Moses and Akhenaten (20 page)

To the resentful Egyptian establishment the Aten was seen as a challenger who would replace the powerful State god Amun and not come under his domination. In the tense climate that prevailed, Tiye arranged a compromise by persuading her son to leave Thebes and establish a new capital in Middle Egypt, on the east bank of the Nile, some two hundred miles to the north of Thebes.

13

HORIZON OF THE ATEN

T
HE
climate of hostility that surrounded Akhenaten all his life – and one may wonder what could have been the causes were they not ethnic and religious – had surfaced as early as two years after his appointment as coregent. The Memphite inscription of his father's Year 30, as we saw in an earlier chapter, had sought to defend his action in ‘placing the male offspring [the heir] upon the throne', suggesting that there had been opposition – undoubtedly from the Amun priesthood and the nobility – to his action in securing the inheritance for his son.

Further evidence of such opposition is found in the proclamation of Akhenaten on the boundary stelae, fixed before the start of the building of his new city of Amarna in his Year 4. Here he refers to what appears to be open opposition he had faced prior to that date: ‘For, as Father Hor-Aten liveth, … priests [?] more evil are they than those things which I heard unto Year 4, [more evil are they] than [those things] which I have heard in year … more evil are they than those things which King … [heard], more evil are they than those things which Menkheperure (Tuthmosis IV) heard.'
¹

Akhenaten is referring to hostile comments he heard about himself prior to Year 4. Not only that: two kings who preceded him had been subject to similar verbal criticism. The missing name here can only be that of his father, Amenhotep III, whose Memphite inscription, referred to above, points to opposition over the steps he took to ensure Akhenaten's succession. But why should Tuthmosis IV have encountered similar hostility from the Establishment? We have no evidence on this point. I have argued in
Stranger in the Valley of the Kings,
however, that it was Tuthmosis IV who appointed Joseph (Yuya) as one of his ministers and the Old Testament indicates that, at the time, he was dissatisfied with his usual advisers, for which the Book of Genesis blames their failure to interpret Pharaoh's dream about the seven good years that would be followed by seven lean years: ‘And it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled; and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof; and Pharaoh told them his dream; but there was none that could interpret them unto Pharaoh' (Genesis, 41:8).

It would appear a reasonable deduction that priestly opposition to the king's behaviour went back to the time of Tuthmosis IV's appointment as his vizier of Joseph, one of the hated shepherds. Although the young Akhenaten would have known of the hostile comments directed at his father, he could have heard about criticisms of his grandfather, Tuthmosis IV, only through having been told about them, possibly by Yuya, his maternal grandfather, still alive when Akhenaten was born.

The criticisms levelled at Akhenaten himself included, according to other inscriptions on the boundary stelae at Amarna, the land the king had chosen for the building of a house for the Aten at Karnak: ‘Behold Pharaoh … found that it belonged not to a god, it belonged not to a goddess, it belonged not to a prince, it belonged not to a princess … [There is no right for] any man to act as owner of it.'
²
The implication is that, as he made in Karnak and Luxor temples for his God, isolating the priests from running or taking part in any of the ceremonies of worship, they must have sought to remind him that the temples of Karnak and Luxor belonged to Amun and other traditional gods of Egypt and that he had no right to introduce there another God who would exclude their authority.

The building of his new city lasted from Akhenaten's Year 4 to Year 8, but he and his family and officials began to live there from Year 6. A fine city it was. At this point the cliffs of the high desert recede from the river, leaving a great semi-circle about eight miles long and three miles broad. The clean yellow sand slopes gently down to the river.

The modern name of the site of Akhenaten's city is Tell el-Amarna. In his book
Tell el-Amarna,
published in 1894, Petrie wrote: ‘The name … seems to be a European concoction. The northern village is known as Et Till – perhaps a form of Et Tell, the common name for a heap of ruins. The Beni Amran have given their name to the neighbourhood … But no such name as Tell el-Amarna is used by the natives and I retain it only as a convention …'

It was here that Akhenaten built his new capital, Akhetaten, The Horizon (or resting place) of the Aten, where he and his followers could be free to worship their monotheistic God. Huge boundary stelae, marking the limits of the city and recording the story of its foundation, were carved in the surrounding cliffs. The first of them date from about the fourth year of the coregency when Akhenaten had decided upon the site. A later set date from the sixth year and define both the city on the east bank and a large area of agricultural land on the bank opposite, apparently with a view to making the new capital self-supporting if it ever came under siege. The stela proclamation runs:

As my father the Aten lives, I shall make Akhetaten for the Aten my father in this place. I shall not make him Akhetaten south of it, north of it, west of it or east of it. And Akhetaten extends from the southern stela as far as the northern stela, measured between stela and stela on the eastern mountain, likewise from the south-west stela to the north-west stela on the western mountain of Akhetaten. And the area between these four stelae is Akhetaten itself; it belongs to Aten my father; mountains, deserts, meadows, islands, high ground and low ground, land, water, villages, men, beasts and all things which the Aten my father shall bring into existence eternally forever. I shall not forget this oath which I have made to the Aten my father eternally forever.

A reiteration of his vows, made to his new capital, was added in his eighth year, which is thought the most likely time that the king, Queen Nefertiti and their six daughters – Merytaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpa-aten, Neferneferuaten the younger, Neferneferure and Setepenre, all born before Year 9 of the king's reign – took up residence.

Akhetaten was a capital city possessed of both dignity and architectural harmony. Its main streets ran parallel to the Nile with the most important of them, known even today as
Sikket es-Sultan,
the King's Way, connecting all the city's most prominent buildings, including the King's House where Pharaoh and his family lived their private family life. Its plan was similar to that of a high official's villa, but on a grander scale and surrounded by a spacious garden. To the south of the house was the king's private Temple to the Aten. The Great Temple of the Aten, a huge building constructed on an east-west axis, lay less than a quarter of a mile to the north along the King's Way. It was entered through a pylon from the highway and a second entrance gave access to a hypostyle hall called The House of Rejoicing of the Aten. Six rectangular courts, known as Gem-Aten, lay along a processional way and were filled with tables for offerings to the Aten. At the eastern end of the enclosure there was a sanctuary equipped with a great altar and more offering tables. Abreast the northern wall of the enclosure lay the pavilion where a great reception for foreign princes bearing tribute was held in Year 12, thought probably to have been the high point of Akhenaten's reign. The house of the high priest Panehesy lay outside the enclosure's south-east corner.

It was not just the form of worship that was new in Akhetaten. Queen Nefertiti, like her mother-in-law Queen Tiye, enjoyed a prominence that had not existed in the past. On one of his new city's boundary stelae her husband had her described flatteringly as: ‘Fair of Face, Joyous with the Double Plume, Mistress of Happiness, Endowed with Favour, at hearing whose voice one rejoices, Lady of Grace, Great of Love, whose disposition cheers the Lord of the Two Lands.' The king gave tombs, gouged out of the face of surrounding cliffs, to those nobles who had rallied to him. In the reliefs which the nobles had carved for themselves in these tombs – showing Akhenaten with his queen and family dispensing honours and largesse, worshipping in the temple, driving in his chariot, dining and drinking – Nefertiti is depicted as having equal stature with the king and her names are enclosed in a cartouche.

Throughout this period changes took place in the nature of Akhenaten's belief. As we saw earlier, when he was shown in his Year 1 worshipping at the quarry of Gebel Silsila in Nubia, he called himself the ‘first prophet' of ‘Re-Harakhti, Rejoicing-in-the Horizon, in his name the light (Shu) which is in the Aten'. Soon afterwards the name of the Aten was placed inside two cartouches so as to be represented as a ruling king. At this early stage the God was represented as a human shape, either with the head of a falcon surmounted with the sun disc or as a winged disc. These early representations were made in the conventional artistic style of the Egypt of the time.

