Akhenaten 3D facial reconstruction.
One of the world’s best-known works of Amarna art, the Wilbour Plaque is named for the American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour, who purchased it in 1881. The plaque was never part of a larger scene. Originally, it was suspended on a wall by a cord inserted through the hole at the top. Artists used it as a model for carving official images of an Amarna king and queen. The queen shown here is certainly Nefertiti; the king may be Akhenaten, his co-regent Smenkhkare, or young Tutankhaten (later Tutankhamun).
Limestone statuette of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and a princess.
Art depicting family of Akhenaten making an offering to the sun.
Statue of Akhenaten in the early Amarna styleю
Antique cast of a statue head of Akhenaten.
Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and the Royal Princesses: Aten, the Solar Disk, blessing the royal family; detail of sunk relief fragment from Tell el-Amarna.
One of the world’s best-known works of Amarna art, the Wilbour Plaque is named for the American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour, who purchased it in 1881. The plaque was never part of a larger scene. Originally, it was suspended on a wall by a cord inserted through the hole at the top. Artists used it as a model for carving official images of an Amarna king and queen. The queen shown here is certainly Nefertiti; the king may be Akhenaten, his co-regent Smenkhkare, or young Tutankhaten (later Tutankhamun).
Limestone statuette of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and a princess.
Art depicting family of Akhenaten making an offering to the sun.
Statue of Akhenaten in the early Amarna styleю
Antique cast of a statue head of Akhenaten.
Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and the Royal Princesses: Aten, the Solar Disk, blessing the royal family; detail of sunk relief fragment from Tell el-Amarna.
philosopher statesman theologian ruler pharaoh
Akhenaten, also known as Amenhotep IV, was born around 1380 Before Christ. He was born to Amenhotep III and his Chief Queen Tiy at some point during his father's reign. Amenhotep IV succeeded his father after Amenhotep III's death at the end of a 38-year reign, possibly after a co-regency between the two for up to 12 years.
Little is known about Akhenaten's education except that throughout his life he showed great knowledge and taste in art and in theology.
Akhenaten was a pharaoh of Egypt who reigned over the country for about 17 years between roughly 1351 B.C. and 1335 B.C.
A religious reformer, Akhenaten made the Aten, the sun disc, the center of Egypt’s religious life, and carried out an iconoclasm that saw the names of Amun, a pre-eminent Egyptian god, and his consort Mut, be erased from monuments and documents throughout Egypt’s empire.
When Akhenaten ascended the throne his name was Amenhotep IV, but in his sixth year of rule he changed it to "Akhenaten" a name that the late Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat translated roughly as the "Benevolent one of (or for) the Aten."
In honor of the Aten, Akhenaten constructed an entirely new capital at an uninhabited place, which we now call Amarna, out in the desert. Its location was chosen so that its sunrise conveyed a symbolic meaning. East of Amarna the sun rises in a break in the surrounding cliffs. In this landscape, the sunrise could be literally read as if it were the hieroglyph spelling Akhet-aten or 'Horizon of the Aten' - the name of the new city.
Akhenaten notes that this capital would quickly grow to become about 4.6 square miles (roughly 12 square kilometers) in size. After his death, the pharaoh’s religious reforms quickly collapsed, his new capital became abandoned and his successors denounced him.
Akhenaten, either before or shortly after he became pharaoh, would marry Nefertiti, who in some works of art is shown standing equal next to her husband. Some have even speculated that she may have become a co-, or even sole, ruler of Egypt.
Akhenaten's rule may be seen as a brief rent in the fabric of Egyptian civilization, in which an idiosyncratic and short-lived royal cult was officially mandated, as was the foundation of an ephemeral royal capital and far-reaching effects in the areas of monumental art. There is little doubt that the major tenets of the Aton religion and the concomitant changes in artistic style were personally initiated by Akhenaten himself, justly earning him the sobriquet of "history’s first individual" - if not the first monotheist. Although the Aton cult quickly disappeared after the death of its inventor, a number of Akhenaten’s stylistic innovations were adopted into the artistic repertoire of later craftsmen, and the large-scale compositions of the Amarna period may be seen as predecessors of later Ramesside battle and festival reliefs.
Unusually, Pharaoh Amenhotep IV was not invested as custom dictated at the main Temple in Karnak but at Hermonthis, where his uncle Inen was High Priest (Ptahmose) of Amen-Re, the Sun God. However, very soon after his coronation, the new Pharaoh began to build a roofless temple to a previously obscure God Aten (or Atum), the disk of the rising sun. He soon forbade the worship of other gods, especially of the state god Amen of Thebes.
In the sixth year, he changed his name from Amenhotep ("Amen is satisfied") to Akhenaten ("beneficial to Aten") and left Thebes for a new capital at Akhetaten (El Amarna), which he started to build. Funds were diverted from the Amun or Amen cultus to the new one. No image of this God was ever made, thus it is often referred to in English in the impersonal form, ‘the Aten.’ Akhenaten vastly simplified Egyptian religion by proclaiming the visible sun itself to be the sole deity, thus introducing monotheism. Some commentators interpret this as a proto-scientific naturalism, based on the observation that the sun's energy is the ultimate source of all life. Others consider it to be a way of cutting through the previously ritualistic emphasis of Egyptian religion to allow for a new ‘personal relationship’ with God.
Initially, Akhenaten presented Aten as a variant of the familiar supreme deity Ra-Harakhti (itself the result of an earlier fusion of two solar deities, Ra and Horus), in an attempt to put his ideas in a familiar Egyptian religious context. However, by the ninth year of his reign, Akhenaten declared that Aten was not merely the supreme god, but the only god and that he, Akhenaten, was the only intermediary between Aten and his people. He even ordered the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt. Departing from the tradition of the claim of divinity, Akhenaton was himself the high priest and his chief wife, Nefertiti, was the high priestess. It may have been believed that only through the combination of husband and wife or priest and priestess could the full power of the deity be revealed. Reliefs show king and queen offering flowers as gifts to Aten.
