Akhenaten, Moses & the Origins of Monotheism - Guest Lecturer: Dr. James K. Hoffmeier

welcome everyone if you're just coming in the back you might like to take a seat and I'd like to welcome a special guest today so we have Professor James hoffmeier from well Wheaton College and then Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois and I think you as you've told me just recently retired whatever that means but Professor Hoffmeyer is an Egyptologist known all around the world dearly beloved among our community is the inventor of the four C's we don't know if you invented them but we think that you do because of your introductory archaeology textbook so it's a really great privilege to have you here brother and have some face-to-face fellowship so please welcome with me well good morning thank you for coming although I understand it's a class so some of you're stuck here apologies for that what does it mean to be retired it means I don't have to great papers anymore which is really wonderful although just yesterday I sent off an 85 page chapter of a dissertation back to the student I'm working with so few more dissertations and no more papers I hope well my my subject today maybe it was advertised I don't know but we titled a lecture Akhenaten Moses and the origins of monotheism and this talk is really something of a summary and really a very heard summary of my book Akhenaten and the origins of monotheism which has been out for a couple of years now so anything I don't have time to say today maybe the library has it and you couldn't borrow it if you really want to be come a friend buy it I have three and almost four grandchildren I need to spoil so all the royalties are appreciated so there's been a big debate in Egypt illogical circles and amongst historians of religion as to whether Akhenaten was a mana theist and if so was he the first monotheists now of course some of you will scratch your head say well surely Abraham was before that and what about Moses we'll come back to Moses at the very end of the talk but I want to talk about Akhenaten first and I can do this lecturer as I did in Adelaide night before last to a completely secular or non theological group and is of course a question of interest for simply from the history of religion or the history of ideas when you think about monotheism as a religious way of thinking that is so influential upon the Abrahamic religions of Islam Christianity and Judaism it has certainly been something that has shaped what the Western tradition and so this is a point of interest whether or not you're a Christian a believer or studying theology so was he a monotheists and I'll go into the data that would suggest that he was but I will argue that Akhenaten was a monotheists - which you might say so what but let me define monotheism and anytime you talk in such terms it really is important to make sure you you have a definition that is relevant and workable so I would define monotheism this is not exclusively my definition but monotheism is defined as the exclusive worship of one deity and the denial of the existence of other deities there is a stage of religious experience called henotheism those you study in Greek no henna and AH one one God and why is that different than monotheism well the two words mean the same thing one has the Latin mono the other Greek so what's the difference really is no difference except how the word is used by historians of religion and henotheism represents a well a lot of people are henna fists henna theists today that is to say I believe in God or even goddess X you believe in god or goddess Y and that's great I only worship one and you can worship a different deity that's henotheism and some would say abraham was the henna theist the patriarchs are henna theists when you get to Moses and you get to later in Old Testament history it's a different ballgame as we would say in the States Deuteronomy 7 when you go into the land what do you do you knock down their altars you destroy their statues etc nothing else is allowed to exist and so we might at this point say as our Muslim friends would say la la la la there is no god but God the German Egyptologist Erik Horne improperly defined Akhenaten's religion by saying there is no god but awesome and often Otton is this profit now the biblical prophets speak in such terms as Isaiah who would say I am the lord and beside me there is no Savior or the words of Hosea I am a Lord your God beside me there is no Savior this idea of exclusive isset II there is none beside me that's monotheistic statement now I'm gonna call donatons religion optimism this has been around a long time since probably the very early part of the 20th century I know if it was Sir II a Wallis budge who dubbed it or not but what we'll see is that Akhenaten's religion actually went through a number of phases over a period of five to seven years so in the earliest stages of Akhenaten's religious experience or reforms I think it's fair to say he was not a monotheists by the 9th year of his reign certainly by the ninth year of his reign he was a monotheist and the only reigned for 17 years or into his seventeenth year let me put Akhenaten in his historical context very briefly he is in what we call the New Kingdom and then more specifically the 18th dynasty and this dynasty was founded around 1540 by the Pharaoh at mosa and his