Nor did Amenhotep see himself as on a par with ‘Aten’, as previous pharaohs had seen themselves in relation to their gods. ‘“You are my heart,” says the King, “There is no other who knows you except for your son, Neferkhepure Waenre,*25 for you have made him aware of your plans and your strength.”’2
Figure 5: Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti bringing offerings to ‘Aten’. The Queen appears to have equal status in worship to the King. From an inscription found at the entrance to the Tomb of Apy, at El-Amarna.
Bit by bit, continuing the process of his father, Amenhotep IV placed disciples of the new religion into key positions in the army and the administration and wherever royal patronage ran. He boldly opened up worship to the populace, where previously only the priests had had private access to the main gods. This unaccustomed freedom to worship, the refreshing lack of ritual and mythological baggage and the promise of equality for all men, obtainable through the King of Heaven and the King of the Earth, made the new religion extremely attractive to the common people. Temples to Aten were built in every region of Egypt as persuasion and example were used to wean worshippers away from the gods of the old cults.
For the priests of Thebes and Memphis, not only could they see the ‘writing on the wall’, they could, quite literally, see the ‘writing falling off the walls’ as Amenhotep’s administrators set about hacking their gods from statues across the land. The priests fought back, resisting wherever and whenever they could, and not without some success. Entrenched beliefs and traditions nurtured over thousands of years could not be eradicated overnight.
Amenhotep decided to move his capital from Thebes north to a greenfield site, and to build a mighty temple in honour of Aten. The place he chose he called ‘Akhetaten’ – ‘the Horizon of Aten’, in an area on the banks of the River Nile now known as El-Amarna. At the same time the Pharaoh added to his name the title ‘Akhenaten’ – ‘he who serves on Aten’s behalf’, further disassociating himself from Amun, the pre-eminent god of Thebes, and severing any links with the traditional deities.
The move to Akhetaten was not only symbolic, it removed the power-base of Egyptian government and military command from an environment where three main gods – Amun, Mut, and Khons – were worshipped, with their associated powerful priesthoods and hangers-on. From Akhetaten, his new ‘Holy City’, Pharaoh set about removing the images of all the other gods throughout Egypt (as evidenced by archaeological research), enforcing a complete break from multi-deity worship.
In vigorously destroying all previous mentions of a plurality of gods, Akhenaten reversed many of the main characteristics of the previous religions and instituted his own new teachings:
1. Only one God could be worshipped
The worship of Amon-re and all the current gods was forbidden. Akhenaten set about removing the gods’ inscriptions and closing their Temples.
Oh, Thou only God!
There is no other God than Thou.3
2. Graven images were banned
The true God, said the King, had no form; and he held to this opinion throughout his life.4
No personal representation of Aten has ever been found from the Amarna period.
3. The cult of death worship and idea of immortality was abandoned completely
No other culture had been so obsessed with death and provisions for immortality than the Egyptian. Akhenaten banished inscriptions or hymns on tombs and made no mention of immortality.
Osiris [the death god] is completely ignored. He is never mentioned in any record of Ikhnaton [Akhenaten] or in any of the tombs of Amarna.5
In the tombs of El-Amarna there are no carvings showing the deceased or the usual Osiris figures for the protection of the dead. The scenes are of graceful figures dominated by illustrations of Akhenaten, who is the human ‘link’ for salvation from ‘Aten’.
4. Ritual animal sacrifice was not practised
Akhenaten counted it sinful to shed blood or to take away the life that Aten gave.
No sacrifices were offered up in his temple; the fruits of the earth alone were laid on the altars.6
5. Universality of worship
Akhenaten opened up religious worship of the Supreme Deity to the common people rather than just the privileged few. He preached the gospel of equality and universal brotherhood.7
Archaeological excavations of the remains of the gigantic Temple to ‘Aten’ at El-Amarna show that its precinct courtyards were well provided with open-air altars for worship by ordinary citizens, in sharp contrast to the secretive, closed cult chambers of other Egyptian temples. Pictures of everyday life in Akhetaten are beautifully preserved in the reconstructed wall of a temple to Akhenaten at Thebes, in the Luxor Museum. Here, bathed in a stream of sunlight, we see Aten’s priests and Pharaoh in acts of worship in the temple, whilst further out in the town the citizens go about their daily tasks – obtaining grain from the storehouses, metalworking, woodworking, brewing, baking and cleaning.
