Akhenaten

Around the fifth year of his reign, Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten and announced, on a series of great stelae cut into the cliffs, that he would found a city on land that belonged to no god. The site, on the east bank of the Nile roughly halfway between Memphis and Thebes, had no earlier temple and no earlier claim on it. He called it Akhetaten, the Horizon of the Aten, and swore in the boundary texts that he would not extend its limits beyond the markers.

The city went up fast and in a hurry, which is why so much of it can be read. Its temples were built from small standardised blocks, about the size a single workman could carry, which archaeologists call talatat. Because the buildings were dismantled within a generation and the blocks were carted off as rubble fill for later pylons at Karnak and at Hermopolis, tens of thousands of them survive with their carved faces protected, and whole wall scenes have been reassembled from them.

The temples themselves broke with Egyptian practice. Instead of a dark sanctuary holding a hidden statue, they were open courts of offering tables under the sky, because the god was the visible disc and could not be represented as a body. The longest surviving hymn to the Aten, carved in the tomb of the courtier Ay, praises a sole creator whose rays reach Syria and Nubia as readily as Egypt, and it does so without a single myth, because a disc has no story.

The Amarna reform is regularly described as the first monotheism, and it is the description that Egyptologists spend the most effort qualifying. The evidence that pulls in that direction is real: other gods lost their revenues, Amun's name was systematically hacked out of monuments the length of the country, and the plural word for gods was itself attacked in some inscriptions. The evidence pulling the other way is equally real. Worship of the Aten in the surviving private shrines at Amarna is mediated through the royal family, so householders pray to the king and the king prays to the disc, an arrangement that looks less like a faith open to everyone than a court cult with the state at its centre.

One camp reads the reform as a genuine revolution in religious thought, a deliberate break that introduced the idea of a single true god and made every other god false, and treats the violence of the erasures as the mark of that break. A second camp reads it as an extension of long standing Egyptian solar theology, in which the sun god absorbs the functions of other gods, pushed further than usual by a king who needed a theology that placed him alone between the god and everybody else. A third position doubts that the reform touched ordinary practice much at all outside the new city and the court that lived in it.

The atlas records the dispute rather than picking a winner. What is not disputed is the aftermath: within a generation the court was back at Thebes, the city was abandoned, Amun's revenues were restored, and Akhenaten's name was omitted from the official king lists, which jump from his predecessor to Horemheb as if the intervening reigns had not happened.