Akhenaten The Heretic Pharaoh | Part 2: Wrath Of The Aten

*Transcript is autogenerated and may contain errors*

What is new everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Anthology of Heroes,
the podcast sharing the true stories of figures who shaped our world.
Have you ever wondered why we know so little about Tutankhamun?
I mean think about it, the most famous fair of all, the only fully intact tomb I've discovered
overflowing with the most spectacular treasure. But look up who his father is or even his mother
and the family tree turns into a spreadsheet. And it only gets weirder from there.
Turns out Tutankhamun wasn't even his real name.
In this episode we're going to find out why. We're about to journey into one of the darkest,
murkiest periods of Egyptian history, the downfall of Akhenaten, the heretic king.
This is a proper ancient Egyptian mystery that at this very moment is still being deciphered.
To this day, archaeologists are digging around in the ruins of Akhenaten,
looking for that one little scrap of evidence that will finally definitively solve the mystery
of what happened to the heretic pharaoh and how Tutankhamun ended up on his throne.
In this episode we're going to get into it. We're going to talk about Akhenaten's
completion of his city, Akhenaten. We're going to talk about his growing paranoia
and his dictatorial state he created, his persecution of the traditional gods and goddesses,
his incestuous relationship with his daughters, we'll explore the public's attitude towards his
new religion, the disgrace of his queen, Nefertiti and the advancement of his supposed male lover,
his mysterious death and the rise of his unknown successor, Smenkikari. Finally we'll
see his memory raised and damned for all eternity, Tutankhamun's restoration of the status quo
and the unique legacy this pharaoh left behind. This is part two of our series.
In part one we did the rediscovery of Akhenaten, his early childhood and the first few years of his
rule. That episode focused on his father, Amano Tepa III, but his story ties directly into his son
so it's worth listening to that one first. As a warning, this episode discusses incest and the
sexual exploitation of children. So grab your tools and let's get digging. Akhenaten, the
heretic pharaoh, part two, Wrath of the Arton. In his golden chariot, pharaoh Akhenaten rode
through the slumbering streets of Arca-Tartan, the new capital of his kingdom. The journey had
become something of a ritual for the pharaoh. The recently paved royal road ran perpendicular to the
Nile and each morning the pharaoh would make this journey, mimicking the sun or the Arton's path
across the horizon. The Arton was the favoured and only god of pharaoh Akhenaten and this city
had been built entirely in its honour. The budding religion had a bureaucracy, a priesthood and a
brand new set of hymns and prayers. But how many converts did it have? Wrenching the public away
from their traditional gods had been harder than expected and the powerful priesthood of a moon
had been a thorn in the pharaoh's side ever since he took office. Akhenaten had uprooted a millennia
of tradition and upset some very powerful people. So now swarms of bodyguards joked alongside his
chariot keeping a lookout for anyone who may seek to harm their paymaster. His chariot passed the
great Arton temple where, on the outer walls, high priests were chiselling his newly devised
prayer to the Arton. Try and imagine this half-built city with its sweltering open-air temples bustling
with activity and the proud 20-something pharaoh riding past. As you listen to this 3,300-year-old
prayer, I've swapped out a few birth names to king names so it's easy to understand,
quoting the great hymn of Arton.
Akhenaten, for you have apprised him of your designs and your power. When you rise everything
grows for the king and for everyone who hastens on foot, because you have founded the land and you
have raised them for your son who has come forth from your body, the king of upper and lower Egypt,
master of regalia. Akhenaten, the long-lived and the foremost wife of the king whom he loves,
the mistress of two lands, Nefertiti, living young forever and ever.
Inside his temples, mounds of fruit and meat sat spoiling in the sun, swarming with flies,
offerings to nourish the hungry Arton on his daily journey across the horizon.
The Arton had its fill, as did the scribes and priests and anyone else connected to the cult
but what of the common people? Far away from the royal road crammed into the corner of the
valley was the city of Akhenaten. At around 200 square kilometers, 77 square miles, Akhenaten's
new capital hummed with life. This squalid shantytown was home to somewhere between 20 and 50
thousand civilians, mostly laborers shipped in from all across Egypt to help construct the new city.
