In Our Time - Akhenaten

Episode Date: October 1, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests Elizabeth Frood, Richard Parkinson and Kate Spence discuss the Pharaoh Akhenaten, the ruler who brought revolutionary change to ancient Egypt. During his reign, Akhenaten embarked on a profoundly radical project: he set out to transform his people's deepest religious beliefs, moving from a polytheistic tradition to the elevation of a single solar god, Aten. The changes in art and architecture that followed have led some to call him 'history's first individual'. Despite his successors' attempts to obliterate him from the historical record, Akhenaten - and his wife Nefertiti - have been an endless source of fascination and speculation.Richard Parkinson is an Egyptologist at the British Museum; Elizabeth Frood is a Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Oxford; Kate Spence is a Lecturer in the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt at the University of Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Pharaoh Akanaten has been described as history's first individual, a saint, tyrant, utopian and rebel. He came to the throne in 1353 BC.

With his queen Nefertiti he transformed ancient Egypt. New temples were built, artisans created revolutionary images of the human body, and a new capital was founded away from the old citadles of Thieves and Memphis. But perhaps most radical of all, he replaced Egyptian polytheism with the worship of one god, the sun god Arten. For this, Arcanaten's successors tried to erase him from history, yet he remains an endless source of interest and speculation. We meet to discuss Akanathen are Elizabeth Frood, lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Oxford,

Kate Spence, lecturer in the archaeology of ancient Egypt at the University of Cambridge, and Richard Parkinson, Egyptologist at the British Museum. Richard Parkinson, can you introduce us to Akanaten and place him? He comes to the throne after possibly the wealthiest period in Egyptian history, era of peace, huge prosperity, great extravagance, his father, Amunhotep III. And he comes to the throne in 1353 as really, possibly the second son. He comes to the throne as Ammanhotep the fourth.

And then things change. By year three, he is building a temple to his new god, who is the sun disk, not the traditional sun god named Ra. By year five, there's a proclamation. to found a new city. By year 8, the new city seems to have been built. By year 9, the old gods are exiled, banned, and a colossal program of raising their names

throughout the traditional monuments. Year 12 is perhaps the zenith of his reign. Year 17, he dies, and suddenly everything falls apart. And we have, in 15 years, a huge cultural revolution imposed on Egypt, which possibly leaves it traumatised. And the following years, culminating, of course, with Tutankhamen,

sees the move back to tradition, the old ideas of kingship, the old gods, the traditional styles of art. What we have, though, is very little evidence. We know the faces, we know the names, we can see the effects in architecture and art, but we really don't know quite why it's happening or what's happening. Tutankhamen, Your Son,

well, thank you for that overview, so concise, and yet at the same time are so full that we could stop now, really. But we'll soldier on. No, those are the bare bones. It's horrible in between. Right. Now, you talked about his father and extravagance

and the greatest period of Egyptian history. Like many people, I'm intrigued by Egyptian history, but the idea of evolution and progress in it is rather bewildering. A lot of things look alike a lot of the time to the uninitiated eye, right? Can you just spell out what his father did, what it was like,

what you meant by the word extraderate, How big were the armies? Give us a bit more about that place. Egyptian power extends into the Near East that are diplomatic treaties with the great empires to the Near East. Egypt has great holdings in the land of gold in Ubit of the South. And it's a time unusually of extended peace. Amunhotep III elevates the power of the king in relation to the sun god.

He has huge temples built in luck. or the temples that people see today are very much his works. And it's a phenomenally wealthy period. The art, even in the Theban Tomb chapels, of fairly lowly officials, is some of the most sublime art Egypt produces. Very florid, very baroque, very fulsome, very appealing, I think, to modern eyes.

And this sense of prosperity is absolute. And on that, Aknautin, Amman, Hohetop the 4th really builds his power base. And what happens with the death of Amin Hotev III is this sudden intellectual, political, religious, possibly social change. And it's very hard to explain how a rule that is very traditional in some ways conforms to all the usual assumptions of Egyptian kingship is suddenly shattered by the sun. Can you take that on, please, Elizabeth, because I want to probe this just a little, not pro, I just describe this a little more.

