The Bible and Egyptian history conceal information about the dispersion of the priests and notables of Akhet-Aten, yet reveal a great deal about the hidden pharaoh, the Divine Father Ay.
When the old, polytheistic religion was restored, an official stela was set up, announcing the re-established order. Archeological evidence of the Biblical and historical Exodus is engraved on this Stela of Restoration, also known as the Stela of Tutankhamun. The Stela is in the form of a half table of the law, engraved by order of the Divine Father Ay. It informed the ancient world (and us, now) about the tragic and miserable situation that prevailed in Egypt at the time. It reveals the fact that the Egyptian leaders had made the decision to abandon the monotheistic religion of Akhenaten and the reasons for the restoration of the previous, established religion.
The temples of the gods and goddesses, from Elephantine to the marshes of the Delta, have begun to collapse. Their sanctuaries are falling, little by little, into ruins in front of piles of rubble covered by weeds. Their homes have been destroyed. Roads run through their fences. The country has a sick feeling and the gods have turned their backs on our land.1
Other translations of the Stela tell of the catastrophic state of the rest of the country.
The temples of the gods have fallen into detestable times. Their courts have become roads where everyone can pass through. The country has been exhausted by curses and the gods have been neglected. His Majesty [the new king, Tutankhamun, guided by Ay] seeks a solution pleasing to Amun. The gods have turned their backs on the country. The gods do not respond any more when their counsel is sought.2
John Adams Wilson, in Egypt, Life and Death of a Civilization, analyzes the inscriptions of the Stela, attested to by Bennet's translations. He takes note of the vivid reaction of the child-king Tutankhamun. The Stela asks the question, "What did the repentant pharaoh do?" The engraving on the Stela gives the answer: "He drove out deceit from one end of the two lands to the other. And Maat [goddess of justice and truth] was re-established. The lie [monotheistic religion] became an abomination within the land."
The Stela of the Return (1330 BC), or the Stela of the Restoration of the cult of Amun. It can equally be called the Stela of the Exodus (Cairo Museum).
The expression, "He drove out deceit from one end of the two lands to the other," is an historical reality, reaffirmed by the Bible - "They were driven out of Egypt and could not tarry" (Exodus 12:39).
Only one man could have caused those words to be engraved on the stela - the Divine Father Ay, a fervent servant of Maat, goddess of truth and justice. Knowing the suffering of the Egyptian people, he had the ability, will, and power to decide upon the radical action that had to be taken. The texts that have come down to us testify to the urgency he felt to reestablish the ancient gods in order to recover the equilibrium of the country.
The High Priest Ay was the only person assured of the power in Egypt after Smenkhkare's death. Egyptologists describe him as a great diplomat and an outstanding strategist, who maintained a certain cohesion in the country during the second part of Akhenaten's reign, while the pharaoh was cloistered in his capital.
Nicolas Grimal writes, "The return of Amunian orthodoxy probably occurred under the influence of the Divine Father Ay, who guided the steps of the young Tutankhamun. Tutankhamun sent out an edict for the restoration of the previous cults, and described the miserable state into which the errors of Amenhotep IV [Akhenaten] had reduced the country."3
Ay was the "Father of the God," as well as the perceived father of the commoners of Egypt. These commoners, the inhabitants of the rest of the country, did not have the right to travel to the new capital. Men and women suffered from having lost the religious and spiritual values of their ancestors. Their gods were struck down and their priests displaced to Akhet-Aten. They were left alone, without resources, and with the further constraint of conscription into work crews to carry out the tasks of the new religion.
Ay well understood the foundations of Aten's religion. He had contributed to its ascension, and had sincerely believed in it. Now, he saw the misery and suffering of the Egyptian people as a consequence of that religious reformation.
The new monotheistic religion had brought tragedy to Ay personally. During Akhenaten's reign, he saw his loved ones suffer and die. His parents (Yuya and Tuya), his brother Anen, and several of his granddaughters died. His sister, Queen Teye, died soon after her husband Amenhotep III. His adopted daughter, Nefertiti, died soon, as did two of his great-granddaughters.
The death of Akhenaten must have dealt the ultimate blow to Ay's dream of the cult of the One God, the Protector. Akhenaten was his son-in-law, a person he had admired during the glory days of Akhet-Aten. Ay was deeply disappointed in the One God Aten. This One God had provided no protection to him at all. He had lost practically his entire family while Aten's cult grew. And Egypt had sunk into a lamentable state. The Stela of Tutankhamun demonstrates that the misfortunes that befell the Divine Father Ay were interpreted by him as punishment from Amun.
