Tomb of Huya

What could the Egyptians have thought of their king and his religion?

 

It is quite clear that only the king and a handful of people very close to him understood what was happening! The rest of the country remained more or less faithful to the traditional religion. This opinion must be tempered, however, by the recent discovery of the remains of a temple to the Aten at Heliopolis and by the certainty, which we now have, that the king did not live cloistered at Akhetaten, even though it was his place of preference.

 

Even among the courtiers, opinions were certainly very dubious behind a façade of approval either forced or through careerism. Opposition could only be underground.

 

One clear sign is the very small number of tombs dug into the cliffs surrounding the town, of which only one seems to have really been used for burial, in spite of a specific exhortation by the king indicating that it would be unthinkable for courtiers to be buried anywhere but in Amarna... which was not easy.

 

We have also found, even in the Amarna site itself, and especially in the workers' village, portrayals of the traditional gods and even statuettes of the execrated god Amun! This persistence and probably even revival of the traditional cults towards the end of the reign seem to have irritated the king deeply. As did probably the opposition of the principal religious institutions in the country which, economically strangled, must have reached a point where the covert criticism became overt...

 

The attitude of the king became more radical at the same time that he changed the qualifying names of his god Aten around year 9 and we have seen that all divine anthropomorphic representations disappeared. Theriomorphic representations, where the king is shown, among others, as a sphinx, also disappeared (fig 44).

 

The king and his zealots mainly attacked Amun and his divine wife, Mut and all those who related to him, smashing statues, hammering out the names of the god everywhere, right up to the tops of obelisks or in cartouches carrying his own coronation name (fig 11, erasure of the name of Amun in the cartouche of Amenhotep). See another example HERE (in French only).

 

An interesting fact is that even the plural of the word "gods" was erased. Thus, the first outline of "monotheism" was accompanied by the first systematic persecutions in the history of Egypt. There were others, but it had to wait 14 centuries for them; those made by the Christians.

 

Having said this, this destruction did not affect all of the gods or the various parts of the country in the same way. The destruction was clearly concentrated in the Theban region and concerned all which was closely or distantly related to the execrated Amun.

 

Whether willingly, through incompetence or by negligence, many cults were not troubled.

 

Everything takes place as if the gods had been divided into two groups: those who are closely or distantly related, theologically or politically, and those which were hard to eliminate and those which, like Osiris, were not a hindrance and that could be ignored.

 

So, in Hermopolis, almost opposite Amarna, the cult of Thoth (fig 47), was followed with no apparent problem! It must be said that one of the attributes of Thoth was the lunar disc, so maybe that played a role. On the other hand, Amun and all the creator gods were attacked.

 

But, contrary to the legend, however, the temples were not completely closed, we are sure of that, not even Karnak. They seriously declined, though.

 

Besides, the king could have had them demolished but that did not happen, though we do not know why.

 

 

The working conditions in Tell el Amarna

Why didn't Akhenaten have the temple of Amon in Karnak, among others, destroyed?   One of the hypotheses would be that the number of available workers was insufficient; indeed, the construction of the capital Akhetaten, as well as that of the temples to the Aten in the rest of the country, probably created a shortage of manpower. The discovery made in 2008 of a cemetery of workers, on the site of the new capital, shows the terrifying exploitation to which these poor wretches were victims. The children, of which 60% suffered from anemia due to the malnutrition and/or to chronic maladides (18-20% during other periods) began to work with of their body as soon as they were in state to lift something. The bony, and notably vertebral damages, are impressive.   In the underfed, whose skeletons kept the record, malnutrition was devastating. The report of Barry Kemp is frightening: "the impact of the deaths among the teenagers doesn't have an equivalent in any other place of Egypt, and at no other historic period [... ] By the age of 20, two third had died". And again: the size of Egyptians men has "never been found as low during all the history of the country".   Obviously, the piles of offerings intended for Aten didn't benefit everybody.   You will find here the complete article on this topic.

 

 

This iconoclastic, sacrilegious campaign must surely have greatly shocked the Egyptians, especially since it was perpetrated in the name of a god who had not gained their confidence.

 

And how could it have been otherwise? Akhenaten had instituted a mechanical, abstract and, in fact, inhumane religion. We can even wonder if we should really talk of a religion in the face of this blind and deaf force endowed with an ineluctable, conscience-lacking progress.

 

The Aten is absolutely not a personal god to whom one may address oneself or to whom one can pray. He is blind to the destiny of men and deaf to their prayers. One can expect neither consolation nor hope from him.

 

None of the human traits always assigned by men to gods could be applied to him. So, for the Egyptians, as Pierre Grandet said, he was "hardly a god". As we have seen, personal piety could only be addressed to the royal couple. The affective link, which would formerly relate an individual with his divinity, represented till then for him a little liberty of thought. Now this link was diverted to the unique advantage of the royal couple whose control was total.