Chapter One
Egypt Fourteenth Century BCE
The divine powers had never smiled more gloriously on Egypt. King Amenhotep III, true son of the great god Amun, was preparing to celebrate his third jubilee, commemorating some thirty-eight years of prosperous rule and internal peace.
Wealth flowed into Egypt like the nourishing Nile flood, and brought forth new and splendid monuments. Egyptian armies and Egyptian diplomacy had forged an empire that stretched from the northeastern satellite states of Syria (including what would one day be Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and much of Iraq) south to the conquered territory of Lower Kush, in what would later be northern Sudan. Egyptian farmers' harvests were so rich that centuries after Amenhotep's death he would be worshipped as a god of agricultural fertility. Up and down the Nile, literally thousands of gods and goddesses received a grateful people's thanks.
Twenty years later, a young king lamented his country's desolation: "The temples of gods and goddesses from Elephantine as far as the Delta marshes had fallen into ruin, and their shrines become dilapidated. They had turned into mounds overgrown with weeds. ... This land had been struck by catastrophe: the gods had turned their backs upon it. If the army was sent to Syria to extend the borders of Egypt, they had no success. If anyone prayed to a god, the god would never answer; if anyone asked a goddess for help, she would not hear. Hearts were weakened in bodies, whatever had been made was destroyed."
What had gone wrong?
When Amenhotep III died, probably in 1353 BCE, his son was crowned as Amenhotep IV. The new king was young, devoted to his wife Nefertiti, and full of strange ideas. Like his father, he worshipped the sun god's most blazing aspect-the Aten, or "disc"-but he worshipped it in a distinctly different way.
For most Egyptians, the Aten was only one face of the great god Amun-Ra. And Amun-Ra, for all his magnificence, was only one of the thousands of deities whose combined efforts kept the Egyptian universe running. Amenhotep III had encouraged worship of the Aten, but he had supported all the gods and goddesses-chief among them Amun, the ancestral god of the city of Thebes.
The new king's first actions as pharaoh gave warning of what was to come. He changed his name from Amenhotep ("Amun is satisfied") to Akhenaten ("glory of the Aten"), and began to build a very peculiar temple.
A normal Egyptian temple was a series of rooms, each one smaller and darker than the one before. In the innermost "holy of holies" lived the god or goddess-a statue that priests and other attendants "woke," bathed, dressed, "fed," and sang to every day. No one else, except the king, was ever allowed to enter the temple. On festival days, the statue was carried out in a boat-shaped shrine-travel in Egypt almost always meant a boat-and paraded down a route lined with cheering people.
But Akhenaten's new temple was not even a building. It was a huge unroofed courtyard surrounded on all four sides by a tall colonnade. There was no inner room, no statue to be fed and worshipped and carried out for people to see. Akhenaten saw his god in the open sky above-the Aten, the visible disk of the sun, pouring heat and light on the earth. This strange structure, built in the sacred city of Thebes, was only the first of a series of Aten temples scattered through Egypt. And there was more to come. If Akhenaten's first moves had been disturbing, his next was devastating.
Major temples in Egypt had long been tax supported, with certain taxes earmarked for their use. They drew additional revenues from the land they owned and from donations and offerings, mostly at the times of their many festivals. At one stroke, Akhenaten ended the temple subsidies-or rather diverted them to the Aten's temples alone-and abolished the festivals. That must have caused consternation all over Egypt. Religious festivals were not just holidays. They were the only times when ordinary Egyptians could see and approach their gods and goddesses. At the great temple of Amun in Thebes, a dozen priests lifted the god's sacred boat, shouldered its carrying poles, and brought him out into the sunlight-a living god for all to see. Officials and dignitaries of all sorts followed closely, enjoying the spectators' cheers. Musicians and dancers brightened the procession. The priests put down their burden at shrines along the processional route, and here the crowding people could bring their prayers and their questions to the god, and sometimes receive oracular answers. Huge amounts of food and drink were prepared for major festivals, lesser amounts for lesser holidays. Whatever the priests and other temple personnel could not eat themselves was presumably distributed to the spectators. These were not rare occasions. Over the course of a year, they averaged out to more than one holiday a week in Thebes.
Suddenly, all this was finished. There were to be no more festival processions. Unlike Amun and every other god and goddess in the Egyptian pantheon, the Aten could not be paraded through the streets-there was nothing for the priests to carry. There could be no statues of the Aten.