successors built a vast empire that stretched from the central part of what is today Sudan and north all the way to and in sometimes across the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia so Egypt controlled a vast empire and it became very wealthy Amenhotep the third who is the father of Akhenaten enjoyed the the great riches of the Empire his predecessors had built up Akhenaten made everything on a huge scale huge statues huge temples things were going great the Empire was under control in fact some refer to this as a pox I get diac a period of peace and prosperity and unity etcetera etc and along comes his son Amenhotep who will be Amenhotep the 4th and he later changed his name to Akhenaten and those are his years 1353 to 1336 we'll talk a little bit more about that we'll talk a little bit about his successors afterwards but when we come to the end of the 18th dynasty around 1300 BC by that time Akhenaten's religion is gone as you will see it's a brief blip on the radar screen of history now back up a little bit around 2000 BC there were two very dominant religious powers at work in Egypt amongst the myriad of gods and goddesses that were worshipped but there were two very important centers for the gods both the Sun God in the north and the name you see on the map there is Heliopolis city of the Sun which today is actually a suburb of Cairo still called iliopoulos and here the Sun God whose cult goes back to the 3rd millennium BC and maybe even earlier represents one very important dynamic and the other in the south way down near the bottom of the map at Thebes and karnak temple is the god a moon now the Sun God and the Sun God will be Akhenaten's deity that'll be the god he focuses on has a long prehistory in other words Akhenaten is not an inventor of something new per se the Sun God is sometimes known to us by different names most prominently ray seems to be a generic term because ray also means day you can use word Ron nap every day as well as Rob meaning of the God and primarily hit the cult Center at Heliopolis is called autumn that's the name by which he is known autumn and as far as we know this goes back before 3,000 BC now interestingly the Egyptian name for Heliopolis and by the way that's the name in the Septuagint okay Mary knows the Septuagint in Hebrew the place is called own and it is here where the Sun God had his primary temple and interestingly enough in the book of Genesis we find Joseph marrying the daughter of the priest of own so Joseph's father law was a pagan priest of the god a tomb of Heliopolis interestingly enough and the name of the temple the cult center of this God was called who'd been been and who'd I know it's not think I'm a great time but it really is means a mansion or the dwelling of the Ben Ben and will talk about what the Ben Ben is in a moment it was my son's nickname growing up because his name was Benjamin so we had fun with that not so much anymore he's well into his 30s but any event from about 2400 BC on all the pharaohs were called the son of Ray the Pharaoh was an incarnation of the Sun God and hence the title son of Ray son of the deity the Ben Ben stone really is the cap of the pyramid the very top of a pyramid or the top of an obelisk is a Ben Ben stone and that was the sacred image of the Sun God in addition to the pyramid the Sphinx that is so well known to all tourists who visit Egypt is also associated with the Sun God we know this from text to talk about the Sphinx and for the period roughly 2,400 to 2300 there was a brief phenomenon of a temple that Egyptologist creatively called some temples with a Ben Ben stone as the primary focus and unlike the pyramids that were used for burial purposes these were cultic in nature so offerings were made here devices were brought here etc and so this may have been replicas of the who'd been banned temple in Heliopolis or own but these were found close to the great pyramids none of these have actually survived fragments of them are available in like the Berlin Museum some of the reliefs but by and large they were there destroyed and have not survived but all these are symbols we come to associate with the Sun God now Amon was a different bird he is always portrayed in human form or almost always if he is associated with an animal it's a ram a ram which is very interesting because sorry this is a little ex purses footnote but you might find interesting in the 5th and 4th centuries BC there was a large Jewish community living in Egypt southern frontier after the fall of Jerusalem and they hovered around the island of elephant tini and aswan and they had a temple of Yahweh there it's actually been found and on the other side of the wall was the temple of the god khanoom who like almond is depicted as a ram now you can imagine the riot this caused when the Jews were celebrating Passover anyway but this dangle that out there for another talk sometime but this is the god Amun typically shown in human form but sometimes associated with a ram he is sky if he's painted he's blue he is the sky he's hidden his name Amon means the hidden one and he's not very well known and his organs are a bit murky but you noticed in the 18th dynasty all these pharaohs named Ammon hotep Amon is satisfied and we can go back to about 2000 BC for the first time and see Pharaoh's with the name Amun M hot Amon is foremost and so it goes