Donald Redford, who is regarded as an authority on Akhenaten, drew attention to inscriptions in which apparently ‘the king set on record his belief that the gods have somehow failed or “ceased” to be operative; and he describes his newly adopted god as absolutely unique and located in the heavens . . . numerous vignettes make perfectly plain that the god in question is Ra-harakhti, “Ra, the Horizon-Horus”, the great sun god of Heliopolis.’9 He also pointed out that the high priest of the city of Akhet-Aten was known as ‘Chief Seer of Ra-Horakhti’, which was, according to Redford, ‘a title clearly derived from the sun-cult at Heliopolis’.10 Ra-Horakhti, as we have seen, was the god of the rising sun in the east. Could the vision that inspired Akhenaten to choose Tell El Amarna have had something to do with the rising of the sun over the eastern hills on a particular day that was crucial for the function of the future solar city?
The Great Return
The reign of Akhenaten, which lasted 18 years or so, is generally known as ‘the Amarna Period’ as it mostly took place in the new city of Akhet-Aten at Tell El Amarna, from the fifth year of the king’s reign to his fall in 1335 BC. At first the period represented a return to the much older - and thus purer and more legitimate - solar religion of Heliopolis and its god Ra-Horakhti. For to the Egyptians, as was also indeed the case in many other ancient cultures, it was the past and not the present that served as the perfect model, that golden age when the social order was imbued with lofty moral standards, deep religious convictions and, above all, a strict observance of the cosmic law as clearly attested by the great pyramids and sun temples that had been left behind at Heliopolis. What is also evident in the Amarna Period is the pronounced change in art, a sort of pharaonic renaissance, according to Egyptologist Arthur Weigall: ‘Akhenaten’s art might thus be said to be a kind of renaissance-a return to the classical period of archaic days; the underlying motive of that return being the desire to lay emphasis upon the king’s character as representative of the most ancient of all gods, Ra-horakhti.’11
Thus everything suggests that Akhenaten saw himself - or perhaps his departed father, Amenhotep III - as a returning solar god of ancestral Heliopolitan origin,12 a sort of messiah who would wrench the religious power away from the corrupt priests of Amun-Ra at Karnak and return it to its true keepers, the priests of Ra-Horakhti at Heliopolis. Akhenaten’s initial intention is clear enough: to highlight the supremacy of Ra-Horakhti and how this god of Heliopolis had united with the Aten as Ra-Horakhti-Aten. But then why, after such a strong initial display of allegiance to Ra-Horakhti did Akhenaten not return the religious authority to the priests of Heliopolis but instead retained it for himself at Tell El Amarna? This question is even more pertinent when we also recall that his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had begun the process of moving base to Heliopolis.13 The answer, I believe, lies partly in the political strategy that Akhenaten had adopted to bring about his great plan of religious reform, which is also why, a few years into his reign, he dropped the idea of a combined solar god in favour of a single god, the Aten. For it is very evident that the image of Ra-Horakhti (a falcon-headed man with a solar disc on his head) disappears completely from the religious art at Tell El Amarna. Only the Aten sun disc is allowed to be displayed. It was not as if the king forbade the worship of Ra-Horakhti, for throughout the Amarna Period we find Ra-Horakhti mentioned with much reverence by leading officials and priests of Akhet-Aten. Indeed, the high-priest of Akhet-Aten bore the title ‘Chief Seer of Ra-Horakhti’. The most likely reason why the image of Ra-Horakhti is not seen in the latter part of the Amarna Period is probably because Akhenaten had become intolerant of multifarious representations of the sun-god other than that of the Aten as a simple golden disc with energy rays falling down to earth. In other words, the king only allowed representation of the sun-god in the way he actually appeared to everyone in the world. The only hints of extra symbolism were the curious leaf-like hands at the end of the sun’s rays (which were probably intended to represent the protective and benevolent warmth and energy of the sun) and the little ankh-signs, the symbols of life, that were sometimes attached to the tips of the hands. But that was all. No human or animal figures or any other kind of symbols were allowed anywhere in Egypt.14
In a single stroke Akhenaten had removed the diverse iconographies that created the schism between a solar god of the north (Ra-Horakhti, the falcon-headed man crowned with the sun disc) and one of the south (Amun-Ra, the human-headed man crowned with the two divine plumes). All this, however, while it explains the prominence and uniqueness that Akhenaten attributed to the Aten, still does not explain why he chose the site of Tell El Amarna to dedicate to his unique sun-god. Why did he not return the cult to Heliopolis, as would be expected from his early devotion to Ra-Horakhti and the closeness the latter had to the Aten? Could it be that he feared that the move to Heliopolis would precipitate a religious war between north and south? Or could it be that his most coveted epithet, ‘living in Maat’, obliged him to act in conformity with Maat? And is it not possible that he found a way through Maat - which, after all, was all about the balance of the cosmic order in heaven and on earth - to attempt to balance the religious forces that were ripping Egypt apart?
