After Amenhotep III came a pharaoh who very nearly turned the ancient Egyptians' world upside down. This was Amenhotep IV (reigned 1352-1336 b. c.), who adopted the name Akhenaton, which means “Servant of Aton.” Aton was the name of the deity whom he declared was the only god. Up to then, of course, the Egyptian religion had included numerous deities. Akhenaton proposed to sweep away all those old gods. Just as there was only one god, so there was only one prophet of Aton, and that was Akhenaton.
To break all ties with the past, Akhenaton established a new capital. He ordered that the new capital be built at a location along the Nile almost exactly midway between the old capital at Thebes and the even older capital at Memphis. Akhenaton called his new capital city Akhetaton (ock-TAH-ton), or “The Horizon of Aton.” He and his wife Nefertiti (neff-ur-TEE-tee) moved the royal court there in the 1340s b. c. Akhenaton took with him very few of the people who had
Attended him in Thebes. Instead, he established an entirely new court and avoided contact with the priests of the old Egyptian religion. To ensure that no one worshiped the old deities, he ordered that their statutes and other images be removed from temples.
The old religion was polytheistic, meaning that it had many gods; what Akhenaton proposed was monotheism, the worship of one god. Egyptian paganism represented its gods as having bodies (though usually not faces) like those of humans; Aton, by contrast, was symbolized only by a golden, sun-like circle.
From the perspective of history, Akhenaton was a man ahead of his time. Most of the ancient cultures (except the Hebrews) had polytheistic religions, but most of these pagan belief systems would fade away. Judaism, which was influenced by the monotheistic ideas of the Zoroastrian faith in Persia, would survive and influence Christianity and Islam, two of the world's biggest religions in terms of their followers. By contrast, the only remaining polytheistic religion of any importance is Hinduism, the religion of India. As for Akhenaton's idea of Aton as having no physical form, this too was a forward-looking concept. One of the Ten Commandments later adopted by the Hebrews forbids any attempt to represent Jehovah with any “graven image.” Islam would later establish even stricter rules against trying to depict Allah.
Ancient Egypt, however, was not ready for the radical changes proposed by Akhenaton, and much of the blame for this can be placed on the pharaoh himself. Instead of trying to bring about gradual change, he was impatient and acted hastily. He won few friends by upsetting the old traditions as he did.
After Akhenaton died, the Egyptians departed Akheta-ton as quickly as they had moved there. In their hurry they left behind the Amarna Letters, which would give historians an extremely valuable record of the time. The next pharaoh claimed his own reign had begun after Amenhotep III, in effect removing Akhenaton from history.
World History