so he has his order to somewhere before 2000 BC becomes very important and then something interesting happens around 2000 BC there one of the greatest corporate mergers in history almond and Ray are very judiciously brought together to form a new god sky and heaven and son together known as almond ray and this little chapel at karnak temple celebrates this god almond ray the synthesis of these two very powerful deities which probably was done for political reasons to unite Egypt after a political disruption of the first Intermediate Period and so religion was used to help unite a country that had been fragmented by civil war so the god of the north god of the south boom bring him together okay so all of that is background - and by the time we get to Akhenaten Amman the god Amun ray was unquestionably the head of the Pantheon in fact he's called the king of the gods he's top dog that's if you're dyslexic top God anyway now who is this Akhenaten I show you these pictures intensely because most people are familiar of these very bizarre-looking pictures of him which usually on the cover of books like mine where he's got the strain for Tooting chin he's got skinny little shoulders but big hips a very strange bird in many ways why he's portrayed this way is a puzzle we know his father his father's Amenhotep the third the very powerful ruler who reigned for 38 years and his mother was lovely and gracious very influential Queen T or TIA depending on who you're talking to so very good roots this man has interestingly enough he was not the heir apparent he had an older brother named Moses depicted here who had he become King would have been son Moses the fifth well we don't know what happened for sure but we do know that he died as a young prince and we see him here on the funerary beer dead and we know he's he's still a prince right here you can see the title sana sue son of the king and his name there that Moses and he's laying there prepared for burial so sadly young prince that Moses dies leaving yet younger brother to take over when Dad died probably at age around age 60 or thereabouts now I'm in hotep the fourth and that's his name when he becomes king it will become Akhenaten a few years later but he starts out as Amenhotep the fourth Amman is satisfied that's what hotep means our first portrayal of this king he looks just like any Egyptian pharaoh in fact looks a lot like dad here he's made in his dad's image but here he is newly minted King sitting on the throne looks very normal he's even portrayed on one of the gateways or pylons of karnak temple as a pharaoh smiting the heads of his enemies and very muscular looking guy not those skinny girlie-man arms that he has later on this is one of the first times we find this king in an attitude of worship and it is worth noting that the two deities he is presenting offerings to on the on the left is the god rah karate which means the son raw in his horizons that's on the left he has two little bowls in his hand he's offering wine and you might want to take this down this may give you extra point on your test the Egyptian word for wine is herb I don't know why just think about it anyway on the right he is making a presentation to that God a tomb of Heliopolis autumn of own so it's worth noting that the first time we do see him acting in a worshipful or a cultic capacity it's both with son related deities know whether that indicates a proclivity I can't say for sure the other interesting thing here is that standing behind him is his mom usually if a mother of a king is shown in a scene like this means one of two things either he's very young or mom's very old and very important in this case this is the beginning of his reign so it suggests he was rather young mid-teens mid to late teens and mom is still enough has an official capacity to help her son figure out the ropes so that's worth noting he does marry and again it's hard for us this day with my son just got married in July and he's what 30 to 33 people are getting married in 1415 very young in they do in many third world cultures even today in the rural areas but he marries probably in his early to mid teens late teens the lovely gracious Shep Nefertiti whose bust famous buses in the Berlin Museum in fact both of these are in the Berlin Museum and she will be a very dominant presence in his life and mother at least four daughters for him but I want to take you to the tomb of Ramos Ramos awaz a prime minister under dad I'm an hotep and continued in his capacity as Prime Minister into the reign of Akhenaten and this tomb has beautiful carved art on the walls the kind of art that we see in the period of Amenhotep the third then on the back wall of the tomb we find something very different this change in the style I'm sure the drawing where you can see this better and now we suddenly see Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti and he starts to be portrayed with this protruding chin and and suddenly looks very different now it's pretty clear that at this point this is probably year 2 or year 3 of his reign and the reason is he's still called Amenhotep but notice now we begin to see the iconography that will become the dominant iconography throughout his life that is the son with the Rays of the Sun pouring down offering blessings and life to all who are below there's this name I'm an ho temp ok so now we'll