-handed; Atum, for example, had either masturbated or expectorated to produce his gender-specific children Shu and Tefnut. However, most gods were clearly either male or female; they coupled and produced their children by relatively conventional means. This cosy divine domesticity made the gods far more accessible to the Egyptian people who, valuing family life above all things, could understand gods who behaved in a human fashion. The Aten had no divine wife and no child to make up the usual triad. He was a remote, characterless entity and his role as a fertile god was very much a theoretical one. We have no equivalent of the Luxor or Deir el-Bahri legends of the divine conception of the king to explain exactly how Akhenaten became the son of the Aten, but it seems unlikely that any form of divine impregnation of Queen Tiy was ever envisaged. Furthermore, there was now no official equivalent of the essentially comforting mother-wife goddess who can be traced back to the female figurines of the predynastic age and who in recent times had been represented by state goddesses such as Isis and, more particularly, Hathor in her various guises. Female goddesses, especially those associated with safe pregnancy and childbirth, had always played an important role in both popular and state religion. Now, officially at least, they were anathema and even Hapy, the fecund male god of the Nile, had been suppressed, presumably because his existence was incompatible with the Aten’s role of sole creator.
Akhenaten, who appears curiously androgynous in many of his portraits, spent much of his life conspicuous as the one male at the centre of a family of unusually prominent women. His grandmother, Mutemwia, his mother, Tiy, and at least three of his four sisters had been ladies of strong character. The highly publicized children in the nuclear royal family were all female, while Akhenaten’s wife was not only a highly capable woman but was – if the evidence from Amarna is to be believed – the passion of his life and the centre of his universe. It is therefore not surprising that Akhenaten, conscious of the lack of a female aspect to the Aten and aware of just how useful an ally a strong queen could be, promoted Nefertiti to provide the absent element of the new cult. In a precept which extended to the royal family, a good Egyptian wife was always seen as her husband’s most loyal supporter. As a consequence, some early New Kingdom queens had been allowed a prominent political role at times when the safety of the monarchy was at stake, and Tetisheri, Ahhotep and Ahmose Nefertari had all played their part in establishing the 18th Dynasty.8 At the same time it was always recognized that the role of the queen, like that of the king, had semi-divine origins. Numerous queens had served the old gods as priestesses and, as we have seen with Tiy, queens were permitted to act as the mortal representative of the deity on earth. This aspect of Nefertiti’s queenship was now to be emphasized as never before. Nefertiti was to become Akhenaten’s religious twin, the female complement to his male role. The Aten, Akhenaten son of Re, and Nefertiti, his wife, now formed an inverted semi-divine triad which paralleled the ancient triad formed by the creator god, his son Shu, and Shu’s twin sister-consort Tefnut.
Tiy, still very much alive and once believed to be the inspiration behind her son’s beliefs, seems to have become a somewhat peripheral figure at this time. In the tomb of Kheruef, which spans the reigns of the two Amenhoteps, we see her alongside her son, offering wine to Re-Harakhty and Maat, and incense to Atum and Hathor. These scenes presumably date to the very beginning of Akhenaten’s reign. With the advent of Nefertiti Tiy is forced to take a back seat, as Mutemwia had before her. Her part in the new religion is not clear and, although we know that Akhenaten built his mother a ‘sunshade’ temple where she could worship the Aten, there is no evidence to suggest that she ever abandoned the old beliefs to dedicate herself exclusively to the new. Where in earlier reigns we might have expected to find scenes of the king accompanied by his mother and his wife, we now see only the royal couple plus their daughter(s). Effectively there is a secondary triad of king, queen and royal offspring, with no place for the king’s mother.
At first sight the Amarna letters suggest that in the field of politics the roles of the two queens may have been reversed with, for at least the first few years of her son’s reign, Tiy remaining a powerful figure. We know that Tushratta chose to write directly to Tiy over the affair of the missing gold statues, in the hope that she could influence her son, who must have seemed very much an unknown quantity. In contrast Nefertiti is never specifically named in any of the letters and it would seem that to Akhenaten’s correspondents she was of negligible significance. While it is possible to argue on the basis of this evidence that Tiy was, for a few years after her husband’s death, required to act as regent for her young son, it seems more likely that Tushratta was appealing to Tiy as a friend, albeit a friend with motherly influence, rather than a powerful queen.
