Empire: World History - 363. Ancient Egypt: Destroyer Of Gods – Pharaoh Akhenaten (Ep 2)

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

**Unlock the entire Ancient Egypt series early and ad-free by joining the Empire Club at ⁠empirepoduk.com⁠** Why did Egyptian priests wear animal masks? Who was the goddess of hangovers? And how did the Pharaoh, Akhenaten, destroy the many Egyptian gods to worship the sun disc, the Aten? William and Anita are joined by Professor Lloyd Lewellyn-Jones to discuss Akhenaten’s extraordinary religious revolution and whether he was a pioneer or a tyrant. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at ⁠empirepoduk.com⁠. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to ⁠www.goalhanger.com⁠. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: James Clayden Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. This episode is brought to you by my favourite London review of books. In our journey to unpick the complexities of the past, it's clear that history is not a straight line. It's a vast, intricate and complex tapestry. To truly understand a political revolution or the fall of a dynasty, you have to build up the picture piece by piece.

You need diary entries and poetry that capture the scale of emotions, the secret correspondence of a diplomat and the sharp discerning insights of the era's great thinkers. And it's this art of the deep dive that the London Review of Books champions. They bring together the world's leading thinkers and interrogate a rich range of topics through long-form essays. try three months of the LRB completely free when you sign up today. Subscribe at LRB.me forward slash trial. That is LRB.m.

forward slash trial to try three months of the London review of books for free. Just do it. It's the most wonderful journal in the country and you will never regret it. Hey, y'all's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair.

With Wayfair, there's no what if. style you love and quality you can trust. Visit wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. Now imagine that you are an Egyptian priest in the year 1,350 BCE. Your world is already ancient, 3,000 years old already.

Your temple has stood for centuries. It's walls blaze with color, processions of gods, offerings of incense, hymns inscribed in hieroglyphs that will track the movement of the cosmos itself. Your day is structured by ritual, the waking of the god in the sanctuary, the presentation of food and linen, the ceiling of the inner chamber at dust, just as goes on in Hindu temples today in India. Generations after generations of your family have done this. The god is Amun, king of the gods, Lord of Thebes, the Him.

hidden one whose breath fills the entire world, and the temple you serve is the greatest religious institution on earth. But just imagine that all of that, all of it, is gone within a decade. Your temple gets closed down, the statue of your god is smashed to pieces. Everywhere the name has been chiseled, it is removed by a blunt instrument in Egypt, everywhere. So the very existence of these gods declared to be lies. A new theology will descend on the country. Imposed from above by a pharaoh who has renamed himself, moved the capital, built an entirely new city and decreed that from now on there is only one divinity worthy of worship, only one, and that is the sun disk, the artan. So no more myths, no more statues, no more processions, just. just this one round shining disc and the light it pours on the world.

And access to that light, access to the divine itself, runs through only one man. And that man is the Pharaoh, Akhenaten. This is the most radical religious revolution in ancient history. Whether it was the world's first true monotheism, whether it planted a seed that would eventually produce Yahweh, the god of the Hebrew Bible of Christianity of Islam is one of the most debated questions in the study of religion. And that is exactly what we are here to explore today.

And we're all very excited about it. This is Empire and I'm William Durhampool. Yes, and I'm Anita Arna. Then you know when you were saying, imagine that you are in this place and being venerated and worshiped? I could imagine that quite easily. It doesn't... I mean, actually quite shocking how easy it was for me to imagine that.

Anyway, we are at episode three of our Ammanus. series, we're diving deeper into the question of what exactly was Akanatham's religion. Our guest today is someone who brings a quite exceptional combination of qualities to this conversation. It is our old friend Lloyd Llewellyn Jones. Welcome back, Lloyd. Hello, both. It's good to be back with you. It really is. Very nice. So to remind everyone who doesn't know Lloyd's extraordinary credentials, he is both the professor of ancient history at Cardiff University and the author of the magnificent Persians, the age of the great kings, which first brought us together. I spent an entire summer driving around the country listening to Lloyd on his

audiobook, which I completely loved and warmly recommend. But since he first came on the show, Lloyd became a priest. I mean, it was a proper calling, okay? It's not like going for a job. It was something that I was moved to do. And I was moved to do it, actually, when I was very young, when I was in my 20s. You know, I first kind of got this call and I thought, no, and I just put it off, put it off, put it off. And then, you know, one day I was teaching a module on ancient Israel, teaching the book of Isaiah to my students, and this overwhelming desire, this feeling came from deep within me, which said, okay, Lloyd, you've been doing this for long enough, you need to take this message elsewhere now. And that was the start of my journey

towards the church. When we first actually met in person, long after we'd first met on screen, you were all clericaled up. I was. I was all dog-collared up. It was a surprise to everyone. Oh, do you know what? If it wasn't such a warm day, I'd have had you do that again today. My define sight you make. Let's start at the very beginning, Lloyd. Before Akhenaten, before the revolution that he brings about,

there is a very rich tapestry of a religious world that he's born into, where there are pretty much gods for everything. I mean, from the very, very small, you'll have a god of the liver to this sort of pantheon, like Hindu gods, if you come from the Hindu tradition or Greek mythology. And he is born to that richness, but he's about to destroy all of it. What's going on? Well, the Egyptian pantheon was vast.