As we have seen earlier, cosmic order or balance seems to have been everything to the ancient Egyptians. Nowhere is it more attested than in the so-called judgement scene when the souls of the dead were weighed on the divine scales of Maat and balanced against her feather of truth and justice. In the natural world this mechanism of balance - which today we call ecology - was manifest in everything, and in Egypt, nowhere more so than in the annual flooding of the Nile and its delicate ecology. We have seen how too weak or strong a flood would spell disaster. The flood had to be just right, which entailed a subtle natural balance between the water level at Elephantine and the time of year. Egypt’s survival depended totally on the balance between the forces of nature and the celestial forces that governed time. Equally, opposing forces between men had to be balanced, as Horus and Seth had been balanced at the time of creation. It was perhaps thus imperative to Akhenaten that north and south should be balanced for the smooth administration of the state. And since the pharaonic state was above all else a religious state, it was the forces of religion that required such balancing.
Since the Eleventh Dynasty onwards, the unbridled rise to power of the priesthood of the south at Karnak had seriously upset the religious balance between north and south. Yet contemplating a handing-over of the religious authority back to the priests of Heliopolis would aggravate matters even more. Tell El Amarna, as it happened, was almost precisely midway between Karnak and Heliopolis, acting as a geographical fulcrum between the ‘Heliopolis of the south’ and the ‘Heliopolis of the north’. Could, therefore, the decision to move to Tell El Amarna be a political act of balance by the king in an ingenious attempt to eliminate once and for all the north and south religious centres in favour of a single one set in the middle of Egypt? As I stood under the starry sky amid the ruins of Akhenaten’s dream city of the sun, engulfed in the silence and acutely aware of the great drama that had taken place here more than 3,000 years ago, I asked myself this: Did not the sun disc also have a mid-point (the equinox) that ‘balanced’ the two extreme points of the summer and winter solstices? And if Egypt was truly made ‘in the image of heaven’, then should it not, too, have such a religious mid-point or fulcrum in the centre of the country? With growing excitement I began to see that, as such, Egypt would indeed truly become a cosmic kingdom that functioned under the law of Maat, that imperturbable and perpetual cycle of the sun that caused it to alternate between north and south. If this was, in fact, Akhenaten’s veiled motive, then his strategy was nothing short of brilliant. For if successful, it would clear thousands of years of religious dichotomy which was now growing into a serious political feud between the north and the south. At the same time, this move would also put everyone under one symbol of the sun-god, the visible sun disc or Aten, whos
e perfect form represented the sole universal creator and whose only religious centre would be at the very epicentre, the very heart of Egypt.
But like all such dreams inspired by ideologies, Akhenaten’s ambitious plan was doomed to failure from the very outset. For he seriously misjudged one thing: human nature. The priests of Amun-Ra at Karnak valued their acquired power and wealth too much to simply hand it on a silver platter for Akhenaten to take to his new capital city at Akhet-Aten, even though Akhenaten was, at least from his own way of seeing things, a solar pharaoh ‘living in Maat’. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the priesthood of Karnak were beyond redemption. Their iron-fist rule of religious affairs had brought them untold wealth and unchallenged authority. Indeed, when Akhenaten was enthroned they were virtually controlling the royal treasury and all the financial revenues, and probably the levy on every commercial enterprise and the income of every household in the land. Clearly they were not going to let all this go away just because a mystical and probably unhinged 18-year-old king got it into his royal head that he was some sort of solar messiah come to ‘monotheise’ the ancient religious system of Egypt. And although at first they had not much choice but to tolerate this capricious boy-king, they were eventually forced to strike back. Yet to give the young king his due, it would take the priests of Karnak 17 years to feel confident enough to make their move.