Akhenaten had abandoned and desecrated the statues of Amun. He had forsaken the people of Egypt as well as their ancestral gods. Ay felt that it was urgently necessary to repair the fault and calm the wrath of Amun. A mere return to polytheism would not suffice unless it was accompanied by a grandiose action to regain Amun's confidence. Amun had allowed Aten the privilege of living, and of expanding until he, Aten, had grown the more powerful of the two. And Aten, far from expressing his gratitude, tried to destroy Amun. So the law of Talion, a law well known to the Egyptians,4 would have to be invoked. Genesis 9:6 presents the law in Biblical terms: "Whoever sheddeth the blood of another person, by that person shall his blood be shed." It is the ancient law of vengeance.
Ay found himself confronted with the most difficult decision of his life. He would have to blame the population of Akhet-Aten for the woes of the country. The cosmopolitan life created by Akhenaten became a pretext for the accusation of corruption, adultery, and exhibitionism against the city. Akhet-Aten had to be destroyed, and its monotheistic priests had to be exiled or killed. They had, after all, been guilty of corruption and of fraternization with foreign women.
Killing priests was certainly not an Egyptian custom. Such an act was considered the crime of crimes. Besides, Ay himself had been venerated and deified by the monotheistic priests.
Smenkhkare had opposed exiling the monotheistic priests, which probably cost him his life. After his death, the Divine Father Ay became the sole initiator of the restoration of the old religion. He could act freely, since the young pharaoh Tutankhamun was under his tutelage.
To save Egypt from the misery and scourges described on the Stela, the Divine Father took his stand against the population of Akhet-Aten. Akhet-Aten's populace, however, attached to their privileges and to their One God, refused to abandon their beliefs and their wealth.
The condition of the Egyptian people, exhausted by the scourges of the One God religion, caused Ay to negotiate a compromise with the monotheistic population of Akhet-Aten. Ay promised them the Egyptian province of Canaan (the Promised Land), along with all the wealth of Akhet-Aten.
The venerated Divine Father Ay shooting at a target held by two prisoners. The population of Akhet-Aten greets the high priest by kneeling. In the center are two royal cartouches of the pharaoh, who is not wearing the royal uraeus, which leads one to suppose that these cartouches were added to the engraving later (gold foil engraving).
The Bible describes the wealth taken from Akhet-Aten in the Book of Exodus: "The Children of Israel did as Moses told them, and asked the Egyptians for gold and silver jewelry, and for clothing. Now Yahwe had caused the Egyptians to be favorably disposed toward them, and the Egyptians gave them what they asked for. So, they plundered the Egyptians" (Hebrew Bible, Exodus 12:35-36).
The monotheistic priests, the Yahuds, took with them the wealth of Akhet-Aten. The city wasn't abandoned in a disorganized manner; the departure was well planned.5 Cyril Aldred discovered that the excavations at the city of Thebes were far more rewarding than the meager loot gleaned from Amarna. Very little was left behind when Akhet-Aten was deserted, providing slim pickings for the archeologists millennia later. The latest research indicates that the capital was dismantled at the beginning of Tutankhamun's reign. And, it was dismantled by order of the Divine Father Ay.
With the capital of Egypt deserted and abandoned, where would its inhabitants have gone? Having left the terrestrial paradise, what happened to the priests of Aten and to the prominent citizens? They were deported to the Egyptian province of Canaan. Not only were the priests and nobles deported, but the Egyptian artists and artisans, who were an integral part of the Yahud class (the Tribe of Judah), went along with them.
The traditional view of what happened to the monotheistic priests is that they returned to their old cities and resumed the priesthood of the old monotheistic gods. However, there is strong evidence against this view.
The Stela of the Restoration gives an archeological indication about the disappearance of the priests of Akhet-Aten. According to Claude Vandersleyen, the Stela specifies that Egypt, lacking enough priests for the restoration of the cult of Amun, organized a massive recruitment drive. "The only written indication of social reorganization of the priests states that from then on, the priesthood would consist of children of the functionaries of their city."6
The new priests had to be recruited, not from priestly families, but from families of the bureaucratic class - a very strange course since the priesthood in Egypt had, from time immemorial, been a truly exclusive caste unto itself.7 In the same way that Ay succeeded his father Yuya, the ancients transmitted their traditions, secrets, and teachings to their descendants. The tradition is promulgated in the Bible. "And the priest who is anointed and consecrated as priest to succeed his father shall make atonement, wearing the holy linen garments" (Hebrew Bible, Leviticus 16:32).
If the numerous priests of Akhet-Aten abandoned their God to return to the old religion of Amun, how could there be a lack of priests? Why did those who had returned to power feel obligated to recruit priests elsewhere, among the uninitiated, in disregard of the ancestral traditions?
