Twenty Years of the Sun Disk Alone: The Pharaoh Struck From History
For twenty years Akhenaten elevated the sun disk Aten above all other gods and moved his capital to a new city in the desert, trying to erase the old gods; after his death the religion was reversed, and both he and Nefertiti, who may have succeeded him, were struck from the lists of pharaohs.
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The whole rise and fall of the reform is written into the names
Akhenaten was born Amenhotep IV, a name taken from Amun-Ra, the biggest god of the day. After he took the throne he renamed himself Akhenaten, pointing at the sun disk Aten, and declared that Aten was the only true god. His successor Tutankhamun was originally named Tutankhaten, meaning ‘the living image of the Aten’; later the name was changed to Tutankhamun, and the faith went back to Amun. The names themselves record a religious reform arriving and departing, and they foreshadow that the experiment would in the end be reversed.
The one true god extended its hands only to the royal family
Aten was not depicted as a deified animal but as a sun disk, reaching downward with many hands, each holding the symbol of life, and reaching only toward Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their children. That meant ordinary people could not approach the god directly; they had to go through the pharaoh as the sole intermediary. Akhenaten's claim was that this is the only god, and that this god likes only the royal family. That near-monotheistic exclusivity is extremely rare in ancient Egyptian history, and it makes up a brief and radical religious experiment.
The roofless temples were built out of workers' broken bones
Akhenaten left the old capital and built a new one, Akhetaten (today's Amarna), in open desert. The city stretched about 7 kilometers along the Nile, and its main buildings were palaces, temples and housing. Because Aten was the sun itself, the temples were built with no roofs; ritual was reworked so that the royal family rode chariots back and forth between palace and temple, displaying themselves to the population as gods. The city was finished in about 10 to 15 years, but the bones at the site show that the laborers lived hard, short lives with fractured backs.
In a city of fifty thousand, only about a hundred actually believed
Amarna covered a lot of ground, but the estimated population is about fifty thousand, of whom the royals and elites who actually took part in decisions may have numbered only around 100; the rest were construction workers and servants. That explains why ordinary people went on privately using objects of the old gods — the new religion was closer to a private faith orbiting the royal family, with no popular base. After Akhenaten died the city was abandoned fast, and because nobody rebuilt on top of it, it became a rare kind of sample for archaeology.
The images of the royal family kissing are propaganda, not reportage
Amarna art overhauled Egypt's visual language: bodies were drawn with elongated skulls, thin limbs and protruding bellies, and male and female figures converged. At the same time the royal family was shown kissing in public, holding their children, showing emotion — none of which earlier Egyptian art would ever have allowed. But this ‘naturalism’ was more likely political propaganda, because in reality Nefertiti lived in her own palace, keeping her distance from her husband. The art was both the symbol of the revolution and its disguise.
The person who ended this revolution may have been the beauty herself
After Akhenaten's death, a figure called Neferneferuaten briefly took the throne. Some Egyptologists think this was Nefertiti under a masculinized royal name, ruling as pharaoh. She may have dismantled her husband's new faith step by step and restored the cult of Amun, with Tutankhamun finally completing the return to the old order. If that is right, this ‘beauty’ was not a believer in the revolution but the person who personally carried out its ending.
Chisel out the name and the person never existed at all
After Akhenaten died, his name was chiseled off the monuments and the temples of Aten were torn down. Later lists of pharaohs skip straight past him and past Nefertiti, who may have been pharaoh herself, leaving nothing but a conspicuous gap. Tutankhamun restored the old religion and was still disgraced by his association with Akhenaten. This kind of ‘striking from the record’ means a person disappears from the historical record entirely.
It is the absence of hair that made her everyone's icon
The Nefertiti bust, discovered in 1912 and now in Berlin, is strange in that she wears a tall blue crown, no hair is visible, and the facial proportions are entirely unnatural. Precisely because there is no hair, she can cross regions and eras and be projected onto as an African queen, as Hitler's ‘Aryan’, even as a science-fiction bride. The bust turned her into a pop symbol, and it also made it harder for us to recover the real Nefertiti.
In their own words · checked verbatim
The royal family and the elite are maybe, I don't know,100 p eople in total.
Campbell Price36:35
the king and queen in ancient Egypt are never shown.With any level of affection or emotion.
Campbell Price41:11
the people that did all the building lived very short, very hard lives.
Campbell Price45:53
when later Egyptians are listing the great kings of Egypt, they leave a conspicuous gap.
Campbell Price48:06
without the hair, She can be the bride of Frankens tein. She can be an intergalactic space queen, She can be anything you want her to be.
Campbell Price52:38
Figures
| Duration of the Aten religious experiment | About 20 years | 24:35 |
| Size of Amarna's core elite | About 100 people | 36:35 |
| Nefertiti's age at first marriage | 8 to 16 years old | 17:26 |
| Length of the new city along the Nile | About 7 kilometers | 34:22 |
| Time taken to build the new city | About 10 to 15 years | 37:44 |
| Length of Akhenaten's reign | About 17 years | 42:23 |
| Year the Nefertiti bust was discovered | 1912 | 51:26 |
Glossary
- Aten
- The ancient Egyptian sun-disk god, the sole object of worship in Akhenaten's religious reform.
- Amarna
- The site of the new capital Akhenaten built, originally Akhetaten, today called Amarna.
- Akhenaten
- An 18th Dynasty pharaoh, born Amenhotep IV, who drove the reform elevating Aten above all other gods.
- Nefertiti
- Akhenaten's queen, whose name means ‘the beautiful one has come’, and the subject of the famous bust.
How to listen
Anyone interested in religious revolution in ancient Egypt, the mythology of kingship, and women's power; also good for listeners who want to sort out how much of the Nefertiti bust is history and how much is invention.
The opening ad and the host-guest small talk (roughly the first 4 minutes) can be skipped; the quiz at the end works as a self-test but isn't essential.