Then, one day in the 17^th Year of his reign, the king died!

 

The disarray of the priests is immediately visible. No longer guided by the sovereign and not knowing what to do, they act exactly as for the burials of previous sovereigns. Akhenaten is mummified and he is buried in the tomb, which he had had furnished for himself.

 

The size of the gulf that had opened between the king and his subjects now becomes apparent by the speed at which the religion of the Aten as such will be abandoned, at least in its executive form, denying the other gods.

 

The city apparently empties very quickly of its inhabitants. Besides ideological reasons, one can wonder if this abandonment was not related to disease. Indeed the Paleoentomologist Eva Panagiotakopulu found in the houses an abundance of various fossilised insect remains, among which were fleas which carried the bacillus of plague (see Geotimes).

 

On the other hand, the real systematic destruction of the Amarnian monuments will date to the times of Seti I and Ramesses II, who certainly had problems of legitimacy and who wished to use certain Amarnian theses without there being any doubt of their Amunian orthodoxy.

All reference to the king, all his images and his name were systematically destroyed, his sarcophagus was smashed, his mummy was repatriated to Thebes and finally disappeared (see appendix 8).

 

All this was done with the general approbation of the whole population, without a voice appearing to be raised in the defence of the heretic religion.

 

Under Tutankhamun, the "Spring" stela proclaimed that the reform was complete, that the too-long neglected cults of the of the traditional gods and goddesses were re-established. Rather as if the country was cured after an illness...

 

This damnatio memoria extended to his three immediate successors, including Tutankhamun [ N.B. we will not cover here the delicate and largely controversial subject of the succession to Akhenaten, a subject so full of controversy that an intelligible synthesis with a chance of being true cannot be made] (appendix 9)

 

Finally, when General Horemheb became pharaoh, he was attributed 59 years of reign as though he had been the successor to Amenhotep III, thus literally effacing Egyptian history during the Amarna period.

 

Three quarters of a century after his death, during the reign of Ramesses II, the king was only remembered under the terms of "enemy", or "rebel", or even according to some as "criminal".

 

Akhenaten's ideas had, nevertheless, marked the mentality of the Ramesside era and beyond more deeply that is sometimes admitted.

 

Thus, we observe new theological developments on the question of "the one", notably in relation to "the first time", the beginning of the world.

 

There is a tendency to picture The One as a manifestation before the creation, which divides itself into "millions" at the creation and whose parts are equal to the whole and are thus worthy of receiving a cult. This is the fundamental difference from the religion invented by Akhenaten and, indeed, later monotheisms.

 

The importance of the "living Ba" initiated by Atenism will develop and we can consider the images of the Ba-bird near the sycamore-goddess in many post-Amarna tombs is a derivation of it (see at Irynefer)

 

As an important sequel to Amarnism, we see a certain doubt appearing as to the destiny in the hereafter, together with the "songs of the harpist" which question what will really happen in the hereafter since "nobody ever came back", with the advice to "have a happy day".

 

Finally, according to Assmann, the effect of the Amarnian experiment was to clarify the ancient beliefs by confronting them with their antithesis and this is particularly true for the conception held of the underworld and its sovereign Osiris who will progressively dissolve completely into Ra.

 

Nobody knows what, exactly, was the fate of queen Nefertiti. Was she disgraced during the reign? Did she die shortly after her daughter Makhetaten? Or after the death of Akhenaten, who some even think she might have succeeded for a short time? So many hypotheses. Maybe we have her mummy, see here.