take a look at his god which is an expression of the Sun God and it is hard for us to understand because from our monotheistic perspective we don't grasp the the ability of polytheists to have many different versions or aspects of the same deity now maybe you recognize this in Old Testament when you're reading along and you read about the different expressions of deity like bow beruete bow various aspects of the bail gods of the storm gods of the Near East but here is a poem from the reign of most of the founder of this dynasty in which the king is likened to the Sun and we're told that he the king is beheld like Ray when he rises in rises and then like The Shining Otten usually transduce off like Sun disc like the appearance of Khepri the one who comes into being pepper means in the sight of his rays on high like autumn that's the Sun God of Heliopolis in the eastern sky so here you see all these different terms for Sun got all mushed together as if it's different aspects or manifestations of this one deity for whatever reason Akhenaten latches on to Optima maybe because there had been no specific arts and cult before this time no specific iconography but in any event we do know that during the generations prior to Akhenaten himself the God Anton was becoming more dominant in fact his father was really attached to the God Aten or the expression of the Sun called Aten in fact dad called himself the dazzling autumn his palace was called the palace of the dazzling autumn and his boat that he traveled up and down the Nile in if you will I don't know what you have here the American presence forever have flown in Air Force One okay so think of yacht one for the Egyptian pharaoh yacht one was called the dazzling autumn so it's clear i man hooked up the third was really into the Aden himself so much so that some who said whoa okay look all we have with Akhenaten is heat this takes it one step further he just goes a little bit beyond what his dad did another theory out there is that what Akhenaten is doing is he's created a cult to his deceased father that the Otton really is a dead daddy called which not too many people are accepting but it's a it's out there based on the research of a very prominent scholar named Raymond Johnson so in any event these are these two theories to try to explain what Akhenaten is doing let's look a little deeper into his God and I'd like to show then how we move towards monotheism rayher octi is depicted here notice he's a falcon headed just as we saw him in that first scene where wine is given to him he has a Sun disc on his head in the dazzling rays shoot out from his head notice of the Sun disc overhead with these are cobras and around the neck of cobras is life and there you have his name ROC Haraki that is the Sun in the two horizons now what you're looking at here is a block about meter maybe a meter and a half long in the Berlin Museum if you like off and on if you like this Amarna period Berlin is the place to go a greatest collection of materials from this period anywhere in the world much to the chagrin of our Egyptian friends but this block shows his God and here you see him just like the ones I've shown you the Sun disken has had head of a falcon and we have his name and it's a rather protracted long name part of which is on the block above but his name is written down there at the bottom ray herati who rejoices in his horizon in his name of shoe who is in the autumn that's a long name imagine saying Amen at the end of that so that says some people call it theological name or his didactic name it's meant to instruct who this deity is so he's raha octi who rejoices in the horizon in his name of shoe now what do we know about shoot another block from this same temple was discovered in the 1850s a copy was made and the block proceeded to be disappeared nobody has seen it since 1850 something all we have is the copy but here we have that name of that deity again raha Rakhi who rejoices in his horizon and to the right we have a depiction of the God shoe shoe is the primeval God the first God created by the Sun God he is the atmospheric light he is the space that holds up the heavens and his wife is definite so here is a block from the temple probably from the very first year of Akhenaten's reign and not only do we have these gods presented we also have the three hieroglyphs together which is the plural for gods so we could say at the beginning of his life he clearly is not a a monotheists head of theist he's an outright full-fledged polytheist this large gateway that you can see through this in the background of the crane as I've traveled around between Melbourne and Adelaide and now here I think I've come to realise that the state bird of Australia must be the crane I see these cranes all over the place and any event these building cranes are being used to dismantle this large gateway or pylon because it was falling apart due to some earthquakes and what was discovered was inside the core structure were all these blocks that had been used to make a temple to this God autumn by 1970s over 40,000 of these blocks have been found at different places reused Egyptians were great recyclers forty thousand blocks with inscriptions on them not just blocks but inscribed blocks and often they would have a scene or a partial scene like this we call them Tala tots there are distinctive size