The abrupt stoppage of temple subsidies must have thrown much of Egypt's economy into confusion. That economy was based on goods, not money. (Coins would be invented some nine centuries later, in Asia Minor.) Taxes were collected in the form of grain, livestock, cloth, lumber, and other staples. Wages were paid in bread, meat, vegetables, and beer. Farmers were often sharecroppers, paying their rent with a specified percentage of their harvests. There was a lively trade up and down the Nile, and even beyond the borders of Egypt, all conducted by barter. And a large proportion of goods from all sources circulated through temples.
Major temples hired their own professional traders, who might travel far to strike bargains for their particular deity. All temples received tax subsidies in the form of food and other goods. They also collected offerings from pious citizens, grew crops and raised livestock on their own lands, and owned bakeries, breweries, butcher shops, and other processing facilities.
All this bread, beer, meat, and produce went first of all to feed the priests and other temple staff, which could number hundreds of people, as well as their families. Some of it was distributed to needier temples, some was handed out to worshippers at festivals, a good deal of it was stored, and no doubt some of it was sold. Wealthy temples had a host of everyday jobs to fill-farmworkers, bakers, brewers, cooks, cleaners, weavers, carpenters, sailors, traders, unskilled laborers, and the ever-present scribes. When temples were put out of business, people were put out of work.
Akhenaten had effectively established Aten-worship as the state religion. The government of Egypt no longer recognized the existence of any other deities. This was a staggering change. In the past, every official act and every royal portrait had been surrounded by divine images. The king himself was the earthly manifestation of the royal falcon god Horus. Isis, the great healing and mothering goddess, protected his throne and nourished him with her milk. The vulture goddess Nekhbet and the cobra goddess Wadjet, guardians of southern and northern Egypt respectively, looked out on their domains from his royal headdress.
The king was the country's chief priest, charged with performing vital rituals. And for generations, every king's right to the throne was validated by the claim that the great god Amun was quite literally his biological father, who had impregnated his mother in a night of divine passion.
Akhenaten, however, recognized only the Aten as his supernatural father. Worse, he began an active campaign against Amun. The ancient god's temples were defaced. His name and image were chiseled out of inscriptions all over Egypt. Not even a goose could be pictured, since the goose was sacred to Amun.
At the same time, Akhenaten withdrew from the divinity-infested cities of Egypt. He announced that the Aten had selected a site for a new city, sacred to the Aten alone. Here, on barren ground, he built his new capital-Akhetaten, "Horizon of the Aten"-a city that would rise and fall within a single generation. Here some of the unemployed workers from the old temples probably found jobs, building the strange, roofless temples of the Aten, as well as palaces and houses for the king's family and the royal court.
The king may have hoped that Egyptians would forget their old deities, but evidence from the Aten's own city shows that they did not. In the ruins of house after house, archaeologists have found statuettes and carvings of Taweret (the hippopotamus goddess who presided over birth), Isis, and other ancient powers. Even the king could not dictate what people felt.
Akhenaten has often been called "the first monotheist." He could well be called the first recorded religious persecutor, although by later standards his persecution was mild. Only those who shared his religious views-or claimed to share them-could hope for a place in his court or a high government position. But the records are too incomplete to show if he killed, tortured, or imprisoned people who did not subscribe to the new creed.
Many people must have subscribed to it. The Aten, after all, was not a new god. Indeed, his official name was "The living Ra-Horus of the horizon who rejoices in the horizon in his identity of light which is in the Aten," later changed to "The living Ra, ruler of the horizon, who rejoices in the horizon in his identity of Ra the Father who has returned as the Aten." (The reference to Horus smacked too much of polytheism, while "Ra" could be accepted as a synonym for "sun god.") Akhenaten's father, the revered Amenhotep III, had already emphasized the sun disc as Ra's greatest manifestation.
Nevertheless, the new religion had a traumatic effect. Ancient Egyptian religious tradition was one of inclusion and balance. Every part of the world was infused with divinity. The sky goddess Nut, her gown embroidered with stars, arched over her reclining consort, the earth god Geb. Ra, that overpowering deity of sun-drenched Egypt, sailed masterfully across the sky each day, adored in his changing manifestations-Khephre at the eastern horizon, Aten in his full glory, Atum in the west.
The night, too, was sacred, and no less important than the day. Darkness revealed the divine stars, among the oldest powers of Egyptian religion. Meanwhile, Ra underwent his own dangerous ordeal, sailing beneath the earth in his "night boat," continually attacked by monsters. Osiris, lord of the dead, revivified the weary sun god each night, so that he could be reborn from Nut at dawn. Other deities defended the boat-notably the fierce warrior Set (also spelled Seth), whose spear fended off the devouring serpent Apep (Apophis).