The answer is that the priests of Aten, the One God, never returned to the worship of Amun. The leading citizens of Akhet-Aten never returned to anonymity. The people of Akhet-Aten - priests, nobles, artists, and common people - disappeared from Egypt to go to the desert of Moab, and later to the province of Canaan.
By a religious alliance with the monotheistic priests, Ay settled a crucial political problem at the same time, dealing with the region's equilibrium. He repopulated the province of Canaan, which had been abandoned by Akhenaten and invaded by bands of Apirus. Many of the Amarna Letters affirm that Akhenaten had received many real cries of distress and appeals for his help. For instance: "Rib-Hadda says to his lord: 'I fall to my lord's feet seven times seven times. Why dost thou remain thus seated motion-lessly, doing nothing, so that the Apiru dog takes thy cities? When that dog took Sumur, I wrote thee, why hast thou done nothing...?'" (EA 91).
By moving his own Egyptian subjects, who venerated him like a god, to the land of Canaan, Ay had reached a solution that allowed him to put an end to the anarchy reigning over the land. By this means, he held back the advance of the Hittites from the North. The Hittites now became, equally, the enemy of the new arrivals. The Divine Father created a "buffer zone" protectorate for Lower Egypt by sending his armies along with the new settlers. The Aramaic Bible frequently speaks of Ay's armies accompanying the Exodus: "On exactly that day, all the armies of Ay left the land of Egypt"(Aramaic Bible, Exodus 12:41).
On Tutankhamun's death, the Divine Father Ay assumed the crown of the Egyptian empire. The succession took place without conflict, and in accordance with the Egyptian tradition of the immortality of the pharaohs, the cult of Tutankhamun was replaced by that of the Divine Father Ay (Adon-Ay). Then, after the death of Ay after a four-year reign, the new pharaoh, Horemheb, faithfully followed the directives of his predecessor, restoring the worship of Amun throughout Upper and Lower Egypt. He made a final, decisive rupture with the religion of Aten, the only truly exclusive monotheism that had ever existed in ancient Egypt. He established judges in the land, putting an end to the disorder and corruption that had grown endemic. Enthused by his religious passion, he went so far as to represent himself as the direct successor of Amenhotep III.
Always following the example of the Divine Father Ay, Horemheb was accustomed to saying that "he traveled the country far and wide," the better to know it and provide for its needs.
Horemheb usurped numerous statues and effigies of the monotheistic pharaohs, effacing their names and their memory by engraving on them his own. He made no exception of Ay. His rancor towards his monotheistic predecessors had adequate reason. Under monotheism, Egypt had suffered the loss of the fundamental symbol of its existence - its clergy. The priests had been the bearers of Egypt's mysteries, knowledge, and traditions.
Unlike Horemheb, Pharaoh Ay is scarcely represented in sculptural form. The rare works discovered which do show his image are paintings and bas-relief murals, or engravings on gold leaf. Ay seems to have accorded slight importance to images representing himself. For him the emphasis was on Egypt's need to return to the worship of the polytheistic god Amun. Although he reigned only four years, Ay had been "pharaoh without a crown" for more than twenty.
During Akhenaten's last ten years, while the pharaoh was cloistered and worshiped within the capital, and during the reigns of Smenkhkare and Tutankhamun, Ay was lord of the land, the Divine Father, respected and venerated throughout Egypt.
It was Ay who presided over the burial of Tutankhamun. And it was Ay who chose the secret location for Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings, filling it with treasures found three thousand years later.
Ay is the forgotten pharaoh. The discrete sovereign of Egypt, he is above the pharaohs. He is the one "whose face is never seen." Ay was the artisan and sculptor of the Great Exodus. He would impose his seal upon the face of all consequent Western civilization.
Notes
1. Translation of Claude Vandersleyen, Egypt and the Valley of the Nile, Vol. 2. Nouvelle Clio, 1995.
2. Translation of Christian Jacq, Nefertiti et Akhenaton. Perrin, 1996, p. 219.
3. Nicolas Grimal, Histoire de l'Ancienne Egypte. Fayard, 1988, p. 294.
4. Elisabeth Laffont, Les livres de sagesse des pharaons. Folio Histoire, Gallimard, 1979, p. 22.
5. Cyril Aldred, Akhenaten, King of Egypt. Le Seuil, 1995, p. 73.
6. Claude Vandersleyen, Egypt and the Valley of the Nile, p. 476.
7. Lionel Casson, Ancient Egypt, The Great Ages of Man. Time, 1969, p. 79.
World History