When you go to Egypt today, you often hear local guides, you know, I've overheard them say, how many gods do the Egyptians worship? I will tell you 777. No truth in that. And in fact, I think nobody ever tried to count to tell you the truth. And you're right, Anita, to say that they were great state gods. like Amun Re, Isis, Osiris, had huge temples and great pilgrimage followers, but also they're the tiny little gods as well. You know, the gods against scorpion bites or the gods that have digestion, whatever it might be.

Oh, God, I love it. There's a god of arthritis. All sorts of things, you know. And it says so much, doesn't it, about ancient perception of self and society that you need this. Not just ancient, Lloyd. You're paying your first visit to India. India to come to our festival next January, and you'll find that there are still gods of cholera, for example, that are worshipped here, little gods as well as great gods like Lord Shiva. Sometimes these gods, of course, you worship them as kind of preemptive strikes, really, don't you, you know?

You worship a god of arthritis to say, please don't give me arthritis. You know, you worship the scorpion goddess, not because she's helping you daily, but please, please, keep the scorpions away from me. So Egyptian polytheism operates on all of these different levels, where we could say state religion and domestic religion, but also during the New Kingdom, and we're in the middle of the New Kingdom at this point, the Egyptians had expanded their empire, and they were happily bringing home foreign gods from Syria, from Canaan. Sourcy goddesses who rather turned the Egyptian gods on in some of the pictures. We have Nubian gods coming up from the south. And, you know, one thing I think it's really important to recognize is that in the ancient mind, there was no contradiction in doing that, you know. The gods were gods were gods.

And it doesn't, and everybody acknowledged that different people have different gods. But they never say, oh, you know, the Hittite gods, they don't exist. Or the gods in Canaan don't exist. They all believe in these things. Listeners might remember that in the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a competition, which God is the stronger, not which God is real, which is the stronger. So even in the Hebrew Bible, the prophets are not saying there aren't any other gods necessarily. There are other people's gods. It also worked the other

way around. I mean, when the Greeks came to Egypt, Lloyd, they would look at Amun and say, well, that's Zeus, obviously, because the parallels were so maintained and they were so respected that people felt they could intertwine very easily. So you had these teeny tiny gods, was there not, a god of the temple hinge, whose only job was to make sure the hinge opened the door. And that had its own god. Isn't that glorious? Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's evoked in things like the book of the dead, the spells for the dead. Because if you're hinged sticks at that point, it means the soul can't get through the door. It means disaster for everyone. So yes, my favorite god of all, of all the pantheons. in antiquity is a goddess called Cripole, and she's the goddess of hangovers for the Greeks.

I love that. I really do, goddess of hangover. Well, bring her back. Literally a god we can all pray to at some point or the other. At the centre of the system in this period is Amun Ra, flesh Amun Ra out for us, because children will have seen the picture, you know, that line drawing of, you know, just describe it. When he is depicted, he is depicted usually in the form of a man. his skin tends to be blue, a kind of cosmic blue, a universal blue, as it were.

He wears a crown with two huge falcon feathers that come from it and a false beard on his chin. Sometimes he's depicted as a ram, so kind of all the power of the male ram. But interestingly, within the theology itself of the New Kingdom, he is called the invisible one. So although he is represented in iconography, people think of him, in fact, as an abstract, the great hidden one. And that's very important because I think lots of people assume that Egyptians are going around worshipping gods who are kind of, you know, appear before them very often with animal heads and so forth. But the idea of invisibility is also there as well. It's also part of it. One thing I've always wanted to know, Lloyd, is that when you see these animal-headed gods,

are worshippers being presented by priests with masks on, pretending to be the gods? And is that where it comes from or not? I think there was an element of that, but we don't know much about it. But I think that certainly during embalming ceremonies, for instance, when the body was prepared for the tomb, I think it's highly likely that a priest would don the mask of the jackal god Anubis, for instance. But I don't think, as we get in kind of Hollywood food, films that these priests were kind of, you know, cavorting around with the heads of cows and bulls. It's not Brendan Fraser territory. No, exactly. I love them as I do. No, no, not quite.

And the priests, they were very, very powerful. And I mean, not just powerful because they were the gateway to the great gods. But, I mean, you also had them controlling. I think, you know, the priests of Amon at Karnak ran, what is it, 80% of the country's industrial output, you know, all of the arable output. Absolutely. They were like, literally. mini-chancellors of the Exchequer. Yes, indeed. So the temple of Amun at Karnak in particular, I mean a vast, vast structure, acres upon acres, it's an overawing experience to be there. And right at the heart of it is this tiny little holy of holies, which had at the centre a little gilded wooden box with little doors to it and inside a little gold statue of Amun.

And he was responsible for this huge cosmic creation. I mean, and his, and his His priesthood were the wealthiest and most powerful priesthood in the whole of Egypt. And the temple itself was not just a place of worship. It was a farm. It was a textile industry. It was the center of education. It was the center of artistic production. So its economy is unfathomable, really.

I mean, it was so wealthy. And many of the gods had this, you know, the temple of Patar in Memphis, for instance, or the temple of... Sobeck in Upper Egypt, but nothing equals the temple of Amun at Karnak, the superstructure. And the Pharaoh himself, where did he fit into this whole priesthood and religion? This is an interesting question because since the Old Kingdom, the Pyramid Age, which, as he said in an introduction, Willie, is already 3,000 years old by the New Kingdom period. since then, pharaohs had been accepted and indeed promoted themselves as living gods. This is a kind of hard concept for us to get our heads around, of course.

