Akhenaten and Egyptian Monotheism

what we're doing or at least gonna get well depending on how bad far back and Lander goes more ancient than we normally go we're going to talk about Akhenaten and Egyptian monotheism and we probably need to put monotheism in quote square quotes here for this because although this is a topic that has often been talked about going all the way back to when Akhenaten was kind of rediscovered yen the sort of modern age lots and lots of has been written on this topic and in some ways Akhenaten was rediscovered or found in the West at sort of the same kind of unfortunate time that people kind of started encountering Zoroaster and in both cases when we did our Zoroaster and szura Zoroastrianism one zero through strep lecture we kind of saw how zuo a stir and Zarathustra was essentially like a palimpsest for or you know it's a what do we mean a Rorschach test for how people would more or less put anything that they wanted to on that particular figure and so Nietzsche of course has his own kind of philosophy book that is inspired by the idea of Sara through strid thus spake Zarathustra that has very little to do with the actual history of the figure the founder of Zoroastrianism likewise you know you're in trouble when one of the early books on Akhenaten is written by Freud not really known for you know the historical part is more reading him what he wants into the topic I would say than anyway we're at so I was gonna start that when when let's say a hundred years ago when people were in the West when post enlightenment thinkers you know we're busily thinking about religion they were thinking about it as a as a sequence of progress where essentially people had stepping stones from the more primitive to the more enlightened where you're starting with let's say a bay essentially dynamism where you understand that there is imminent power maybe in things and you are worried about lightning having power and all this kind of a magic to next a sense of animism where maybe primitive people's are sensing that that there is sort of a force within let's say the animal and you might take on the power of the wolf in order to accomplish that something like that shamanism that sort of thing to paganism where these forces then become more anthropomorphize more embodied so now we are sort of thinking well how does lightning actually get to you well maybe somebody has to throw it how does anything you know particularly happen how does wind go it has to be blown in in that sense we we kind of naturally answer amorphize things you maybe think of your car as a little person with a little eyes and a face we think of to this day I think we think of evolution as a force that is anthropomorphised and has a plan because we always think that evolution is planning to let's say it's a gave bird's wings in order for them to fly as opposed to the way natural selection actually works so I think it's a natural thing to have anthropomorphic forces like that too then though monotheism which was essentially viewed as the eventual and necessary evolution and progress and then to the place where all the kind of people these Enlightenment thinkers were we're looking at this and the stepping stone that they had gotten to which is to say enlightened secularism so now they have put behind themselves all of these sort of religious things which yeah exactly what they believed that they had so this is there this is their bias and their blinders let's say and so what they I'm gonna suggest that when they one of the ways that there's viewing this monotheism is through which is the thing that they're most familiar with this is what they're emerging out of these are people who are coming out of essentially the judeo-christian West and specifically they're thinking about klaris ism and they're thinking about churches the church the Catholic Church or a Christian Church and then more MORE and when it breaks off into Protestantism the different Protestant denominations state churches and but to even get back to anything else or outside of the West so when they sailing around in ships and they encounter China they hard-pressed to decide if China is even has it religion is China it's sometimes now on modern maps China is can be alternately labeled all atheist or Chinese folk religion whatever that is or Confucianism or Confucianism / Buddhism's last whatever and so anyway it was something that doesn't easily fit into the boxes that were available for people who are thinking of Christianity and established churches that are doing a very particular thing and not doing other things so Christianity for example in general doesn't involve getting in a group in a field together and doing exercises in public whereas that may well be a central religious practice in parts of China right okay so their monotheism itself I think when it is differentiating itself from earlier religions which ended up being lumped together and called paganism monotheism created a bunch of polemics to explain why we monotheists are right and why you pagans are all really stupid and so these polemics though I'm gonna argue actually quite false and I've told before a story of from the book of Daniel of the polemic that is a that exists there where Daniel II essentially is talking - it's actually in the it's actually in the apocryphal part of the Book of Daniel but anyway where Daniel is essentially talking to Nebuchadnezzar Nebuchadnezzar has this wonderful idol name Bell temple where they feed Bell every night this giant feast and all of this wine and everything like that and every night they close the doors with Bell and all wine and all the food in the morning they wake up and it's all gone and so Daniel then who thinks that you know the booth is indicating that the Bell is obviously just an idle is able to prove that that it's the priests of Bell that are eating all the food and getting doing all the drinking and so when that happens that you're here anyway they're able to Nebuchadnezzar realizes he's tricked and so Daniels a lot to smash the idol and actually execute all the priests and their families so happy story for the monotheists but there's another story that I that I like that is actually referenced in the Quran but it's actually comes initially from Jewish Midrash on the on Genesis which is essentially to say an expansion of the Genesis story and it's about Abraham and a plumbing against idols that Abraham is encountering so Tara who is Abraham's father is an idol manufacturer who once went away and left Abraham in charge of the store a man walked in and wished to buy an idol Abraham asked how old he was and the man responded fifty years old Abraham says you're fifty years old and would worship a day-old statue at this point the man left a shame so the statues just a day old and he's gonna you're gonna actually give it your worship later a woman walked into the store and wanted to make an offering to the idols so Abraham took a stick and smashed the idols all the little idols and put the stick in the hand of the largest idol when Terra returned he asked Abraham what happened all the idols Abraham told him that a woman came to make an offering to the idols the idols argued about which of them should eat the offering first then the largest Idol took the stick and smashed all the other idols Terah respondents saying by saying that there are only you know there are only statues and they have no knowledge the statues couldn't have possibly you know no big statue could actually smash all the other statues whereupon Abraham responded by saying that you deny their knowledge yet you worship them so at this point Terah his father is exasperated and so he takes them to Nimrod so Nimrod I remember as the mighty hunter in in Genesis so he that story gets expanded in Midrash is so that he is essentially the king of kind of proto Babylon and he's the guy who built the Tower of Babel and they expanded story the M rod proclaims Abraham and proclaims to Abraham that we should worship fire Abraham responds well water puts out fire so obviously waters more powerful Nimrod then declares that then we should worship water abraham responds that clouds hold water so nimrod declares well let's worship clouds then the abraham responds wind pushes clouds nimrod declares them we should worship wind and abraham responds that people can withstand wind nimrod becomes angry with abraham and declares that abraham should be cast in the fire and if Abraham is correct ie if there's a real God then God will save him and then because it's literature Abraham is cast into the fire and he's saved by God so works out very very well so what I argue here though is in this in this polemic you know where we have this sense that pagans essentially are all worshipping idols and that they understand or they think that the idols are actually alive and are eating things and this kind of a thing in an actual physical animated sense or for example one of the things that we I think we're also very quite guilty of when we're thinking about what we think of as pagan religion so like the religion of ancient Greece in Rome we really concentrate on mythology because the mythology for us is related to the way we think of let's say our the religions that we're more familiar with so when we focus on religions that are focused on scripture and text and so we think that the mythology you know has that same place or as Canada in that same kind of sense but this isn't the same way the religion acted at all and we tend to do therefore be quite when we're dismissive we think how can you have a religion like we're like this Zeus is sleeping with all these women there's nothing going on here that's admirable or Noble or anything like that that's not the core focus of of the religion so it's it's quite different so one of the things I just want us to be thinking of as we are kind of looking at this and trying to get back to very early times into really quite ancient times is we have to be kind of thinking of the blinders that we are looking at when we are thinking of just the stuff that's most familiar to us and then at Elizabeth alluded to earlier the blinders then also that these enlightened secularists had which I've argued in a couple places anyway is that they're so very focused on the immediate religion that they were thinking of which is and the control let's say that state religions and that clerics had the control that Catholic clerics had over Europe's university system and things like that that they really lost track of all the different other ways that religion could function and does function outside of the contained little place that the circle that was drawn around it in the modern West where we say inside here is religion everything else outside in our lives has nothing to do with religion so as we've seen when we did our lecture on Aristophanes the clouds his comedy where he is making writing a play and making fun of Socrates and the other philosophers this is a religious festival the experience that they're going to in having a comedic play is religion you know this is still something that we've seen how we saw how comedy and how plays and drama you know we've inherited it down and it has now generally