Even in the tombs of the dite at Akhetaten, the king totally dominated the wall decoration. Representations of Akhenaten and his wife and children (as well as depictions of the various temples of Akhetaten) were ubiquitous, and hymns and offering formulas were dedicated as often to the king as to the Aten. It is notable that these offering formulas were frequently—although not exclusively—addressed to the god by the king himself rather than by the tomb-owner. The only surviving copies of the famous Great Hymn to the Aten, the most comprehensive text on the main dogmas of the new religion (probably composed by Akhenaten himself), are found in these tombs. This hymn and all other texts at Amarna were written in a newly created official language that was much closer to everyday speech than the classical Egyptian that had so far been used for official and religious texts. The boundary between official and vernacular language did not disappear completely, but the use of the latter for literary compositions was greatly stimulated by this development and gave rise to a whole new literature in the centuries after the Amarna Period.
Osiris, the most important god of the dead, appears to have been proscribed from the very beginning of Akhenaten’s reign. Even the doctrine that viewed Osiris as the nocturnal manifestation of the sun-god, well established in funerary religion long before Amarna, was rejected by Akhenaten. The Aten was a god of life-giving light; during the night he was absent, but it is unclear where he was thought to go. Darkness and death were completely ignored instead of being regarded as a positive, necessary state of regeneration. At night the dead were simply asleep like every other living being and like the Aten himself. They were not in the ‘Beautiful West’, the underworld, and their tombs were not even physically located in the west but in the east, where the sun rises. The ‘resurrection’ of the dead took place in the morning, when the Aten arose. The Aten himself represented ‘the time in which one lives’, as the Great Hymn expressed it. The mode of existence of the dead was, therefore, one of a continual presence with the Aten and the king in the temple, where they (or their ba-souls) fed on the daily offerings. For this reason the Amarna private tombs were full of representations of the temples of the Aten and of the king driving along the royal road towards the temples and offering in them. The temples and palaces of Akhetaten were the new hereafter; the dead no longer lived in their tombs but on earth, among the living. The tombs, therefore, served only as their nightly resting places. Mummification persisted, because at night the ha returned to the body until sunrise. For this reason, funerary rites, including offerings and tomb equipment, appear to have continued as well, although most shabti figures no longer have the chapter from the Book of the Dead traditionally inscribed on them. It is difficult to be sure what the Amarna Period private coffins and sarcophagi looked like, since no examples have ever been found at Amarna. On Akhenaten’s own large stone sarcophagus the four winged goddesses who traditionally stood at the corners were replaced by figures of Nefertiti, and some finds from other sites suggest that private sarcophagi may also have been decorated with depictions of members of the family of the deceased rather than funerary deities. There was also no ‘judgement of the dead’ before the throne of
Osiris, which the deceased formerly had to pass through in order to gain the status of a maaty (‘righteous one’); instead, the king’s officials earned their life after death by following Akhenaten’s teaching and by being totally loyal to him during their lifetime. Akhenaten was the god who granted life and a burial after old age in his favour; he embodied maat and it was through loyalty to him that his subjects could become maatyu. Without this there would be no life after death, and continued existence upon earth depended on the king, who therefore monopolized all aspects of the Amarna religion, including funerary beliefs.
World History
