King amenhotep iv biography of martin

It seems that the Apis cult was maintained and other gods are still mentioned in inscriptions although they are usually solar gods or personifications of abstract ideas. In fact, the names of the Aten which were written in a cartouche describe the god in terms of the other gods. Furthermore, it seems that the personal relationship with the Aten did not extend to the common people, just the Royal Family.

Akhenaten and his family are frequently shown worshipping the Aten or simply enjoying everyday activities beneath the protective rays of the Aten disk, reinforcing the link between the king and his god. Ordinary people could not worship the Aten directly, they worshipped the King and the royal family. This gave the king absolute power over secular and religious life in Egypt.

They argue that the king was worried about the growing power of the priests of Amun, as his father Amenhotep III had been. By establishing a new order which rejected Amun in favour of the Aten who was accessible primarily to the king he took religion back from the priests. As well as Nefertiti , Akhenaten surrounded himself with a number of powerful women whom he clearly adored and respected.

Each of the royal women had her own sunshade temple where she could worship the Aten. They were generally located within beautiful gardens complete with ritual pools where the wonders of nature could be enjoyed.

King amenhotep iv biography of martin

The Armarna women, in particular Nefertiti , seem to have represented the feminine aspect of the Aten as creator. Akhenaten was often depicted with an elongated jaw line, wide hips and a round belly. This development was a complete break from all of the conventions of ancient Egyptian art, and has led to some fairly wide speculation. Was the pharaoh developing a new art form, or suffering from a physical affliction?

In males, this disorder is typified by an elongated face and an androgynous figure. Funds were diverted from the Amun or Amen cultus to the new one. Some commentators interpret this as a proto-scientific naturalism, based on the observation that the sun's energy is the ultimate source of all life. This religious reformation appears to have begun with his decision to celebrate a Sed-festival in his third regal year—a highly unusual step, since a Sed-festival a sort of royal jubilee intended to reinforce the Pharaoh's divine powers of kingship was traditionally held in the thirtieth year of a Pharaoh's reign.

Perhaps absence of any reference to the realm of the dead, so prominent in Egyptian religion, was the most remarkable feature. In honor of Aten, Akhenaten also oversaw the construction of some of the most massive temple complexes in ancient Egypt, including one at Karnak, close to the old temple of Amun. In these new temples, Aten was worshipped in the open sunlight, rather than in dark temple enclosures, as the old gods had been.

Akhenaten is also believed to have composed the Great Hymn to the Aten, which began:. Thou arisest beauteous in the horizon of heaven. O living Aten, beginner of life, when thou dost shine forth in the eastern horizon and dost fill every land with thy beauty Aten is both near and distant. Initially, Akhenaten presented Aten as a variant of the familiar supreme deity Ra-Harakhti itself the result of an earlier fusion of two solar deities, Ra and Horus , in an attempt to put his ideas in a familiar Egyptian religious context.

However, by the ninth year of his reign, Akhenaten declared that Aten was not merely the supreme god, but the only god, and that he, Akhenaten, was the only intermediary between Aten and his people. He even ordered the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt. Departing from the traditional of claim of divinity, Akhenaton was himself the high priest and his chief wife, Nefertiti , was high priestess.

It may have been believed that only through the combination of husband and wife or priest and priestess could the full power of the deity be revealed. Reliefs show king and queen offering flowers as gifts to Aten. Akhenaten's reform may have been partly motivated by the desire to curb the power of the priests, whose wealth and power rivaled the Pharoahs, by assuming a priestly role for himself.

The old cultus was neglected, no priests or high priests were appointed and the temples fell into neglect. Certainly, it seems that the priests of Ra led the backlash against his reform following his death. Nefertiti exercised a great deal of authority, perhaps almost as much as her husband. This is suggested by the fact that in the art of the period known as the Amarna period there are more depiction of her than of the Pharaoh himself, while one relief has her adopting one of the poses of the Pharaoh, that of the victor in battle.