Kirstama could do with that now, couldn't he? Of course, we have some leaders who believe that they may well be gods, you know? I can't think who you are indicating here. It's a really strange one because, of course, the Egyptians saw their rulers become old and forgetful and decrepit and, you know, losing teeth and hair, and yet still maintain that they are living gods, and eventually they die, of course. So the way in which this was kind of used in Egyptian theology was to suggest that the kingship, the pharaoh himself, is forever. The individual may change, but the institution of the pharaoh goes on and on and on. So as one pharaoh dies, he becomes the new Osiris.

and his son or heir becomes the new Horus. So there's this constant cycle of life and death, life and death, life and death. But for most people in Egypt, they really did believe that the pharaoh was a god. And that's very different from the kind of things we get in Mesopotamia, for instance, where kings like Hamurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, this kind, they were the viceroy of God. So they were charged with things, you know, by God. But here, in Egypt, we have a mortal man who is also at the same time an immortal god. And in the iconography, you see the kind of closeness between Pharaoh and the gods.

They often hug him. They'll kiss him on the lips. He's depicted at the same size as the gods, you know? I wonder if it's because they don't get much exposure to the Pharaoh. Because if you think about Akanaten's dad, Amunhotep III, I mean, if you look at his mummy, it wasn't a beautiful thing. to look at. I mean, he was morbidly obese. He was, it's suggested that covered in abscesses, you know, riddled with something that looks like arthritis. So, I mean, could they maintain this godliness? Because no one saw them. No one saw the decrepitude of the flesh.

I think there's a lot in that, Anita. I really do. The kind of mystique of monarchy is held up by that, isn't it? The very invisibility of the monarch, I think, is very important within all of this. And, you know, the pharaohs of Egypt did not. go around pressing the flesh in the manner of sort of modern European monarchs at all. They didn't do their balcony presentations, this kind of thing. There was a mystery around them because they were sacrosanct after all. So you treat them as a god. This distinction you draw between Egypt and Mesopotamia is the same, interestingly,

in the Hindu world, between India and Southeast Asia. And in India, kings like Raj Rajajah Chola are the viceroy of Lord Shia. and there are pictures of him standing below Lord Shiva in his temple. But in Cambodia, the Khmer temples, kings portrayed with divine attributes. They're holding the Contra of Vishnu or whatever it is. And it's a huge leap between the two of them. It's a big difference. It really is a huge difference there.

So that's the world we're in Pharonic Egypt. We've got a divine pharaoh. You've got the dad, okay, Amunhotep, who is this glorious son and all gods and, you know, divine and respects all gods. You know, I think isn't he responsible for just hundreds and hundreds of statues of Sechmet? And, you know, his iconography is very, very strong. And you've got his son growing up in the shadow of this man. Is he growing up with ideas beyond his station even then?

Do we have any indication that he's about to basically toss it all out of the window? We have no indication of this whatsoever because our sources are completely silent on the man who would be, Aachenaten. until he appears as Archanatan. And that's because generally in the New Kingdom, princes didn't get much of a run-in publicly at all. He wasn't the elder's son. No, no, he wasn't.

There was somebody else, a prince called Tartmosa, who seems to have pre-deceased his brother. We get no knowledge of him, although I think it is important to expand your idea of what this world was like under Aminhotep III and his kind of divine status. The other person who was fundamentally important in our Archonatten's life is his mother, Queen T, and she was also going through a process of divinisation too.

In fact, under Queen T, Aminhotep III, her husband, creates her as a living goddess, too. And we get from Aminhotep III a very developed theogany, which stated that Aminhotep III himself was the offspring of, of Amun Ra, who had slept with his mother, Mutemwiyah, and pregenerated Amunhotep III. So there is a kind of theogony that's going on here. All of this is building up the divine status of Pharaoh and the royal women as well. And of course, the royal women become very important in the Amarna period. And we get some hints towards the end of his father's reign that he is making theological

changes. And there is a shift to the system. Nothing as radical as what will happen. The name Arten starts emerging in the last decade of Amunhotep the Third's reign. Now, we can't pin that on Archanaten at all yet because, as I say, he doesn't appear in the imagery or anything. And Arten, we should say, is just the everyday Egyptian word for disc, isn't it? A sundisk, a shining disc. And so we see, for instance, Aminhotep has a beautiful palace built at Malcarta on the West Bank.

And there he has a lake built. And it's called the Lake of the Arten. and a bark that floats on the lake is called the bark of the Arton. And so this name is getting used more and more. And it's kind of interesting as well. As this name becomes used, so Amunhotep III's iconography begins to change. And one thing Egyptologists have noticed is in the 10 years before his death, his iconography, his portraits become more and more youthful all the time.

So it's almost like if we do want to link this shining disc with Aminhotep III, there's some kind of rejuvenation going on. It's almost like he's basking in the sun's rays and it's rejuvenating him, bringing him back a kind of boyhood. But we can't pin any of this on Archanarten just yet because he's not there. But also, I mean, there's a huge difference that these discs and this, you know, youthful Benjamin buttoning of Aminhotep is happening. alongside, it's not instead of.

Basically, you've just got more pictures and more statues and more carvings. Yes. But all of it is existing in the same time. As all of the old polytheistic gods are all there, all that's developing as well, absolutely. Do we then pinpoint the moment, something called sort of tragic madness when the son decides everything his father has done is wrong and I'm going to destroy it all and start again? Does it happen when he changes his name? because he's also meant to be an Amunhotep.

