Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (17 page)

The fact that, of all the royal tombs of the period, only the tombs of these two brothers survived intact surely cannot be coincidence. (Indeed, of all the royal tombs of ancient Egypt – from Giza, Saqqara and the Valley of the Kings – only a handful have ever been found as they were left.) Rather it would suggests that the steps taken to hide them from future generations may have been unique. We can understand why such a procedure may have been considered necessary for Tomb 55, but why Tutankhamun? – unless his burial was somehow linked with the condition of Tomb 55. Yet from the perspective of Egyptian magic, there is nothing unusual about Tutankhamun's tomb.
Indeed, it is the complete opposite of Tomb 55. Smenkhkare was left in a state of desecration, stripped of his belongings; Tutankhamun was left in state of splendour, surrounded by the most fabulous treasures. Is there perhaps some relevance here?

We shall return to the possible link between the two tombs later. Before we can proceed, however, we must examine the thinking behind the actions of these contemporary pharaohs. The entire mystery of Tomb 55 – and every subsequent mystery it leads on to – will ultimately remain a mystery unless we can get into the minds of those who lived during the Amarna period. We need to appreciate their reasoning, which seems almost exclusively driven by their reaction to Atenism – either pro or anti. The new god seems to have dominated the entire era. Exactly how, then, did this most unusual religion get started?

CHAPTER SEVEN

The One God

The most remarkable aspect of Akhenaten's revolution in religious thought is that it apparently springs into existence – seemingly from nowhere – the moment Akhenaten becomes king. Apart from passing allusions, there is only a handful of references predating Akhenaten's reign which seem to give the Aten any real significance:

• At the beginning of twelfth dynasty, around 2000
  BC
  , the deceased pharaoh Amenemhet I is referred to as having flown to heaven to unite with the Aten; as is the eighteenth-dynasty pharaoh Amonhotep I.
  
• Tuthmosis I, around 1525
  BC
  , chose as one of his tides, 'Horus-Re who comes from the Aten'.
  
• From the reign of Akhenaten's grandfather, Tuthmosis IV, around 1400
  BC
  , a large commemorative scarab bears an inscription in which the peoples under the dominion of the pharaoh are described as, 'his subjects under the sway of the Aten'. (Scarabs such as this, sacred to the god Khepri, represent a dung beetle rolling the sun across the sky.)
  
• Akhenaten's father, Amonhotep III, named his state barge
  Radiance of the Aten.
  

Although the Aten existed as a divinity before Akhenaten came to power, there was apparently no such thing as Atenism. No one, as far as we can tell, had ever considered worshipping it exclusively, or indeed giving it any importance in its own right: it was merely an aspect of Re-Herakhte. As solar deity, Re-Herakhte had many different roles and being the Aten – namely the sun disc itself – was just one of them. Consequently, Atenism is even stranger than it first appears: before Akhenaten's reign this new supreme deity was not really considered a god at all. In order to ascertain how this extraordinary situation came about, we must examine Akhenaten's earliest years as king, before his move to Amarna.

It was once thought that outside Amarna no references to Akhenaten had survived, as no monuments had been found bearing is name. Eventually, however, it was realized that the pharaoh had not always been known by the name Akhenaten. He was actually born with his father's name, Amonhotep ('Amun is Pleased'), and began his reign as Amonhotep IV, taking the name Akhenaten ('Living spirit of the Aten') in his fifth regnal year. Under the name Amonhotep IV, references to Akhenaten do appear in a few Theban tombs that managed to escape desecration. But they are few and far between, and it was only thanks to a remarkable quirk of fate that we have any real knowledge of Akhenaten's early years in Thebes. When Horemheb attempted to destroy all evidence of Akhenaten's existence by dismantling his Aten temple at Karnak, stone by stone, he used the masonry to repair the nearby temple of Amun-Re. Here reliefs from Akhenaten's temple were preserved unscathed for over 3,000 years.

Between the wars, two of the pylons (pyramid-shaped gate towers) at the Temple of Karnak were dismantled for structural repairs by the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Inside, the two directors, Maurice Pillet and Henri Chevriery, discovered over 40,000 sculptured blocks which Horemheb had used for filling when he erected the pylons shortly after his accession. Now called the Karnak Talatat, nearly all of them came from the Aten temple and many are sculptured in sunk relief showing scenes from Akhenaten's early years as king. Reconstruction of this gargantuan jigsaw puzzle seemed almost impossible, however, until 1965, when Ray Wingfield Smith, a retired US foreign service officer and amateur art historian, initiated the so-called Akhenaten Temple Project to undertake the task. The project took years: it even ran out of money and had to be taken over by a Canadian team in 1975, under the directorship of Professor Donald Redford of Toronto University. Aided by modern computer technology, Redford was eventually able to reassemble many of the ancient scenes.

