The Strange Life of Akhenaten

it is about 1350 to BC and a 17 year old boy has just become the ruler of the most powerful civilization in the ancient world in the next few years he will use every means at his disposal to transform the entire kingdom into his dream of a religious utopia whether his people want to or not he believes that he can overturn thousands of years of tradition by the sheer might of his will he will attempt to radically remake society religion art and even entire cities until he gets what he wants welcome to the strange life of the Egyptian pharaoh akhenaten known as The Heretic Pharaoh in 13 52 BC when the teenager Akhenaten was crowned Pharaoh of Egypt he was known by a different name Amenhotep the fourth he was named after his father Amenhotep a third a legendary military general who had ruled for almost 40 years but the old Pharaoh had just died and his young son had big shoes to fill however this boy Amenhotep the fourth was never meant to be Pharaoh his eldest brother taught mosa had been groomed to be the heir to the throne for years however Tut mosa had died suddenly an Amman hotep had been thrust into the spotlight now upon his father's death he was handed the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt and the absolute power that went with it the young king had just inherited an international empire that was at the height of its glory thanks to the unprecedented military conquests of his father he controlled lands as far south as Nubia in Africa and as far north as Syria in the Middle East every year treasure from all over this vast Kingdom flooded into the Royal coffers of Egypt's capital city of Thebes the last series of Pharaohs had used this immense wealth to construct monumental temples to the many Egyptian gods as a result the skyline of Thebes was filled with dozens of spectacular temples decorated in elaborate hieroglyphs and adorned with an array of precious metals the largest and most expensive of these glittering temples was known as Karnak it was dedicated to the god Amun RA the supreme deity of Thebes legions of priests served in the multitude of religious sanctuaries throughout thieves and they'd become used to generations of Pharaohs honoring their gods through the construction of ever more elaborate temples and offerings the new boy king looked out over the bustling metropolis of Thebes the jewel of Egypt he considered the reach of his realm with his unquestioned military dominance the vast territorial control unspeakable wealth and or inspiring cities but the young Amenhotep the fourth was not happy there was no amount of money nor power that could satisfy him because he had just one thing on his mind and to get it he was willing to sacrifice absolutely everything the young Amenhotep the fourth wanted revolution a religious revolution from this point on he would spend the rest of his life dedicating himself to forcefully overturning one-and-a-half millennia of Egyptian religious beliefs ridding his kingdom of all Egyptian gods and replacing them with just one a god that he called the artim but what was the Artin simply put it was the son however unlike every other Egyptian god the Pharaoh did not believe it was a half-human half-animal being he believed that its physical form was the son itself a perfectly round disc so when the King looked up into the sky he saw just one God who gave life warmth and happiness to everyone on earth this was the Aten all other gods paled in comparison therefore when Amenhotep the fourth wanted to depict the image of the art and in artwork he represented it as a perfect circle with his rays of light reaching down to the earth in the form of arms at the end of the Rays were hands holding the ankh the Egyptian hieroglyph that represented life the new king believed that his primary purpose as the new Pharaoh was to reveal this God the art and to the people now that the coronation ceremony was over Egyptians were completely ignorant about what was about to happen to them just five years after taking power Amenhotep felt the time was right to unleash his revolutionary ideas onto his people the Pharaoh called his courtiers and scribes together and through them announced to all of Egypt that he was suddenly changing his royal name the king ruled that people should no longer call him a man hotep because that name meant the god Amun is satisfied instead from now on he was to be known as Akhenaten this new name meant the person who is effective for the Artin in this first act which seemed so minor to us the Pharaoh made it abundantly clear to everyone that his utmost concern was with promoting this one God then Akhenaten's religious revolution was made even more obvious when he ordered the construction of four new temple complexes to the art and just outside the sacred temple grounds of Amun RA at Carnac this was a calculated move the monumental Karnak complex and the entire capital city of Thebes had always proclaimed that Amun RA was the most powerful and important of all gods the construction of 4 sanctuaries to the art and could easily be interpreted as a direct challenge to the supremacy of the old God in fact this is exactly how some did understand it the masses of priests who serve the supreme god of thebes must have been outraged by the sudden development from their pharaoh it appears that they're enraged protests must have been so frequent and so impassioned that Akhenaten's patience ran out the pharaoh stood up and announced that because he kept hearing angry words he was going to show everyone how little the old god Amun and the city of Thebes mattered to the Artin and Arkan Artin himself the Pharaoh declared that he and the entire royal family was officially leaving Thebes and abandoning the old capital forever only a month after changing his name