gotten into the zone that we call secular but in some senses the fact that you're enacting that that way is exactly the same experience and why it was meaningful religiously in antiquity and so for a lot of the things that we're gonna see Akhenaten doing you know as he is reforming or changing the religion of Egypt that he has inherited for us to kind of an impose our sort of modern sensibilities and say oh this is this is this is the thing that we're familiar with these are kind of our modern sensibilities that's something that definitely happened for last couple hundred years or last hundred years or so but it has led to I can tell from the scope of all of the many many books and everything like that that and videos and everything else on this topic has led to all kinds of crazy dead ends and weird weird theories and stuff like that so anyway so we'll try anyway we'll try to avoid those things tonight okay this is unseeable but anyway you can just show you it a little bit this is essentially going back from the year one Common Era all the way back to 3,000 before the Common Era so we don't normally get so far back but when you're in Egypt Egypt really goes far back as well so when we're doing things like Mesopotamia Sumeria and so let us show in this sort of timeline you know we're pretty familiar with you know once we get to Alexander the ptolemies in Rome we talk about that kind of thing a lot but then it was going back there's the old middle and new kingdoms of Egypt and so this part that we're gonna be looking at is here in the middle of the new kingdom and the neat thing about this when I we started looking at it the particular yura even though we're talking about like oh there's three thousand years of history the particular era that we're kind of talking about is just really chock-full of almost all of the big superstars that we're quite familiar with I think if you know kind of the greatest hits of ancient Egypt and so for example we'll talk about Hot Chip soot which is to say the famous female pharaoh akhenaten who's the topic for tonight his son King Tut to thank Amun and then obviously Nefertiti and then also very quickly after that his ramses ii ii is also you know the Ozymandias of poetry and also often they for example the pharaoh that and one of the greatest pharaohs anyway but the pharaoh that people would like to line up with for example the exodus so if you like me watch the 10 commandments a bazillion times when you were a little kid you just think of him as being yul brenner but anyway all of that is in this new Kingdom period and that's what we're gonna cover now which is let's say way past you know when you know here a thousand years before that when they're making the pyramids right and so already those are so ancient that the people hardly know you know they don't it's not part of what their current temporary culture okay so the New Kingdom so one of the other things that is happening right at the beginning of the period that we're looking at is there was this period of the foreign rule over Lower Egypt and some will just mention here in this map we are very oriented these days with our maps so that North is always up but in the past obviously that was not the case and in fact I've mentioned before we use the word oriented because that you know it means you need to put the map facing east but nowadays of course we actually face it in the face the map north Elizabeth yeah I think of Upper and Lower Canada oh yeah it's the upper st. Lawrence and the lower st. Lawrence and this is the upper and lower yeah it's the same thing so Upper and Lower Canada so this is Upper Canada because we're up River from Lower Canada Quebec which is north of us so it's not about the map and that's also true for Germany so upper Germany is up the Rhine you know up next to Switzerland from lower germany which is now closer to the the North Sea the Baltic Sea yeah I was just going to say that the Upper and Lower Egypt is based on the flow of the Nile itself so Lori Egypt is because the Nile flows from south to north and that's why you have Lower Egypt in the north because that's the way the Nile is flowing so Lower Egypt is in the north but Nile flows from south that's right because it's all the water is coming from here yeah so then that's like no rain at all and so the rip waters of the Nile is all going that way it's up to the down right and so that's confusing for all of us now because we all put map and maps with north at the top but that's the way it was okay so anyway there is this period intermediate period right before the New Kingdom where this section Lower Egypt which is to say the Delta the part where the river spreads out and has a big Delta where that and is under the control of foreigners who are called in Greek the Hyksos it's more or less means the foreign rulers and and then in the south by nubian dynasty and so there is a local dynasty based in Thebes and there's actually some other local rulers having their own kind of little Egypt little Egyptian dynasties these guys though successfully expel the foreigners around fifteen hundred and thirty before the Common Era and established a new kingdom and then once they do that they've adopted some good new military equipment like chariots and stuff and so then they expand that out - kind of like the edges of wherever the Egyptian Empire ever gets that it's kind of greatest extent so they go into Canaan and Syria and Phoenicia essentially this area of the western Levant where there's all of these Canaanite Phoenician Syrian cities states that they essentially over aw and I make it to vassals and then from there then they also get into the Pharaohs then get into contact with some of these other great rulers the rulers of Babylonia and nittany which they strike up actually correspondences with and we end up having for our particular time period a bunch of the letters which is one of the crazy lucky coincidences essentially in the period that we're gonna be talking about here for Akhenaten in his City they have been getting all of these correspondences where the people over here they all right on these clay tablets and they are making all the community inform and everything like that which the Egyptians are like what is wrong with you people and so they at some point rather the Egyptians are copying that all over onto papyrus which is where we get our word paper but it's actually made in this case out of the reeds you know that our time together and so the Egyptians are switching them over to scrolls and papyrus which they're keeping and essentially the Royal archives which had been lost papyrus lasts a whole long time but that would be a really long time if we were to actually have this this stuff but it's but the clay you know survived and so essentially they threw that all the way and so we have all these letters from these foreign kings and the foreign kings are pretty much all writing to pharaoh saying you promised to give me gold you know i you were gonna give me this gold statue where's more gold send me all the gold you can send because the egyptians have all this gold so they're just fabulously wealthy and they're corresponding with the other kings pharaoh often is asking sent hot chicks essentially so not women that's what we need for the for our hair i'm here but down here yeah from Nubia yeah so anyway they've now expanded and had that Empire and they've started that communication actually later on we get some of the communication from the other side too because the Hittites have saved their side of the correspondence too and there's some very interesting correspondence from that side okay so because the native Egyptian dynasty had been headquartered is essentially at Thebes thieves then becomes now the capital of a now newly unified Egypt the New Kingdom of Egypt and so the Pharaohs of the 18th dynasty as it's called in the King lists attribute a lot of their successes militarily in order to in terms of destroying the different invaders and also having victories outside of the two lands outside of lower and upper egypt to the Theban god a moon and they often will then name sons you know with their main named in his honor so for example a bunch of the kings are named Amenhotep and that means is satisfied and so we have a lot of those kind of names where you have the gods name and it's like for example in when we have names like Michael and Gabriel and Raphael those all have the name L in the end which is like Allah or Elohim or L you know Hebrew or Arabic for God there's other ones that are like Jehoshaphat you know which is huh Jonathan yeah John so where those kind of things in other words have different names of gods in them right anyway so these have the names of the different Egyptian gods and so the high priests of Amun at Thebes have become more and more powerful in terms of court officials at this time and a moon is kind of increasingly at this time becoming sort of like the lead god of a an Egyptian Kingdom or Pantheon as the different pharaohs are making this alliance with amo in hand with moons priests in Thebes so this is a big temple complex in Thebes in Luxor now is now called Karnak just a little bit north of Thebes I don't know how tall they're very tall you can tell right so these ones are these ones are composite right so these ones are brick so you can see that like this oh they're stacking them up right but the ones that the thing that is amazing for anything when they're talking about that size is when they are getting the obelisks to stand up right and so and those because those are all one piece and their enormous lis heavy stones and so it's a big engineering feat for them to be able to do it okay so there's a lot of different we already had a big heart to read timeline but here's a big hard to read a family chart but essentially we'll kind of look at it as the people who were the local deines in Thebes they then conquer and kick out the Hyksos and they make essentially the Egyptian Empire then the dynasty changes to the 18th dynasty right so the 17th dynasty and now the 18th dynasty according to the King list and so at the beginning of this these are especially warrior Kings and so I mentioned now most the first who defeats the Hyksos by conquers their conquering their capital which have been in lower egypt and the delta the capital avarice and then under getting down now to his grandson here we're not grant maybe grandson we're not sure Ted most of the first expanded the Empire then to that great extent that I showed on the map subjugating much of Nubia in Syria so anyway then that's gonna lead to from took Melissa to HAP shet suit that's quite one of our famous figures that we probably heard of so queen hatshepsut is the primary wife by his primary wife Titmouse the first had a daughter who married her half-brother took most of the second who is the son of tete most of the first by a lesser wife and so in that some sense he has a their half siblings but in some sense the the male here took most of the second has a somewhat lesser status because he's not the son of the great wife of the Queen it's from a lesser wife concubine or consort so took Moses seconds reign is uneventful and it's probably dominated