Ammon Hotep the fourth really is his real title. He decides, no, I'm going to be Akanaten. We see the change before the name changes, in fact. And it was realised back in the 1980s, 1990s, when work was being done at Karnak, we discovered inside one of the great pylons, these are these huge kind of towering edifices, that they are often packed with rubble to make solid fill. And Egyptologists realised that one of these pylons, at Karnak was actually packed full of small what we call Talatatat, small blocks like bricks,

which were highly decorated, and they belonged to the opening years, the first five years of the reign of Amunhotep the 4th, Archanaten, and they show him worshipping this sundisk. So he had actually built a temple for the Arten inside the domain of Amun, which later after his death was then pulled down. And the dramatic thing that we see here is the iconographic change. So no longer that perfect symmetry that we think about in Egyptian art, you know, everything's in proportion, everything is in order, suddenly we see this image of Aachenarten with this elongated face, long, long chin, swollen belly, long spindly legs and arms. And behind him, with the same kind of bizarre distortion of her body is Queen Nefertiti.

and three of their first daughters. So almost from the beginning, he has in his mind, the iconography is going to change entirely, and the attention is going to be on the Aten. But then he abandons, of course, as he said in the introduction, Thebes itself, and relocates upriver into Middle Egypt, and there establishes his new capital, Arget Aten,

the horizon of the Aten, and with that comes the name change as well. We're going to go to the new city in a second, but just before we do so, just dwell on that body that you mentioned. It looks feminine, doesn't it, to me? The rounded hips and the buttocks in particular and the belly, they're normally the kind of thing we expect on a statue of a woman. Absolutely. The question is, is it a new aesthetic that he champions? And, I mean, to my eyes, I have to say, I think the whole thing of Nefertiti and her daughters with these same things is very beautiful.

I love the style. They're striking. I mean, they really are, and new and fresh. If I had one piece of Egyptian art to loot and take into my home, it would be one of the daughters of Acknarton from the Berlin Museum. Absolutely, with their elongated skulls and so forth. Made out of pink granite very often, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you say very beautiful.

I think they look like sort of protein ETs, extraterrestrial. I don't find them beautiful. You could say aliens as well, right? I do find them beautiful, but disturbing at the same time. you know. So what's going on with Archanartan's body then in reality? So so much ink has been spilled on this, as you can imagine. So people thought, for instance, he suffered from various diseases, you know, in which fat deposits were different, or there were skeleton deformities or whatever there may be. I don't think any of that applies because we're thinking here, we have to look at Archanaten always with theological eyes. What Archanaten is trying to do here, if he's getting rid of all the other deities, okay? What does he do then with the great female principles of Egyptian religion, ISIS, nephus, Shu, Tefnut, all these great goddess types, you know? But what he does, I think, is he brings them all into his body. So he is deliberately kind of sexually ambiguous in that way.

His body emphasizes both the male and the female within himself. Because it is himself, that's the most important thing in Archanaten's world. So he didn't look like that, you're saying? I don't think so. No, I don't think so at all. If the mummy that we have found in Kings Valley, 55, is indeed Archanaten, and it's possible, then we can say he didn't look anything like that at all. So that's interesting, because in Hinduism, you've got the concept of the male and female divine in the same person.

Ardine Shakti, you know, the power is both things. I think something like that's going on. You've mentioned that he moved the capital. Can we talk about that? because that sentence is so easy to say. Isn't it just? How the hell do you do it? I mean, we're talking about a massive set of edifices and infrastructure and people.

So why does he suddenly decide, I don't like this anymore? I want something different and I want it somewhere else. He wants a virgin sight that nobody's built on before. He kind of has a vision from his God. He's not the only person in history to have this. Alexander is a good example, you know, a new place. untainted by any other God. That's what he says actually in the Great Him,

untainted by any other God, a new place. And he goes to this place. Middle Egypt, it's about maybe three hours drive south from Cairo today, which has a flat base, and then there are two mountains, the sort of plateaus, really, rises out of the horizon. And this was basically the... physical manifestation of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph, Achet, which means horizon. So he saw

in the landscape a hieroglyphic which said, this is the place. Because he really thinks God is talking directly to him. Oh my goodness me, yes. I think that's the thing. This is, artanism is a personal relationship between Aachenaten and the Aten. Nobody else matters. We're going to take a break now, but after the break, find out what this private conversation between Archonarton and his god is going to make him do to all the other gods that existed before. Join us then. We have some. This episode is brought to you by the National Archives. It's Tom Holland here from Goldhangers. The Rest is History. Now, American Independence is often painted as a quest for freedom, a triumph of democratic ideals. But it was also a period

of immense risk and violence which turned the colonial world upside down. So if you want to go beyond the familiar tales of the Boston Tea Party and red-coated battalions, I have some marvellous news for you. The National Archives is holding a free exhibition. Revolution 250. America's Independent Story 1763 to 1783. It's not just a story of declarations and battles and revolutionary heroes. It uncovers the human cost of decisions made on both sides of the Atlantic.

You'll also encounter voices too often push to the margins. Don't miss this once in a lifetime exhibition. Revolution 250. America's Independence Story 1763 to 1783, June the 24th to November the 29th at the National Archives in Q. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. In the UK, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime. The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins?