basically 52 centimeters long by 26 by 24 sorry 52 centimeters that's the Egyptian cubit my own professor dr. Donald Redford was the one who was tasked with trying to pull all this material together and discover where they originally came from ironically my professor has yet to retire and I'm retiring so anyway here's a beautiful picture of a teletype block with workers carrying Tala thoughts it's so like someone with an iPhone taken a picture somebody with an iPhone but anyway it does illustrate how these men were able to carry a single teletype on their shoulder and build and it is reasoned that this allowed Akhenaten to build ridiculously I mean he built huge temples in very short periods of time and the the smaller stones seem to work a lot better than using the great big stone that took scores of men to move one block here's the some of the scenes of some that have been matched but the vast majority have not been matched and what Professor Redford ended up doing was working from photographs the wonderful giant jigsaw puzzles and two volumes of these scenes have been published by Redford I had the pleasure to do one of the chapters but what we begin to see now from these later temples and these later temples we'll talk about more in a moment he built four of them and we see the iconography that would become familiar with some of the blocks show the king undergoing a Jubilee festival the Jubilee festival normally takes place in the Kings 30th year it's a rejuvenation ceremony here he is at the beginning of his reign our began this career three years into his reign or four years and he's celebrating the Jubilee which is what's going on here you're not an old man yet you're probably barely 20 what's going on from these blocks and here more blocks showing him undergoing this ceremony here are some matched scenes by this time he has three daughters that's what we figure it's least year three maybe you're four at the latest he has three daughters here's the procession with the king the Queen the three daughters is put together by a National Geographic artist many years ago based on the scenes several things happened through this ceremony and as I said we have at least four temples that were built one of which was for the celebration of this Jubilee he changed his name he now goes by Akhenaten the name Amenhotep is dropped in fact when the temple started construction his name Amenhotep appeared on some of the blocks then he had his his working Quran chiseled that out and right in Akhenaten so he changed his name in connection with the ceremony in other words embracing the name Autzen and dropping the name of a moon the second thing that happens is the name of his God now appears written in a cartouche using the same technique for a king Kings write their names in these oval rings called cartouche --is and now the gods name now this is not common gods names are typically not written this way but the signal is being sent that this king or this deity is not king he's now at the top so all this happens around year three of his reign just taking a quick tour of back in the 1970s when we discovered this temple outside of what is today karnak temple this is where these some of the fragments of these great statues are found some of which are in the Cairo Museum and the Louvre in different places very strange there he is a very strange look this is our team in 1977 yes that's me on the right about 25 kilos ago and here we are digging on the outskirts of what was - karnak temple you can see off in the background and here we found the remains of the temple and we're Akhenaten's statues were found and that's me the young photographer but basically what we came to realize was that this temple thanks to the inscriptions and the scenes were found is where this jubilee festival occurred here are more of these teletype blocks were found some years later I'm going to speed things up but this is the data and this is the result okay so down here at the bottom the outline of the temple and it actually goes beyond into the village off to the east so some of the temple walls actually under present-day houses now look at that blue outline gives you a sense of the size of this thing it was huge because at that time this was the main temple of a moon that had been built over the years by many kings and he builds a temple larger than the main temple built by his forebears that Moses the third and we have blocks with the names of four different temples Egyptians named everything so each temple has a name and the first one he built was called hoot Ben Ben remember that name who'd been Ben was the name of the son temple iliopoulos so he's clearly identifying himself with that old tradition but meanwhile makes these other temples as well well no sooner than the celebration is over several things begin to happen in rapid succession number one a program to eradicate the images and names of especially Amun and other deities begins an iconoclasm a purge and you can go all over Egypt and you can see like this the image of a moon has been chiseled out and often it's his name that's chiseled out even at the very top of this obelisk that stood 96 feet high the image of Amun has been hacked out and you can just see the white outline showing that but then that it was subsequently restored by a later King probably setting the first over here you can see the