by this very strong-willed wife that he had and he dies leaving a two-year-old son by one of his lesser wives to end this on his name took most of the third and so have sets that had not had any sons and so in this sense so she is the stepmother / aunt of the the new king that she is essentially would be the region for but instead of just being essentially content to be regent in this case she assumes the throne herself as a co Pharaoh so she's also Pharaoh female pharaoh co-ruler with her infant nephew stepson Ted most of the third and in doing that she is often portrayed with iconography that is associated with male pharaohs and so this is a one of the classes of her yeah shaking and you can see then it also has likely essentially this symbolic beard so there wasn't the Egyptians actually kings pharaohs actually grew beards like that but they you know would put those to put them on yeah she's also the first one to actually use the term Pharaoh which means great house / ah and that's where it comes from and also she's the first Pharaoh to sort of assume a semi-divine status by stating that it was the god a moon who came to her mother and conceived her oh right that's a very good point son important actually for where we're going so so yeah there had been the female female rulers before but they hadn't used the term Pharaoh so there's one two female pharaohs before this so she had a very long and successful reign by almost everybody's assessment and that included expansion of trade in punt which is this kind of area that's on the Red Sea coast where there's a bunch of spices and things like that and she also did massive construction projects throughout both upper and lower egypt and so this is the kind of thing that frankly if your entire history is told through archaeology if you're a person if you're a kind of a king that really like to build stuff that ends up being you know you ended up getting points for that so we mentioned here that this connection that hap set suit has with Amun so the idea she was just talking about that she saw a moon is having essentially a man Immaculate Conception or a conception for her when she's born she also very clearly had the support of the Theban priests of a moon whose oracle proclaimed that it was a moons will that she would reign as pharaohs so she would carve into then her difference Stella's when she's erecting her monuments she will say this is what Amon says to her welcome my sweet daughter my favorite the king of Upper and Lower Egypt Macari yep Chet suit thou art the Pharaoh taking possession of the two lands so in other words that this is something that is divinely ordained that she assumed the throne and reign as Pharaoh and so this is an image of her as Pharaoh in with Amon the god and then this is her nephew / stepson who's kind of Co Pharaoh but doesn't get to do anything while she's alive so however after her death her stepson / nephew took most of the third having reigned in name under her for about 20 years now he's a brash young guy 22 and he then rules another 34 years in his own right so he has a very long reign by any standard but if you count both his reign in name and his name personal reign it's 54 years long so that mosa clearly by the end of his reign in reflect upon reflection was quite resentful of his stepmom and so at a certain point he decided to begin deleting her from the record and taking over all of her different monuments and maybe claiming them for his own and so he goes through and it's a little haphazard but it gets continued under his son as well deleting all the monuments that she'd built and almost succeeded that in erasing her from history by doing that they do that in the tank a mess - so Ramses is one of the things they're saying is most as they're kicking Moses out grams he says let us be let his name be stricken from every pile on you notice all this kind of thing so you go through you can kind of see in this then Sochi it's hard to see anyway there's a big image here there's a little image straight and then there's a big image here and it's just all been I mean the by erased it really means it's just hacked you know and so Sheheen what so the striking of the names wasn't just to delete them from the historical record but by erasing their names they were denying them immortality oh good point yeah so we're we I'm as a historian I tend to think of the the consequences to history but we should also be remembering and actually this should be very clear that that so much in antiquity especially in this earliest antiquity so much that every single thing that you do is what makes reality you know and so by enacting something that makes it be by by building something by setting up Stella everything like that that makes it be as long as you have the name on the permanent temple you're immortal that's all that it's all built there and so this is in part I think the the the point of the Ozymandias poem right so look on my works ye mighty and despair because even the great Pharaoh's at a certain point their names are lost yeah I was wondering how was it known that I've chefs I've had an image there that was erased yeah so so so you you have to kind of figure it out they have to figure it out by kind of context and things like that based on when they what they can see when other ones of these have been made when I said before that they almost succeeded in erasing her from the whole record if you fail to get every single one of them though then you can kind of see oh well here's one and this is this is who's this Abnett see what is going on you know and so when that happens then you can see the context in which the other ones have been deleted and you realize oh that one was deleted there in some cases though we'll have to say that when we're giving the examples of these negative evidence sometimes you it's it's conjecture that it actually was this particular thing the the pharaohs did kind of there's gonna be multiple occasions here where the pharaohs are deleting people and so as a result of that there's more than one possible person that's getting deleted and so this is one of the ones that they're pretty confident with okay so titmouse was followed by his son to most of the third is followed by his son to most of the fourth who was followed by his son Amman hotep the third so just to kind of piece these together we're not far away I wanted to bring in hatch that suit so he could talk about her but anyway to kind of get how we're gonna get to where now the story to get to akhenaten so under Amenhotep the third egypt had reached essentially a peak in prosperity there's also kind of a flowering of artistic style and this is also the peak of international prestige as we're talking about all these letters that are going back and forth between the egyptian pharaoh and the great kings of mitten ii and babylon and and the Hittites and then also all of the local vassal leaders of Cain and Syria and specifically Syria and Phoenician area so I'm in hotep long reign he is celebrated with Jubilees in the thirtieth 34th of 37 years at a new palace city that he creates Atmel cotta and so he essentially this is the kind of thing when you were super rich as these guys have now become you could make your own when you're having a jubilee party this is not what Queen Elizabeth was able to do if she built a whole new Capitol or anything they just had her parachuting in with James Bond or whatever it was during the Olympics her I can't really what happened during her do you believe it anyway so the Jubilee doesn't have it's not quite the same as what the pharaohs were able to do back then so Jubilees or said festivals as they're called are something that the pharaohs were able to do when they reached their 30th year of their reign the 30th regnal year so possibly it's conjectured that I mean hotep the third is reacting to the growth of the power of the priests of Amun and Thebes he had his manners scribes research archives for ancient rites associated with how Jubilees art were celebrated archaically so the said festival so he then built a new Jubilee palace slash City temple complex at mell cotta which is essentially you know a little bit north of Thebes on the other side of the river and when they celebrated then that Jubilee on the 30th year actually three Jubilees this would just be mass of parties and drinking and their food and all kinds of other things that are associated with in addition to all the ceremonial things and in fact I guess there's a letter from the king of Babylon who's very upset that he can get invited to this shindig although I don't think he could actually go to it but anyway there was like a lot of regret for not being able to be there so anyway from Thebes to making just a little new ceremonial city close to Thebes so one of the things that happens though at the central ceremony of this Jubilee is Amenhotep an axe something that hadn't been done since archaic times which is that he has these two boats built and also actually special canals and and harbors and things like that that are modeled on in Egyptian mythology the boats that the sun-god raw array uses to on the day the day one the Rozz barge to go across the sky and so you can kind of see rah the sun-god on the boat right so a barge and Nile barge and then there's a disc of the Sun which is the in Egyptian the otten of the Sun on his head and so that is the the manifestation when you see the Sun going across the sky every single day that's something that you can see every single day because you're able to see the physical manifestation or the Autzen of ray or raw every single day and then when he rises on the east Anu and obviously sets in the west and then is revivified by taking the the night boat through the underworld and it is a resurrected and born and new or revivified and born anew as raven in the dawn the next day right and so that exact essentially ceremony is done they make a big ray barge the Pharaoh gets on the thing he's dragged through the you know the boat is pulled along just like the the Sun goes all the way across the sky and he goes from the one side of the river and the one Harbor across to the other side of the river the other Harbor and then he switches when he's at that change moment it's called the horizon of vorrei the horizon of the Aten he then switches boats and then he gets on the other boat to come back which is somewhat more unusual because in first place you might think of the Pharaoh enacting well he's the son he's riding around in a boat and you just think of him the same way you think of the solar disk but now he's also doing this kind of unexpected thing of taking the the kind of a night boat back you know which is indicating his death but then again when he gets back over there his symbolic rebirth and I say symbolic when they actually do stuff it's not really symbolic they mean it you know so so everything has all kinds of symbolic meaning but in fact they really mean it when they when they do that and so following then the path of the nightly rebirth of the Sun God Amenhotep is then you know reborn into as a divinity now so as opposed to preceding pharaohs who were essentially all sent understood to be divine after their