The government buildings were laid out in a modern grid formation but the worker's city
was a hodgepodge mess. Swept to the side of the plateau like dirt, there were no piles of fruit,
meat or even basic public services for these people. From their battered skeletons we know
that they lived short tough lives. Were these people planning to live in the city once that
had been built or did they have a family to return to? I suppose it didn't really matter,
the backbreaking nature of their labor meant most would never leave.
Mornings bent over steaming furnaces and afternoons hauling heavy stones.
About half died in their teens and almost all were dead by 35. But at least in the service of
the Arton they had an afterlife to look forward to, right? We've got no record of how these
laborers felt about the new religion. One crude bit of graffiti found inside a commoner's house
seems to indicate a man was trying to invoke the power of the Arton inside his house,
proving that he either did not understand that only Arcanarton could worship the Arton or more
likely he wanted to go directly to the god and skip the pharaoh. Both scenarios we can imagine
would not have pleased Arcanarton. Had every citizen of Arcanarton tried something like this?
Was the plethora of Arcanarton's propaganda that they themselves were writing slowly being
observed by these workers? Small statues of both Arcanarton and Nefertiti have been recovered from
the ruins and from the size and quality of them we can guess that they were created for veneration
in homeshrines. Were these statues the pharaoh's attempt to reeducate the commoners on how to
correctly worship? Or far away from the great Arton temple masked by the din of the blacksmith hammer
did the commas snigger the stupidity of the pharaoh in his new religion? Maybe they were confused
by it? Never before in their history had they been told to worship just one god. Whatever their
reason, converts weren't forthcoming and the pharaoh was displeased. Arcanarton could play
make-believe in his perfect city but in the old capitals in Memphis or Thebes the old gods Amun,
Hathor and Ra had been bloodied but not vanquished. Apart from the men he'd elevated to positions
of power there were precious few people with flesh in the game in his new religion and by the 10th
year of his reign Arcanarton seemed to realise he was fighting a losing battle. Changing the
demographics of society at such a core level was near impossible in such a short amount of time.
His father's religious reforms took place over 39 years and they were far milder than this.
Arcanarton had tried to force the population of his entire empire to an accepted almost
complete overhaul of their world in less than a decade but he wasn't to be deterred.
Isolated in his great royal palace where the floors were paved with images of his enemies,
the heretic king schemed furiously. He was about to show every citizen from slave to high priest
that there was no shadow their gods could hide in. He'd given them all the chance to bask in the
glow of the Arcanarton. They had refused and now they'd be scorched by it. From Memphis to Thebes
and all down the twisting deltas of the Nile, Arcanarton's agents arrived in force. Craftsmen
flanked by the Pharaoh's thugs stomped down into city squares and temples. Some carried hammers,
others chisels but all were there for the same reason. Citizens of the kingdom could only watch
open mouth as the Pharaoh's men began destroying statues of their gods. Head in hands they watched
the slender figure of Hathor, Tita and Smash as the thugs hammered her into dust. The proud,
handsome face of Osiris beaten and hacked away. Never before had Egypt experienced anything
like this. No island was too remote, no shrine too distant and no tomb too sacred. Wherever they
could be found the old gods were brutalized and destroyed under the direct orders of Arcanarton.
The public outcry must have been ear splitting but the heretic pharaoh was not done yet. It was not
enough to dispel the gods. Arcanarton wanted to rewrite history and pretend they never existed
at all. Hieroglyphics that used the Egyptian word for god in plural form were rechiseled into singular
form. Arcanarton's hit squad were illiterate but it didn't matter. He'd drawn for them a list of
hieroglyphics to look out for and what to recast in their place. Priests who dared to protest were
beaten and those that hid statues faced execution. There was virtually nothing anyone could do.
Power was held so tightly at the top that any rebellion would have been over before it began.