Towards the end of the period, however, she appears to disappear from the artistic record. In artwork, her status is evident and indicates that she had almost as much influence as her husband. It has even been suggested that after his death she ruled in her own right. Indeed, she is once even shown in the conventional pose of a pharaoh smiting his or in this case, her enemy.

In other depictions, she wears crowns that usually only male royalty wore. On the other hand, she is typically depicted as much smaller than her husband, which accentuates his power. Aten's name is also written differently after Year 9, to emphasize the radicalism of the new regime which included a ban on idols, with the exception of a rayed solar disc, in which the rays commonly depicted ending in hands appear to represent the unseen spirit of Aten, who by then was evidently considered not merely a sun god but rather a universal deity.

This is indicated by references in the hymn to Aten's also blessing the Syrians and the Nubians. The hymn refers, as cited above, to all peoples and their racial characteristics as Aten's creation. There has been much speculation about possible links between Akhenaten and Moses. While there is no empirical evidence of any link, scholars have been fascinated by the possibility that monotheism may have started in Egypt and influenced Judaism or that there may have been at the least some traffic between Judaism and Akhenaton's creed.

It could equally be argued that it was Moses who influenced Akhenaton, if indeed there was any contact at all. It is usually assumed that prior to Moses, the Hebrews were henotheists gave exclusive allegiance to one God but did not deny the existence of others and that Moses introduced monotheism. For Muslims, however, Abraham was a monotheist many say the first, although that designation usually belongs to Adam see Q The early stage of Atenism also appears to be a kind of henotheism familiar in Egyptian religion, but the later form suggests a proto-monotheism.

Texts frequently refer to Akhenaten's theology as a "kind of monotheism" Montserrat: Some have described him as the "world's first monotheist. Osman, for example, writes " from historical sources, Akhenaten is the first person we know of to introduce worship of one God" Osman: Some argue that Egyptian religion was monotheistic anyway, thus Akhenaton cannot be described as introducing a completely new notion; "Despite the polytheistic nature of Egyptian religion, it derived from an essentially monotheistic belief in a single creator deity responsible for all that existed, including the other deities" Greenberg: In year 7 of his reign BC or BC the capital was moved from Thebes to Amarna, though construction of the city seems to have continued for two more years till BC or BC.

The new city was dedicated to the royal couple's new religion. A religious revolutionary, he eschewed but did not abandon the traditional pantheon of deities, and worshipped the sun-god Aten. He oversaw the construction of some of the most massive temple complexes in ancient Egypt in honor of Aten. The idea of Akhenaten as the pioneer of monotheistic religion was promoted by Sigmund Freud the founder of psychoanalysis in his book Moses and Monotheism and thereby entered popular consciousness.

Styles of art that flourished during this short period are markedly different from other Egyptian art, bearing a variety of affectations, from elongated heads to protruding stomachs, exaggerated ugliness and the beauty of Nefertiti. Artistic representations of Akhenaten give him a very feminine appearance, giving rise to controversial theories such that he may have actually been a woman masquerading as a man, which had been known to happen in Egyptian politics once or twice, or that he was a hermaphrodite or had some other phenotypic sexual disorder.

There is circumstantial evidence that he was bisexual and had many lovers of both sexes, after Nefertiti disappeared from the historical record. It is also suggested by Bob Brier, in his book "The Murder Of Tutankhamen", that his family suffered from Marfan's syndrome, which is known to cause elongated features and may explain his appearance.

In the fifth year of his reign, Akhenaten rejected the traditional religion in favour of worshiping the Aten, or sun disc, after whom he renamed himself. He closed all the temples to the old gods and obliterated their names from monuments. He built a new capital, Akhetaten Tel el-Amarna , on a previously uninhabited site in Middle Egypt, as well as introducing a completely new artistic style.

Akhenaten's principal queen was Nefertiti.