And over the past 50 years, cancer research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And that's proof of what research can achieve. Like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by HPV, the human papillomavirus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible. Indeed, it did by a vaccine. And it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90% lower than expected in

women in their 20s. I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the UK. This is something that I really hope my daughters will never have to deal with. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visitcancerresearchukuk.org forward slash rest is science. Very exciting news. After our first sellout empire show, we've got a second show at the rest is fast this September. And we've got a brilliant. session lined up. We're calling it three Ayatollahs an Iranian dynasty. We're going to be joined by great friend of the show Ali Ansari, one of Britain's foremost experts on Iranian history, but also

an excellent storyteller. Together, we're going to unpack one of the most fascinating and urgent stories in the world right now. How has the influence of the Ayatollah shaped Iran since the 1979 revolution? Does the grip of the Islamic Republic appear to be fracturing? What role have other played in shaping Iran's fate. And as the regime faces economic pressures, regional setbacks and a disillusioned younger generation, what comes next for a civilisation that has outlasted empires? Expect sharp analysis and the usual storytelling and warmth and wit and the usual mischief that you've come to expect from us to. The rest is fest runs from the 4th to the 6th of September at London's South Bank Centre. Empire members, you can get your tickets on the 28th of May.

General Sale opens on the 2nd of June at 10am. Visit southbankcenter.com.com.com UK to find out more. Okay, welcome back. So just before the break, we had Akan Atenh having private conflabs with gold and seeing his messages in the landscape and deciding he's going to build his new capital in the middle of a virgin landscape, not an easy thing to do. How long does it take him to do it, first of all, and what does he create? Very quickly. It's an overnight change almost, you know. I mean, first of all, he has to send his architects and builders to Middle Egypt, and they construct very hastily a very large city, including two palaces, workshops,

and two enormous temples. And two temples built on a completely different model to the ancient temples of Egypt. So when the ancient temples, remember I told you about that tiny little shrine in the middle could be vast, they came in closer and closer and closer, darker and darker and darker until you got to the centre, which was the Holy of Holies. Archonarton's temples in a manor are all open to the sky.

That's the whole purpose, of course. These vast courtyards, with no shade whatsoever, apart from one little sunshade where he would stand. Which ambassadors complain about, don't they? I'm not a fan of Aachenarten, let's put it that way. Thank you. I am also not a fan. Willie, what about you? You want to steal a statue, but...

I saw the opera, Agnarton in 1984 when I was about 19 years old, and it had the most mesmeric effect. I mean, I find it difficult to sort of divorce the historical Agnarton from the Willie, old romantic. The glorious image. I am a romantic. So the lines are drawn. You love him.

I hate him. and Lloyd's going to be a bit more diplomatic about it. What I see in him is a zealot, an absolute zealot, who gives no room to anybody else for interpretation, belief or unbelief, okay? It's his relationship with his God. Even Nefertiti, I get a feeling, doesn't really count. You know, she's there because she has to, he has to have a female principle. But I think about these sun temples, everybody standing in the open,

in the glare of this sun, in the draining heat of Middle Egypt, this is not a kind thing. This is not about, you know, let's rejoice in this together. This is absolute oppression of the people. And one thing that Don Redford, great Egyptologist noted, about the iconography of Archanan's reign, it hates him, and I'm with him all the way, that Archanan's court are always depicted bent over,

doubled over in obsequiousness before him, you know, and crouching on the ground very often, as though they're afraid to stand up, you know. I think he was a real tyrant. Not only did he make them, you know, keel over and die in the sun, ridiculous new place, his new bad, but also, I mean, the things he expected, he wanted an obliteration of any name, any image, any iconography to do with the past gods. Some of these things are difficult to get to. I mean, we're talking about very tall obelisks that he's sending, you know, these poor workers up to right to the top to chisel off names. The pettiness of it feels a bit bonkers to me, that it all has to be scrubbed out. The process of hacking out the name of a deity is important.

Whenever, you know, those people who could read in Egypt, and these are the priests, of course, whenever they read, they had to read aloud. There was no such thing as silent reading. And so immediately they would say, you know, they saw the hieroglyphs, Amun. It would come out, by canceling their names, of course, they cannot say the name of the God. And if the name of the God isn't there, does the God exist in that case? Does a tree in a forest fall and make a sound? You know, it's that kind of thing. If we don't say the name of the God, does he exist at all? We haven't talked about motives, and your friend Don Redford has an inscription where Act Narton seems to be saying because it's a broken inscription and it's fragmentary and there's

these kind of frustrating gaps. But he seems to be saying the old gods aren't working anymore. Yes. It's not that he's denying the presence of the old gods, but they are rivals to his new God. I think that's an important thing, you know. And he wants to foreground his new God, which of course is so completely linked to him. So really, I mean, it's self-aggrandizement, I think, more than anything else here. It's egomaniacal to the point where actually, I mean, even if, you know, you had a name that was associated with the old gods, let's say your father had a name. associated with the old gods, he would have that name scrubbed off your father's tomb. Absolutely, absolutely. And what I can't get my head around, okay, so it's rather like, if you think about Britain, you know, in the 1540s, say, with, you know, the way in which the old church images were being whitewashed over or hacked to pieces. But what do we do with the belief? You know, there's been a group of people, you know, worshipping an image of Mary, you know, or at least

venerating Mary for centuries. And then somebody from the same village says, I'm only doing my job and knocks her head off, you know. How did Archanaten bring the people with him? Did he ever bring the people with him? That's a big question. And I think the way in which, at his death, the whole revolution was reversed so quickly, suggests to me he wasn't successful.