I mentioned the army, Richard mentioned the treaties to the great empires. Can you elaborate that a bit more so? We have an idea of Egypt as Egypt before Akanahun takes over. I think a lot of what Richard said is absolutely our vision of Amunhot at the Third's reign. And what's interesting culturally is the, what we think we see in terms of discussion of religious belief systems and religious structures. And this is one of the things that Akanaten seems to pick up and develop. You have in the reign of Aman Hote at the third end, in his predecessors as well,

as an intensification of discussion of religious matters in particular contexts. For example, the nature of the sun god, the nature of Ray or Reharahe. he becomes a focus for particular types of discussion in hymnic material in the hymns of non-royal individuals. And they're exploring his nature. They're kind of exploring the nature of the sun god as a kind of a single creative force. And there's also intense discussion of the nature of the creator god as well, again, in similar sorts of contexts. And at the same time, alongside these interesting, very involved discussions of the nature of these particular gods, You have a pluralism and a plurality of religious expression as well.

So Amunhotet III, as Richard said, is building numerous temples throughout Egypt to all sorts of different gods. So back the crocodile god and the fayum to Amun in the Theban area. And so you've got this real sort of pluralism and diversity of religious expression and religious display in the reign of Amunhotep III that then Akanaten seems to take up and seek to purify and distill. down to some sort of essence. Part of the fascination with Akan Atenha is to do with his beautiful and mysterious wife, Nefertiti. A bust was discovered, was it 1912? 1912.

And she's amazing. She looks very European. She looks like a modern, beautiful woman. It's kosher, is it? I mean, our vision of Nefertiti is very much that bust, which is in the Berlin Museum now, where she's got this elongated neck, high cheekbones, the long, the kind of tall crown and the beautiful, almost European-looking visage that some people actually suggest maybe Akanatans are modelling on Akanatins' face as well, which is an interesting, interesting idea.

But she is this iconic image, and I think we get a feeling that we kind of know her or can relate to her through that image. In actual fact, we actually don't know that much about her in terms of. of her origins, how she came to be queen. What we do know and what is particularly striking about her is that she is one of the, she actually is the most prominent royal woman in Egyptian representation. There is no other royal queen princess

that is so prominent alongside the king. Right through the Egyptian dynasties. Right through the Egyptian dynasties, pretty much. Even Ramsey's 2nd's great queen Nefertari is not as prominent as Nefertiti from the evidence that we have. So she is alongside him in offering scenes. She is with him in these strange stealer

that we have set up in people's houses where the whole family is depicted together, dandling children, eating, that sort of thing. And so she's alongside him in all of these different contexts. And it may be that in some sense, by Akanaten removing the traditional anthroposurban, anthropomorphic deities that people were so familiar with. The crocodile gods.

The crocodile gods, the Amun, who is very much an anthropomorphic god, by removing these deities, he had to replace them with something. And so he's replacing these traditional triads that were so important to Egyptian belief and practice. Father, mother and son. With his own image and his own family. And Nefertiti is crucial to that. Just briefly, was the fact of the way Nefertiti looks at, Was that part of the way that Akanaten himself became thought of as a much more modern person than any other Egyptian para?

Absolutely. I mean, there's an Egyptologist who puts it rather well when he says that for most of our understanding of Egyptian history, everything looks quite other and quite alien. But the Amarna period gives us a sense of cozy domesticity because we have these family scenes. And it gives us a feeling of familiarity. and a feeling that we can understand them, which I think is wrong, but this kind of cozy domesticity is what is being projected to us. Kate Spence, can you tell us about Akanaten takes over from this immensely wealthy father. Heard about the wealth of Nubian gold mines and a diplomatic man, the treaties with the empires, the big army is still there,

and the building is going on apace. Now, after two or three years, as Richard outlined, Ackernarton turned his back on that and started in his own wake. Have we any evidence to know why he did that? What provoked that? One of the big questions with Ackanarten is why, and it's one of the most difficult things to answer on the basis of the evidence that we have.

What we see in terms of the evidence itself is, as Richard's explained, early in his reign, at least by year three, he starts to build this temple to his new vision of the sun god, the Uttin. But alongside that at the beginning of the reign, he has been doing what Egyptian kings normally did, which was continuing the work of their fathers. And so, for example, in the big temple at Luxor, he does actually continue doing traditional Egyptian style decoration.