deaths and maybe they get on the boat bark was Ray and then they are you know become a part either the Sun disk or they're in there in immortal afterlife as they kind of our part of that procession now I'm in hotep the third is alive as the living Sun God you know reborn you know physically in his ceremonial City here so anyway he's done this thing to become Ray so although now he's a God on earth probably that's how it's being read by some scholars anyway I'm at hotep the third nevertheless actually does die so even though you do this thing and you become a God as far as you're concerned and everybody else around you it doesn't necessarily mean you actually can live forever and in this case it worked out that he didn't and so when he died physically then he was succeeded by his young son on hope to the fourth and so this is an early image of a diamond hooked up the forth before he changed his name and became Akhenaten so this is the character that is their topic tonight so this new Pharaoh celebrates one of these Jubilees this happens to be a jubilee ceremonial city for him to do it and so he's able to do it but he did it well before his 30th year just a few years actually after after he starts raining in his own right it's not clear there has to be a little bit of arguing about whether he has a long coat Regency may be with his father beforehand or a short one but in any event depending on when you're starting this it's still very early and not anywhere near his 30th year but instead what's possible probably being said then is how can you celebrate a jubilee if you haven't been raining 30 years the idea here is that he is expressing ongoing continuity with his dad's reign so in other words I mean hope that the third had become the eternal living timeless son God who simply is reenacting the you know the day every single day likewise even though that guy is gone now Amenhotep the fourth is in that same position as the living deified God so if he did inherit that much of the idea from his father I know there were its solar deification the new Pharaoh quickly tricks things like way farther than that so he turns it up to 11 we might say initially so then initially that ceremonial city or as Jubilee City is quite close to Thebes and so the capital is still at Thebes and so he erect their new temples to this manifestation of the solar God we're gonna be talking about here Aten he makes those within Thebes and that exist side by side with the traditional religion so all the other temples the temples of Amun but then in the 5th year of his reign he decided to disband all the competing priesthood so there's no you're not gonna be a priests of Amun anymore you're kicked out and he himself officially changed his own to akhenaten which is to say living spirit of the Otten so now he's understanding that this there is the solar deity the Autzen and of which he is the living spirit of it so this is a early picture of Akhenaten now as he's now called so what's Akhenaten's God looking like so this is a little this is a later more developed form of the imagery but essentially the Otton is the physical manifestation or solar disk of the Egyptian Sun God raw and it's initially seen in as an aspect of raw and so when we say the physical manifestation you guys see this God every day right I guess if you go outside and look anyway to see but essentially the you know it's the Sun disk right but it's shown then in art as having all of these different rays and the Rays all end in little hands and often the hands are bestowing divine gifts so in this case they have ox here which is to say devoting devoting symbols of divine life here - in this case Akhenaten right - the living Pharaoh God yes so is that a real conehead does he have a real conehead no like and so as the Rays come down and you catch them with an arc and I always wonder what those hogs did yeah so they're catching rays from the Sun the Rays are giving you the Ox the Rays are holding the Ox key they're not catching he's maybe he's catching with something else he's got or he's been given stuff the answer the little hands are holding those ox and they're giving it okay and we'll talk about the art in terms of the elongated head and things like that so yeah you're anticipating where we're gonna go okay so now that akhenaten has changed his name and his folk and as eliminating building temples to Otton and eliminating the other gods worship he focuses worship on Auton as the Supreme God who is reborn each day and represented an art as the solar disc right so so there's the ox that we were just talking about in this case this is just it's this is a different God that is holding a knot but it's just easier to see that the little little rays that are holding them there there's all kinds of different theories about what the ox actually mean they're ubiquitous in Egyptian art they could be fertility symbols people have suggested all kinds of different ways that they can be they could people suggest that it's related to for example the symbol for women and Venus and things like that it's generally understood to be a life force you know so essentially the gods are bestowing life force on you and that kind of a thing but there's a lot of different theories and so you can see over here there's one of those little long straight and that's one of the hands from the sun's rays right okay so in this now the religion that we have seen evolved here we essentially have the equation of God and King so Akhenaten's father had equated himself with the son in life and now Akhenaten considers himself the son of the Otton so he is in the same way he was son of his father before he's now son who was also God and the son he also has got in the son and he is son of the Aten which essentially now represents a timeless eternity for all of the past kings or it's representing all kings or pharaohs in general time as now that Akhenaten may be is moving into an eternal perspective he is less focused on things happening the past or happening in the future and instead that everything is kind of in this internal now because of his immortal existence as a God so he himself is the Autons living expression the Akhenaten the divine intermediary then between the Supreme God and the realm of mortals so he and his family are the ones who are are able to access and essentially get the gifts from and the divine power from the Otton everyone else then must worship the pharaoh and his family as the as intermediary okay so we don't know everything about autism because a lot of this has all been lost but there are kind of four big components and we'll talk about each one of these which are one the establishment of a new capital city so not just a giant Jubilee city palace temple but now an either entire new capital another new city for for Egypt the city is called confusingly how can Totten as opposed to Akhenaten anyway so I can Totten here which means the horizon of the Aten which is essentially that same thing that his father had talked about at the end that jubilee period essentially where the where the Otton or where the Sun is essentially having his little stomping ground as it's going from the one boat to the rest and so now we have that as the as the center or the idea of the of the new capital - as we were just talking about there is a revolution in artwork and one of the things that happens in this revolution is that the Pharaoh is shown as very weird looking andand Rajan s and so people comments on you know we was just talking about this crazy conehead or actually so elongated head but then he's wearing a crown that's a cone there is this emphasis now on the Queen so the high Queen Nefertiti and then also on all of the royal daughters of the couple but then no no emphasis or no representation of any royal sons which is unusual of course unless you don't have any so and then finally then we talked about here a little bit and we'll talk about more the prayers persecution of all the other gods besides the Otton and so the closing of the temples the erasing of their names the banning of all of their idols okay so first the capital so bye-bye Thebes you know hopefully essentially the the Pharaohs of the 18th dynasty you know have done very well by this original capital and by a moon and by the priesthood but now Akhenaten employs all of his inherited vast wealth to build a new capital named horizon of Otton Aachen totten which we're gonna canal from now on call Amarna because that's the the modern name so el-amarna is what it's called now in that way I won't have to keep saying Akhenaten at Aachen totten so anyway so from Thebes which is kind of the middle of Upper Egypt to the middle Egypt here you know still Upper Egypt but anyway the middle part of it you know which is to say closer to Lower Egypt so it's actually closer to the well one of the other old capitals of Memphis right anyway the move is naturally super enormous Oh as costly but anyway it's also blow to the old capital so yes so the question is yeah there's all the people from Thebes moved so everybody who had a job moved essentially if you so this is BA by another huge blow to Thebes right and so as you are bringing the whole government so you'd be bringing the army you'd be bringing the the your police force Royal Guards you'd be bringing your whole bureaucracy all the scribes and the only people that are being employed in terms of like all those people that were working for all those building projects that you might have been doing when you were building the ceremonial party capital of mal cotta there you know for the Jubilees when you're not a Capitol Jubilee City so all of those people that have been engaged in those building projects were building Akhenaten's new temples that were existing in Thebes all the construction workers those guys all got moved in as much as they could move and so what you end up having left is you know pretty depressed economy where you where the local priests no longer have their job the taxes are diverted to the new capital and all that sort of things so it's a huge economic blow right to the old capital but there also would be drawing from pretty well everywhere so since it's a capital they would be pulling you know key people from all kinds of different spots one of the places that they probably drawing from appears Heliopolis so Heliopolis in the greek name anyway is the city where Ray's cult is from Aras cult is from it so some of the some of the ceremonies and things like that that those priests had those are probably getting pulled into the new cotton priesthood but we don't know for sure so essentially some of those maybe are coming in but a lot of the people down here these Theban priests are now out of luck they don't have a job so essentially all of this kind of vast changes probably cost stock weights throughout the whole Egyptian economy and we know that by the end of Akhenaten's reign from from this position of very serious wealth there's now a pretty serious collapse going on and the letters that are coming back from all these kings that we've been talking about where they kept asking for gold they're more or less saying well you you said you were gonna send all this stuff you never sent us