white because it was chiseled out words spoken by almond ray that was chiseled out and restored now that's going to great lengths to climb up on the top of obelisk that chisel out the names of this god the temple of Amun was closed all the priests were fired I liken him to Ronald Reagan who shortly after it became president the air traffic controllers decided they want to go out on a strike which was illegal in the States and son Ronald Reagan's is fine you're fired he fired them all and I had more air traffic controllers and so that's exactly what ought not did okay you're not gonna work for me you're all fired and and so the temple of Amun was closed other temples were closed he diverted all the resources from the temples to building his temples for his god it's starting to look a little bit like an abandonment of the gods even in north sinai where i excavated we found blocks these are door jams and the name of almond has been hacked out and even in the cartouche the name of the great-grandfather amenhotep ii the name almond has been hacked out this is in sinai i mean from one end of egypt to the other somebody's going around chiseling out the names of this god that looks very exclusive istic this is a statue in vienna of Akhenaten's father Amenhotep and close up of the name you can see even dad's name has been hacked out even it's my dad I can't handle the name almond anymore that's that's the extreme to which and I by the way this is not the king himself right now he has his soldiers and henchmen doing this alright what led to this what led to an abandonment of the most prominent deity and by the way Jerome I too asked the question who ever heard of a nation that a band their gods this is not done and of course that's we could say out of Egypt who ever heard of this such a thing by the way later generations will look back to this King and call him a heretic we might think of him as a hero he got the idea of one God but anyway what happened what's behind this my theory and this really is what I tried to do that's different and it really came about in the course of my research I started which probably is a very good sign and hopefully you'll learn it too is when you're doing research you might start with a thesis but as you start looking at the data you say it doesn't go that way it's leading me this way and that's exactly what happened to me in fact I was so alarmed by the direction I was going I finished this chapter I sent it to four colleagues one of whom is boy walking at Macquarie and and several other scholars I said am I going nuts here what do you think of this theory and the OPAC says it's brilliant that makes sense anyway so here's here's what they thought was brilliant I suggest he had a Damascus Road experience a conversion experience a divine encounter it's the AH phanie of some sort that sort of changed his perspectives on things what was that I don't know but we have several lines of evidence which I don't have time to get into in detail but there are five lines of evidence one of which is the name of the temple that he built that temple that I was involved in excavating as a young graduate student the name of the temple is gampa hatun he built a new temple I'll show you a plan of that at Amarna his new capital he built a temple in Nubia by the same name and it means something like of the cotton is discovered there's a sense of discovery uh uh an encounter and by the way Hosea talks about how God discovered Israel in the wilderness there's this element of surprise just like finding grapes in the wilderness you don't expect to find grapes in the wilderness it's it's odd so I think there's some sort of discovery I don't whether it was he was blinded by the Sun who knows what I'm just saying something happened there are inscriptions that seem to suggest this very interesting these blocks are in still intact in a wall and you can only partially see them and professor Redford crawled up and tried to copy the text and photograph them but you can't see the whole thing and part of it is blocked but it has a it basically depicts in words the god Roger octi seated and making a proclamation and then this proclamation it refers to the gods above is the word have ceased it's as if the gods have ceased to function and this God is saying I want you to make a a temple of a God who is different and and this seems to be a reflection on this theophany the king went mad making temples to this God all over Egypt and all these lines represent places where temples were blocks have been found I learned just the other day that now also at paramah see the the the capital of the 19th and 20th dynasty they found teletype block reused we found them out in Sinai so what happens Akhenaten abandons if you think of think of Thebes as Vatican City for the almond imperial capital it would be like the Catholic Church moving from Rome and going to Geneva and starting all over again or something like that and this is what does he abandons the the sacred city the Vatican of his day and establishes a new capital halfway between halfway up Egypt in a place called Amarna and the new name of the city is called asset often around the city he makes these markers to mark his new city all of which have the Sun God and him adoring the Sun God and even with the founding of the city he makes if you will a a confession of some sort of theophany