Moses and Akhenaten (19 page)

Some additional light was cast on the youth of Akhenaten as a result of excavations on the site of Amenhotep III's royal palace complex at Malkata in Western Thebes by the discovery of hundreds of small inscribed fragments of great historical importance. Here it becomes evident that the Middle Palace of the complex was probably built for Akhenaten while he was still a prince and, as ‘Regnal Year
V
occurs in the inscriptions, that he continued to live there during the early Theban years of the coregency with his father. The earliest dating for Amenhotep III is not earlier than Year 8, which indicates that Year 1 could not relate to him. The only mention of Akhenaten before his accession to the throne was found in Malkata in the form of an undated wine-jar seal with the inscription ‘… (of) the estate of the true King's Son, Amenhotep (Akhenaten)'. The use of the expression ‘true son' indicates an early challenge to the prince's right to inherit the throne and that the coregency had not yet started. This therefore dates the wine-jar seal to some time between Year 20 of Amenhotep III, who spent most of his time in Memphis until then, and the start of the coregency in Year 28. It also suggests that at around this time Akhenaten was old enough to have his own establishment. It is, in fact, thought that he was in his mid-teens when the coregency started: ‘His [Akhenaten's] brother, who ordinarily would have inherited the throne, had died in infancy, and Amenhotep IV was made coregent with his father … He was perhaps sixteen years at the time.'
¹

Deducting sixteen years from the start of the coregency with his father, we come to Year 12 of Amenhotep III as the year of his birth. Furthermore, two commemorative scarabs issued by Amenhotep III point to the possible place of his birth. The first, dated to Year 10, relates ‘a miracle, brought to His Majesty, the daughter of the prince of Nahrin [Mitanni], Sutarna [Tushratta's father], Gilukhipa and persons of her harem, 317 women'.

The last issue of these commemorative scarabs is the pleasure lake scarab, dated to Year 11 and, as we saw earlier, recording ‘… under the majesty of … Amenhotep III, given life; and the Great King's Wife Tiye, in her city of Zarw-kha … His Majesty celebrated the feast of the lake, in the third month of the first season, day 16, when His Majesty sailed thereon in the royal barge
Aten Gleams.'

It seems that, after his first year with the Mitannian princess, Amenhotep III went back to Queen Tiye for a kind of second honeymoon in her Eastern Delta city of Zarw – the ‘end of Egypt', where the desert and the road to Gaza began, and close to Goshen where the Israelites had settled – which must have become the summer residence for the royal family, as it became again during the Ramesside rule of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties. The Egyptians had three seasons, Inundation, Winter and Gathering, each of four months, with the year beginning in mid-July. The middle of the third month would therefore have been around 1 October. Thus it is possible that Akhenaten was born in 1394
BC,
either towards the mid-July end of Year 11 or around the beginning of year 12.

Zarw had been rebuilt during the Eighteenth Dynasty as a conveniently situated military post for operations in Asia. It also seems that the harem of Tuthmosis IV, Amenhotep III's father, had a residence at Zarw as inscriptions of Neby, the city's vizier at the time, found at Sarabit el Khadim in Sinai, give his titles not only as ‘Mayor of Zarw' and ‘Troop Commander', but as ‘Steward of the Harem of the Royal Wife'. If the queen in question was Mutimuya, Amenhotep's mother, this could imply that even Amenhotep III must have spent some time during his childhood in this Eastern Delta residence of his mother, especially at the height of summer when the Delta was cooler than Lower and Middle Egypt.

Akhenaten was born in an era of peace and prosperity for Egypt. A combination of diplomacy, judicious marriages and equally judicious use of gold had secured a balance of power, at least temporarily, between Egypt and the neighbouring Hurrian State of Mitanni, the Hittites, the Assyrians and Babylonians; Palestine and Syria, conquered by Tuthmosis III in the middle of the fifteenth century
BC,
posed no threat; the southern frontier had been secured up to and beyond the Nile's Fourth Cataract. Luxuries from the Levant and the Aegean world poured into the country on a greater scale than ever before, more land was brought under cultivation, art flourished, prosperous State officials and priests enjoyed the pleasures of new town houses and country villas with large estates. How the common people fared is less clear, but they must have benefited from the general prosperity and the State projects that offered alternative employment during the long summer droughts.

Throughout the country, new temples were founded, old ones restored. One of the biggest temporal projects was Amenhotep III's splendid palace, the Malkata, in western Thebes, opposite modern Luxor, with an imposing mortuary temple beside it for the god Amun-Re. Thebes was also the seat of the State god, Amun-Re. While ancient cults of other gods continued to flourish locally, the cult of Amun-Re had received, and continued to receive, such favourable royal treatment – generous endowment for the great temple of Karnak at Thebes, munificent gifts of land and gold – that it had become virtually an arm of the State executive. Yet there was already a hint in the air of the enormous religious upheaval that lay ahead.

During the reign of Amenhotep II, the king's grandfather, and Tuthmosis IV, his father, a gradual but growing fusion had taken place between the cult of Amun, the patron god of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and the cult of Re, the sun-god, whose foremost centre of worship was far to the north at On (Heliopolis), north of modern Cairo and close to the important administrative and military capital of Memphis. Re was looked upon as the lord of the universe, the giver of all life, and the king ruled according to Re's divine plan by virtue of being his son. On an increasing scale during this period hymns and prayers to Re as the giver of life began to appear on a variety of monuments, including stelae and tomb doors. As a rule the name of the sun-god was given in the form common in Heliopolis, Re-Harakhti (Horus of the Horizon).

At a royal as well as a religious level a change took place during this period that must have seemed as strange to those aware of it as some of the wilder claims of today's ardent feminists. The name of Queen Tiye, unlike that of earlier queens, is placed regularly in a cartouche, a distinction previously limited to the ruling monarch, and is also included in royal titularies. Furthermore, she is represented as being of equivalent stature to the king.

As with Moses, we know very little of Akhenaten's early years beyond the fact that he had an extremely close relationship with his mother, Queen Tiye, who seems to have been his only confidante at this stage of his life. There is no evidence that he spent his early days at Memphis, where his father had his main residence at the time and where the heirs apparent were normally trained and educated with the sons of the nobles. His appearance at Thebes does not seem to have occurred until Year 20 of his father, Amenhotep III, when the evidence of the wine-jar seal has been interpreted as ‘the true king's son, Amenhotep', indicates that he had a palace there. William C. Hayes, the American Egyptologist, comments on this inscription: ‘The King's son, Amenhotep, referred to here was in all probability the future king Amenhotep IV before his elevation to the coregency, which is thought to have taken place in or about Year 28 of Amenhotep III.'
²

It is from his behaviour and the kind of knowledge he seemed to have acquired at the time of his ultimate appearance at Thebes that we have to guess at where Akhenaten most probably passed the greater part of his childhood. His appearance does not suggest that he had any physical training, contrary to the custom among Eighteenth Dynasty kings, and he is never shown hunting lions or other wild animals. Nor is he depicted smiting an enemy or leading his army in combat. On the other hand he does not seem to have had the respect for Egyptian deities or customs evinced by other kings.

As many elements of Akhenaten's new religion had their origin in the solar worship of Heliopolis, this points to his having had some training and education at this city, especially as Anen, the brother of Queen Tiye, was a high priest of Re, probably at Heliopolis. Yet his developed views about the Aten when he was still a young man suggest that he must have been involved in his early years in a monotheistic cult of the Aten at Zarw, his mother's city, which – if his life in early childhood, like that of Moses, had been under threat – would have been the safest place to conceal him.

A significant pointer to the existence of such a cult there even before the birth of Akhenaten is the fact that the vessel used by Amenhotep III when he sailed on the pleasure lake was named
Aten Gleams.
We also have evidence that the Aten temples which Akhenaten built at both Karnak and Luxor at the beginning of his coregency were not the first Aten temples in Egypt, and, again significantly, the very first shrine appears to have been in the city of Zarw. Another of the titles of Neby, the mayor of Zarw during the time of Tuthmosis IV, was
imyr hnt,
and, as the word
hnt
has been interpreted as meaning ‘lake' or ‘lake area', Gun Björkman, the Swedish Egyptologist, has taken this title to indicate Neby's control over the lake area of Zarw: ‘This seems to agree very well with what can be concluded from the monuments of Neby. Considering the nature of Zarw and its neighbourhood, it also seems suitable that Neby should have the designation discussed.' Björkman also gave a footnote reference on the same page. ‘Professor Yoyotte has drawn my attention to a photograph in the Archives P. Lacau (Photo A III, 63, F6) of a
talalat,
i.e. a small block from the time of Akhenaten (these are the stones that Akhenaten used in the building of his Theban temples), showing a procession of bowing officials. The accompanying inscriptions describe Neby as “The Overseer of the Foremost Water in the
hnt
of the Temple of Aten”.'
³

As this scene and inscription indicate a Temple of Aten already in existence at the time Akhenaten was constructing his first Aten temple at Karnak, it must have existed in the Zarw lake area of the Eastern Delta – what the Bible calls ‘the land of Goshen' – before his rule began. In addition, we have the text on a wine-jar, placed in the tomb of Tutankhamun at the time of his death, that reads: ‘Year 5. Sweet wine of the House-of-Aten [from] Zarw. Chief vintner Penamun.'
⁴

Therefore, even before Akhenaten built his first temple for his new God and right up to at least the time of Year 5 of Tutankhamun, Zarw had a temple to the Aten. If Akhenaten was born there, for which there are strong supporting indications … if his absence from Thebes and Memphis during his early years can be explained by the fact that, during this period of his life, he was living at Zarw, the city of his mother, whose Asiatic relatives had settled in the vicinity … and if the first temple for the Aten in Egypt was at Zarw, then the inescapable conclusion has to be that he must have received his first inspirations regarding his new God and his new religion while he was at Zarw. This would explain the fact that his new religious ideas – including the Israelite idea of a God without an image – were already to a large extent developed when he came to the throne at Thebes as coregent. It is also worth noting that the name of the chief vintner, Penamun, resembles an Egyptianized form of Benjamin, and the vintner could have been a descendant of that tribe.

The section that follows immediately matches, in greater detail, the outline of the story of Moses given in
Chapter Six
and is repeated here to save the reader from having to refer back to it.

As her son reached his mid-teens, Tiye took the precaution of ensuring his right to the throne by marrying him to his half-sister, Neferneferuaten Nefertiti, daughter of Amenhotep III and
his
sister, Sitamun, and therefore the rightful heiress, whom the young prince succeeded in converting to his new religion. It has been suggested that because of her name, which can be translated as ‘the beautiful one who is come', Nefertiti may have been the Mitannian princess Tadukhipa. Such a marriage would have been contrary to royal practice in Egypt at the time, however, since the new king established his right to the throne by marrying the royal heiress. Furthermore, the fact that Horemheb, the last ruler of the Eighteenth Dynasty, is generally believed to have established his right to the throne by marrying Nefertiti's sister, Mutnezmat, indicates that Nefertiti herself must at this earlier stage have been the heiress daughter of Amenhotep III.

As a further step towards ensuring that her son's right to the throne should be unassailable, Tiye subsequently persuaded Amenhotep III, whose health began to weaken as the years went by, to appoint him as his coregent at Thebes, but, in order to gain the acceptance of the priesthood, the stress in making the appointment was placed during the first Theban years upon the role of Nefertiti, the heiress.

On his accession to the throne as coregent, Akhenaten took the names Nefer-khepru-re Waenre Amenhotep – that is, Amenhotep IV – and from his very first year provoked the priests by his aggressive attitude. He had barely assumed his new position when he used some of the wealth amassed by his father to build at Thebes a large new temple to the Aten – a God for the world, not just for Egyptians – within the precincts of the existing Amun-Re temples at Karnak. This was followed by a second temple at Luxor. He snubbed the traditional priests by not inviting them to any of the festivities in the early part of his coregency and, in his fourth year, when he celebrated his
sed
festival or jubilee – usually, but not necessarily, a rejuvenation celebration that marked Year 30 of a monarch's reign – he banned all deities but his own God from the occasion. Twelve months later he made a further break with tradition by changing his name to Akhenaten in honour of his new deity.