AKHENATON AND THE EGYPTOLOGISTS

1. AKHENATON AND THE EGYPTOLOGISTS ^^^

2. What is an Egyptologist? “An Egyptologist is any archaeologist, historian, linguist, or art historian who specializes in Egyptology, the scientific study of Ancient Egypt and its antiquities. Demotists are Egyptologists who specialize in the study of the Demotic language and field of Demotic Studies. A practitioner of the disciplined study of Ancient Egypt and Egyptian antiquities is an "Egyptologist", the field of Egyptology is not exclusive to such practitioners.” **

3. Opinions of EgyptologistsOn Akhenaton and Religion Opinions of Akhenaton vary widely. He has been referred to as a heretic, a madman, the first monotheist, the source for the Oedipus legend and even Moses. It is not difficult to find a point of view that you can support. Akhenaten has been called "the first individual in history", as well as the first monotheist, first scientist, and first romantic. “As early as 1899 Flinders Petrie declared that,“If this were a new religion, invented to satisfy our modern scientific conceptions, we could not find a flaw in the correctness of this view of the energy of the solar system. How much Akhenaten understood, we cannot say, but he certainly bounded forward in his views and symbolism to a position which we cannot logically improve upon at the present day. Not a rag of superstition or of falsity can be found clinging to this new worship evolved out of the old Aton of Heliopolis, the sole Lord of the universe”.”***

4. Opinions of EgyptologistsOn Akhenaton and Religion There are other points of view: “There is, of course, no evidence linking the cult of Aten to today's monotheistic beliefs, and no archaeological evidence of Hebrew tribes appears until two centuries after the pharaoh's death. Nor do scholars agree on what accounted for Akhenaton's beliefs. "As a result," says Egyptologist Betsy Bryan at Johns Hopkins University, "people tend to allow their fantasies to run wild.“****

5. Pharaohs of the Sun The Religious Controversy “Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun—perhaps Akhenaten's son born to a secondary wife—have been called the Pharaohs of the Sun. Their reign was brief. Akhenaten ruled just 17 years, and within a few years after his death in 1336 B.C., the old orthodoxy was restored. Akhenaten's enemies soon smashed his statues, dismantled his temples, and set out to expunge all memory of him and Nefertiti from Egypt's historical record.” “But the controversy the couple created lives on. Egyptologists still struggle to piece together the story of this renegade pair. Swept up in religious passion, they brought the vast and powerful Egyptian empire to the brink of collapse.”***** 

6. Pharaohs of the Sun The Religious Controversy “Barry Kemp, an archaeologist at Cambridge University, is even more pessimistic: "The minute you begin to write about those people you begin to write fiction.“ "You could compare him to a cult leader," says Rita Freed, an Egyptologist from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Experts continue to argue whether he was the world's first monotheist. He insisted on one supreme god—an all-powerful creator who manifested himself in the sunlight. But he perceived himself and Nefertiti as extensions of that god—also deserving of worship. “*****

7. Pharaohs of the SunThe Religious Controversy His was a strange new vision," says Robert Vergnieux of the University of Bordeaux in France. "Since the Egyptians' god was now the sunlight, they didn't need statues in dark inner sanctums. So they built temples without roofs and performed their rituals directly under the sun." "For a short time the Egyptians believed the sun god had come back to Earth in the form of the royal family," says Ray Johnson. "There was a collective excitement that becomes tangible in the art and architecture. The whole country was in jubilee. It's one of the most astonishing periods in world history."

8. Pharaohs of the Sun The Religious Controversy Did he really have popular support? Not everyone agrees. From Rolf Krauss, "He was a horrible tyrant who happened to have very good taste in art," says Krauss. Was he trying to continue his father’s reforms? During the latter part of Amenhotep III’s reign, the solar deities became increasingly important. But it was Akhenaton who completed the transformation of the solar god into not only the most important deity, but the only deity.

9. Pharaohs of the Sun The Religious Controversy In fact, Erik Hornung tells us in his Conceptions of God in ancient Egypt that the real revolution involved:  "...the implied transformation of thought patterns, in which all the traditional forms were bathed in the glare of a new light which the Egyptians came to find intolerable. Beginning with the change in the king's birth name, from which the name of the (state god) Amun was removed, there was a step-by-step process of elimination. Amun was replaced by Aten, mythical statement by rational statement, many-valued logic by two-valued logic, the gods by God. All this was accomplished according to a well-conceived plan.“^^^^

10. EGYPT”S GOLDEN AGE OF ART "You're never going to find two Egyptologists who agree on this period," said Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist. "See, she is as beautiful as ever," says Rolf Krauss, a curator, as we enter a room dedicated to a painted bust of Nefertiti recognizable the world over. Spotlights in the darkened room set the queen's long, graceful neck, flawlessly symmetrical face, and tall blue crown aglow.*****

11. EGYPT”S GOLDEN AGE OF ART “Krauss and others debate whether Nefertiti actually looked like this bust—some think that it served mainly as a model for artists making other statues of the queen. But Nefertiti seldom looks the same in any of the numerous portraits of her. Krauss shows me one statue of her as an older woman. The face is lined, and the breasts sag. "We call this the 'tired Nefertiti,' " he says. In the Egyptian Museum in Cairo are colossal statues—troubling and mesmerizing—of Akhenaten. His face is elongated and angular with a long chin. His eyes are mystical and brooding. His lips are huge and fleshy. Although he wears a pharaoh's headdress and holds the traditional symbols of kingship, the crook and flail, across his chest, the chest is spindly, and the torso flows into a voluptuous belly and enormous feminine hips.  ”*****