Plus they found sort of secret Amun worshippers in Amman, haven't they? All their old prayers that they knew were Amman-related or ISIS worship. We found in Amarna, in private households, little votive plaques showing Achanaten, Nefertiti and the disc, which locals were supposed to worship in their homes. And as opposed to the old hippopotamus goddess that they used to worship, you know. But you can't tell me that, okay, they paid lip service and put up these little plaques. But I'm sure the lady of the house when she was pregnant and going through childbirth

still went back in her mind to the hippopotamus goddess, Tawarit. And we found images of the different gods. have indeed. Exactly. So there's this tension there. Lloyd, can we talk about the artin itself? This is sort of the center of this cult. I mean, it feels to me like a new cult, really. It's a boy rebelling against his dad and he knows everything and this is going to be the way. And it really, and it's all about him. The artin, theologically, what is it? Because we know it's a round disc. We know it's got these rays that end up in sort of unk shapes. What is it meant to represent? What is it meant to represent? What

Is it? It is merely the sun, that's all. And Egypt had been following a solar cult since the pyramid age, okay? So Ra is a sun god. So there's nothing unusual in that per se, apart from the fact that now, Aachenarten's fetish is actually on the disc itself. So this round ball of energy is the thing that he venerates. Rather than the abstract concept of the sun giving light and so forth, it is now the disc itself which becomes all-consuming form him. And as you say, in the iconography, the rays of the sun come down and they often end in hands, very stylistically depicted, and some of those hands give the unch sign, the sign of life,

to Aachenarten, Nefertiti and their daughters. Hang on, how do you say it? I say unk. How do you properly say it? Ach. Ang, ang. Ang, okay. So it's an abstract, really. I mean, it's a strange thing. The sun has always been around.

And in fact, I always think with Achenaten, oh, couldn't you go for something more interesting? You know, it's so obvious, you know. And of course, it's a great benefit, but also sun worship provides difficulties. So what happens at night for Aachenarten? What happens when the sun goes? Well, the Egyptians had thought all about that in their previous theologies, you know. We know that the sun is swallowed by the sky god. and it travels through her body and she gives birth to the sun every morning.

But the artin doesn't do that because the artan can't acknowledge a sky goddess. So what happens when darkness comes, you know? You've hinted at it before, but he does not believe that there are no other gods. It's just that he's not worshipping other gods. So you could technically still have the sky goddess swallowing. You could technically. Now, how do you have a theology that doesn't answer a question? I mean, the thing is, a new theology normally has an answer for something.

Yes, yes, indeed. That's the problem, isn't it? Yeah. But I think if we were to try to find a question, what's the question Archanaten is putting for this new theology, it is, what am I all about then? That's the feeling I get, you know? That's what he's asking. What am I?

Where am I in all of this cosmic thing? And he finds his answer in the Sundas. It's so interesting. I mean, I sort of think, I wonder if his dad had hugged him more, whether we'd got into this situation. The other thing that's really conspicuous is when he builds Achid Arcton, I'm that all the court go up. Obviously, there must have been cohorts of priests of Amun left behind wondering what the hell is going on now and what's going to happen to our land and our powers and our families.

But he puts around him a cohort of priests and courtiers who are sycophants to the letter, which again is something that we see in current politics as well, isn't it? And if people are not saying to him, are you sure you want to do this? Because we know that international reputation of Egypt just sinks, the Amana letters show that Egypt is in crisis in this period because Achanaten has no interest in pursuing military pursuits or even just settling the colonial expansions of this period. There's lots of letters from the king of Biblos saying, I'd be surrounded by enemies, please send help, please send help. Then another one saying, and they're getting closer. You haven't sent any troops, please. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And Pharaoh has not responded, oh my lord,

I crawl upon my belly seven times and seven times like a dog. Please send us troops. And, you know, they just get the answer, I'm sorry. I'm not in the office right now. He does actually write back to one saying, why are you writing to me so often? He's uninterested in any of these things. Completely uninterested, yeah. We haven't mentioned what actually happens to the old priesthood.

It isn't just that they're out of a job. The head priest is sent to the quarries. I mean, it's a gulag situation, isn't it? Yes, absolutely. I mean, and you've got to wonder again, you know, what was Arnatan's relationship to these men when he was growing up? Because I can't get past the feeling of personal vendettas going on here on that kind of Stalinist level as well, you know,

really going for the people who matter. So I suppose if we run a scenario that under the age in Amunhotep III, the high priest of Amun and the high priest of Patah had anordinate influence of court and maybe we're dismissing Archonarten with his bizarre ways, then of course it's all about comeback, isn't it? You know, in retribution.

I'm still sure I do understand the theology. So Arton simply is the sun and, you know, we're going to have new architecture and you're all going to be too hot in the daytime because it's all about the sun. That's, you know, that's what we're going to do. Does the sun care? Can you, as in before, you know,

go and pray and make an offering to the Arton and be blessed and have, is that the relationship? Or is it just, a son which is beyond you and above you and your life doesn't matter at all. Your life doesn't matter at all. It has no interest in you. And really, you're not encouraged to offer to the son. You're encouraged to offer to Aachenarten. He is the intercessor. He is the only one who can hear the son and the son speaks to him and he speaks back to the son. So it's not at all

this idea of personal faith. He's not asking for that from anyone. And one of the things I think that's really difficult, is that Mart, a concept which is absolutely central to Egypt's theology, Mart means truth, order, balance, justice. She's represented as a young girl with a feather on her head, a delicate thing that could easily be broken. What happens to Mart in this new theology? because there's no real place for it, you know. Does Aachenarten therefore become Mart himself, probably? We are dealing here with an absolute religious zealot and a narcissist, I think, who is piling honours upon himself.