Distinguished in Jubilees
Meanwhile there is something else in Akhenaten’s grandiose plan that I believe has escaped attention: the very strong link that the king himself made between the city of Akhet-Aten and the royal jubilees. This, as we have already seen, is made obvious from the name of the city centre, which was known as ‘Aten Distinguished in Jubilees’. In Chapter Two we have associated these jubilees with the Sothic cycle and, consequently, with the solar phoenix, who, oddly enough, was sometimes called ‘The Lord of Jubilees’.15 The phoenix was especially sacred to Heliopolis, for it was there that it had alighted at the time of creation - zep tepi, the ‘First Time’ - to set into motion the cycles of the sky and time. Bearing this in mind, it is very significant that Akhenaten described the site of Akhet-Aten as ‘The seat of the First Time, which he [Aten] had made for himself that he might rest in it’.16
How many jubilees did Akhenaten celebrate at Akhet-Aten? And for whom? The answers depend on which Egyptologist you want to believe. Donald Redford, for example, allocates only one jubilee to Akhenaten, and not at Akhet-Aten but at Karnak. So does the Egyptian-based Egyptologist Jocelyn Gohary, who is an accredited expert on Akhenaten’s jubilee (although unlike Redford, she does leave the question somewhat open).17 On the other hand others have proposed that there were at least two, and perhaps even three or more, jubilees celebrated by Akhenaten during his 17 years of reign.18 At any rate, all these scholars seem to at least agree that very early in his reign, probably in the second or third year, Akhenaten decided to proclaim a jubilee not for himself but, oddly enough, for his ‘father’ the Aten. And this was three years before the break with the priests of Amun-Ra at Karnak. It may well be that the king, in his naivety, thought that he could casually impose his new god on the priests of Amun-Ra with such an event. At any rate, Akhenaten’s controversial desire to have a jubilee so early in his reign - let alone for the Aten - prompted a massive construction programme at Karnak under the very nose of the disgruntled priests of Amun-Ra. Among the many temples built in haste at Karnak, two stand out: the so-called Gm-(t)-p-itn, ‘The Sun Disc is Found’, and the Hwt-bnbn, ‘The Mansion of the Benben’. These temples, much like all other temples that Akhenaten had built during his reign, were later to be deliberately dismantled stone by stone by the priests of Amun-Ra after the king’s death, and the stones used as common hardcore and rubble for new constructions at Karnak.
In the last 50 years archaeologists have discovered vast numbers of small blocks of stones, nearly 45,000 to date, that were once part of the Gm-(t)-p-itn and the Hwt-bnbn, within the walls of pylons built after Akhenaten’s death. These small blocks are known to Egyptologists as talatat, apparently a word of uncertain origin.19 At first some enterprising Egyptologists thought they could reassemble the talatat like a gigantic puzzle, but the process was to prove so complex and tedious that hardly any progress was made for many years. In 1965, however, Ray W. Smith, a retired American army officer and a keen amateur student of ancient arts and technologies, proposed to use computer graphic technology to make virtual reconstructions of the various wall panels whence the talatat had been removed. He gathered a number of prominent Egyptologists to found the Akhenaten Temple Project under his directorship. In 1972 he was succeeded by the Egyptologist Donald Redford, who established that almost all the talatat had come from the Gm-(t)-p-itn temple (‘The Sun Disc is Found’), which had serviced Akhenaten’s jubilee at Karnak. But because there was no similar evidence of a jubilee at Tell El Amarna, Redford concluded that no other jubilee had been celebrated after the second year of the king’s reign. But this lack of archaeological evidence - especially in a place which had been dismantled with such ferocity by the armies of Amun-Ra - is largely offset by the circumstantial textual evidence, which indicates that Akhenaten had at the very least intended to have many jubilees in his new city, not just for himself but also for his ‘father’, the Aten. Indeed, it is clear that from the very start Akhenaten’s intention was that the city of Akhet-Aten should serve as a jubilee centre during his lifetime and, more especially, after his death ad infinitum - very much as the Third Dynasty pharaoh Djoser, I believe, had also intended for his Step Pyramid complex at Saqqara 1,300 years earlier. One of the eulogies that Akhenaten often gave to the Aten is more than sufficient to confirm this intention: ‘The great living Aten that is in the jubilee, Lord of Heaven, Lord of Earth, in the midst of “Rejoicing” in Akhet-Aten. ’20 The Aten is several times called by Akhenaten imy hb(w) sd and nb hb(w) sd,21 ‘Distinguished in Jubilees’ and ‘Lord of Jubilees’,22 and an inscription on the first boundary stela for the city which the Akhenaten himself had placed makes it clear that ‘There shall be made for me (Akhenaten) a sepulchre in the eastern hills; my burial shall be made therein, in the multitude of jubilees which Aten, my Father, has ordained for me.’23
