Akhenaten and the Amarna Revolution: Egypt's Aten Religion

Akhenaten was an Egyptian king of the 18th Dynasty who ruled for about 17 years, c. 1353–1336 BC, and led the most radical religious change in the history of ancient Egypt. Born Amenhotep IV, he made the Aten, the visible disc of the sun, the supreme and almost the only god of the state, closed down the cult of Amun, founded a new capital at Amarna and introduced a strikingly new style of art. The changes did not outlast him: within a generation his successors had restored the old gods and tried to erase his name from history.

Background: Egypt under Amenhotep III

Akhenaten was the younger son of Amenhotep III and his Great Royal Wife Tiye. He inherited an empire at the height of its wealth, stretching from Nubia to Syria and linked by letters and marriages to Babylon, Mitanni and the other great powers. His elder brother, Prince Thutmose, died before their father, leaving Amenhotep as heir.

Religion in Egypt centred on many gods, but the most powerful cult was that of Amun of Thebes, whose temple at Karnak controlled vast estates and wealth. Under Amenhotep III there was already growing interest in solar gods, and the Aten, the physical sun disc, appeared more often in royal texts. Whether the son simply pushed an existing trend to its extreme or broke deliberately with tradition is one of the central debates about his reign.

The early reign and the Aten at Karnak

Amenhotep IV came to the throne around 1353 BC. Whether he first ruled jointly with his father for some years is still argued; most scholars now favour no co-regency or only a short one. In his first years he ruled from Thebes and built a series of temples to the Aten just east of the great Amun temple at Karnak, including one called Gempaaten.

These temples were built with small, standard-sized sandstone blocks known today as talatat, about 52 by 26 centimetres, which could be carried by one worker and laid quickly. Tens of thousands of them were later dismantled and reused as fill inside later pylons at Karnak, which preserved their painted reliefs. Scholars have since reassembled many scenes from them.

The Karnak temples were open to the sky so that the sun could shine on the altars. Their reliefs and colossal statues already showed the new art style, and Queen Nefertiti appeared in unusually prominent roles, including scenes where she smites enemies, an image normally reserved for kings. Early in the reign the king also held a sed festival, a royal jubilee, much earlier than tradition required.

A new god, a new name, a new capital

By about his fifth year the king had taken a new name, Akhenaten, usually translated as “effective for the Aten” or “beneficial to the Aten”. The god’s own name was written in two royal cartouches, like a pharaoh’s, and he was shown as a disc whose rays end in small hands, some holding the ankh, the sign of life, to the noses of the king and queen.

In the same year Akhenaten founded a new capital on an empty stretch of the east bank of the Nile, roughly halfway between Thebes and Memphis. He called it Akhetaten, “Horizon of the Aten”; the site is now known as Tell el-Amarna. Its limits were marked by large boundary stelae carved into the cliffs, whose texts record the king’s vow never to leave the city. The court moved there around years 6 to 9 of the reign.

Akhetaten grew quickly to a population estimated at 20,000 to 50,000. It had great open-air temples to the Aten, palaces, administrative offices, workshops, and villas for officials, as well as workmen’s villages and a royal tomb in a valley to the east (Amarna (Akhetaten)).

The religion of the Aten

The new religion focused on the life-giving light of the sun. The Aten was the creator who made and sustained all living things, every country and every people, and was present wherever sunlight fell. Unlike traditional gods, the Aten had no human or animal form, no myths and no cult statue hidden in a dark sanctuary; worship took place at open altars in sunlight.

The fullest statement of the new belief is the Great Hymn to the Aten, carved in the Amarna tomb of the courtier Ay. It praises the sun for bringing each day to life, for feeding animals and plants and for creating the diversity of human languages and skin colours. Its imagery has often been compared to Psalm 104 in the Bible, although whether there is any direct connection is uncertain.

Crucially, only the king and his family had direct access to the god. The hymn calls Akhenaten the Aten’s son, the one who alone knows him. Ordinary people seem to have worshipped the royal family as intermediaries; house shrines at Amarna held stelae showing the king, queen and princesses under the sun’s rays.

From around year 9 the policy hardened. The name of Amun was hacked out of monuments across Egypt, sometimes even the plural word “gods” was erased, and the temples of Amun were closed or deprived of income. How far other cults were suppressed varied, and excavations of the Amarna workmen’s village show that many people quietly kept household gods such as Bes and Taweret.

Amarna art

The art of the period broke with centuries of convention. Akhenaten was shown with a long, narrow face, heavy-lidded eyes, thick lips, a slender neck, narrow shoulders, a rounded belly and broad hips. Early colossal statues from Karnak exaggerate these features dramatically. Later Amarna work, such as the famous painted bust of Nefertiti found in 1912 in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose, is more naturalistic and refined.

Scenes of the royal family were also new. Reliefs show the king and queen kissing their daughters, holding them on their laps and playing with them under the sun’s rays, as on the house altar now in Berlin. Nature scenes of birds, fish and plants on palace floors and walls show the same interest in the living world that the hymn celebrates.