12. ART: THE LEGACY “Because of the strangeness of these and so many other images of Akhenaten, scholars speculated for decades that the pharaoh had a deforming disease. But now many believe that the seeming bisexuality of the colossi might be rooted in Akhenaten's new religion, for Aten had both male and female aspects. They also point out that in the early years of his reign, when Akhenaten was a young radical fighting an established religion, he had reasons for the exaggeration. He wanted to break down more than a thousand years of artistic tradition, so he instructed his artists to portray the world as it really was. Instead of the standard static depictions of physically perfect pharaohs smiting enemies or making offerings to the gods, artists gave the new king a much more realistic appearance. "Akhenaten probably didn't have the greatest physique by American standards," says James Allen, a specialist on the period at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. "He had the easy life in the palace.“*****

13. ART: THE LEGACY “For the first time, artists routinely portrayed the pharaoh in informal situations—being affectionate with Nefertiti or playing with his children. They also painted scenes of life and nature—wheat rippling in the wind, farmers plowing, birds taking flight. In truth, Akhenaten unleashed a creative furor that gave rise to perhaps the finest era of Egyptian art. “ ***** “The Wilbour Plaque (Pl. I) is named for the American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833-1896), who acquired it in 1881. As a scholar, Wilbour's greatest passion was for ancient inscriptions, although he also collected uninscribed objects, of which this plaque is the most famous. A small fragment of limestone, the plaque bears two images in the characteristically Egyptian sculptural technique of stink relief, in which the figures are carved into the ground rather than raised above it. At the left is a king wearing the baglike headdress called a khat with the protective uraeus cobra on his brow. At the right, on a slightly smaller scale, is a queen wearing a cap crown also adorned with a uraeus.”!!!

14. Image: House Altar-Akhenaten Nefertiti And Three Of Their Daughters.pngFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

15. ART: THE LEGACY “In the early years of Akhenaten's reign an angular and manneristic style developed , whereby Akhenaten and Nefertiti were depicted as virtually identical. Both were shown with receding foreheads, lined and haggard faces, long noses, large lips, and slanting eyes. Both had hollow cheeks, heavy jaws with drooping chins, long and thin necks, and pronounced collarbones. However, during the Amarna Period, the style of royal imagery became more curvilinear, organic, and sensuous, and Nefertiti was no longer shown as a near carbon copy of Akhenaten. The Wilbour Plaque is a splendid example of the late Amarna style.”!!!

16. ART: THE LEGACY “Nevertheless, beginning with Wilbour's observations and the first publication of the plaque in 1927, the general consensus has been that its subjects are Akhenaten and Nefertiti - an opinion maintained in the most recent publication of the plaque. The earlier and more exaggerated images of Akhenaten have been considered as perhaps representing his actual appearance to some extent, but at the same time being "deliberately unrealistic" and not, as is often claimed, a reflection of a pathological condition. On the contrary, the earlier images have been considered to reflect a new concept of the kingship and, given the close resemblance of Nefertiti to Akhenaten, the queen ship as well, the implication being that the queen, like the king, had a close relationship to the god.”!!!

17. Akhenaton and Moses An even more thought provoking idea is from Sigmund Freud. He was fascinated by Egypt and Akhenaton. He wrote a book titled “MOSES AND MONOTHEISM “which argued the idea that Moses was at the court of Akhenaton, and not only a follower, but an Egyptian priest of the Aten religion. Freud also believed that Akhenaton was the source for the Oedipus complex. This idea of a connection between Akhenaton and Moses was picked up by Ahmed Osman, a historian, lecturer, researcher and author. He is a British Egyptologist, born in Cairo believes that Akhenaton is the Biblical Moses. His concludes that the Moses in the Bulrushes story from the Bible is really about Amenhotep IV’s persecution by the priests of Amun, and his mother, Queen Tiye’s efforts to protect him. His four published books about Egypt are: Stranger in the Valley of the Kings (1987) - Moses: Pharaoh of Egypt (1990) - The House of the Messiah (1992) - Out of Egypt (1998) +++

18. AKHENATON:SUMMARY During the years of Akhenaton, art developed into a naturalistic style. Up to this time, the pharaoh and his queen were portrayed as the perfection of form. The ancient polytheistic religion, worshipped through the priests in dark temples of Egypt, dissolved into sun light, the all powerful creator. Whether you perceive Akhenaton as a mystic with a vision, or a ruler with a political agenda, there is no doubt that his influence continues today in both religion and art.

19. AKHENATON:SUMMARY

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21. Sources **Definition of an Egyptologist from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. ***http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten ****http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/rebelliousson-200711.html *****From Pharaohs of the Sun, National Geographic April 2001, article by Rick Gore. +++ http://www.ahmedosman.com !!! The Wilbour Plaque at the Brooklyn Museum MAGAZINE ANTIQUES,  Jan, 1997  by Richard A. Fazzini ^^^^http://touregypt.net/featurestories/amarnaperiod.htm ^^^http://www.exn.ca/egypt/story.asp?st=Rulers