The House of Rejoicing
Akhenaten’s own father, Amenhotep III, is known to have celebrated at least three jubilees, with the last being in the thirty-seventh year of his reign. According to Egyptologist Francis Griffith, the palace of Amenhotep III in Western Thebes, which was called the ‘House of Rejoicing’, had included ‘a great festival hall for the celebration of the jubilee’. Griffith further noted thatTwo ‘Houses of Rejoicing’ are named among the buildings designed by Akhenaten to adorn his new capital. In the fourth year of his reign, when he issued the proclamation establishing the city of Akhet-Aten, ‘The Horizon of the Sun’, at the modern Tell-el Amarna, Akhenaten caused copies of it to be engraved on the eastern cliffs at the north and south limits of the city . . . Herein the king swears by the Aten to build all kinds of monuments in Akhet-Aten and binds himself not to remove elsewhere. Among other things he says: ‘I will make a “House of Rejoicing” for the Aten, my father, in the island of “Aten Distinguished in Jubilees” in Akhet-Aten in this place; and I will make a “House of Rejoicing” . . . [for] Aten, my father, in the island of “Aten Distinguished in Jubilees” in Akhet-Aten in this place.’ The gap in the record deprives us of the reason why there should have been two buildings of almost identical name, purpose and situation; perhaps one was a palace, the other a jubilee hall, associated together as in his father’s (Amenhotep III) residence.24
Griffith seems to have believed that Akhenaten had probably intended to have a permanent jubilee temple dedicated to his ‘father’ the Aten in the new city of Akhet-Aten, to be located somewhere next to his palace. This idea is supported by the fact that Akhenaten’s natural father, Amenhotep III, had built a permanent jubilee hall that was attached to his own palace in Western Thebes, and that it was variously known as ‘
Splendour of Aten’ and ‘House of Rejoicing’. Archaeological evidence has shown that the ‘House of Rejoicing’ temple at Akhet-Aten was an integral part of the Great Temple of the Aten, itself called ‘House of the Aten’. All this makes it nearly certain that Akhenaten saw the god Aten as the god of jubilees, so much so that, according to George Hart, in the mind of Akhenaten the ‘Aten is also thought to celebrate jubilee festivals like the pharaoh himself’.25 The British Egyptologist Stephen Quirke also proposed that the term ‘father’ that was often used by Akhenaten when referring to the Aten was because ‘Akhenaten seems to have insisted on the survival of his father’s presence in the Sun-disc.’ According to Quirke, ‘These might be the reasons behind the great festivals documented in years 9 and 12, and perhaps the consolidation of the city of Akhet-Aten in year 6. The (heb) sed festivals (jubilees) continued to be celebrated for the Aten, as if the elder king were still alive on earth.’26 Jocelyn Gohary could not avoid noting that ‘in several cases, however, when a wish is expressed that the king may celebrate many sed-festivals (jubilees), it appears to have some connection with time, length of reign, lifetime and so on’. She also noted that the term ‘and so on’ may be, according to some researchers like Flinders Petrie, ‘a division of the Sothic Cycle’.27 We should recall from Chapter Two that it was suggested that the heb-sed festivals were based on calendrical computations taking into account various intervals within the Sothic cycle and, furthermore, that some kind of super heb-sed was celebrated at the commencement of each 1,460-year cycle. The fact that one such period would have fallen in c. 1321 BC and thus well within the expected lifetime of Akhenaten (he would have been 48 years old), may indeed explain the flurry of epithets, feasts and temples that evoked the heb-sed in the Amarna Period. The Amarna Period was a Sothic period.
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