The population could only watch in horror as men shimmied up obliques and chiseled off references
to their gods. It must have seemed like the end of the world. No longer content with the art and
being the supreme god, Arcanarton was now insisting it was the only god. For the first time in Egypt
and very likely the first time in the history of humanity, someone had decreed that only a single
god existed. A claim that would, much later, become the dominating view of many world religions.
But there was nothing prophetic about the pharaoh's claim. Perhaps he really did believe his own
propaganda but the fact remains it was a religion about him. Citizens only need to gaze up at the
murals to understand the king's vision for them. The arton who, remember, had merged with Arcanarton's
father bathed light on the royal family and they, the public, worshipped the pharaoh. As his propaganda
made it clear, the arton's will could only be understood by him. Arcanarton had driven a wedge
between people and the divine, a wedge that only he could fill. A cult of personality with a religious
twist. To replace the images that his thugs had smashed, the pharaoh's craftsmen tooled away on
new figures and statues. Most of these hated images are now lost to history but a few survive.
As in the case of Hitler showing himself with a puppy or Kim Jong-un running arm in arm with
children, Arcanarton wanted to show off his softer side. In one statue he sits on a chair with his
first wife Kia sitting on his lap. Another shows the royal couple relaxing with their daughters.
Arcanarton cuddles Meritarton. Meketarton bounces on Nefertiti's lap while Anka's
son Parton grabs at her mother's earing. Nefertiti was almost as instrumental to the religion as
Arcanarton himself. And making the situation even stranger is the fact that Nefertiti bore Arcanarton
no sons. For most pharaohs this would be a source of shame but Arcanarton went to unprecedented
heights acknowledging his daughters, each of them having their own little temple at Arcanarton.
The pharaoh seemed to love his daughters more than most, though perhaps this love was not
the paternal type. In Egyptian mythology many gods and goddesses married their siblings.
Pharaohs constantly tried to emulate the gods so brother-sister marriages were fairly common and
not really taboo. Father-daughter relationships though were virtually unprecedented.
Egyptologist and archaeologist Nicholas Reeves concurs with many other historians who believe
Arcanarton was having sex with at least two of his six daughters. One of these affairs seems to
have resulted in a stillborn child while another probably killed his daughter Meketarton during
childbirth. If these relationships were publicized the revulsion felt by the Egyptian population
would have been similar to our own in the 21st century. This was not common. The only other
recent example of father-daughter incest was again Arcanarton's father, Amanotep III.
As for reasons why, the prevailing theory for these affairs is that by year 10 of his reign
Nefertiti was probably past child-rearing age. The couple had undoubtedly tried for a male heir
but six daughters later their time had run out. Arcanarton did have a son but it was through
his first wife Kia, a woman who had either died or been removed from court at this point.
Does that mean that Nefertiti, a figure so often associated with femininity and beauty,
proposition Arcanarton to have sex with their daughter to ensure her offspring would continue
ruling? It's a dark and pretty sickening question and one will probably never have a clear answer to.
Likewise is the question as to what these two young women were forced to go through,
all at the sick desires of their father and possibly their mother too. I can't help but wonder
how indoctrinated were they? Did they believe what they were doing was for the will of the Arcanarton?
By year 12 of his rule, Arcanarton and Arcatarton were unravelling. Temples to the traditional
gods were closed and falling into disrepair, leading to tens of thousands of priests and
scribes out of work and destitute. Without these core institutions, the commoners suffered.
Festivals and holidays vital to keep the masses happy and ceased and in their place was a confusing,
unrelatable religion that few people really felt attached to. The construction of Arcanarton now
had Egypt teetering on bankruptcy and foreign kings waited, licking their lips for the impending
collapse of the all-powerful Egyptian state. In these troubled times, a fallen priest of Amun named
Pawa scribbled down a prayer on a scrap of parchment and tucked it away into a doorway,
where it lay for 3,000 years before being rediscovered in 1893.
Crying out to Amun, he wrote, Come back to us, O Lord of Continuity. You were here before anything
had come into being, and you will be here when they are gone. As you have caused me to see the
darkness that is yours to give, make light for me so that I may see you. As your car, meaning your
essence, endures and your handsome beloved face endures, may you come from afar and allow this
servant, the scribe Pawa, to see you. O Amun, O great Lord who can be found by seeking him,
may you drive off fear, set rejoicing in people's hearts. Joyful is the one who sees you, O Amun.
By the end of Arcanarton's 12th year of rule, something very strange happened. Nefertiti, the
royal wife who had always been integral to the cult of Arcan, disappears from the record.
Always pictured beside her husband in similar scale, it's hard to read into this as anything but
scandalous, and her replacement confirms it. Where Nefertiti once stood, hand in hand with Arcanarton,
someone else stood in her place. A man. A surviving stele shows two kings of the same height,
sitting on thrones. The secondary king reclines back, stroking the chin of Arcanarton and kissing
him on the mound. The evidence seemed to speak for itself. The title of great royal wife,
which had only ever been associated with Nefertiti, now darkly passed to their daughter,
Meritarton. Had Nefertiti been caught up in some court drama, perhaps her husband's mad
reformation had finally pushed her into open rebellion. Had she been killed and replaced with
an unknown male lover of the pharaoh? And was Arcanarton the first openly gay or bisexual ruler in history?
In the early 1900s, this was a prevailing thought, but as the study of hieroglyphics progressed,
archaeologists blew the case wide open and revealed an even stranger truth.
Something happened around the 12th year of Arcanarton's reign. We still don't know what,
but the prevailing theory is that Nefertiti, far from being disgraced, was elevated to the rank of
co-ruler. Royal wife had become co-king. There was precedent for this. The 18th dynasty saw more
women in power than any other. Had Shepsut, the woman king, being the best example of this.
But to make things even more confusing, Arcanarton himself disappears soon after this.
The last solid piece of evidence we have for his rule, a faded tag attached to a jug of wine,
references his 17th year on the throne. And then, after that, nothing, nothing at all.
What had happened, had Arcanarton finally lost his mind? Was Nefertiti's promotion to co-ruler
not a power grab, but the desperate measure of a government fearing total collapse?
Whatever had happened, Arcanarton was gone. And in his place was King Nefertiti and a
co-king Smenkakari. Trying to find anything about Smenkakari is like grasping at mist.
Theories as to who he was, if he was a he, range from Arcanarton's lover, his son, or even Nefertiti
again. Perhaps the queen formally embraced a masculine name to help establish a rule.
Again, there was precedent for this. Another theory goes that after the death of Arcanarton,
Smenkakari was a rival claimant for the throne. Perhaps he had been raised up by
traditionalists who didn't want a woman as head of state. Whoever he or she was,
they weren't around for long. Two war, maximum three years later, Smenkakari was gone. And Nefertiti
was probably the sole ruler of Egypt. What had happened to the heretic king?
If there's one thing ancient Egypt is famous for besides the pyramids, it's record keeping.
Damned as his memory was, maybe, just maybe, under the shifting sands of Arcanarton,
there's another chest full of clay tablets waiting to tell the full story. Arcanarton's religious
reforms emphasised the present and, apart from picking the location of his burial,
he doesn't seem to have given much thought to the afterlife. But perhaps we can garner a glimpse
of his frenzied mind by the objects found in his tomb. Alongside the pharaoh's body were two
Shabtis, miniature figurines, and next to them, two magic bricks dedicated not to the artan,
but to Osiris, the old god of the underworld. In his final moments on earth, did Arcanarton's
restless soul return to the fold? In 1906, Hugo Winkler, a German archaeologist,
was digging in central Anatolia, now Eastern Turkey. Winkler was no Egyptologist, he was
instead looking for the fabled Hittite capital of Hattusa. The Hittites, you'll remember,
were one of the other power holders at the time of Arcanarton and his father, Amonetep III.
After several months of digging, Winkler's crew reported an enormous cache of clay tablets,
almost 10,000 in total. Winkler cracked the crate open and looked at language.
It was one he knew well, cuneiform. The language of the Amarna letters.