Set, the god of disorder, master of the desert that surrounded the fertile Nile valley and master of unpredictable storms that sent flash floods down dry streambeds, would later be equated with the Christian devil; but such an idea was alien to ancient Egyptian thought. Set's tumultuous power was necessary to defend, support, and balance the orderly cosmos that the Egyptians cherished-just as the cooling, restful, star-revealing night was necessary to balance the blazing, life-giving, merciless sun.
Keeping the universe running was a cooperative project. No deity could do without help. Ra had a crew of gods and goddesses to sail and steer his boat, to tow and moor it, and to get it past the dangerous sandbank of noon (when, as anyone who has been outdoors in Egypt at midday can testify, the sun seems to be stuck at its zenith). During the night, Ra traveled through the world of the dead, restoring life and light to the grateful souls in the darkness.
Neither could the gods do without human help. On earth, the king performed daily rituals that kept the sun boats moving and on course. Throughout Egypt, priests' hourly rites and the prayers of ordinary people helped assure that the sun would rise for another day.
Akhenaten's religion overturned this inclusive, self-balancing system. If the sun disc was the only deity, darkness was worthless at best, possibly evil. In Akhenaten's cosmos there was no nighttime sun. At night the Aten, the only god, was simply absent, and there was no one else to pray to-except the king, the Aten's son and chosen agent on earth. Akhenaten's theology put himself in a position of supreme importance, only slightly subordinate to his god.
Throughout most of human history, people accepted that every nation and ethnic group had its own religious tradition, worship- ping its own divinities in its own way. Believing that "my" religion was true did not mean believing that "yours" was false. Your gods might be distorted perceptions of mine, or they might be separate and independent beings. Either way, I had no reason to doubt their existence. I might look down on your revolting style of sacrifice or your silly methods of divination, and in time of war I might pray earnestly that my deities could beat your deities; but afterward I might think it prudent to worship some of yours along with mine.
Monotheism radically changed all that. If I believe that there is only one god, then all other deities are either demons or delusions. If my religion is true, all others must be false. With one divisive stroke, Akhenaten had created religious intolerance.
Akhenaten died after seventeen years of rule, his new city still unfinished. An ephemeral king named Smenkhkare either succeeded him for a short time or simply served as co-regent during his last years. Akhenaten's "Great Royal Wife" Nefertiti had borne six daughters but no sons. Smenkhkare may have been the son of a secondary wife, or-a more intriguing possibility-Smenkhkare may have been Nefertiti herself. It was not quite unheard-of for an Egyptian queen to rule as "king."
In any case, Smenkhkare's reign was brief. The next king crowned was a boy named Tutankhaten, no more than eight or nine years old-probably a son, nephew, or cousin of Akhenaten. Obviously he could only be the puppet for someone behind the throne.
The two most powerful individuals in Egypt were now the high official Ay and the army commander Horemheb. Both had served Akhenaten faithfully, but both must have found his policies harder and harder to swallow. And Egypt was ready to boil over. While the country struggled to cope with economic and social disruption, its empire was crumbling. Horemheb was forced to lead or send troops both north and south, to Syria and Kush. The expanding Hittite Empire threatened Egyptian dominance. Worst of all, a plague had broken out in Syria and spread to Egypt. It was clear to many people that the gods had abandoned Egypt. And why not, since the king had rejected them?
With no more than a few months' hesitation, the new boy-king's handlers began undoing what Akhenaten had done. They did not deny the Aten, but they restored the worship of the old deities. From now on, as in the good old days before Akhenaten, the Aten would be only one among an innumerable host of gods and goddesses. The temple subsidies that Akhenaten had abolished were reinstated and increased. New priests were appointed. The old festivals were celebrated again. Within a few years, the young king changed his name from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamen, substituting Amun for the Aten, and the royal court returned to Memphis, the ancient capital. Akhenaten's short-lived city was abandoned.
The new king's restoration work provides clues to the destruction Akhenaten had wreaked. Tutankhamen had new and larger statues made of Amun, the creator god Ptah, and other deities, which may imply that the former statues had been destroyed. He rebuilt quays along the river-perhaps the quays at which Amun embarked and landed on his Nile journeys, or the quays where pro- duce and supplies were unloaded at the great temples. And Tutankhamen appointed many new priests, who may have been needed to replace priests killed or exiled by Akhenaten.
The young king reigned for some nine years. When he died unexpectedly, Ay-now a very old man by ancient standards-took the throne. Ay survived another four years. At his death, Horemheb had himself crowned king as quickly as possible.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In the Name of Heavenby Mary Jane Engh Copyright © 2007 by Mary Jane Engh. Excerpted by permission.
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