6. Burial without worldly goods
No manifestations of daily life pandering to wealth, such as statues of servants or ostentatious possessions, are evident in the tombs at El-Amarna. Walls are generally devoid of sculpture, apart from prayers and pictures of Aten being worshipped, or representations of the royal family.8
7. Magic and myth were confined to the bin
Akhenaten flung all these formulae into the fire. Djins, bogies, spirits, monsters, demigods and Osiris himself with all his court, were swept into the blaze and reduced to ashes.9
8. Monogamy
Monogamy was demonstrated by the example of his own life. Akhenaten remained faithful and loving towards his wife, Nefertiti, during her lifetime. She produced six daughters for him, and despite the pressure to sire a son, he stayed loyal to her. Akhenaten appears not to have had any mistresses.*26
INTERPRETATIONS OF AKHENATEN’S ACTIONS
The relationship between God and ruler, as we have seen, had undergone subtle, in mathematical terms ‘differential’, changes over the millennia, culminating in the thinking of Akhenaten. Now we find the feeling ‘the pharaoh who is useful to [God], who is useful to Him’,10 and inscribed on a stone memorial in the Temple to Ptah, at Karnak:
He has made great the victories of my majesty above [those of] any king who has been before. My majesty commanded that his altar should be supplied with everything good.11
The Pharaoh, rather than being a contemporary, or incarnate representative, now expresses joy and thankfulness to God and offers sacrifices in gratitude, not in placation.
I believe it is at this point in history that there was a true moving over from the earlier ‘cult’ type religion, where ritual practices and magical spells are undertaken for what is desired, and if they don’t work there is pique and even menaces.12 The necessity of sacrifice, as a means of appeasement, can also be seen to be weakening. By jumping back in time the antecedents of this pivotal change in attitudes can be clearly detected.
In the Instructions on sacrifices and worship of the Tenth Dynasty, King Merikare (c.2000 BCE) is told:
More acceptable to God is the virtue of one that is just of heart than the ox [of sacrifice] of him that doeth iniquity.13
We see this fundamental religious tenet clearly echoed in the Old Testament in Hosea 6:6:
For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.
Akhenaten’s strength of purpose in resisting ritual animal sacrifice, against a background of the relatively primitive and violent cultural society, marks him out as one of the greatest humanitarians of history. It took Hebrew society a further 1,400 years – and then only by force majeure, with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE – to abandon animal sacrifice. Even by today’s standards Akhenaten was 3,300 years ahead of his time, as animal sacrifices still continue in certain parts of the world.
Nevertheless, Akhenaten has often been labelled as an ‘heretic’ and dismissed as a worshipper of the sun, particularly by
religious writers both Jewish and Christian. This is a complete misrepresentation of his much deeper spiritual beliefs. ‘Aten’ is, indeed, figuratively represented by the sun, with outstretched hands giving the power of life and goodness to the world. But Akhenaten’s prayers and texts, of which we have numerous examples, make it quite clear that the God he believed in was not the sun, but an unknowable Supreme Force that had power over everything in the universe.14
A number of modern scholars, described eloquently by Cyril Aldred, who wrote the classic Akhenaten King of Egypt, have tried and, it seems in some ways, succeeded in submerging Akhenaten’s reputation in a sea of character assassination. His pacifism and internationalism have been attacked, his features ridiculed, his social and political innovations denied him, even his relationship with his daughters postulated as incestuous. Whenever religious writers mention Akhenaten, and that is generally very seldom, he is often labelled an ‘heretic’, with all the overtones that word implies.