anything what's going on you guys are you know we don't trust you anymore of this kind of things so essentially Egyptian prestige is really in declining Akhenaten isn't concerned with let's say any of the things that that he doesn't he doesn't focus on any of the things obviously that he's not interested in so that includes things like taxation bureaucracy all that kind of thing which she essentially delegates to other people he's not interested in corresponding with kings outside of Egypt he doesn't care about outside of Egypt and so that all goes by the wayside what he's really concerned about obviously is his new religion which he is pretty much enacting every single day you know from his new capital so look a little bit at this new capital the horizon of the Otton I can Totten or Amarna the city this is kind of a zoom in and you really can't see the map I turned it sideways because of the way the map was originally shown it wasn't wanted to have be able to have North at the top in this case because the direction the cardinal directions are important but essentially as the Nile is going here you can kind of see the Central City the central focus is the royal tomb which is the place where every morning the Sun is rising and so essentially this the main thing that's happening in this solar worship city is the Sun is going across this horizon of the Otton this is this section cordoned off for the sun's to kind of be worshipped in and to be experienced in is set up then with all of that that focal point in mind so the royal tomb is in the east the Sun disk would rise every morning and then wet because were there and one of the things that would happen is that as Austin's living spirit Akhenaten would go on a procession from east to west like the Sun in the morning during his commute and commute back at night which would essentially make each day a solar religious festival as he is the god of the Sun and he is experiencing that and all the people in the town are experiencing that this is a artist reconstruction of the central area of that new capital so with essentially the government Kings house here Great Palace police barracks the little temple button in the big temple button there's also letters from foreign ambassadors or foreign Kings complaining that their ambassadors have had to sit out in the Sun all day and ask why does Pharaoh make everybody sit in the Sun all day long you know there's no you know because anyway obviously because that's important because the Sun is God right okay so we just had them that new capital now let's look at this second component here the revolution in the artwork that's happening now at the new capital so Akhenaten initiates this complete artistic revolution which ultimately portrays him as pretty let's say grotesque is's sometimes been called and so essentially he has these giant hips protruding belly he big baby face and elongated face and giant eyes and anyways this is ultimately increasingly strange looking guy compared to the wave Herot pharaohs have always previously been shown which is always quite heroically and you know always the same you know this kind of a thing it's a very conservative society that didn't really value like being very lifelike or any of those kind of things so what I'm gonna argue as though that although when this is first kind of seen by people again using modern lenses that we have when in our modern times people were becoming increasingly excited by realism and that realism is better than I cannot graphic ways of doing kinds of things and and so they saw this as realistic and the so they thought well this guy is actually being very very honest nobody would want to be portrayed this way so he must have really been you know deformed or something like that so modern interpretation then lot along so this is this kind of realism which we value and speculated them that the portrayal is of a cannot and implied that he had some kind of genetic defects because his entire dynasty has been incestuous and so there's you know could be a lot of potential for that or there's there's some other kind of disease however now that we've likely identified Akhenaten's actual corpses mummy and it turns out it's a relatively normal corpse this is really one of the reasons why we haven't identified as him before what we can say about this corpse is it for sure it's Tutankhamun's dad they've done the genetic tests that show that and we can say that it's also you know anyway in a sarcophagus where all of the names were taken off and you know where the it's in the right place and so all the different indications they got they defaced it so they because again that's a heretic king ultimately went yeah and but anyway because people were looking for this really weird deformed King and they weren't finding it they were overlooking this and it was hard to describe which who this actually was but people are pretty and we're not sure but anyway there's a big strong argument that this is actually Akhenaten so we have seen has come also there was extensive damage to the mummy when it was found so when it was discovered the sarcophagus was actually open and the mummy was lying in a pool of water so actually a lot of it had rotted away so it's mainly just the bones mm-hmm so yeah so made it harder to identify okay so rather though than maybe being a realistic portrayal of Akhenaten it's in fact probably religiously motivated as opposed to realistically motivated and the goal then of this new portraiture is to show Akhenaten and also his Queen Nefertiti as the primordial Egyptian couple of creation and so you can kind of see them together here this is not a once been broken a little bit but you can definitely see there's actually similar right so they're both sort of both male and female they're both sort of maybe he's almost pregnant looking and having breasts and things like that there's very deliberately obscured or indistinct genitals you don't know what's going on between them as not being differentiated gender wise and this seems to correspond to the Egyptian theology or cosmology of creation where the there there's initial primordial couple so let's say essentially the Egyptian Adam and Eve style people when when in the in the cosmic Genesis tale in the first chapter of it it says God created you know mankind in in God's image male and female created he them in other words so there's essentially from this creation there's both male and female and there's a bunch of this differentiation that happens where God is separating likeness from darkness light calls day in the darkness he calls night where they're separating the land from the water these same things happen in the Egyptian creation myth where there is essentially these pre-existing gods or proto gods or primordial figures who are before there's differentiation represent light and darkness but before they're both but before they're separated or they represent heaven and earth but before heaven and earth are separated and male and female but before male and female are separated and so this idea is also represented Egyptian cosmologically in something that's called the OGG dead which is to say the Eightfold or the divine for primordial dichotomous couples in this archaic Egypt and probably not by coincidence they the center of worship for the Agda ad is very very close to Amarna so in relocating the capital to this zone it may be referencing this same primordial state or this creation part of the creation story so anyway we're seeing this ambiguously gendered couple so one of the things that happens a lot of the time with religion is you don't usually want to say hey I got a great new religion for you guys a lot of people don't want to immediately sign up for your new religion so generally when people are let's say even coming up with a new religion one of the things that they will do is they will say this is a restoration of old religion right so when Joseph Smith and founding Mormonism and in 19th century United States he doesn't say hey when are you joining my new church Mormonism instead the church is called the restoration it's the restoration of primitive Christianity so essentially they are bringing back the Church of Peter and the Apostles and all those kind of things so that's how it's essentially couched even though it actually is a brand new thing that's being created right and so in the same exact way what going back to Akhenaten's father there was actual research it looks like into sort of how these Jubilees were done that maybe inspired some of this solar divinization and so in other words there is a sense that what they're trying to do is get back to archaic religion and so it's possible that they're also again going for that here trying to dial it back to this very earliest moment and that that is in fact then sweeping away what we would say is the old Egyptian religion but now they're saying is no this is a later Egyptian religion that has gotten us away from this pure primordial Egyptian religion that Akhenaten is restoring so okay so we looked at this revolution in artwork and we're seeing that it rather than being a realistic portrayal of Akhenaten it is in fact trying to show Akhenaten as undifferentiated and so the Akhenaten and Nefertiti are both male and female then there is also emphasis on Queen Nefertiti and royal daughters but no royal sons and so we'll go back to our family chart that's very complicated here but essentially we had the dynasty coming this way Diamond hooked up the third who has those Jubilees to his son I'm in Hope depth the fourth who changes his name to Akhenaten so he marries Nefertiti as his great Queen because of it wasn't that far back with hat shut suit there this dynasty had spent a bunch of time specifically not marrying women who would qualify as great queens and so they had actually not not been giving women that same status so they would have more or less everybody would just rule with lesser queens as much as they were able but now Nefertiti is is has that new elevated status and is also that sort of regained that place almost as a Co Pharaoh in all of the imagery with Akhenaten which is why she's getting the Pharaoh crown here on the family family chart and so between the two of them and their marriage you'll see all of these different daughters and then because of the genetic testing we're pretty confident that Akhenaten also has two talent Commons or King Tut King as he's later called anyway King Tutankhamun with the Amun name but when he's born the I he has an Auton name there so to Tonk cotton and that's by some other wife so it's not by Nefertiti and at this point there's like crazy theories about who all of the different people are I mean not they're not crazy but there's lots of them and they're competing and I'm not an expert on any of those things as ones that I find maybe a little more compelling than others but anyway who they all are there's there's different possibilities for her there and it probably doesn't totally matter to us but essentially these are this these ending times one of the reasons why it's hard for us is that later the later dynasties these are essentially the kings that are getting erased from the King lists when they have the