Pouring over the tablets one caught his eye, and its contents would turn out to be one last
tantalizing clue in the mysterious tale of Arcanarton. In a correspondence directed to the Hittite
king, it read, quote, My husband died, a son I have not. But to you, they say, the sons are many.
If you were to give me a son of yours, he would become my husband.
Never shall I pick out a servant of mine and make him my husband. I am afraid.
The correspondence was signed Dahamanzu. Dahamanzu is a new name for us, but archaeologists quickly
realized this was the Hittite pronunciation of the Egyptian title Tehmetnasu, meaning the king's wife.
Dating these tablets narrowed the rider down to just two people,
Tutankhamun's wife, Unkasenamun, or Nefertiti. If the queen really did request a foreign king
to marry her, it was a desperate last resort. As Amonetep III had once told the Matani king,
no daughter of the king of Egypt is given to anyone. And he was Nefertiti not only offering a
daughter but inviting a son to marry into the Egyptian royal line. Inheriting the kingdom of
Egypt, could there be a greater dowry payment? The Hittite king, incredulous as he was, jumped at
the opportunity, scrambling an expedition force together he duly sent a son as requested. But
the queen's treachery caught up with her. The Hittite entourage was met halfway by an Egyptian
governmental force and slaughtered. If Nefertiti had been Dahamanzu, then her treacherous plot would
be a last act in public office. Soon after, she too, died. While the final years of Akhenaten
remain for now a mystery, the subsequent years are some of the most well-documented in Egypt's
history. Akhenaten was gone, Nefertiti was gone, whoever Smenk Kari had been was gone.
From the lowliest laborer to the most refined courtesan, almost every person in Egypt desired
a return to the old ways and the old gods. Not only that but all wanted this blemish on the
record of their state expunged. Akhenaten never reigned and Arcataten never existed. The quickest
way back to stability was a run-of-the-mill pharaoh at the helm. No unorthodox beliefs,
no strange representations, no father-daughter marriages, a boring, standard pharaoh. Luckily,
there was one to be found and you already know his name. Tutankhamun, King Tut.
How Tutankhamun came to be is a bit of a mystery. He is probably Akhenaten's son but possibly his
brother. As for his mother, no one's really sure. A prevailing theory was that he was the
son of Kia, Akhenaten's first wife who disappeared from the scene early on. Another theory speculates
that he was the incestuous offspring between Akhenaten and one of his daughters. The boy king
certainly had some physical defects consistent with incestuous coparenting. Whoever the offspring
he was, he was young and pliable. Guided heavily by a council of regents, Akhenaten's probable son
set to work undoing everything and anything his father had changed. The first to go was his name.
Like most of Akhenaten's children, he was named in honour of the Arten. Tutankhamun was the child's
birth name, a name meaning living image of the Arten. This was quietly altered to Tutankhamun,
the living image of a moon. Up and down the Nile, the heavy temple doors that had remained closed
for nearly 15 years slowly creaked open. Cobwebs were brushed from Horus' face and the towering
statues of Amun Ra were hauled back to their places of prominence. A flurry of activity gripped Thebes
as workmen, all eager to do their part, repaired the temples and churned out new statues,
showing Tutankhamun, the boy king, sitting proudly beside Hathor and Ra. Within the great
temple of Amun at Thebes, Tutankhamun, or more accurately, his regents installed a plaque that
emphasised his part in the restoration of the Old World Order, part of which reads, quote,
When his majesty was crowned king, the temples and the estates of the gods and goddesses from
Elephantine, as far as the swamps of Lower Egypt had fallen into ruin, their shrines had fallen
down, turned into piles of rubble and overgrown with weeds, their sanctuaries were if they had
never existed at all, their temples had become footpaths, the world was in chaos and the gods
had turned their backs on this land. Hearts were faint in bodies because everything that had been
was destroyed. Now the gods and goddesses of this land are rejoicing in their hearts, the
lords of the temples are in joy, the provinces all rejoice and celebrate throughout this whole
land because good has come back into existence. By the time of Tutankhamun's death about nine
years later, almost everything was back to normal. Akhenaten, the heretic king's treasured capital
emptied quickly, the towering great art and temple stood quiet and still in the centre of the dead
city. The grasping golden rays of art and still grazed his structure and crossed the horizon each
day, but none were there to welcome them. Towards the back of the valley in his great royal tomb,
Akhenaten was interred just as he'd ordered. The dead king's lonely sarcophagus, the only
reminder of the so-called Amana period. Over the next few years, weeds sprouted in between the marble
tiles. Carrion birds made their nest in the awnings and locals chipped away at the great
art and temple, quarrying off stones for their own dwellings. Years turned to decades. The mortar
that supported the murals of the art and cracked in the hot desert air and mosaics of Akhenaten
and the royal family fell from the walls and lay forgotten on the floors of empty buildings.
