Oh, look who is sitting here. It’s the heretic pharaoh in Shanghai. My, you are the globetrotting celebrity now, aren’t you? Irony of ironies is that General Horemheb inadvertently made you famous by trying to cover you up. By trying to obliterate you from Egyptian history after your death, he turned you from a probable footnote into a renegade hero. Yeah, I see that smile on your face. So you’re in Shanghai now? You know, you can get some real pizza in this city and a fairly good burrito. Been to New York yet? You just have to visit the Met or Brooklyn Museum.
Wandering into a hushed room of the Shanghai Museum, I hadn’t expected to run into Akhenaten in a somewhat sensational show about Ancient Egypt, perhaps meant to dazzle the retina and showcase the unusual more than to edify (like many museum-shows these days). Actually, when this sandstone sculpture was made, he was still Amenhotep IV, but he was already moving away from the god Amun to the sun or Aten disk.
This was the man whose sudden and radical religious reforms had been chiseled away, his name sanded from monuments, his city left to be reclaimed by the desert, his child (“King Tut”) possibly murdered. And yet, despite all efforts to erase him, here he was, possessing a magnetic aura in the heart of Shanghai. Not only had he not been erased, but he sat majestically as a victor over the ravages of politics, bureaucracy, corruption, religion and time. People passed by glancing at him and the strange physical distortions he liked to see in sculptures of himself.
Akhenaten is the most enigmatic of all the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. During his reign of 17 years (circa 1353–1336 BCE) he experimented with monotheism, diverging from thousands of years of tradition in which he declared the sun god, Aten, as the only god. This was not just a theological fine point but a subversion of the entire Egyptian worldview. He moved the capital to Akhetaten (modern-day Amarna), abandoned the traditional pantheon, and revisioned Egyptian art, encouraging artists to use an unprecedented fluidity, realism and maybe even a type of expressionism.
Abandoned were the harsh, rigid, idealized depictions of rulers conveying gravitas and strength. Instead, there were now images of Akhenaten with elongated features, full lips, and a body that seemed almost androgynous. He became like a Pharoah Ziggy Stardust. Even more unusual were the family portraits, which were intimate, affectionate depictions of Akhenaten with his queen, Nefertiti, and their daughters, often reveling in the divine rays of the Aten.
Sigmund Freud wrote a book called Moses and Monotheism in which he proposed that the Jewish religion took the concept of monotheism from Akhenaton. This theory has been completely disproven over the years but looking at the monotheistic religions which would change the world and comparing them to what Akhenaten did reveals what the heretic pharaoh was up to.
Akhenaten’s monotheism was not an ethical revolution, as it was in the case of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This type of monotheism also carried with it the responsibility of the individual and society to engage in personal and societal ethical improvement. For Akhenaten, monotheism was more about an exclusive devotion to the Aten disk to bring greater religious importance to himself and his family, to centralize power, and to break the control of the priests of Amun.
Did Akhenaten really begin to move away from a transactional, magical type of worship, to one which challenged individuals and societies to rise to higher ethical levels? Or, did he just replace the priests with himself as an intermediary to a new god and create an art to humanize himself as a form of propaganda, like most dictators? The move to the Aten seemed to be a case of moving just one notch higher on a level of self-absorption and self-importance.
Dr. Toby Wilkinson, an Egyptologist who has focused on the lives of common people in Ancient Egypt, pointed out in The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt that those who lived in Akhenaten’s capital lived brief, wretched lives. Life expectancy was often in the teens. Bone analysis shows inadequate nutrition, extreme physical and emotional stress and continuous physical adversity. Height was stunted and anemia was rife. I’m guessing, think of North Korea during the 1990s and magnify it by a power of 3. This was the effect of Akhenaten’s religious reform on the human beings around him.
Akhenaten’s new religion did not possess moral commandments like the Torah, Gospels or Quran. There was no emphasis on justice, charity, or righteousness. Akhenaten’s reforms were a power-grab, not social change. The focus was on the king’s relationship to a god, not on people or Egyptian society rising to moral challenges. The people seemed to be there to be worked to death for the god-king.
After Akhenaten’s death, the pendulum swung back. The boy-king, Tutankhaten, changed his name to Tutankhamun and brought back the old gods. Amarna was abandoned, and Akhenaten’s name was scratched from records. Horemheb, the general who later seized the throne, went further, dismantling Akhenaten’s monuments and using their stones for his own projects.
Yet, the more they tried to erase him, the more intriguing he became to us. The rediscovery of his legacy in the 19th and 20th centuries turned him into one of Egypt’s most famous rulers, a pharaoh who challenged the gods and reshaped history. As I stood before his sculpted image, I couldn’t help but smile at the absurdity of it all. The more they tried to silence Akhenaten, the louder he has been promoted through the ages.
Now I know what that wry, benevolent smile means. I’ve seen all this before. I saw it at Angkor Wat where people were enslaved to build a temple to a god-king and I even saw it at Borobudur, where common folks were most likely forced to work to build a giant temple honoring a religion of peace and kindness. Akhenaten sits there smiling at how gullible we are and how willing we are to impute greatness and show respect to the self-serving and self-promoting. He smiles at the world-wide tourist industry that promotes grandiose structures built through human exploitation of other humans.
The Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) once wrote: “Le mal aussi a ses héros.”
(“Evil has its heroes too.”)
So there you sit, you sly dog, the opposite of Ozymandias, preserved for all time, not truly held accountable for your actions, representing narcissistic values that exist to this day, and now lionized by a contemporary world that often seems to place empty celebrity above all. You have lasted, you are the opposite of Ozymandias, but we can adjust a couple lines from Shelley’s poem to apply to you: “My name is Akhenaten, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Author