official King lists that are kept so where we we go from Amenhotep the third and then all of these pharaohs get erased from the king list and goes straight to the last one in the dynasty here Horemheb so anyway as a result some of them are a little more conjectural than others or not understood so like the early images we have of Akhenaten where he's a pretty reasonable looking guy now for TV actually shouldn't say TT we should at least that high on that it was very beautiful in some of the bus and things like that that we have of her and this very famous one but also she you know is similarly portrayed and they are a couple as we've seen one of the one of the reasons we've mentioned is possibly this idea of this primordial do ad where they are both the male and female together but another thing that we see are as a Nefertiti with all the daughters initially three but eventually they have six often in the artwork and so one of the ways that this may be described why the feminine is all around them and they are representing because they are representing this cosmic eternal timelessness of creation where they are both before the time of gender differentiation the girls are possibly in the same way that the words Egyptian words for sunray and also for hand are both female words so in the same way that the Otton is male or in but it's obviously the Supreme God is then interacting with everybody through these female rays and female hands likewise Akhenaten who is the living spirit of Aden in the flesh is perhaps communicating to all of the subjects and worshipers through you know his female daughters here okay he did however have a son who doesn't get to doesn't show up in any of the iconography anywhere in his life but you can kind of see here from Tutankhamun's throne that that some of the Amarna style stuff is surviving here so he still has his little potbelly as part of the style in this throne image and you can also see there's all of these little hot and rays that are happening behind him even though it's coming from a time period when after where he's buried anyway after a time period after the the religion has been reversed so EF Akhenaten's mummy has been correctly identified then then we do think that he has a son tooten Aachen and so but but by a lesser wife and Nefertiti so presumably Akhenaten's artwork then doesn't depict sons because this is a conjecture but anyway because since he is the living soul of Aten and he is eternal and timeless if there is a boy there that's his heir that's gonna take over the way he took over when his dad who was also eternal who you know then died you're sort of reminding yourself that's you've got a replacement maybe Sheheen's got in a comment the last few years of Akhenaten's reign he was actually calling along with the shadowy figures Mancari yes who some people still there's debates as to who he really was whether he was a brother son or maybe even Nefertiti herself being posed as a in more of a male sense right um so there was the co-ruler ship it's probably that because Tutankhamun was not Nefertiti's child and was Akhenaten's son by his sister ki most likely that that's why he was sort of like left to the side yes that's a really good possible Theory's right so we can come back here for just a second and so we'll give one of these because it's it's kind of irresistible so essentially yes so so if the younger lady who is Tutankhamun's mother is Akhenaten the sister which is what this is actually even showing who kind of fell from grace but then Tutankhamun then still is around and so he's kind of the air but they don't have but he's an area essentially from a disgrace lesser mother than obviously the one from the great queen who who doesn't that you don't tend to they that you want to always in these kind of dynasties you always support your own kids and you never this is just part of the way all these dynastic stories work and you don't have too much like the nephew / stepson kind of guys so different possibilities are that Nefertiti for example because in all of the Zico nog Rafi she's more or less becoming male feet you know male / female and because we aren't that far from having male female Pharaohs that are in that kind of guys it's possible for example that she is you know this character here mink RA who was not very well we don't know too much about otherwise but she could have the are busily changing their names you know and and so now as she maybe if Akhenaten has either gone mad or he's not able to rule or function he's got a co Pharaoh could be that that Co Pharaoh is in fact his wife who has now taken a new male name and is actually ruling and if that's the case one of the other things that is possible and is theorized is we've got this sort of crazy letter that the hittite king has gotten from a queen of egypt and so and it's a high queen of egypt if it's the queen of egypt and so the queen of egypt is more or less saying you know I don't have any you know my husband said I don't have any any sons I don't I'm not gonna let any one of my slaves you know essentially everybody bully is below me and I'm not letting any one of them become Pharaoh but I've heard you have plenty of Sun so send me one of them you know and I'll marry him or whatever and then he'll be the Pharaoh and so essentially the hittite king is like you know that's crazy no one ever even gets to marry an Egyptian princess you know there's just no way that that's happening you must be you know this must be a joke that somebody's writing anything whatever he sends that back she writes him again and says what what are you talking about are you nuts you know what I have admitted this this whole you know scandal essentially this is a shameful that I don't have an error and things like that send me one of your sons you know because I'm gonna make him be Pharaoh you know and so and so he sends one of the sons and then somebody assassinates him probably and so it's possible then that that's that this Queen we don't have it name because essentially the what we essentially have is the Hittite vocalization for the great wife of Pharaoh as opposed to knowing the actual name of whoever is actually writing him and there's a couple different theories one of the theories that people have is that it's Tutankhamun's widow but it's unclear why and she wasn't as great she wasn't really a great Queen and so it's not this is could be anyway we're not sure that's one of the theories so it could be her but it also could be Nefertiti now in the guise of now ruling in her own right as a pharaoh so I just mentioned there's a bunch of theories and so that was kind of a fun one that's okay so so we've talked then about Nefertiti and her daughters and so then finally we're gonna talk a little bit then about the persecution of all the other gods besides Hutton and they're claiming that you know closing their temples banning their idols and erasing their names and so this is where we get to this kind of question about whether optimism here is mono something or other so whether we mean monotheism or more likely before saying Mahalo tree we're we're saying that there's what you're only supposed to there's multiple gods but you're only able to support you're only supposed to worship one God there are references for example in the great hymn totten where you call out ol Sol God besides whom there is none Akhenaten is family though are continued to be portrayed as divine and the cult of the Pharaoh continues and so it seems that they alone were to worship at and directly and everyone else was to worship Botton's living eternal representative on earth the primordial undifferentiated couple of creation and their six daughters who probably not coincidentally then form a group of eight right and an OGG do add so in terms of this persecution by focusing on the primordial and supreme Creator God who is existing in internal timeless States but specifically by turning the clock back prior to that moment of differentiation of the divine this is then not saying that let's say all of the other gods don't exist but rather we're back in time before essentially they emerge and they have all of their present forms and so they are essentially irrelevant since we are in that creation moment so they're cults then are persecuted essentially in a kind of a reign of terror by Akhenaten their names where possible or erased their temples clothes their festivals and rites bands and their priests dispersed and so we have here from one of the temples in Thebes of aa moon his name you know gets erased in this it's not really erasing I think it's going you know kind of way that they're doing it so nevertheless there had to have been throughout all of this time in the force of will of the Pharaoh that he is able to accomplish all this is pretty amazing and the the power of his bureaucracy and everything else and nevertheless there had to be a huge pressure to end that both probably popular and then also by the elite everywhere and so to allow them the worship of the old gods and that was enormous and we can kind of see that because of what happens as we mentioned when Akhenaten ceases to be in control of the situation anymore so the pressure on his kind of group of lesser known or lesser powerful potential successors whether they're his wife whether they're whoever they all these characters end up being during Tutankhamun's minority or to tend to accountants minority the dynasty was pretty well tottering and ultimately the government has to abandon the new capital and restore the worship of the old gods although it isn't a quick revolution and it's not that they give everything up so they continue to worship Otten but they essentially allow the others to come back and so we get both in suits out common he now to content Otten changes his name or adds a name to himself as to tuck almond so he makes an almond name again but both of them are existing in his stuff so he has both so and so again we see that even in his burial throne there's some of the optimism still going on there so there's a restoration then and so the young pharaoh adopts a non almond name so he goes from the living image of Otton to the eliminate in living image of a moon and he lives long enough to essentially restore the old religion so originally originally when first discovered to King Tut was thought to be a very unimportant king who it was just lucky that his tomb hadn't gotten robbed and that's why we have all this wonderful gold stuff in fact actually because he reopens all this stuff he bill all kinds of monuments and there's all kinds of different ones of his images he was much more important than he was initially given credit for however he does die quite young in an untimely way and so there's also lots of different theories about how that could be and whether he was killed and this sort of thing he's succeeded initially by a grand uncle of his who is the Grand Vizier a guy named a and then after a little bit of a short rule by a another court official the army chief hormon Hebb takes over the throne and he ultimately is then last of of this dynasty so when the dynasty collapses when it's replaced by the ram acid dynasty that is the next one the 19th dynasty these