Within a generation, few remembered the cult of Akhenaten and those that did didn't wish to recall
it. When a future pharaoh set out to record every king in Egypt's history, Akhenaten was skipped.
When scribes were forced to mention his name, they referred to him as the enemy or that criminal.
Even this, it seems, did not satisfy Egypt's loathing of their dead king.
Sometime later, someone snuck back in and returned to the ghost city to perform one last act of
indignation on the heretic pharaoh. Just as he had once done to their gods, they did to him.
With hammer and chisel, they pried open the outer lid of his tomb and hacked off his face
and name from his wooden sarcophagus, trapping his soul eternally in the mortal world.
Around 1,500 years later, after the eternal power of Egypt had been eclipsed by another,
soldiers of the Roman Republic camped in the heretic king's lonely halls.
Sheltering from the winds of the desert, perhaps they lit a fire and cooked a stew.
One legionnaire wandered off from the others and carved his name into the stone entrance hall.
Perhaps he looked around and wondered what this place was.
Religions came and went and empires fell. Until one day, a French surveyor employed in the army of
Napoleon Bonaparte marched past the sand-covered ruins and noticed the telltale signs of large-scale
habitation in this unmapped corner of Egypt. By then, only Bedouin nomads inhabited the
half-buried ruins and they knew nothing about its history. The French surveyor would be the
first to map the ancient city in over 3,000 years and his sketch would generate some interest.
The grid-style plan of the city gave credence to the site being one of importance, at least at
some point. Over the next century or so, archaeologists would pass through the area and marvel
at their unique frescoes and distorted figures, at least the ones that hadn't been smashed apart.
But it was only in 1887 when a peasant woman sold a box of clay tablets that the story of Akhenaten,
the heretic king, would come to light. What can we say about Akhenaten?
Despised as he was during and after his reign, he occupies a truly special place in Egyptian history.
For a man whose memory Egypt was so keen to banish, he's one that's proven near impossible to forget.
Visionary, innovator, despot, heretic? However you see his rule, there's been no shortage of
special interest groups wanting to co-opt his image for their own cause. Afrocentrus points
to him as the first of many glorious black-free thinkers whose memory has been misappropriated
and tarnished by white scholars and their western agenda. Some point out that he was,
on the world stage, a pacifist, a man whose only wish was to build a utopia for his beloved citizens.
Nazi pseudoscientists also put their claim on the pharaoh,
inventing a nonsense family tree and speculating that Akhenaten was at least partially Aryan,
evidenced by the sun worship, which they claim is an old Aryan practice.
Many claim him as the first monotheist, the first individual in history to promote the
worship of a single deity. Some take it even further and claim the hymn to the artan, which we read
earlier, directly inspired passages in the bible, specifically Psalms 104, 16-23. And psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud takes to the extreme speculating that maybe Moses had served Akhenaten as a high
priest and after the collapse of his reign rehashed his teachings to found a new religion.
Whatever you or anyone else believes about him, the secret of Akhenaten,
once buried on the east bank of the Nile, has been unearthed permanently. And for Akhenaten,
a man so desperate to be remembered and worshipped, well, 3,300 years later,
perhaps the cult of Akhenaten is stronger than ever.
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