Nefertiti’s curious exclusion from the Amarna letters does seem to suggest that her influence was confined to the religious sphere. It may also be, at least in part, a reflection of her husband’s general lack of interest in all foreign affairs, although there is perhaps a danger that Akhenaten’s pacifism and insularity may in turn be overstated. While no one could claim Akh
enaten as one of the great Egyptian warrior pharaohs, the empire certainly did not collapse during his reign. Unfortunately, as the sequence of Amarna letters is obviously incomplete we are forced to draw our deductions from a markedly one-sided view of events.
The change in religion necessitated immediate changes in religious art, as scenes of the old gods and their rituals were displaced by scenes of the new. Just as the traditional temple scenes had to be replaced by images of Akhenaten and his wife offering to the Aten, so the non-royal tombs of Amarna, which under a more conventional monarch would have been decorated with happy images of the tomb owner and his wife plus detailed funeral tableaux, were now dominated by the royal family. Depictions of the dead are few and far between in the Amarna tombs. Instead we are presented with scenes of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their children – the living symbols of royal fertility – worshipping the Aten, visiting the temple and generally going about their daily routine, to the extent that the tomb becomes almost a shrine to the activities and achievements of the royal family. We see officials raising their arms to praise the royal couple, while the ordinary people bow low before the god’s representatives on earth. Tomb owners, forbidden direct contact with their god, were forced to send their prayers via either Akhenaten or Nefertiti. The burial petitions in the Amarna tomb of the temple official Panehesy included prayers addressed to both king and queen, although the petitions directed to Nefertiti were to a large extent dependent upon her cultivating the good will of the king:
Akhenaten: May he grant a reception of loaves, presented at every festival of the living Aten in the hall of the Benben.
Nefertiti: May she grant the entrance of favour and the exit of love, and a happy recollection in the presence of the king, and that thy name be welcome in the mouth of the companions.9
The tomb of Huya, steward to Queen Tiy, even included a prayer addressed to the dowager queen:
Praise to your Ka, O Lady of the Two Lands, who makes the Two Lands bright with her beauty, the Queen Mother and Great Queen Tiy, Mistress of the Provisions, abundant in fat things…10
The formal scenes on the tomb walls were replicated in the highly conspicuous mud-brick kiosks found in the gardens of some, but perhaps surprisingly not all, of Amarna’s élite. These buildings, originally misidentified as birth bowers or garden pavilions, seem to have functioned as miniature Aten temples where Akhenaten’s most loyal subjects could worship the royal couple, and through them the Aten. Most of the chapels have survived in ground-plan only, although we can see that they were of varying complexity, ranging from a simple room built on a raised platform to an entire small-scale temple complete with forecourt, pylons, portico and subsidiary rooms. We might reasonably expect to find that the chapels were open to the sun, although in the absence of walls this cannot be confirmed. The fragments of evidence which have been preserved indicate that their walls were decorated with scenes of Akhenaten and Nefertiti offering before the Aten, and that they housed brick or limestone altars plus stelae and statues of the king and his family.11
More intimate scenes of royal family life were reserved for the stelae recovered from within the homes of prominent courtiers, where they almost certainly served as domestic shrines, a scaled-down version of the garden chapels. In the absence of the traditional myths and legends these stelae showed the royal couple and their offspring relaxing in the royal pavilion under the protection of the Aten’s rays, and an accompanying inscription was usually provided to stress the subject’s loyalty to the king. The affection between king and queen in these scenes seems both obvious and natural, and is a stark contrast to earlier royal couples whose affection was expressed by the queen placing one rather stiff arm around her husband’s waist. Indeed, one badly damaged relief now housed in the Louvre appears to show Akhenaten sitting with Nefertiti and at least two of their children on his knee. If Akhenaten rarely appears alone with his daughters, it is presumably because he regards the children as being in the care of their mother. He would certainly not be the first father to be wary of looking after six small girls. In fact, ‘off camera’, the young princesses were cared for by their nursemaids; young women who hover in the background of the palace scenes and who generally remain anonymous, although we know that Ankhesenpaaten had a nurse named Tia.
Queen Tiy is remarkable by her absence from these scenes of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their family, although the Amarna house of Panehesy has yielded the famous stela of Amenhotep III and Tiy where the old king is depicted in all his ‘flabby lethargy’. It would appear that this stela, carved at the very end of Amenhotep’s reign, was brought to Amarna by Panehesy as a mark of his devotion to the old regime.
Almost all Egyptian art is capable of an interpretation beyond the obvious, and these scenes of relaxed domesticity certainly held a symbolism for their original artists and owners which is now lost to us. The identification of the Aten, king and queen as a divine triad seems fairly obvious, as is the assumption that the royal children were included in the tableaux as physical manifestations of the couple’s fertility. Akhenaten constantly stressed his role as the son of the god, and it is not surprising that he should use his own children as symbols of rejuvenation. Nefertiti, her lower body emphasized, is presented as the fertile Tefnut, consort to Akhenaten’s Shu. A scene showing the queen serving the king by pouring him a drink, or by placing a necklace around his neck, is in many ways a distortion of the traditional scenes where a king would offer before a god. Such scenes continue beyond the Amarna age into the reign of Tutankhamen. Less obvious, but by no means improbable, is the suggestion that the reed matting and slender pillars of the royal pavilion may have been intended to represent a stylized birth bower, the temporary structure used by mothers during labour and the period of purification which followed delivery, and therefore may have served as a reinforcement of the theme of fertility and reproduction which was a constant underlying motif in Amarna art and religion.12
It seems that not everyone was enamoured of the new-style religion and its emphasis on the domestic life of the royal family, although resistance was very low-key and took the form of humour rather than obvious dissent. A series of crude limestone figurines unique to Amarna which show families of monkeys generally aping the behaviour of the royal family is probably best explained as an early attempt at political satire: the monkeys drive chariots, play musical instruments, eat, drink and even kiss their young.13 Ordinary citizens seem to have encountered little difficulty in maintaining contact with their traditional spirits and deities, many of which were associated with age-old concerns over fertility, pregnancy and childbirth. Leonard Woolley, in his 1921–2 excavation of the Amarna workmen’s village, discovered a range of Bes and Taweret amulets plus eye of Horus ring-bezels and even a few decorated Hathor heads.14 Glazed Bes pendants, the remnants of broken necklaces, have been recovered from both private houses and the royal tomb, while an entire wall of the workmen’s village Main Street House 3, one of the few Amarna houses whose walls have survived to yield traces of their original decoration, was painted with a frieze of dancing Bes and Taweret figures.15 Beset, the uncommon female version of Bes, was also present at Amarna in the form of an amulet, while a cupboard in one private house yielded a small votive collection of two model beds, a fertility figure and a stela painted with a scene showing a woman, child and Taweret, the pregnant hippopotamus goddess of childbirth and bringer of babies to the childless. As far as we can tell, no steps were taken to hide these images and we must assume that Bes and his friends were acceptable to Akhenaten, either because they had once been included among the legendary followers and protectors of the sun god, or because, as elements of the ‘minor tradition’, they fell outside the scope of the prohibition extended to the mainstream deities.16 Neither Bes nor Taweret could have presented any real threat to the sovereignty of the all-powerful Aten, and Akhenaten’s tolerance of superstition may well have been a tacit recognition of his inability to eradicate the beliefs central to the family unit.
Bes, the male protector of women in childbirth, was a demi-god or a spirit rather than a great state god. Nevertheless, or even perhaps because of this, he was a universally accepted motif and as such was by no means confined to the lower classes. We have already seen that the Malkata bedroom of Amenhotep III was decorated with comical Bes figures. Queen Tiy seems to have been particularly fond of Bes, and her ornate chairs and beds, recovered from the tomb of Yuya and Thuyu, were decorated with both Bes and Taweret. An unusual cosmetic jar, now in Turin Museum, even shows Tiy herself in the form of Taweret. Bes and Taweret had always played an important role in popular – as opposed to state – religion. Throughout the dynastic age the whole cycle of human reproduction was seen as a dangerous yet desirable process, and childbirth itself was a particularly worrying time when the entire family would be brought into contact with inexplicable forces of creation far beyond human control. All labour involved risk to both mother and baby and conventional medicine could do little to help either. Mothers-to-be therefore turned to the supernatural for protection and Bes and Taweret seem to have remained acceptable as the protectors of the family – men, women and children – throughout the Amarna age. The fact that images of these gods were used to decorate the living rooms of the Amarna workmen’s houses, while at the Theban workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina Bes was joined by scenes celebrating women and childbirth, is a strong indication that these female-centred cults were shared by the whole family and were in no way restricted to women.
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