Akhenaten packed up the royal court and sailed north along the river nile his followers may not have known without being taken or what their king had in mind how many days or weeks they were to be traveling however one morning as the royal ships approached a bend in the river Akhenaten called them to a halt he drew everyone's attention to the eastern horizon where laying between the rivers shore and a line of cliffs in the distance was a barren stretch of sandy desert as dawn broke and the Sun rose from behind the distant cliffs his rays shone through a gap in the rocks by sheer coincidence the image of a Sun rising between two hills was the exact picture which made up the Egyptian hieroglyph for the word horizon to the Pharaoh the art and himself had given him an epiphany this empty stretch of desert was to be the site of a brand new capital city to explain the epiphany to his courtiers Ark Martin said that it was the Artin itself who told me where the new city should be made for him this site was of fundamental importance to the king because this place has never been owned by another God nor goddess nor anyone else this city was for the art and alone and it would be the center of an entirely new Egyptian religion work on this new city began immediately Akhenaten ordered that a huge workforce of artisans officials and builders should be transported to the site and within a few years a whole new capital arose out of the sands Akhenaten called the settlement our curtain the horizon of the Sun disk he wanted it to rival the glories of Thebes and be the jewel in the crown of his utopian vision in the centre of his new city the Pharaoh drew our plans for a giant temple to his new God in a style that had never been attempted before unlike the old temples in Thebes there was no statue of the God to worship because Akhenaten reasoned everyone could look up and see the Sun itself yet even stranger the building was to be constructed without a roof instead a huge open-air courtyard was built the vast open space in this courtyard was filled with over 1500 tables to be piled high with all kinds of food and drink all offered as a gift to the Aten as the Sun traveled through the sky every day it was to look down upon these gifts and see the generosity of its worshippers just nine years after he took the throne Akhenaten's new capital and the enormous new temple were ready for use to celebrate the king of Egypt then declared that all other temples and their gods were officially banned and the myriad of priests were permanently dismissed from their roles the artim was now the only God in Egypt and the City of our Qatar tan was the religious and royal epicenter of the kingdom yet Akhenaten was not finished with his revolution he then announced that the most important person in this new religion was Akhenaten himself the Pharaoh claimed that this was because he alone had a special relationship with the Aten I cannot and then penned a hymn to the art and in which the worshippers had to sing the following lines living out and no one truly knows you except for your son Akhenaten you created the earth and raised up your son the king of Upper and Lower Egypt our Canon the king was not even trying to be subtle he had announced that he was the son of the god because the Aten was now his father I cannot endure clared that he was the only connection between the Egyptian people and the god I Canon was effectively the high priest of his own religion so if any arm was confused the Pharaoh had just made it absolutely clear that all religious military and political power existed in one man our Canon he had achieved so much so quickly defero decided that it was time to bask in the glory of his dreams made reality Akhenaten announced a special festival for all of the people who had been shipped in to populate his new city the Pharaoh climbed into a lavish golden chariot and rode through the streets of pocket art and to bask in the adoration of his subjects however the fairer knew that most Egyptians did not live in his new city and that he needed to make himself just as visible to all of them regardless of whether they saw him in real life or not so I can art and decide that it he needed to revolutionize how he was shown in art so that all people everywhere knew who he was and that things had changed forever he ordered the creation of a series of new statues of himself to be erected in various cities around his kingdom that Akhenaten enforced a bizarre new artistic style for his Masons to follow in these images the statues of the King were to exaggerate certain features of the Pharaohs body creating an uncomfortably disproportionate figure Akhenaten was shown with a strangely elongated head thin neck giant chin thick lips and narrowed eyes his body had enlarged buttocks swollen thighs and engorged stomach the overall effect upon those who saw these statues must have been shocking clearly akhenaten did not want his people to forget who he was or that the world they lived in was entirely different from what had come before Akhenaten's dreams had come true he had recreated Egypt in his own image now he had to make sure he could guarantee that his revolution would survive into the future even beyond his death so he needed an heir a son Akhenaten had been married to the beautiful Nefertiti even before he became Pharaoh and with her he had fathered six children but all of them were daughters thankfully the Farrah had also married other wives from which he finally had a male heir upon the birth of his son Akhenaten made his intentions clear that this boy was to carry on his father's legacy Akhenaten called his young son to town carton a name which meant the living image of Artin the weight of carrying on the revolution rested on this infants tiny shoulders in an ominous hint of what will happen when this boy grows up we you'll know him by a slightly different name we do not remember him as to take our tan but as Tutankhamun but as Akhenaten held his son in the middle of his new city the future was looking bright to spread the word of his successful new regime I can Artin invited the diplomats from kingdoms all over the world to come and visit and admire his grand project no one could believe what had happened at the heart of the world's greatest superpower and what had been achieved by this ambitious determined religious radical ican Arden had put everything in place to recreate an Egypt that was grounded in him alone but this was not to last in about 13 35 BC just 17 years after taking charge of Egypt something went terribly wrong all trace of Akhenaten disappears from history we don't have a single mention of when he died or under what circumstances his capital city was abandoned within 20 years of the last mention of the Pharaoh and the new religion of the Artin was all but wiped from history it is almost as if we were never meant to know that Akhenaten had existed someone wanted Akhenaten forgotten forever as strange as the life of this Pharaoh was it is not as strange as what happened after he died make sure you check out the second part of this video the strange afterlife of Akhenaten available only on the armchair historian website if you'd like to know more about the historical details behind the story in this video keep watching for a short PostScript explanation keen-eyed viewers of this video may have noticed that there are very few concrete details in this story this is especially true regarding dates and strict chronologies about minor events this is primarily due to the fact that historical evidence about this pharaohs rule is notoriously fragmented and scattered archeologists and historians have been left with only a handful of detailed documents from this time period and a myriad of vague references to seneschal people and events to create an account of Akhenaten's life the most detailed sources of information are from a series of inscriptions known as the boundary stelae these stelae are giant carvings which are dotted around the border of our qatar turn they were commissioned by the King to mark out how far his new city could extend in each direction of the compass thankfully the boundary stelae contain long speeches from the king from different years of his reign it is from the information in these texts that historians begin to reconstruct the story of Arkin Artem's life we must be wary though as these are officially sanctioned documents we are relying on information that is inherently biased in favor of the Pharaoh it is from these stelae that we know which year he founded the city and that the King believed that the art in itself had revealed the location to the Pharaoh the other extremely valuable sources we have for the King and in particular the religious beliefs of his new faith are from the tomb inscriptions there are a number of tombs dug into the cliffs to the east of our Qatar turn these were to be the resting places of the officials and courtiers who move to the city with the rest of the royal court what has proven most valuable to historians is the fact that the walls of these tombs contain a number of images of Akhenaten and his Queen Nefertiti they also preserved a copy of the him to the Artem that was quoted in this video in which the Pharaoh claims to be the son of the God but again these tomb in scription x' were created to flatter our canton and to demonstrate the loyalty of the officials who were buried there so they are problematic texts but apart from these sources a lot of information is simply guesswork by historians who are operating with incomplete information from other sources viewers might also correctly point out that some poetic license has been taken in the narrative of this video especially when explaining the Pharaohs motives for his decisions and when describing what happened on a particular day in the King's life this is certainly a valid point however you will find that every historian has to offer their own elaborations on the same events and that as a result audiences will discover variations in other biographies of The Heretic Pharaoh unfortunately this is the nature of the beast so to speak between the little details we have from our very biased sources there are gaps of months and years where we know nothing but until we have further sources every attempt to give a step-by-step account of Akhenaten's reign requires significant gap-filling and educated guesswork the purpose of this production was to present the key details of the Pharaohs life in an entertaining and dramatic way I hope that the audience will forgive the artistic flourishes that were required in order to achieve this if you have enjoyed this journey back into the past you want to understand more about why we have so few historical sources from the life of Akhenaten I encourage you to watch part 2 of this video series the companion episode is called the strange afterlife of Akhenaten and that's only available on the armchair historian website we'll be delving into how all trace of Akhenaten was mysteriously lost and then dramatically rediscovered centuries later click the link in the description below to watch it right now and if you'd like to see more great historical content like this make sure you subscribe and I'll see you next time you

Channel: History Skills

Views: 24,492

Rating: 4.6317692 out of 5

Keywords: akhenaten, pharaoh, history, ancient, egypt, aten, akhetaten, amarna, el amarna, atenism, sun disc, armchair, historian, religion, art, politics, teacher, student, classroom, new kingdom, collaboration

Id: YFGOpmz1AhI

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 29 2019