where he says behold Autzen there's Autzen and he goes on to say about how anton revealed to him a desire to have a new city built and new temples built and that's what he does this is the temple gampa otten remember that name that was a temple we discovered at Karnak a huge temple 150 meters long and look at the bottom all those little squares are altars 920 altars in that one field altars all these little squares in the temple these are altars and on the North Moore not all of which have been uncovered but Barry Kemp from Cambridge whose excavating here Blaser 1700 altars minimum guys gone nuts what are you doing making so many altars talk about altar calls anyway Barry camp himself says surely it's a symptom of obsession why is he so obsessed with altar making now read through your Bible and you will know that almost any time God appears with us to Abraham or to Samson's parents or other stories in the Bible I can show you stories outside of the Bible the response is to make an altar and make an offering altar building and offerings are responses to theophany and I think this is a tangible piece of evidence that he is responding to this encounter with this deity which changed his life forever and that's why he's always showing standing before an altar piled high with food offering to his God now two more things and we'll try to bring this to the end the God has one more name change and this name change occurs by his ninth year and the names I think signifies any attempts to associate his deity with any other deities so look at the new name instead of raha octi who rejoices in his horizon in his name of Shu who was in the optin it now becomes living ray the living son ruler of the horizon rejoicing in the horizon in his name of Ray the father who has come literally or appears as the son days notice Shu is gone we can't have that pagan element raha Rock T is gone we can't have that other deity associated and all that is stripped and were simply left with the son who manifests himself through the Sun disc and so what we see is and by the way oops I've gone the wrong direction sorry I just want to show that picture once again because what happens is is from about year five year six on never again do we even see his God portrayed as a falcon the Falcon is gone the human figure like with a Sun disc on his head that's gone all you have is his Sun itself so what we might think of all the pagan elements are gone from the iconography now lastly in terms of and I think the best theological affirmation of his view is found in the great him found on one of the tombs at Amarna what of his priest name I and this is a hymn that is said to be composed by Akhenaten himself splendid you rise in heavens light land old living art and creative life earth brightens when you dawn in the horizon when you shine as Autzen of daytime how many are your deeds though hidden from sight forget this is the creaky line o soul God beside whom there is none that's an exclusive monotheistic statement and to be theologically consistent if there's only one God that God must be a universal God not just a local God so read on the lands of Syria and cush as what is today Sudan and the land of Egypt they're all a part of his creation so it's clearly a universal God at the logical conclusion of monotheism and that line o soul God beside whom there is none is that there is no god but God okay so I think if I had more time to develop it we could make a very strong case for him being a monotheistic but the second let me just wrap up those points other deities especially Amun RA the previous previous had God is persecuted and eradicated we actually even have writings where the plural writing for gods is scratched out because that's no longer theologically viable other temples are closed and we know this because later decrees which I'll show you a picture of in a moment his successors King Tut opens all the old temples and rehires all the fired priests who are still alive temples are built all over the place exclusively to this God no temples built to anyone else and it's this exclusive element that leads me to say he's a monotheistic a head o theist ok is there a connection to Moses well I don't know if he was the first but certainly one of the first to make a suggestion was none other than Sigmund Freud he wrote a book which is still available I think it's every now and then somebody reprints it and it's called Moses and monotheism 1939 and the good doctor says I venture now to draw the following conclusion if Moses was an Egyptian which I don't know I would start with that assumption and if he transmitted to the Jews his own religion then it was that of Akhenaten the Auton religion so again I don't know that he was the first James Henry breasted talks a little bit about it some years earlier but he popularized the notion Freud did because the who Freud is a lot of people paid attention but as most Egyptologists think he should have probably stuck to psychoanalysis preferably the person sitting in front of him not somebody from thousands of years earlier now my conclusion is there is really no connection and there are several reasons for that again people differ on when the Exodus occurred if you go with the so called early date then Akhenaten comes a hundred years after Moses and the Exodus if you believe in the late date or 13th century date then it's not