No comments The Cult of the Aten
There can be little doubt that the new king was far more of a thinker and philosopher than his forebears. Amenhotep III had recognized the growing power of the priesthood of Amun and had sought to curb it; his son was to take the matter a lot further by introducing a new monotheistic cult of sun-worship that was incarnate in the sun’s disc, the Aten.
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| Cult of the Aten |
This was not in itself a new idea: as a relatively minor aspect of the sun god Re–Harakhte, the Aten had been venerated in the Old Kingdom and a large scarab of Akhenaten‘s grandfather Tuthmosis IV (now in the British Museum) has a text that mentions the Aten. Rather, Akhenaten‘s innovation was to worship the Aten in its own right. Portrayed as a solar disc whose protective rays terminated in hands holding the ankh hieroglyph for life, the Aten was accessible only to Akhenaten, thereby obviating the need for an intermediate priesthood.
At first, the king built a temple to his god Aten immediately outside the east gate of the temple of Amun at Karnak, but clearly the coexistence of the two cults could not last. He therefore proscribed the cult of Amun, closed the god’s temples, took over the revenues and, to make a complete break, in Year 6 moved to a new capital in Middle Egypt, half way between Memphis and Thebes. It was a virgin site, not previously dedicated to any other god or goddess, and he named it Akhetaten – The Horizon of the Aten. Today the site is known as el–Amarna.
In the tomb of Ay, the chief minister of Akhenaten (and later to become king after Tutankhamun‘s death, p. 136), occurs the longest and best rendition of a composition known as the ‘Hymn to the Aten’, said to have been written by Akhenaten himself. Quite moving in itself as a piece of poetry, its similarity to, and possible source of the concept in, Psalm 104 has long been noted. It sums up the whole ethos of the Aten cult and especially the concept that only Akhenaten had access to the god: ‘Thou arisest fair in the horizon of Heaven, O Living Aten, Beginner of Life . . . there is none who knows thee save thy son Akhenaten. Thou hast made him wise in thy plans and thy power.’ No longer did the dead call upon Osiris to guide them through the after- world, for only through their adherence to the king and his intercession on their behalf could they hope to live beyond the grave.
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| Pharaoh Akhenaten and his family adoring the Aten, second from the left is Meritaten who was the daughter of Akhenaten |
According to present evidence, however, it appears that it was only the upper echelons of society which embraced the new religion with any fervour (and perhaps that was only skin deep). Excavations at Amarna have indicated that even here the old way of religion continued among the ordinary people. On a wider scale, throughout Egypt, the new cult does not seem to have had much effect at a common level except, of course, in dismantling the priesthood and closing the temples; but then the ordinary populace had had little to do with the religious establishment anyway, except on the high days and holidays when the god’s statue would be carried in procession from the sanctuary outside the great temple walls.
The standard bureaucracy continued its endeavours to run the country while the king courted his god. Cracks in the Egyptian empire may have begun to appear in the later years of the reign of Amenhotep III; at any rate they became more evident as Akhenaten increasingly left government and diplomats to their own devices. Civil and military authority came under two strong characters: Ay, who held the title ‘Father of the God’ (and was probably Akhenaten‘s father-in-law), and the general Horemheb (also Ay’s son-in-law since he married Ay’s daughter Mutnodjme, sister of Nefertiti). Both men were to become pharaoh before the 18th Dynasty ended. This redoubtable pair of closely related high officials no doubt kept everything under control in a discreet manner while Akhenaten pursued his own philosophical and religious interests.
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