Ramses guys the new dynasty essentially dismantles the various temples that had been made of a tune they take all the little bricks and they use them in new structures and so they've had to have been reconstructed in different ways - for archaeologists to find all this stuff and like I mentioned they get taken off the King list even so in the new fiction of how the King list is written which is now the new reality because when things are written that's what it the way it is Harmon have then is said to have succeeded directly after Amenhotep the third and so all of these other you know Akhenaten and and Tutankhamun were were not did not exist so it was only them the spectacular modern finds that you know proved that otherwise so that their immortality has come back and they're functionally them among the most popular I guess Tutankhamun's probably the most popular or most common popular Pharaoh and then probably knocking Akhenaten and Rama Caesar right up there both of them together maybe so ramses ii is very popular still - so so having kind of gone through that history of it you have a question Robert okay so so what about questions of this connections with Abrahamic monotheism and so for example ramasees here who I mentioned is the three kings down on the list is popularly portrayed here by yul brenner as the Pharaoh from the Exodus story with Charlton Heston being the Moses from the Exodus story and so it's been very tempting to then you know we're not that far hop skip and a jump you know people have Freud wrote about it you know follow people following Freud if argued even that Akhenaten actually was Moses which is a crazy stretch I think my feeling about it is in all of these I tend to as a historian I prefer whereas there's all kinds of different potential connections and stretches and things like that that you can imagine I would rather have you know those are quite speculative until you have you know something concrete on which to build your kind of historical house of cards I mean it's completely possible that all kinds of complicated things happened that we simply just don't have any evidence for but for to my thinking the actual composition of the Moses stories he's actually now so much further in the future that you'll be hard-pressed for masti be carried in oral tradition because it's not it's not poetry it's not these kind of things to have brought it all all the way from this from this kind of time period and what I would rather say is instead of there being this kind of direct connection between let's say Akhenaten doing this kind of thing and the later Israelite Kingdom getting the idea about manometry so in other words there were only should worship one God even though there are other gods henotheism this kind of a sense that later evolves into Abrahamic monotheism I would suggest that I think that rather that it had being a direct connection that this is the kind of thing that happens when you have the same institutional pressures are the same kind of political pressures and other social pressures that are going on which is to say what Akhenaten's religious movement is doing here is a centralizing of the religion and equating it with the king so where you have the king being the sole source and having an alliance with us one centralized priesthood so that is bringing manila tree to the fore and all of the other shrines and everything like that all around Egypt are closed and nobody else is allowed to do the sacrifices or any of those kind of things so you have that happening and we have that same procedure happening once you get to the actual historically attested part of the Bible when the Bible is being composed with the rains of Hezekiah and Josiah where these Kings of Jerusalem are in their reforms shutting down all of the other priests hoods of shutting down all of the worship of all of the other gods they're centralizing it with the priests in Jerusalem and the temple there and they're there then creating essentially the same kind of mono lar trail I'm monologist conditions we're essentially the kings as a kind of a king priests state are insisting on only worshiping the God that they are patronizing at their capital center which is the which is happening in this case for the Davidic Kings in Jerusalem with the temple that is part of their palace complex anyway that is in the center of you know in the center of their state so I remember reading that and perhaps you covered this earlier in the lecture that when Egyptian society first formed along the Upper and Lower Egypt that the land was so rich there that that tend to be the small little farming communities up and down the length of the Nile and into the Delta which is the which is Lower Egypt yep and they all tended to worship at the time kind of what had been you know little local gods and deities beings going back to you know Neolithic the Neolithic period and then that the appearance of or invention I guess you can say of the great guides of you know what we know as the Egyptian religion opiate Isis and Osiris and all that that they were kind of a a way for the society to have a you know a larger overarching religious system that could unify all those little communities and and I'm wondering whether in some ways the trend towards monotheism is yet another step in that direction right exactly so I'd argue that that's the same kind of what just one of these trends right so it's essentially you take this a dis dis unified thing of a condition of villages where everybody's own households everyone's tribes you have your household gods and all those kind of things and that's where your your loyalty is lying to we're in Egypt you start to have each of the little provinces or gnomes you know each one of them has their like local cult that becomes the centralized priesthood of that kind of thing and then once you have these justly the two lands and you have the national government then those get brought together into Pantheon's you try to systematize it and ultimately when you start to have an imperial culture like they're having in the middle of the eighteenth dynasty where they essentially create their own Empire a moon then is kind of you know kind of accelerating into that place of being essentially a supreme deity or a head of a pantheon like you kind of get when Jupiter becomes the head of the Roman pantheon or zu starts to take on those characteristics and then and then at those moments is can potentially be ripe for saying no not that he's not the supreme god the supreme god is this one and so could maybe get swapped out at that moment in that same way the what's happening in cain and in some ways the God of Israel kind of comes out of nowhere because Yahweh is not well attested up until kind of the time when the manometry starts happening and so therefore you know at some point or other different kinds of manometry can develop under those kind of social conditions without I think they're having to be any particular Direct Connect to any one of them because it may be just a natural thing to evolve out of the existing social connections so political conditions yeah I just spent a semester studying the Italian Renaissance oh yeah in Florence and how exciting that you were in Florence I was in Florence Wow I noticed when during your talk like there were a lot of similarities between what the Egyptian's were doing and then like some of the symbolism like the change in art from a Byzantine style to more of a humanistic or realistic change that was kind of the same way that the Egyptians went from like the alien-looking to the real one type of thing and also when we were talking about how everything looked female yeah so I think it was the same during the Renaissance how what are they called abstract ideas because of the language took on a feminine form it was like mother nature every feminine because of the language mm-hmm and then just a final comment about how like in Catholicism they don't have multiple gods but they started using Saints and creating Saints right to promote like the economic or the political aspirations of individual Pope's or whatever so yeah I think it's kind of the same thing for Egypt where they were backing certain gods to try and get support for what they were doing yeah good comments all so the you know in terms of your comments about the art so I'm not an art historian but if that is thickened in terms of all of the different books that have been reading about this this topic which is to say there had been all sorts of artistic developments that are kind of leading up to this moment because the it is getting richer and so there were several discernible styles that were before you get to this kind of Otterness break that included just things being done more opulent ly in those kind of things but so there is a bunch of things about that stuff where they do seem to be doing things that are something we're real because they're still very stylized and kind of new a completely new way right so they have like these long gated fingers they have you know big baby faces there's all kinds of things that right yeah yeah just like they do in Byzantine and so in that sense that what they're moving here in autism although was initially identified as being more realistic let's say than the stiff kind of thing that Egyptians were doing it's it's not necessarily realistic but it's new you know in a bunch of other different ways and one of the explanations and one of the art historians or article I read was having is the interesting thing that's happening is the things that otherwise would have taken place just in a moment and you would never see it so like a priest is doing something and like you see like a little bit of the incense is coming off or whatever or like we're saying with the Rays you're actually seeing this moment when the Rays are on you or any number of things we're essentially but tight was like a state of timelessness is suddenly suspended you know because again they're maybe trying to emphasize that maybe theologically yeah it was interesting that the Rays of the Sun were passing things down like yeah because in like the Annunciation of Mary it depends on the art sometimes it's rays that are coming down that are focused on Mary's heart yeah sometimes it's with a dove yeah that's like representing the Holy Spirit so it's kind of right it's a odd connection so how you do how do you portray divine power you know intervening or in it's an intermediary and so there's a you know a couple different ways that you can do it and that's a neat parallel you had dial back here oh yeah so one of the one of the comments you made about about languages that have gender so when nouns are you know have gender and other in English we don't have this right for the most part I mean we talk about ships and cities and things like that is female or something like that but in general it doesn't exist but if you are in a place where you mostly are only speaking your language you tend to immediately I think think of every single thing that you know it's more likely you think of it just as that's and that's how the let's say the feminine of their masculine is because it's part of you the way you're processing the language