Amarna Period - Egyptian-Hittite Diplomacy and Akhenaten's Revolution
Akhenaten came to the throne around 1353 BC as Amenhotep IV and attempted the only religious revolution in Egyptian history. Within five years he had changed his name, abandoned Thebes, and founded a new capital on virgin ground in Middle Egypt — Akhetaten, the horizon of the Aten, at the site now called Amarna — on land he swore he would never leave. The doctrine was radical. The Aten was the visible disc of the sun rather than a god with a body and a myth, and it was proclaimed the sole god; the temples of Amun and the other deities were closed, their revenues seized, their priesthoods dispersed, and their names chiselled from monuments, including the plural word for gods. Access to the Aten ran through the royal family alone, which made the theology a political instrument. The art changed with it. The rigid conventions of Egyptian representation gave way to elongated skulls, heavy hips, drooping bellies and sagging faces, and to domestic scenes of the king and Nefertiti with their daughters on their laps under the sun's rays ending in hands. The Amarna Letters, a diplomatic archive found at the site in 1887, show Levantine vassals writing repeatedly for help that did not come. He died around 1336 BC. The court returned to Thebes within a few years, the boy king changed his name from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamun, and the temples reopened. Later king lists omit him entirely, which is why the period was recovered only by excavation. Tutankhamun's tomb survived intact because a later king's workmen buried its entrance under their own rubble.
- Year: 1353 BCE
- Category: Political