From the Karnak Talatat, together with the reliefs from early tombs that managed to escape desecration, we learn that Akhenaten had seemingly proclaimed the Aten supreme deity the moment he became pharaoh, and immediately ordered a temple to be erected to his god. Called the
Gempaaten
('The Aten is Found in the Estate of the Aten'), it was built to the same unique plan as those that were to follow in Amarna, with its special feature – 'The Window of Appearance' – like a papal balcony were the pharaoh could appear before his followers.

From the very beginning Akhenaten sees himself as a prophet. His father's epithet, like all the preceding eighteenth-dynasty pharaohs, had been 'Ruler of Thebes', but Akhenaten described himself as 'Divine Ruler of Thebes'. To have himself depicted as an androgynous being was also his intention from
early in his reign. In 1925, while digging a drainage ditch at the Temple of Karnak, workmen uncovered a row of fallen statues bearing the name Amonhotep IV. The huge colossi, of which fragments of twenty-five were eventually found, were of a startling, almost grotesque character, unlike any statues previously found in Egypt. Now reassembled in the Cairo Museum, they are extraordinary, three-dimensional representations of Akhenaten, showing the same exaggerated physiology as depicted in the Amarna reliefs. These, however, date from before the move to Amarna, and had originally adorned the
Gempaaten
temple.

Although the Aten is supreme god and Akhenaten is its only prophet from the outset of the reign, there appears to have been no suppression of the old religion for the first four or five years. In fact, the high priest of Amun was still active in the year 4, overseeing the cutting of stone for a royal statue. However, by the year 5 Akhenaten proscribed the cult of Amun-Re, closed the god's temples, and made a complete break from the past by founding his new city on a virgin site not previously sacred to any god.

Throughout the first half of his reign, Akhenaten seems to have been struggling to find a conventional Egyptian context with which to convey his new religious concept. In the Old Kingdom the Aten had been seen as the visible manifestation of Re, and when Re became assimilated with Horus as Re-Herakhte by the Middle Kingdom, the Aten became an aspect of this composite deity. It was, in fact, as Re-Herakhte that the Aten was first represented at Thebes: a falcon-headed man wearing a solar disc, the
uraeus
and the
Atef
crown (the crown of Osiris). The full title by which Akhenaten refers to his god in his early regnal years is: 'Re-Herakhte, who rejoices in the horizon in his aspect of the light which is in the sun-disc'.

However, Akhenaten clearly does not see his god as Re-Herakhte, but something which had previously been considered an aspect of Re-Herakhte. Namely, 'the light which is in the sun-disc' – in other words, sunlight. In an attempt to distinguish his deity from any previous god, however, Akhenaten had its name contained in a double cartouche. All the same, it appears that his subjects still found it difficult to grasp the idea that the Aten was something other than Re-Herakhte. On the Boundary Stelae proclamations of the year 5 at Amarna, we find Akhenaten desperately, and garrulously, attempting to explain his god to his people:

May the good god live who delights in truth, lord of heaven and lord of earth, the Aten, the living, the great, illuminating the two lands. May the father live, divine and royal, Re-Herakhte, rejoicing in the horizon in his aspect of the light which is in the sun-disc, who lives for ever and ever, the Aten, the great, who is jubilee within the temple of the Aten in Akhetaten.

Here we learn of a very different deity from either Re-Herakhte or the Aten, as they had previously been perceived. Indeed, it is unlike any Egyptian god: an all powerful, heavenly father who demands that his children live in 'truth'. Precisely what this reference to truth implies is hard to say. One can only assume that Akhenaten's followers were encouraged to behave candidly and live an honest life. The word
Mat,
'Truth', appears again and again at Amarna, and the phrase, 'living in truth', seems almost to have been a motto of the new religion.

The same struggle to convey his religious thought is also evident on the Boundary Stelae, when Akhenaten describes his personal relationship with the Aten:

And may the Horus [the king] live, strong bull beloved of the Aten; he of the two ladies, great of kingship in Akhetaten; Horus of gold, upholding the name of the Aten; the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, living in truth, lord of the two lands, god like the forms of Re, the only one of Re; the son of Re, living in truth, lord of crowns, Akhenaten, great in his duration, living for ever and always. The good god, unique one of Re, whose beauty the Aten created, truly excellent in mind to his maker, contenting him with what his spirit desires, doing service to him who begot him, administering the land for him who put him upon his throne, provisioning his eternal home with very many things, upholding the Aten and magnifying his name, causing the earth to belong to its maker. . . .