Earlier Egyptologists, however, took a different line. W. M. Flinders Petrie, one of the foremost archaeologists of the nineteenth century, was rapturous in his view of Akhenaten as philosopher, moralist, religious reformer, innovator and idealist. His views were particularly influential on James Henry Breasted, Professor of Egyptology and Oriental History at the University of Chicago. Breasted was a fascinating man in his own right and has been described as the American ‘bridge between the old world of indoor scholarship and the new one of excavation’.15 (See the Glossary for more information on Professor Breasted.) Having made an intense study of hymns composed for Aten, probably partly by Akhenaten, Breasted wrote:
…there died with him such a spirit as the world had never seen before – a brave soul, undauntedly facing the momentum of immemorial tradition, and thereby stepping out from the long line of conventional and colourless Pharaohs, that he might disseminate ideas far beyond and above the capacity of his age to understand…16
Akhenaten took the revolutionary step that previous rulers had moved towards and possibly contemplated but had not dared to take. To quote Cyril Aldred, Keeper of Archaeology at the Royal Scottish Museum at Edinburgh:
In essence his [Akhenaten’s] doctrine rejected the universal concept of idolatry. He taught that the graven images in which Egyptian gods revealed themselves had been invented by man and made by the skill of artisans. He proclaimed a new God, unique, mysterious, whose forms could not be known and which were not fashioned by human hands.17
What Akhenaten attempted was incredibly brave. He tried to turn back, in seventeen short years, the tide of several thousand years of history and, in mainstream Egyptian society after his death, he failed. Some historians still argue that Akhenaten’s religion was of little consequence in overall history, as it was ‘ephemeral’. To judge it on its survival only in Egypt is to misjudge completely its significance. In its purest form it may have faded quite rapidly in mainstream Egypt, but its core ideas, underscored by the progressive wisdom of past dynasties, lived on and were far from ephemeral for the Jews, or, subsequently, for the rest of the world’s main religions.
As N. de G. Davies, one of the most eminent archaeologists of Akhenaten’s capital city put it:
It is astonishing that Akhenaten had not only reached monotheism, but had carried worship to a height which required no nearer symbol or other outward embodiment than the mysterious and intangible sun in the heavens, which to the ancients was far from being, as it is to us, clearly a material body, explained, analysed and weighed.18
I believe that Akhenaten’s legacy of monotheism had a much more profound influence on the Hebrews than has previously been admitted or realized.
LINKS WITH JUDAISM
It is significant to note that the main fundamental tenets of Judaism are identical with those of Akhenatenism, namely:
a) worship of only one God
b) forbidding of graven images and rejection of all idolatry
c) abandonment of death worship and ideas of imminent physical resurrection
d) burial without any worldly goods or protective ornaments
e) abandonment of holocaust sacrifices
f) universality of worship – it is not just for the privileged few
g) monogamy
h) rejection of magic, sorcery and charms19
i) worship centred on a temple.
All these principles, except (i), were also complete denunciations of traditional Egyptian religious practices, emphasizing the stark immiscibility of Akhenaten’s new religion with the old.
The nine main characteristics of Akhenaten’s monotheism listed above, closely follow the fundamental tenets of the Jewish faith as it is practised today.20
The early Israelite religion entirely abandoned ideas of immortality and existence after death was never mentioned. The Pentateuch makes no mention of any kind of separate world or afterlife and has no terminology for such a state.21 The idea of a ‘life to come’ was a much later concept, introduced by prophets such as Isaiah, Daniel and Ezekiel. It was probably developed as a requirement to encompass God’s judgement and to explain how sinners in this life would get their just desserts in the next, and why the faithful person’s reward is not always in this life. When this ‘idea’ was reaccepted, it also let in ideas of pre- and post-Akhenaten Egyptian after-life.
When Akhenaten swept away the worship of the dead, the cult of Osiris, funereal incantations and provisions for the dead the implication was that there would be no corporeal after-life. There was, nevertheless, a concept of a redeemable immortal soul, which would continue on if the dead person had led a sufficiently pure life.
