R.Wilkinson,
The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt
Aten: ‘Lord of Jubilees’
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. . .
Francis Llewellyn Griffith, ‘The Jubilee of Akhenaten’
In Year 6 the Aten was given a new epithet: ‘Celebrator of Jubilees’.
Ahmed Osman,
Akhenaten and Moses
I will make a ‘House of Rejoicing’ for the Aten, my father, in the island of ‘Aten Distinguished in Jubilees’ in Akhet-Aten in this place.
Proclamation by Akhenaten at the foundation ceremony of the city of
Akhet-Aten
Aten living and great who is in jubilee residing in the temple of Aten at
Akhetaten
Amarna inscription, in R. Wilkinson,
The Complete Gods and
Goddess of Ancient Egypt
A Desolate Place
In November 2002 I made my first visit to Tell El Amarna, a lonely place on the east bank of the Nile in middle Egypt. I was, however, not alone but with some 40 rowdy Italians brought to Egypt by my good friend Adriano Forgione, the editor of
Hera
magazine in Rome. Each year Adriano organises a special tour to Egypt for his readers and often asks me to escort them around. If I am free then I accept willingly, for I very much enjoy these events, which give me the opportunity to meet a sample of my readers face to face and, as often happens as well, make new friends along the way.
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We had left the Meridian Hotel at Giza with two coaches at sunrise and had taken the new asphalt Fayum road. It was a delightfully warm and bright autumn day and everyone was filled with a sense of adventure. Tell El Amarna had been on my agenda for quite some time, but somehow I had not found the time or opportunity to go there.
Upon reaching the outskirts of the Fayum oasis, our driver turned south-east towards the Nile. We then skirted the river for a few hours and finally reached the busy market town of Al Minya. After a little rest and some refreshments, we drove out of Al Minya to eventually arrive at the small hamlet of Malawi, where we crossed the Nile on a rickety old ferry boat. At this point we left the lush Nile Valley behind and drove into the desert to reach a vast crescent-shaped plain backed by low rocky hills. We were at the fabled site of Tell El Amarna.
But where was the legendary city of the sun?
Sadly, Akhet-Aten has all but disappeared, gone with the wind, to use the popular phrase. Long gone are the sumptuous palaces and splendid sanctuaries that once graced this place. And long gone is the fabulous Great Temple of the Aten. All that remains are the outline of foundations and two broken columns of the so-called Small Temple of the Aten. According to Barry Kemp, leader of the 1977-8 El-Amarna Survey of the Egypt Exploration Society, ‘Amarna was never a lost city in the sense that it became invisible, although there may well have been a long period when it was not noticed through lack of interest.’
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Well, it was quite invisible now. Akhet-Aten, much like my native city of Alexandria, must be seen not with the eyes but with the imagination.
The ruins of Tell el Amarna were first noticed in modern times by the Frenchman Edmé Jomard, a senior member of the 1798-9 Napoleonic expedition, who, on his way back to Cairo down the Nile, was surprised to come across the scant remains of what appeared to be a huge town not shown on any of his maps. ‘Most of the constructions are unfortunately demolished, and one can see little more than the foundations’, Jomard was to lament. Unwittingly he had stumbled on the lost city of Akhet-Aten, or rather what was left of it after it had been deliberately razed to the ground, stone by stone, by the infuriated priests of Amun-Ra in
c
. 1335 BC. Jomard produced a freehand sketch of the city which served as a rough survey until 1824, when a full archaeological survey was conducted by Sir John Gardner Wilkinson. After him came the Prussian archaeologist Richard Lepsius in the 1840s. It was Sir William Flinders Petrie, however, who started systematic archaeological digs in 1891. From 1917 onwards several detailed surveys were made of Akhet-Aten, the last being by Barry Kemp and Mohamad Abdel Aziz Awad in 1977-8, published in 1993 by the Egypt Exploration Society of London (EES).
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From all these surveys and especially the latest by Kemp and Awad, a realistic picture can be made of what the city of Akhet-Aten looked like. Today there is a scale model of the city, made by the British architects Ingham Associates of London, displayed at the EES.
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As far as ancient cities go, Akhet-Aten was a sprawling metropolis, 12 kilometres long and two kilometres wide. When new, it must have looked like a gleaming jewel along the east bank of the Nile. Its true boundaries extended on both sides of the Nile and included the green fields on the west bank. It is estimated that the city’s population grew to about 30,000 within a few years, a huge number for the epoch, which would have made Akhet-Aten a metropolis when compared to primitive cultures elsewhere in the second millennium BC, when people still lived in small settlements and numbers rarely exceeded a thousand souls.
As customary in Egypt, work at Akhet-Aten began with the tombs for the royal family and other nobles. These were cut into the eastern hills behind the city centre. The royal area was called ‘Aten Distinguished of Jubilees’ and consisted of vast temples with open courts, lavishly designed palaces and villas with gardens and private quays on the Nile, and a variety of auxiliary buildings such as military barracks, workshops, government compounds, record offices, stables and storehouses. There was a splendid avenue that served as a ceremonial route for the king and that ran parallel to the river between the Great Palace and the Great Temple of Aten. The latter was known as
gem-pa-aten
, ‘House of the Aten’.
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This huge temple had an elongated rectangular plan, with its entrance in the west side leading into a closed forecourt known as the ‘House of Rejoicing’ and then on through a series of six interlocking courts. At the rear of the temple was a slaughterhouse for sacrificial animals, and further still, at the far end of the complex, was the Sanctuary of the Aten, which consisted of a series of open-air courts containing hundreds of offering tables. The whole Great Temple complex measured a staggering 760 metres long and 290 metres wide, and was completely enclosed by a high boundary wall. The King’s House, or palace, was immediately south of the Great Temple, and there was a small bridge leading from there to the royal gardens fronting the Nile. South of the King’s House was the so-called Small Temple of the Aten, which probably served as a private chapel for the king. The city had two main ports, one for the Great Temple and the other for the royal palace. There was also a large docking wharf with a series of small quays that serviced the various storehouses and the residential areas of the city.