Here it is Horus with whom Akhenaten associates himself. He has gone back to the gods of a much younger Egypt, before the cult of Amun-Re, when Re was the supreme deity in his own right and the pharaoh was seen as Horus, Re's incarnation on earth. It is quite evident from everything we know about Atenism that Akhenaten did not personally regard Re as his god or himself as Horus. Indeed, within a few years he proscribed all reference to Re, Horus or any other god. It would appear, therefore, that Akhenaten is appealing to the religious sympathies of the ancient cult of Re. It still survived in northern Egypt, principally at Heliopolis, and it may have been from here that many of Akhenaten's devotees originated.

During the Old Kingdom the myth developed that Re once ruled Egypt personally but, wearied by the affairs of mankind, retired to the heavens, leaving his son the pharaoh to rule in his stead. This notion had been initiated and nurtured by the priesthood in Heliopolis, who had remained the primary
influence in Egyptian religious affairs until the conquest of northern Egypt by the Hyksos at the end of the Middle Kingdom. During the Hyksos period, though, the cult of the Theban god Amun, in unoccupied southern Egypt, rose to prominence.

When he expelled the Hyksos, the first New Kingdom pharaoh Amosis, thinking himself especially favoured by the god of Thebes, heaped vast wealth upon the Temple at Karnak and appointed Amun priests as his four chief prophets – the most important religious officials. The institution of the Chief Wife began at this time too, when Amosis married Ahmose-Nefertari, the chief priestess of Amun, in the belief that Amun would thereafter incarnate in him. Of course, after one and a half thousand years of existence, the Heliopolis Re cult had not died out, so to appease them and unify the country, Re had been assimilated with Amun. However, an independent cult of Re continued to exist at Heliopolis, no doubt resenting the wealth and power of the Amun priests in Thebes. It was to them that Akhenaten seems to have been appealing. Indeed, he seems actually to have been influenced by the cult of Re, as there are a number of uniquely Heliopolitan traits in Atenism:

• The Aten temple at Karnak was built in the
  ben-ben
  style (a truncated pyramid on a square base), which had been unique to the solar temples at Heliopolis.
  
• The chief priest of the Aten, Meryre, was given same title as the high priest of Heliopolis – 'Greatest of Seers'.
  
• Akhenaten ordered that the Mnevis bull, the sacred animal of Heliopolis, should be moved to Amarna so that its worship could continue there.
  

It seems very likely, therfore, that Akhenaten's ideas were formulated in Heliopolis before he became king. However, as we have seen, it is not the Heliopolitan god Re that he is exalting. Akhenaten's god – despite all the early references to Horus, Re and Re-Herakhte – is something so different from any former Egyptian deity that Akhenaten invented a new symbol to represent it: the sun disc from which shone rays holding the glyph for life, the
ankh.
The sun had previously been represented by a winged disc, but from the very begining of Akhenaten's reign, the Aten is represented as the rayed disc. A scene in the Theban tomb of the steward and king's cupbearer, Parennefer, for instance (which must date from the first regnal years, as the king and queen are unaccompanied by children), shows the royal couple standing below this new symbol.

Akhenaten seems to have abandoned his attempt to fit his god into an orthodox context by his ninth year, when .he prohibited any further association of his god with Re-Herakhte. Moreover, he ordered the removal of the plural form of the word 'god' from all inscriptions. Akhenaten's god was the
only
god, as the pharaoh had spent years trying to convey. Presumably his belief in a 'good god' – as he describes both himself and the Aten – had made him reluctant to resort to such coercion previously.

One of the chief difficulties Akhenaten must have encountered in expounding his religion is that a nation used to visible gods – in the form of idols – could not grasp the idea of an invisible god: Akhenaten forbade the making of any image of his god. If the Aten had simply been the sun disc, as it had previously been, and Atenism had merely been sun worship – as the first visitors to Amarna had thought – then it would have been a very simple concept to convey. Akhenaten could have
continued to use the winged disc symbol to represent his god. However, he chose a glyph that represented sun
light
, just as he had initially chosen the sunlight aspect of Re-Herakhte to represent his god. It seems clear that sunshine – which brings warmth, light and life, yet cannot be seen in its own right – was the nearest Akhenaten could come to comprehending and conveying the idea of an invisible, omnipresent, all-providing god. The Aten – a word that simply means 'sun disc' – does not actually, therefore, appear to be the god's name, rather the nearest written word that previously existed for life-giving sunlight. In conclusion, Akhenaten seems to have been inspired by the idea of a universal god – something which was impossible to fit into an established Egyptian context. Accordingly, this would seem to imply that the thinking behind Atenism was a foreign concept.

There are three essential aspects of Akhenaten's god which sets it apart from all other Egyptian deities: