AKHENATON AND THE EGYPTOLOGISTS

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AKHENATON AND THE EGYPTOLOGISTS

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Pharaohs of the Sun The Religious Controversy

• Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and the boy pharaoh
  Tutankhamunperhaps Akhenaten's son born to a
  secondary wifehave 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.  

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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 godan all-powerful
  creator who manifested himself in the sunlight.
  But he perceived himself and Nefertiti as
  extensions of that godalso deserving of worship.
  

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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."  

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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 fathers reforms?
  During the latter part of Amenhotep IIIs 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.
•  

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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.

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EGYPTS 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.
  

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EGYPTS GOLDEN AGE OF ART

•  Krauss and others debate whether Nefertiti
  actually looked like this bustsome 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
  statuestroubling and mesmerizingof 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.  

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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. 

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ART THE LEGACY

• For the first time, artists routinely portrayed
  the pharaoh in informal situationsbeing
  affectionate with Nefertiti or playing with his
  children. They also painted scenes of life and
  naturewheat 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.!!!

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

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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.!!!

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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 IVs persecution
  by the priests of Amun, and his mother, Queen
  Tiyes 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)

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AKHENATONSUMMARY

• 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.

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AKHENATONSUMMARY

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Sources

• Definition of an Egyptologist from Wikipedia,
  the free encyclopedia.
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten
• http//www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeol
  ogy/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/amarnaperi
  od.htm
• http//www.exn.ca/egypt/story.asp?stRulers