Now, just to, again, exactly get this theology in our heads and where it stands on the various spectrums of monotheism or not, Tell me if I've got this right. Monotheism strictly defined is the belief that only one God exists. Exists, yeah, absolutely. Then you have, is it monolotry? Monoletri? Yeah.

Which is the exclusive worship of one god, but not denying. Yeah, many gods exist, but one tends to be exclusively worshipped. Which is what you get in early Canaan. I wouldn't even say early Canaan, but by the 6th century BCE, something like that is happening. Yeah, yeah. And then there's... Hennotheism, which is the elevation of one God above all the others as supreme. So where are we? Where does artanism sit on this? I would say that this is a henotheistic religion, okay.

He doesn't get rid of the other gods. He acknowledged they exist. They're not functioning correctly, and there's no power there. I don't think he can never claim really in monotheism. And of course, Velikovsky and people like that back in the 50s were all over Archanan, saying, I know, this is the origins of monotheism. But I think we're far from that, actually, very far from that. We need to talk about one of the greatest mysteries, and it's delicious, the great hymn to the Aten, and its relationship with a book that we may be more familiar with, right? So, first of all, just tell us what we're talking about, the words themselves. I wrote them out, but I think you probably know them off my heart, don't you? Yeah, so found in one of the tombs in Amarna is this glorious composition that we call the Great Hymn to.

the Arten. Some people think it is the work of Archan Arcten himself, others that have court, scribe, wrote it. I don't think it makes a difference whether it was Archanan Arn or a scribe. I think the sentiment is what's important. And it talks about the supremacy of the creator God, the Arten, that when the earth is in darkness, there is nothingness, but then the light comes forward, the rivers are full of fish. The deeds of this god are just purely benevolent. This sun shines down not only on Egypt, but on all lands, which I think is really fascinating. It says every lion comes forth from his den. When you rise, they live, when you set, they die.

Now, the reason I picked that one is because of the parallels with the other book, okay, which is, okay, drumroll, the Bible. So in Psalm 104, there is this line. Okay, so I'll read the one I've just read to great hymn says, every lion comes forth from his den. when you rise they live, when you set they die. Psalm 104, the young lions roar after their prey, they seek their meat from God, the sun arises, they gather themselves together, and they lay them down in their dens. It's very close, isn't it? The proximity between stuff that you find in the Bible and in the Great Him.

But there's 600 years between the two. Yeah, at least 600 years between the two. James Henry Brested, around about 1900, great Egyptologist, he firmly believed that the author of Psalm 104 knew the great art and him somehow, you know, and this is his version of it. Nowadays, few people think that, although there are a couple of adherents still to it. Mirian Lifthheim, a great scholar of hieroglyphs in the 1970s, 1980s. 1980s, she thought that this is really standard or generic creation imagery we have in Egypt, in the Levant, in Mesopotamia. I agree with her on all of that, but what I can't quite qualify is the structural similarities between the two. Because in fact, if you take them verse by verse,

they do echo one another all the time. I mean, there's a constant towing and fro in between them. Is there any other Canaanite or any other thing that is, you know, like we have many different versions of the flood, and we now know that there are several flood myths. Do we have any other things that talk about lions going out and all the stuff? Oh, so many. So many. The metaphors and similes are absolutely standard across the whole of the ancient Near East, which includes Egypt, okay? So that's not an issue for me at all. Which itself is interesting, because we kind of think of Egypt as being different.

No, it's not so different, honestly. When I speak of the ancient Near East, I always include Egypt in it. I think it is part of that world. The zeitgeist is there. And we really see it in things like song of songs in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Egyptian love songs draw on the same parallels all the time. Oh, my sister, you know, your hair is like a flock of sheep. Your breasts are like twin gazelles.

Pomegranates. Exactly the same. Pomegranates. I'm saying necks of like the Tower of Ivory. it's exactly the same image with the shed and I don't find that difficult at all

but I do find it puzzling and I can't answer really why the structure is the same. No, no, I'm not having that because that's why we booked you. Your bishop's going to be getting at you now, come on.

I know, I know. You're basically in the two food groups that matter here. You're clergy and you're a historian of ancient Egypt. So for some people, this is a, you know, actually it's a mic drop moment

for those who believe, you know, this is the revelation of God and look at how constant and consistent it is. You know, this message is the same and it may have been diluted in parts, but can you see that line that stretches straight to that one true God? This is where it all starts.

And then the atheist going, told you, it's basically a bunch of people stitching up pretty poetry. Mike drop. Here's the difference, and it's in the difference that's fundamental. Okay. The great hymn treats the darkness, the absence of the sun, as the enemy. as death, as nothingness.

Whereas the Psalm treats darkness as God's creation as well. It is still God's. God is still there. In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth, and he said that'd be light, and he divided the darkness from the day. And he called the light day,

and he called the darkness night. So dark, in Hebrew thought, is still part of God's world. Archanaten sees darkness as an absence of his God. It is a huge dog of does, but you're also a scholar of Persia. I am. And the light and the dark is a big concept in Persian religion. Huge concept there as well.