Akhenaten's reform may have been partly motivated by the desire to curb the power of the priests, whose wealth and power rivaled the Pharaohs, by assuming a priestly role for himself. The old cultus was neglected, no priests or high priests were appointed and the temples fell into neglect. Amenhotep III had also favored Aten, especially towards the end of his reign, probably in opposition to the worship of Amon in Thebes. Montet points out, too, a certain henotheistic trend in Egypt that had many earlier Pharaohs of vaguely monotheistic tendency speak more often than not of the god than they did of the gods. Certainly, it seems that the priests of Ra led the backlash against his reform following his death.
Aten's name is also written differently after Year 9, to emphasize the radicalism of the new regime which included a ban on idols, with the exception of a rayed solar disc, in which the rays (commonly depicted ending in hands) appear to represent the unseen spirit of Aten, who by then was evidently considered not merely a sun god but rather a universal deity. This is indicated by references in the hymn to Aten's also blessing the Syrians and the Nubians. The hymn refers, as cited above, to all peoples and their racial characteristics as Aten's creation. Aten, too, is "life" and "men live by [him]." Representations of the symbol (the solar disc) of the god, too, were accompanied by an inscription pointing out that something that was transcendent could not properly or completely be represented by anything of which god was the original creator.
At the site of Akhenaten's capital about 350 tablets known as the "Amarna letters" were uncovered in 1887, showing the diplomatic correspondence between Akhenaten, his fellow kings in West Asia, as well as those of vassals who owed the Egyptian king allegiance.
The letters indicate that an empire called the Hittites, based in modern-day Turkey, became increasingly assertive during Akhenaten’s rule, going to war against Mitanni, a people who had been an Egyptian ally. In addition to their conflicts with Mitanni, Hittites were also stirring up instability in the vassal states of Syria, and a nomadic group, the Apiru, was creating unrest in Syro-Palestine. Previous Egyptian kings would likely have launched a military expedition into West Asia as a result of these acts, Akhenaten appears to have done nothing. Some modern scholars criticize Akhenaten, noting that he focused all of his efforts on his religious ideas and thereby allowed Egypt's international prestige to deteriorate.
The introduction of a new cult was accompanied by innovations in the portrayal of the human form in both relief and sculpture. The royal family was depicted with features that, by comparison with standard conventions of Egyptian art, appear noticeably exaggerated: a prognathous jaw, a thin neck, sloped shoulders, a pronounced paunch, large hips, and thighs, and spindly legs. Facial features were characterized by angular, slitted eyes, fleshy lips, nasolabial wrinkles, and holes for earplugs, while the princesses are often each depicted with an inflated, egg-shaped cranium. Much scholarly debate has centred on whether these features reflect the actual appearance of the king - extended by convention to his family and retainers - and various theories have been argued about the presumed pathology of Amenhotep IV and what medical conditions might produce the anatomical traits shown. The Karnak colossi in particular show these new characteristics in notably exaggerated form, including one that apparently depicts the king without male genitalia. Whether such statues were intended to represent the male and female element combined in the person of the divine king or whether they are simply statues of Nefertiti has not been satisfactorily settled. More simply, the remarkable innovations of Akhenaten in several cultural spheres at once may be reasonably viewed as a manifestation of the intimate connection in Egyptian culture between art and religion. In devising a radically different cult based on the worship of the sun’s natural form, the king was forced to develop a new artistic idiom with which to express it. That Akhenatenwas personally involved in these changes seems clear: the biographical text of one of the reign’s master sculptors indicates that he was instructed by the king himself.
Akhenaten was also a poet and an artist. He was not just a connoisseur of painting and sculpture, he was a musician who liked to hear his choir of blind singers and the sound of his new harps. Assessment of Akhenaten's legacy ranges from hero to villain, depending on whether the assessor wants to depict him as a weak Pharaoh who compromised Egypt's security and economy, or as an enlightened man, idealist, and religious reformer.
Akhenaten (then known as Amenhotep IV) was married to Nefertiti at the very beginning of his reign, and the couple had six known daughters. This is a list with suggested years of birth: Meritaten, Ankhesenpaaten (later Queen of Tutankhamun), Neferneferuaten Tasherit, Neferneferure, and Setepenre. His known consorts were: Nefertiti, his Great Royal Wife early in his reign; Kiya, a lesser Royal Wife; Meritaten, recorded as his Great Royal Wife late in his reign; Ankhesenpaaten, his third daughter, and who is thought to have borne a daughter, Ankhesenpaaten-ta-sherit, to her own father. After his death, Ankhesenpaaten married Akhenaten's successor Tutankhamun. Tutankhamun in his turn was the son of Akhenaten and his mother is one of Akhenaten's sisters known to historians as the Younger Lady.
Nefertiti exercised a great deal of authority, perhaps almost as much as her husband. This is suggested by the fact that in the art of the period (known as the Amarna period) there are more depictions of her than of the Pharaoh himself, while one relief has her adopting one of the poses of the Pharaoh, that of the victor in battle. Towards the end of the period, however, she appears to disappear from the artistic record. In artwork, her status is evident and indicates that she had almost as much influence as her husband. It has even been suggested that after his death she ruled in her own right. Indeed, she is once even shown in the conventional pose of a pharaoh smiting his (or in this case, her) enemy. In other depictions, she wears crowns that usually only male royalty wore. On the other hand, she is typically depicted as much smaller than her husband, which accentuates his power. In contrast, the images of Rameses II's wife, at Abu Simbal, show his queen Nefertari equal in stature.