Earlier writers suggested that the king’s unusual appearance reflected a medical condition such as Marfan syndrome or a hormonal disorder. The skeleton most likely to be his shows no sign of these conditions, and most scholars now see the style as deliberate symbolism, perhaps presenting the king as both male and female, father and mother of his people like the Aten itself.

Family, foreign affairs and the end of the reign

Akhenaten and Nefertiti had six daughters: Meritaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Neferneferuaten Tasherit, Neferneferure and Setepenre. Another wife, Kiya, was also important for a time. Around year 12 the king held a great reception at Amarna where envoys from many lands brought gifts, a scene recorded in officials’ tombs. Not long after, his mother Tiye and his daughter Meketaten died.

The Amarna Letters, the royal archive found at the city, show that Egypt continued to deal with Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni and the Hittites, and to receive anxious letters from vassal rulers in Canaan and Syria. In this period the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I destroyed the power of Mitanni and drew several Syrian states away from Egypt. Older histories blamed Akhenaten for neglecting his empire, but many historians now argue that Egypt’s core territories in Canaan remained under control.

Akhenaten died in his 17th regnal year, around 1336 BC. The last years of his reign and the immediate succession are among the most confused in Egyptian history. A king named Smenkhkare and a ruler called Neferneferuaten, possibly Nefertiti herself or Meritaten, reigned briefly.

The counter-revolution

Within a few years a young prince named Tutankhaten, generally thought to be Akhenaten’s son, became king. Under the guidance of senior officials, he changed his name to Tutankhamun, his wife Ankhesenpaaten became Ankhesenamun, and the court left Akhetaten. His Restoration Stela at Karnak describes temples fallen into ruin and the gods turning away from Egypt, and announces the return of the old cults.

The kings who followed went further. Horemheb, a general who became pharaoh, and the early Ramesside kings dismantled Akhenaten’s temples and reused their blocks. Akhetaten was abandoned and stripped. Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Ay were left out of the official king lists, such as the list at Abydos, which moves straight from Amenhotep III to Horemheb. In one later legal text Akhenaten is referred to only obliquely, as “the enemy of Akhetaten”.

The whereabouts of Akhenaten’s body are uncertain. A royal tomb was cut for him at Amarna, but the burial was probably moved to Thebes after the city was abandoned. Many scholars identify the skeleton found in 1907 in tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings as his, and a DNA study in 2010 found that this man was the son of Amenhotep III and Tiye and the father of Tutankhamun. Some researchers still argue that the KV55 body is Smenkhkare.

Rediscovery, legacy and myths

Akhenaten was effectively forgotten until the 19th century, when travellers and scholars noticed the strange reliefs and erased names at Amarna. Excavations by Flinders Petrie in 1891–1892, the German expedition under Ludwig Borchardt that found the Nefertiti bust in 1912, and British work from the 1920s onwards revealed the city. Excavations led by Barry Kemp since 1977 have studied ordinary life and the city’s cemeteries.

His reign has attracted more modern interest and speculation than almost any other in Egyptian history. Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939) proposed that Moses was an Egyptian follower of the Aten religion, an idea not supported by evidence. Akhenaten has also inspired novels, an opera by Philip Glass (1984) and many popular theories, some far beyond what the sources can support.

Several popular ideas about Akhenaten do not survive close study of the evidence.

Myth: Akhenaten was a pacifist dreamer who lost Egypt’s empire. Fact: his reign saw at least one recorded military campaign in Nubia, and his officials maintained Egyptian control in Canaan. The main losses in Syria resulted from Hittite expansion.

Myth: the Aten religion was pure monotheism like later Judaism. Fact: the king and royal family played a semi-divine role, and traditional household gods persisted. The religion had no known scripture beyond hymns and royal texts, and it vanished soon after his death.

Myth: Akhenaten’s statues show his real body. Fact: the exaggerated style was an artistic programme, and his likely skeleton shows no physical deformity.

Timeline

• c. 1353 BC: Amenhotep IV succeeds Amenhotep III.
• c. 1353–1349 BC: Aten temples built at Karnak with talatat blocks.
• c. 1349 BC (year 5): The king takes the name Akhenaten and founds Akhetaten.
• c. 1346–1344 BC: The court moves to Akhetaten.
• c. 1344 BC (around year 9): The Aten’s name is revised; persecution of Amun intensifies.
• c. 1341 BC (year 12): Great reception of foreign tribute at Amarna.
• c. 1336 BC (year 17): Akhenaten dies.
• c. 1332 BC: Tutankhamun restores the old cults; the court leaves Amarna.
• 1912: The bust of Nefertiti is found at Amarna.

Why it matters

Akhenaten’s revolution shows how far a single ruler could reshape religion, art and the capital of a great ancient state, and how quickly the change could be undone. The Amarna period gave the world the Great Hymn to the Aten, the Nefertiti bust and the Amarna Letters, and it remains central to debates about the origins of monotheism and the power of kings in the ancient world.