and then finally I think it's a very good point in terms of this this about the Saints so this argument that kind of monotheists have had where we let's say argue against people who were calling polytheists and actually Muslims called Christians polytheists are is some do is that it's kind of complicated we know always listening to what people are saying in terms of the polytheism so I mean we talked about going to encounter world religion we went to last month at a Hindu temple where essentially the leader the temple who the elder was there talking was emphasizing very strongly that as far as he's concerned and you ISM is monotheists there's one God but then there are all of these expressions of when we use the word God with the little G for in which in some sense are divine beings that and how different is that from angels when jinn which exist in Islam or saints and angels also in Christianity or different persons of the Trinity or I argue often you know when I'm talking to not not most Shiite Islam but in Sunni Islam there's a sense that the Quran is uncreated and therefore Co eternal with with the Creator or with God and so as far as what that means in Christianity is that the Quran is a second person of the Trinity or duality as for it you know in other words the Quran is therefore eternal and therefore God as far as that's what anyway that anyway from a Christian theological perspective and so it would undercut let's say the normal emphasis on on monotheism but anyway what I'm a main point here is is that in general we tend to not be listening to and we tend to be defining these based on our kind of what we emphasize is most important and through these kind of polemics so yes no you it was yours and then back ya know you had that your hand up first I'm sorry I was just thinking about the idea would erase and there being a feminine in the hands of feminine yes along with this transition from very stylized Egyptian pharaohs and she's something more androgynous very at the same time feminine yes right it's not thinking about how Akhenaten Akhenaten he's embodying a male son gone yes right I was just thinking that combined like you've got creation happening repeatedly yeah so if the son God is sending down his rays they need to be going somewhere on a big sense would be going from our feminine yeah to kind of create that oh yeah good point yeah and like you say it's enacted in the artwork but it's then it's actually enacted every single day you know so this is this is the really because essentially the temples are all open-air you're seeing it they you don't have to wonder if you're in Egypt if it's gonna rain that day because it's not as a you know as part of the as part of the prayer it's a great prayer to him to Akhenaten one of the things that I can I'm sorry too Otten not to Akhenaten one of the things that as son to ah Thanh is wat and as you've created everything you you have wisely made it so that you've divided how you bring the waters to to the world right so we out beyond the two lands beyond Egypt you use the heavens to to get you know to give water to the lands but here in Egypt you don't use the heavens here in Egypt you've appointed it so that you use the underworld so because they have the annual inundation where they get their water from is that the Nile floods right and so essentially they understand like the entire Universal cosmology based on the fact that where they're living in Egypt that's an interesting idea so Valerie yeah I just besides it's the Hindu case another that springs to mind readily and something you've covered a lot in previous lectures and stop me if you also covered it earlier in today's lecture but the the Greek case where you know they had the the rich pantheon of different gods and then eventually buy you both the 45th century BCE figures like Plato we're talking about kind of like a single right principle there was more kind of ontological in their case then then let's say Center didn't you know and the example of a ruler but it's curious that in his famous you know their book the Republic he also uses the the imagery of the Sun represents that single principle the people who don't know about this thing you know he matches them in this cave and then some few of them you know have an you know gain and understanding and enlightenment so to speak they exit the cave and they see the that the Sun you know and the good yeah yeah the for mother good yeah so that's a curious parallel example for slightly different reasons yeah so in in like you say in kind of advocating for his own kind of proto monotheism Plato here you know is using the Sun as an analogy anyway and it's and that's one of the things I was kind of thinking of you know if you are let's say if you have been raised in a polytheist society where you're thinking of all of these different forces you know so for example Zeus is up in the clouds throwing lightning bolts that's not as big a thing in Egypt right so you can imagine why in Egypt you haven't come up with you know lightning bolt God as your as your main God as you're kind of looking around what its gonna be in Egypt Nile is a pretty big choice you could pick you know but then also look up and that could be another another choice you know so that was so so coming up with the Sun as as the central god is something that you know happens multiple places multiple just one more little thing I don't know if maybe you also you covered this earlier in the lecture but apparently in Egypt prior to Akhenaten they they worship the Sun in different aspects like there were different deities representing the Sun and different functions and then that too became centralized and one of the things that was happening as we were talking about how I'd say the Theban priesthood was kind of asserting itself to try to become kind of like you know get Amun their guide to be sort of like the supreme in the pantheon they had already decided to do some kind of syncretism with the the northern kingdom with the lower with Lower Egypt and that gadre up there the Sun God and so they had started calling essentially I'm an almond ray right so then but they were controlling the cult of mom and Ray not those guys up in Heliopolis right so essentially what you sometimes do like you say is if you can't beat them you syncretized them into your god and so somehow then L becomes Yahweh and they become two the same together yes Kingdom ruled from all the way way back but was the time when the New Kingdom ruled Israel at that time under also rule of the New Kingdom so yeah so this is so this is earlier than most people want to place the Moses story so essentially the Moses story people would like to place it like I often with Rameses down there which is it down and then to the nineteenth dynasty and so when this happens this kind of greatest extent this is prior to Akhenaten so I'd listed who it was here who moved all the way out and had kind of a high moment it's like kind of greatest extent here so all the way back here for took mosa which is a lot earlier and so essentially the control by the time you get to even half that suit is kind of letting letting it go a little she's not as concerned with the Empire and certainly by the time you get to Akhenaten they're not returning these guys letters anymore so even the the local rulers who are kind of the vassal Kings are writing letters and they're complaining hey this other vassal King you know is actually not on your team anymore and he's stealing all of my cities all the time and I'm trying to be loyal to you but you never send any money anymore there's no gold to pay anything and the whole empire is gonna fall away if you if you don't send anything and essentially the Pharaoh writes back and says you sure write all the time and complain all the time I'm not interested in getting his met so many letters from you you know why do you always write all the time and so then that guy ultimately Falls and so essentially the you know the Pharaohs are only they're only ever so interested in all this stuff because they there aren't getting as much out of it other than prestige you know the other the other rulers are excited about all the gold that they get from Pharaoh but Pharaoh isn't as excited about what they get upset suit by the way you know was going this way what because they are you know excited about getting all of the the frankincense and myrrh and all of the spices and things like that that they're kind of importing from that direction he's a second so that's later so where does rammus use the Empire get to so I don't have a map of where Ramses is at and so I haven't tried to place the Exodus story on this because in my opinion is composed so much later that I anyway a lot of people are interested in that and we'll probably do a lecture you know on trying to place the that that story but anyway I happened for this lecture okay I'm curious why some of them were mummified in some weren't this habit Queen happy it wasn't mummified and the ramses ii wasn't mummified but as far as I know and then the other one was the what to his income was discovered in all encased do you know anything about that so so I don't so I don't know the answer to that my I mean mostly what I was reading about and I was kind of doing the research for this is the different Toomes that they were busily trying to construct in their lifetime and one of the things would happen is if they died earlier than expected they won't have finished it properly and then the other thing that will happen is like for example in a half set suits case it was that no not her case in yeah in her case so she initially has a tomb you know as the great wife of the Pharaoh which is no longer appropriate so she makes another tomb because she's a pharaoh later and so in the same same way then there's earlier tombs that are getting made before you're going to become Akhenaten and build a great tomb at your new capital but anyway so essentially so I was like that kind of part about tombs in construction but you know in terms of why they failed to in some cases get their proper mummification I think that they still I think they still wanted it and you know in terms of it's not that the religion had stopped caring about that because essentially the the pharaohs were still all part of essentially the deified solar disk even if you are living it in a timeless sense right now while you're alive so ultimately you know Akhenaten's dad you know he's worshiping his dad as having become the Otton and actually all the previous pharaohs are essentially the odd right so they think they believe immortality is still still important anyway to to the kings alright guys I think we're gonna stop it did a visitor questions from the stream okay well thanks for joining us so many slides

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 49,110

Keywords: toronto, community of christ, polytheism, bible, religious studies, bible studies, literary criticism, bible mythology, egypt, egyptian myth, mythology, ancient history, akhenaten, tutankhamon, tutankhamen, tutankhamun, nefertiti, history of egypt, pharao

Id: ZiIg58xwLXQ

Length: 103min 27sec (6207 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 14 2018