Between the king's Year 4 and Year 5 a new style of art started to appear, part of it realistic, part distinguished by an exaggeration of expression. There was also a new representation of the God. A disc at the top of royal scenes extended its rays towards the king and queen, and the rays end in their hands, which sometimes hold the Ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life, to the noses of the king and queen, a privilege which only they enjoy. The disc and its rays are not to be seen, for example, in scenes showing officials in the doorways of their tombs, reciting the famous hymns to Aten found inscribed on Aye's tomb. The king and his queen are the major figures in the Aten cult: it is their colossal statues that surround the open courts of the temples, which contained no images of the gods although the walls were probably covered with scenes depicting the worship of the Aten. Pharaoh was Aten's channel of communication and only he had the power to interpret the divine will. In the longer hymn to Aten, thought to have been composed by the king himself, a long poetic passage credits Aten with the creation of all the phenomena of the universe and asserts that all creatures exist only by virtue of the sun's rising and infusing them with life each morning.

In Year 6 the Aten was given a new epithet, ‘Celebrator of Jubilees', jubilees which coincided, significantly, with those of the king. Then, towards the end of Year 9 the name of the Aten received its new form to rid it of any therio-anthropomorphic and panetheistic ideas that may have clung to it. The falcon symbol that had been used to spell the word ‘Re-Harakhti' was changed to abstract signs giving an equivalent ‘Re, Ruler of the Horizon' while a phrase in the second cartouche was also altered, ridding it of the word for light, ‘Shu', which was also a representation of the old Egyptian god of the void. This was replaced by other signs. The new form of the God's name read: ‘Re, the living Ruler of the Horizon, in his name (aspect) of the light which is in the Aten'.

No evidence of burial, or even of sarcophagi, have been found in any of the nobles' tombs and their main interest remains in the vivid picture they give – in a manner previously unknown in Egypt – of life in the new city and of the intimate family life of Pharaoh himself. Pendlebury, who worked at the site in the 1930s, later had this to say, in his book
Tell el-Amarna,
published in 1935, of the tomb paintings and sketches: ‘Carelessly and hastily carved as many of them are, the new spirit of realism is strikingly evident. The incidental groups of spectators are so alive, the princesses turn to one another with their bouquets so naturally. Almost more important, however, are the religious texts from which we can read the hymns to the sun written by Akhenaten and giving the theology and philosophy of the new religion.'

The ruling Pharaoh was regarded as being head of the priesthood, head of the army and head of the administration of the Two Lands of Egypt. By rejecting the gods of Egypt, Akhenaten ceased to be head of the priesthood and the temples of Egypt were no longer under his control. He also had no control over the running of the country while his father was still alive. But, from the time he moved to Amarna, Akhenaten relied completely on the army's support for protection and, possibly, as a future safeguard against the confrontation that would be inevitable once his father died and he became sole ruler.

Alan R. Schulman, the American Egyptologist, was able to demonstrate that although, because of his physical weakness, Akhenaten alone of the Tuthmosside House is not represented as an active participant in horsemanship, archery and seamanship – in which his forebears excelled – he seems to have been at pains to emphasize his military authority. In the vast majority of the representations, he is shown wearing either the Blue Crown or the short Nubian wig, both belonging to the king's military head-dress, rather than the traditional ceremonial crowns of Lower and Upper Egypt. Akhenaten's use of these two types of headgear on almost every possible public and private occasion may then have been intended to identify him constantly in the minds of his people as a military leader: ‘Scenes of soldiers and military activity abound in both the private and royal art of Amarna. If we may take the reliefs from the tombs of the nobles at face value, then the city was virtually an armed camp. Everywhere we see parades and processions of soldiers, infantry and chariotry with their massed standards. There are soldiers under arms standing guard in front of the palaces, the temples and in the watchtowers that bordered the city, scenes of troops, unarmed or equipped with staves, carrying out combat exercises in the presence of the king.'
³

The military garrison of Amarna had detachments of foreign auxiliaries in addition to Egyptian units. Schulman goes on to say: ‘Just as Amarna had its own military garrison which stood ready to enforce the will of the king, so the other cities of Egypt must also have had their garrisons and the army, loyal to the throne, carried out its will. That the army was so loyal to the throne and to the dynasty was almost assured by the person of its commander, the god's-father Aye, who somehow was related to the royal family. Though he does not give them great prominence in his inscriptions as a private individual, Aye held posts among the highest in the infantry and the chariotry, posts also held by Yuya, the father of Queen Tiye and possibly also the father of Aye.'
⁴
(The precise relationship of the four Amarna kings will be discussed later.)