Akhenaten: The Pharaoh That Egypt Wanted to Forget

so have you ever been in a situation where you have a certain way of doing something whether it's a job how to do it like a math problem or something or anything that involves a procedure now imagine you get a new boss teacher or whoever fits in this scenario and they tell you to stop doing it the way you've always been doing it and do it in a new special way odds are you're not going to be very receptive now imagine that this new technique doesn't really make things more helpful and all it does is make people upset and more confused this type of thing once happened across all of ancient Egypt on a mass scale thanks to one of history's most interesting pharaohs Akhenaten akhenaten decided to completely change Egypt's religious system and as a result became rather unpopular eventually when he died Egypt went back to the old ways but they weren't keen to remember him Akhenaten became the Pharaoh that Egypt wanted to forget so akhenaten is an economy's actual name originally he took the throne as Amenhotep the fourth the Amon part of his name is supposed to represent the Egyptian god a moon as the name Amenhotep means a moon is satisfied a moon is the king of the Egyptian Pantheon the equivalent of Zeus then sometime in the 15th century BC he was combined with the Sun God raw to form on the raw still the head honcho but now also controlling the entire Sun as represented by that disk on the top of his head the disks name is attend Amenhotep the fourth for a mysterious reason decided that from now on Egyptian should worship that Sun disk over Umrah himself so he changed his name to Akhenaten which means effective of @n his new religion of atenism is a puzzling one for many reasons for example Akhenaten only worship 210 which makes one believe that this new religion was monotheistic or worshiping one God but as far as we know he never officially denied the existence of the other Egyptian gods either were actively forced others to not worship other gods he just focused on a tenth if that's the case then it wouldn't be monotheistic but technically it would be he no theistic where he recognized many gods or don't deny other gods but you only worship one but then it gets a bit more confusing because there's some evidence that suggests that they tried to put a 10 above the rank of God meaning a tenth isn't a God after all but something more it's weird but for the sake of this video will say a 10 was worshipped as a God so what does a 10 do now as a god a 10 is considered the source of life and considering what the Sun does in growing plants and keeping animals in here warm that's not much of a stretch when depicted the sunrays of a 10 would be handing down unk's which is that symbol UCL with a lot of Egyptian stuff basically it represents life so it's the Sun literally handing life to people and animals and so on and so forth now how did the people of Egypt handle this they weren't that happy for one thing ancient Egyptians had no word for religion like at all religion was so engrained into their lifestyle that religion and lifestyle were essentially the same thing to them it'd be like calling waking up and eating three meals a day a part of your religion sounds redundant right while Egyptians kind of had the same attitude with their religion so while changes did happen to ancient Egyptian religion those would be due to either long periods of time passing by over the course of many generations or there would be local differences between northern Egypt and southern Egypt as the world wasn't as connected back then compared to now but one thing that was consistent was that the Pharaoh was worshipped as a God himself which justified his absolute rule so when Akhenaten proclaimed the worship of the ten it was an awkward position on the one hand it's such a sudden change and arguably a form of heresy but if Akhenaten is a God with whom he must absolutely obey then do you go along with it or not optimism definitely got some followers for certain but the old ways didn't exactly die off not to mention the priesthood of a moon didn't exactly like this change either in fact one theory is that the priesthood of a moon had so much power that Anton ISM wasn't attempt to remove that power from them either way the priests didn't like it one bit in fact Akhenaten decided to build a new capital for Egypt away from the other towns that would be heavily influenced by the priesthoods we called this new capital Amarna and also named this period of egypt after that city but the city was actually called akka Totten yes that name is similar to Akhenaten's name hi now but in this city he built a lot of temples for attend as you can imagine going back to Akhenaten himself he was also notable for having a very weird depiction of himself most pharaohs when depicting themselves were romanticized to look stoic strong or idealistic but Akhenaten would have himself as well as his relatives carved to look rather weird a lot of elongated features like in their face elongated skulls and things like that through the arms there are some theory that akhenaten had some sort of genetic defect to make him look like that and that the artwork was an attempt at realism but some of the classic stoic type of art has survived of ikana and one of his wife's Nefertiti then of course we have several statues of him and his family with weirdly elongated skulls well that's weird why do they have such elongated skulls yeah there's a few ideas one being the genetic defect considering incest was common among the royal families of Egypt that could be an explanation and if you think that this depiction is fake while some of these depictions are exaggerated we do have some skulls that show elongation compared to a normal skull maybe like one of the people the royal family had it and it became associated with royalty so others had their skulls artificially elongated to copy them kind of like how people started wearing powdered wigs after louis xiv did it there are also other cultures where artificially elongated skulls did occur despite being before modern surgery so it's not that unthinkable either way Akhenaten definitely had distinguishing style depicting himself in his family so what happened after he died while the worship of autumn continued it wouldn't last very long after a few short rains Tutankhaten became a young pharaoh of egypt his name meant living image of @n naturally being a kid ruler meant that a lot of people would try to influence him and oh boy did they the priesthood convinced him to change his name to Tutankhamun the name that you're more familiar with and of course the name means living image of a moon instead of at in Tutankhamun also moved the capital back to Thebes from Ramana so the old ways were on their way back to reigns later we have a new pharaoh in the last one of this dynasty called Horemheb Horemheb would be the one to officially end the worship of the ten altogether then under his reign they destroyed as many attend temples as they could they also tried to erase as much of the Amarna period from Egypt as they could considering it a horrible embarrassment for their history it's kind of like de-stalinization under Khrushchev but way bigger and the thing is it actually kind of worked when you have a very small amount of people who can read and write not to mention history itself is not something that everyone learns about in ancient Egypt it's very easy to control information like that add to the fact that life expectancy in ancient Egypt was only in the mid to late 30s if they survived childhood it didn't take as long for generations to die off thankfully they didn't destroy everything so modern historians and archeologists have learned about Akhenaten and his reign but a lot of what we found were destroyed fragments or well-hidden pieces of art the erasing of history is also why we know so little about Tutankhamun and perhaps why his grave wasn't robbed by grave robbers as no one would be searching for him but this tells about how powerful history can be and how the modern era where we have scholarly debates about history as well as the standards of acceptance of history is one we take for granted many might argue about revisionism or reinterpretations being dangerous but it's over silly stuff like an older figure apparently having flaws is controversial but it's nowhere near as impactful as the idea of erasing an entire dynasty from the record it's why ancient history isn't nearly as certain compared to more modern history thank you for watching hey everyone hoped you liked the video if you liked it please click like and subscribe and don't forget to use that notification bell so that way you can actually see a new video of mine when it comes out I will see you guys next time

Channel: EmperorTigerstar

Views: 104,604

Rating: 4.9390388 out of 5

Keywords: history, geography, Egypt, Ancient Egypt, Ancient, Nile, Akhenaten, Aten, Tutankhamun, Amun, Amun-Ra

Id: mgYe4a2ruS4

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Fri May 04 2018