As the centuries passed, mainstream Judaism in its new homeland drifted away from these original beliefs and, after the destruction of the First Temple, the weakened convictions of the priests accelerated the drift. The old Egyptian ideas on death, foreign to Akhenaten’s period, crept back into usage – amulets, anti-evil magic, superstitions and Kabbalah.
The wearing of amulets and ornaments to ward off the evil-eye can be reliably traced back to at least the seventh century BCE, when the earliest example of religious engraving on metal in the Israelite Kingdom came to light. In 1980, during the excavation of an Iron Age cemetery at Ketef Hinnom, just outside Jerusalem, two small sheets of silver, measuring 27.5mm by 11.5mm, were found tied around the necks of two children, almost certainly as protective amulets for the dark journey ahead.22 The amulets contain the oldest-known Bible text and are now in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Their inscription reads:
The Lord bless you, and keep you:
The Lord make His face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you:
The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.
The words are echoed in the Book of Numbers, 6:24–26, recording the Priestly Benediction still used today by rabbis and priests alike, and originally made in the Temple by the High Priest as he held both hands outward with the fingers in a special position.*27
The allusion to a sun that illumines the face of the worshipper is central to the blessing, and is reminiscent of the theme espoused by Akhenaten. Perhaps he too stood in prayer and made the same blessing. The three themes by which the God of Akhenaten communicated with his creatures closely equate, in number and sense, to the Hebrew Priestly Benediction. They were spoken of as:
the Beams (setut) that give health and sustains all that is created
the Beauty (neferu) of the light giving the power to see and enjoy life
the Love (merut) from the warmth giving beneficial qualities of well-being.23
The reverberations of Akhenaten’s ‘new thinking’ were not just to affect temporarily contemporary Hebrews who came into contact with it. The effects were ongoing.
Many of Akhenaten’s teachings and ideas can be identified in the Old Testament and in Jewish beliefs and practices and, to a lesser extent, in Christian, Muslim and other world religions. There is a chronological lineal linkage that ties the three great religions
of the world together. Both of the so-called ‘daughter religions’ of Judaism believe in the basics of the Old Testament. The Old Testament has also influenced the New Testament and the Koran, and, in its turn, the Koran has also been influenced by the New Testament.
I have shown how Abraham and his family made contact with the Amenhotep pharaohs, but that there were no clues to the treasures of the Copper Scroll. The next candidate for consideration is Joseph, a much more promising character, as he amassed vast wealth and power in Egypt.
CHAPTER TEN
JOSEPH – PROPHET OF DESTINY
When we left Abraham and his entourage, he was journeying north away from Egypt towards Canaan. He settled initially between Beth-el and Hai, soon moving on to the plain of Mamre, near modern-day Hebron.
Before Abraham died, his son Isaac married Rebekah, who bore him twins – Esau and Jacob. When the time came for Isaac to die he was deceived into giving his final blessing to Jacob, rather than to his first-born son. Not surprisingly Esau was none too pleased and threatened to kill his brother, who fled to Haran in Mesopotamia (modern Syria). There Jacob worked hard and married two daughters of Laban, his uncle, Leah and Rachel. Jacob sired twelve sons, including Joseph, and one daughter.
The more Jacob prospered the more Laban’s sons became envious. Seeing approaching danger, Jacob decided to flee with his family towards Canaan. Here in the story there is an interesting passage in Genesis, illustrating how fragile the Patriarch’s grasp of monotheism was, and how lax his attitude, even within his own family, towards the possession of idols.
And Laban [when he had caught up with him] said to Jacob… ‘…but the God of your father spoke to me last night…And now you have gone away because you longed greatly for your father’s house, but why did you steal my gods?’…Now Rachel had taken the household gods and put them in the camel’s saddle, and sat upon them.
Genesis 31:26, 29–30, 34
The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran Page 12