Are we bringing Persia into this? If we want to do this, yes, we can. Because my belief is that much of the Hebrew Bible, as it stands, is written in Persia. It's written in the Persian period, or at least edited in the Persian period. So Persian religion, including this polarity of dark and light, truth and the lie, gets filtered into all of this. So while we can say, oh, look, there are Bronze Age elements here in the Psalms, most of them had their redaction in the Persian period. And that makes a big difference. We cannot just read the Hebrew Bible as some old Bronze Age mythology all going on, because actually it's.

being filtered over centuries, in fact. And massively edited and again on the return from Persia. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So it's never a question of saying, you know, A plus B equals C. There's also always something that's going to get in the way of that. You sort of teased us a little bit at the beginning that you were a team Anita. Yeah, I'm happy to be on. I'm happy to be on your team Anita.

But also, so was all of Egypt, it turns out. You're sounding a bit like Act Nata now. I see the irony in this, yes. How soon after he dies, and we'll go into that in more detail on the next episode, how soon do people just say, no, don't like it? It collapses almost immediately. So much has been channeled through him, hasn't it? You know, without him, like the MAGA movement,

without the leader, the charismatic leaguer, we hope things will just disappear, you know, as though they never were. And that's the interesting thing. They didn't want to just say, we've got through this blip. Later Egyptians erased him from history, completely utterly. So if you look at king lists and the Egyptians loved their lists of monarchs, one at Abidos, for instance, showing Setti the first and his son and heir, Rameses Isohn, second, in front of all the katushes of the pharaohs of Egypt.

Conspicuous in his absence is Aachenarten. And we see it far closer to his time with his son. Tutankhamun, as we know him, originally had the name Tuchtankhaten and changed his name to Tudan Chamun to take in that old faith again. And very famously in Karnak Temple, Tutankhamun, this young king

under the tutelage of the old priests of Amun, I dare say, establishes a huge edict basically saying, okay, back to normal, let's open the temples again, and let's reboot them because Egypt was in flux. He says, you know, this last 10 years have been chaos when Egypt was without its gods.

So we have to restore the order through getting the old gods back again. One interesting thought, though, you know, the people of Egypt decide very quickly they don't want to borrow this anymore. But it does come back and just maybe this is a good place to end. But Siegman Freud was obsessed with the fact that actually, this lived on. I mean, he was obsessed with Egypt, apparently, and he had little statues from ancient Egypt all over his desk. But he says Moses was the last Egyptian priest of the Arten. Freud needs a good lie down, I think, to really think that through. No, there's nothing there. But it was very popular in 1900s, Velikovsky in the 50s, claiming that Moses the monotheist,

Archanaten, the monotheist, and linking the story of the Exodus to this period. It was kind of natural thing to do. nothing there. And all this kind of esoteric stuff was going on, you know. There's a brilliant book that was written early in the 2000s by the late Dominic Montserrat, a colleague of mine looking at the traditions of Archanaten since his death, which is a great read. I recommend for anybody. He's been portrayed in film. There's a 1953 movie called The Egyptian, which stars Edmund Purdam and Gene Tierney. Your face is lighting up, Lloyd. Yeah, one of these wide-screen ethics, you know, in which Aachenarten is shown as this kind of monotheist. He chants the hymn with all of these kind of Hollywood singers in the background, shaking sister and doing the A-A-A-Rs.

And, of course, very famously in Philip Glass's opera Achnarton, which I think is a masterpiece. I think it's absolutely a masterpiece. Everyone who doesn't know this has got to go. Maybe the Metropolitan recording. That production is staggering. I saw the first one in 1984. The Hymn to the art and you see is a masterpiece, whoever wrote it is, it is a beautiful, beautiful literary work, a lyric work. And what Glass does in that, the whole opera is sung in ancient Egyptian, until we get to that moment where Aachenarten, who is sung by a castrato, which, you know, well, a countertenor, which of course has all that sexual ambiguity about the voice, he sings the hymn to the artan in the language of the audience, whoever it will be so English or Catalan or Spanish or French or whatever it will be, just to bring that closeness, that proximity home. And then Glass does the amazing thing. He puts on the end of that wonderful hymn, the Hebrew, biblical Hebrew singing of Psalm 104. So it all comes together really beautifully. Yeah, I really recommend people listen to it.

Now, we love that opera. We love that hymn. But you have shown us, I think, very persuasively that he was not really someone you would have wanted as your ruler or indeed as the man leading your religious life. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in. Loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify advertising.

You're among fans. Should we think of him, actually, is the man who brings intolerance into religion, that he's the first guy to say you should not worship this. You should worship that. That's a really good question. I'm tempted to say yes, you know, because I really don't know of any other individual before the late Bronze Age that does that at all,

because all kings and all priests recognize the authority of other gods and other kings, and he just doesn't do that. So yes, you know what, I think you're absolutely right. I think there is something there. Another nail in his coffin. This has been such a deep and winding spiritual journey. It's brilliant, and I can't think of anyone else we would rather have done this with. You were wonderful, Lloyd. Thank you.

Thank you. Lloyd Lwellyn Jones, Professor Ancient History at Cardiff University, priest of the Church of Wales, friend of empire. All of those things matter equally, I find. So lovely to have you next time on Empire, the story of how it all fell apart. And if you want to listen to that right now, you don't have to wait. Head to the link in the description. Become a friend of the show today. Until the next time we meet is goodbye.

from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William, Duremberg.