On the surface, all was perfect in Akhet-Aten. Unfortunately, however, it was built in haste - jerry-built according to Donald Redford - in order to satisfy the king’s eagerness to quickly move his court out of Karnak. Had it survived, it is unlikely that any building would have remained intact for very long without constant repair and redecoration. As for the location, the king could not have chosen a worse place. This was an inhospitable desert bowl made even more uncomfortable by the eastern hills at the back that would have radiated the sun’s heat with ruthless intensity. Summer at Akhet-Aten must have been a scorching nightmare. Unprotected by the lush vegetation of the Nile Valley, the winds would have constantly showered dust from the arid and dry eastern desert. Even today it is a desolate region inhabited only by a few
fellahin
families living in squalor. So why did the king choose this ill-disposed location to build the eternal domain of the sun-god?
According to Egyptologist Cyril Aldred, Akhenaten decided to move his capital from Thebes to Tell el Amarna some time in the fifth year of his reign because he was apparently ordered to do so by the solar god Ra-Horakhti.
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There is a hint of this in the so-called Earlier Proclamation that Akhenaten made for the city which, ‘begins with a sonorous recital of the names and titles of Ra-horakhti-Aten followed by those of the king’ and in which the king decreed: ‘May the Father live, divine and royal, Ra-horakhti, rejoicing in the Horizon in his aspect of the Light which is in the Aten (sun disc), who lives forever and ever . . .’
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Donald Redford, who is regarded as an authority on Akhenaten, drew attention to inscriptions in which apparently ‘the king set on record his belief that the gods have somehow failed or “ceased” to be operative; and he describes his newly adopted god as absolutely unique and located in the heavens . . . numerous vignettes make perfectly plain that the god in question is Ra-harakhti, “Ra, the Horizon-Horus”, the great sun god of Heliopolis.’
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He also pointed out that the high priest of the city of Akhet-Aten was known as ‘Chief Seer of Ra-Horakhti’, which was, according to Redford, ‘a title clearly derived from the sun-cult at Heliopolis’.
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Ra-Horakhti, as we have seen, was the god of the rising sun in the east. Could the vision that inspired Akhenaten to choose Tell El Amarna have had something to do with the rising of the sun over the eastern hills on a particular day that was crucial for the function of the future solar city?
The Great Return
The reign of Akhenaten, which lasted 18 years or so, is generally known as ‘the Amarna Period’ as it mostly took place in the new city of Akhet-Aten at Tell El Amarna, from the fifth year of the king’s reign to his fall in 1335 BC. At first the period represented a return to the much older - and thus purer and more legitimate - solar religion of Heliopolis and its god Ra-Horakhti. For to the Egyptians, as was also indeed the case in many other ancient cultures, it was the past and not the present that served as the perfect model, that golden age when the social order was imbued with lofty moral standards, deep religious convictions and, above all, a strict observance of the cosmic law as clearly attested by the great pyramids and sun temples that had been left behind at Heliopolis. What is also evident in the Amarna Period is the pronounced change in art, a sort of pharaonic renaissance, according to Egyptologist Arthur Weigall: ‘Akhenaten’s art might thus be said to be a kind of renaissance-a return to the classical period of archaic days; the underlying motive of that return being the desire to lay emphasis upon the king’s character as representative of the most ancient of all gods, Ra-horakhti.’
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Thus everything suggests that Akhenaten saw himself - or perhaps his departed father, Amenhotep III - as a returning solar god of ancestral Heliopolitan origin,
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a sort of messiah who would wrench the religious power away from the corrupt priests of Amun-Ra at Karnak and return it to its true keepers, the priests of Ra-Horakhti at Heliopolis. Akhenaten’s initial intention is clear enough: to highlight the supremacy of Ra-Horakhti and how this god of Heliopolis had united with the Aten as Ra-Horakhti-Aten. But then why, after such a strong initial display of allegiance to Ra-Horakhti did Akhenaten not return the religious authority to the priests of Heliopolis but instead retained it for himself at Tell El Amarna? This question is even more pertinent when we also recall that his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had begun the process of moving base to Heliopolis.
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The answer, I believe, lies partly in the political strategy that Akhenaten had adopted to bring about his great plan of religious reform, which is also why, a few years into his reign, he dropped the idea of a combined solar god in favour of a single god, the Aten. For it is very evident that the image of Ra-Horakhti (a falcon-headed man with a solar disc on his head) disappears completely from the religious art at Tell El Amarna. Only the Aten sun disc is allowed to be displayed. It was not as if the king forbade the worship of Ra-Horakhti, for throughout the Amarna Period we find Ra-Horakhti mentioned with much reverence by leading officials and priests of Akhet-Aten. Indeed, the high-priest of Akhet-Aten bore the title ‘Chief Seer of Ra-Horakhti’. The most likely reason why the image of Ra-Horakhti is not seen in the latter part of the Amarna Period is probably because Akhenaten had become intolerant of multifarious representations of the sun-god other than that of the Aten as a simple golden disc with energy rays falling down to earth. In other words, the king only allowed representation of the sun-god in the way he actually appeared to everyone in the world. The only hints of extra symbolism were the curious leaf-like hands at the end of the sun’s rays (which were probably intended to represent the protective and benevolent warmth and energy of the sun) and the little
ankh
-signs, the symbols of life, that were sometimes attached to the tips of the hands. But that was all. No human or animal figures or any other kind of symbols were allowed anywhere in Egypt.
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