most likely has gained relevance for endowing the king with a male son, Prince Tut-anj-Aton, the future heir and pharaoh Tut- Ankh-Amon because he changed his name in favor of Amon again.
He began to reign during the golden years of the Egyptian Empire, almost 3,500 years ago. Egypt was the richest and most powerful in the world. His army defeated anyone else who faced him, his crops were plentiful and his population well fed, his sumptuous temples and royal palaces were laden with treasures, and everyone was convinced that their success was due to their gods.
Then Akhenaten arrives with revolutionary ideas, it is the first time that a pharaoh in thousands of years proposed to change the pantheon of the Egyptian gods, with only one, the creator of everything: the Sun or Aton, as it was called, life was born from the sunlight, embodied in Aton, what he proposed was heresy.
However, the pharaoh was a living god and could change everything: religion, politics, art and even language.
It was then that he decreed that the 2,000 traditional gods that had protected Egypt since its foundation were eliminated.
The gods in animal and human forms were replaced by an abstract god, the Sun that illuminated the king with its rays. For the traditional priests, who had dedicated their entire lives to the ancient gods and had been extremely powerful until then, were exiled, Akhenaten began to win many powerful enemies.
The next announcement from the royal couple was just as surprising, they left the ancient and holy city of Thebes, the heart of the entire nation, and would head north up the Nile River in search of a new utopia.
The city”Akhetaton”
It was the fifth year of their reign when they left Thebes and traveled some 200 miles north, until they reached what is now Amarna, where they built a city. On a rock, which is still on one of the hills, is written a public proclamation composed by Akhenaten that explains the reason that led him to choose precisely that place.
As he says, the great god told them “Build here.” The place is surrounded by hills and at certain times of the year the Sun rises through a crack creating the shape of the Hieroglyph on the horizon. And so he did.
Thousands of people from distant Thebes were brought in to build, decorate and manage the new capital where more than 50,000 people came to live.
They dug a well, planted trees and gardens, the arid desert flourished. They built finely decorated houses and palaces, as well as the temple to the one god.
Akhenaten’s vision of a religious utopia gradually became a reality.
The city called Ajetaton (which means Skyline of Aton) became the political and religious heart of the nation, the center of a new cult.
The entire city of Akhetaton can be considered a reflection of the expression of royalty, since during the Amarnian period it was transformed into the most important political and religious center of Egyptian power, designed in order to show that re-centralized power.
The act of creating repeats the cosmogonic act par excellence, since the creation of the world, and consequently of everything that is founded, is in the center of the world, since the creation itself was carried out from a center (Eliade 1972: 16). For this reason, the foundation of Akhetaton is a recreation and at the same times a center of divine order, and as such it can and should be considered as a sacred space.
The intention of exalting power on the part of the pharaoh also appears in the arrangement of the city’s buildings, in their own architecture, in the decoration of palaces, temples and burials and in the installation of the border stelae that the demarcate. In addition, it is through these features that the relationship of the sovereign and his family with the deity (one of the strong points that make the reform legitimacy) and how they are produced can be analyzed.
Traditional temples were closed: upon entering the complex, the floor gradually rose, the ceiling fell, and there was very little light.
Sun worship brought open-air shrines, something that was done before but never on such a large scale.
The city has an area with temples, palaces and residences while, 11 kilometers to the east, the necropolis with a Royal Valley and a Valley of Nobles is located, as can be seen in figure 2. The landscape of the east bank is It can then be divided in two ways: between a sector for the living (residential, administrative and ritual) and another for the dead (necropolis), and between a residential sector and another administrative and ritual.
Akhenaten had succeeded in establishing a new city, a religious paradise in the desert.
On the other hand, the division between an administrative area and a residential area has to do with the differentiation between the city center, dedicated to administration and religious rituals, and the residential palaces of the royal family, separating the royalty from the common. of the inhabitants of the city.
Each construction related to royalty or the Aten cult in Akhetaton was given a premeditated location, consistent with its symbolic and functional role as a building, which also had to be framed with the urban plan as a cosmic totality: the processional path, known as “royal road ”, ordered the pharaoh’s journey, made it sacred and in turn divided the sectors of the city, differentiating them. This 2.5-kilometer road was the backbone of the settlement, a route that crossed it from north to south, linking the Palace of the North Bank with the central city, and was traveled by Akhenaten and his family in the context of parades and walks as part of exhibits.
Sometimes, their displacement began in the Palace of the North Bank (possible residence of Akhenaten), passed through the North Palace and the northern suburb, and then entered the central city, detailed in figure 4, in which they were the Great Palace, the Great Temple of Aten (or House of Aten) and the Small Temple of Aten (or Mansion of Aten), where the pharaoh performed ritual and administrative tasks.
He had declared himself a son of God and it seemed that his religious revolution was successful. But suddenly everything began to collapse, his subjects, even those who lived in the city, had not really abandoned their gods and the pharaoh learned of his betrayal. Then he ordered to find all the images of the ancient gods and destroy them, and he sent the soldiers to erase the memory of the ancient gods especially the name of Amon-Ra from all the land of Egypt.
This period is known as heretical, with Akhenaten’s religious revolution, many questions now arise, such as what was the origin of Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s wife, or who was really Semenkhkare, the heretical Pharaoh’s co-regent successor.
The fact that the clergy of Amun, by regaining power and destroying all traces of passage through the land of Akhenaten’s heresy, have covered with a thick veil, this fascinating stage in the history of Pharaonic Egypt.
Dee takes a book out of her briefcase and begins to relate:
In 1985, the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfuz (1911-2006) wrote the historical novel “Akhenaton”, for this work he won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first writer in the Arabic language to achieve such an important award.
The work is set in the years after the fall of Akhenaten and before the death of the beautiful Nefertiti, probably in 1330 BC.
In his opinion, the queen mother was the main responsible for her son Amenhotep IV, from childhood, to be educated in the religion of Aton. When the whole empire worshiped Amun.
Tiye was a Nubian of humble origin, who came to share the throne by her marriage to Pharaoh Amenhotep III. She was characterized by being a strong, intelligent and cunning woman. She also had a lot of power and became increasingly interested in increasing religious studies, incorporating the worship of other gods, especially the one referring to the new god in which she believed for political reasons: “Amon is the lord of the gods of Egypt yu symbol of power and perhaps defeat for the empire’s subjects. Aton, on the other hand, is the god of the sun who shines everywhere and to whom all creatures can lead without harm”.
Then we will inevitably have to speak of the gods of Egypt.