quite a century but you're decades removed in other words Moses comes along well after and so there is a chronological issue secondly there is a geographical issue once akhenaten makes his new capital in middle Egypt everything seems to indicate that that's where he stays he doesn't venture off all over Egypt he doesn't have to you see Pharaohs used to have to go to the different temples and show up to do their royal duty at different temples all over Egypt there's only one temple that needs taken care of he didn't have to go anywhere he could stay put and all the evidence seems to suggest that he was he bound himself to an oath to stay in his his Vatican his Vatican City Moses on the other hand was in the land of goshen which is northeastern Egypt the Bible also calls it the land of Ramses the northeastern Delta and if you read the exodus narratives it's that Moses gets up in the morning and boom he's there in pharaoh's court he didn't take three four days traveling to Amarna where he could have hung out with Akhenaten for a while had lunch so it seems there's a geographical problem perhaps the biggest problem is that when Akhenaten died so did his religion this is his circus guess it's located on the Nile side of the Cairo Museum if you ever get to the Cairo Museum go outside there's no signs telling you where to go but it's a wonderful big Sun disk and the Rays on it okay so it's around if you face the museum go around the left side you'll see it unless they move it to the new museum but I don't think they are but there it sits when he died his religion was lost we know this on a number of levels when he died his reforms died with him what you see in the right is the inscription left by Tutankhamun one of his immediate successors might have been come along a couple years later we don't know for sure if Queen Nefertiti ruled for a short stint in between but Tutankhamun left us this inscription in which he tells about restoring Egypt reopening the temples his later success of Horemheb talks about hiring back priests and getting things back to normal in other words the goal of Tutankhamun by the way he changed his name he was born to tank Aten the living image of Aten and he change his name to Tutankhamun the living image of Amun so we can say that to uncommons greatest contribution was to make almond great again so I believe then that each religion was based on its own theophany Moses had his burning bush encounter with God and that stands at the basis of the beginning of the mosaic religion if you will and whatever encounter Akhenaten had with the Sun that we read about in the 10th pylon inscriptions or the the boundary Stila both had their own encounters with deity and there's something fundamentally different I think when you have a theophany and a religion follows there are several things you need to make it last number one you have to have a charismatic leader there have to be there has to be a body of literature and there has to be followers to carry it on as far as we know with Akhenaten when he died the literature that was carved on the temple walls stayed there we have no copies of later texts classic Egyptian literature is copied again and again and again over the years on papyri and other other sources we have no additional copies of those inscriptions that that really are his theological manifesto except on the walls in those tombs and they were all abandoned so the each had his own theophany and i might conclude by saying that that moses was was still the first person with a tablet to download data from a cloud thank you [Applause] thank you very much it was a treat and taking us a little bit to the side of where we would normally have gone which makes it all the more special I could never have done that we've got not much time for questions because lunch is about to begin and I didn't find you two questions anyway I don't think but probably we got time for two quick questions if there are any I've got plenty bit yeah yeah what what happened had only a face a mother could love yeah we really don't know many of thought there were genetic issues the DNA studies that were done on the mummies of several family members like his father his mother there is a mummy that was found in tomb 55 in the Valley of the Kings which may be his mummy it's not labeled it could be his body or traditionally was thought to be that of a son of his but that mummy and those don't suggest any of this sort of genetic disorders like Marfan syndrome fragile X chromosome so the if that if those tests are valid and some question of the DNA was taken from the long bones legs and I've been told by some that long bones are not the best place to do DNA the teeth are the best place because if you can't contaminate the inside the enamel whereas other parts of the body are more easily contaminated so maybe there's a DNA prop you know a genetic thing but most now think if that is valid then it must be some stylistic religious motif because he goes from being looking very normal to very weird thank you we'll probably call it a day for the sake of our kitchen stuff but please join me thank you [Applause] lunch awaits

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Views: 47,968

Rating: 4.6633167 out of 5

Keywords: James K. Hoffmeier

Id: RvHU0zyfRpk

Length: 55min 9sec (3309 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2019