The only difference is that he's only representing solar god. So we only have sun gods there. So you have superficially rather normal Egyptian religious scenes, and it's in the nature of the gods that are being shown that things are seen to be different. Now the issue... Can you just tell the listeners about the Egyptian scenes? You said we are rather different from what, and what were they?

Well, what would normally find in Egyptian temples are what initially appear to be endless scenes, of kings standing in front of gods, making various sorts of offerings. So, for example, offering food with offering tables loaded with food, offering water or other liquids, wine, milk to the gods. And these are repeated in sort of little images along the temples that look a bit like a cartoon strip, really. And so this is a normal Egyptian approach to temple decoration.

And Archanartan initially carries on with this. And it's by about year three that we find his new style of art and his new representations coming in. And these tend to be rather different because the god represented is no longer anthropomorphic. It's the solar disk, which is shown literally as a circle of representing the sun, with long arms, long rays which reach down towards the earth, each ending in a hand which can then sort of touch the king,

the Queen or any of the things that are offered to it. So it's a rather different type of image we're finding here. When you say year three, just to remind our listeners, we're talking about the year 3, 1,350 BC. You're marking the years of his reign, obviously, but in case somebody turned on the radio light. Right, was it common for Pharaohs to come to the throne and break with the traditions of their predecessor?

No, this is extremely uncommon in Egyptian history. The Egyptians generally have a very, very strong sense of tradition and doing things in the right way. They have this term Ma'art, which means something along the lines of right order, just the right way, the way things always have been done. And most Egyptian kings rule in accordance with Ma'Art. They always follow the way things have been done in the past. And this brings a real conservatism with a small sea to Egyptian.

art architecture and in fact every aspect of Egyptian life including agriculture and military matters oh yes you have to do everything the way it always has been done since the beginning of time thousands of years oh yes this goes on for thousands and thousands of years it wasn't about policies it turned that kept them going for a long time it did yes no it was very successful sorry it's yeah so they it's normal to do things the way they always have been done and normally when an Egyptian king his successor, there would be a long period of preparing for the funeral,

getting everything ready for that, and then the new king would take up where his father left off, or presumably usually his father, and would continue with the monuments, the political strategies, the military strategies. Over the period of whole lengths of reigns, you do sometimes see differences between kings. Each has an individual character, some will be more military,

some will be more focused on temple building. But these come out over sort of the lengths of rains. It's not usually apparent within the first few years that someone is really setting out to be different. And with Arcanartan, the way he goes about doing it, it's absolutely clear that he is intending to shock. He's intending to really, really upset everybody and make them think completely differently

about religion and kingship generally. Well, let's look at the changes in this next stage. section of the program, starting with Elizabeth Fluid and go back to something that's been seen in the last hundred years, so as central thing, his attitude to divinity. Now, what evidence do we

have that Akanatan did reform religious belief? Well, I think the evidence is the one thing that we can say about him as Kate just said is that he initiates this cultural transformation that

affects art, language and religious. and it's the religion that is at the core of that. So what he seems to do is to reduce and purify and subtract. So he takes the plurality, the diversity, the all the kind of the multitude of forms that characterises Egyptian religion and purifies down to a single concept and a single image. And the single concept from which Akanaten sees all creation kind of emanating is light and his religion has been termed by some scholars a natural philosophy

rather than a religion, because it's focused on the notion that everything emanates from light, and light is the preeminent source. And so he purifies right down to this. What do you mean by purifies? He removes all the gods and beings that support the sun god. When you say removed, do you mean he knocked down those statues? No, they disappear.

But how do they disappear? They're completely unrepresented. The idea that the other gods are removed and excised and erased comes a little later. But in his vision of the god, when he's creating this idea of the sun god, he removes the myths, the mythologies, the creation myths that surround it. So the sun god, when he's going through the sky in his sort of cycle through night and day, through eternity, is accompanied by beings, by supporting deity. these are gone.

There is no creation mythology for this sun god anymore. There's no mythology. There's no history. It's all about the present, being in the present, immediacy. No symbolism, for example, as well. So, say in 18th dynasty tombs of non-royal officials in earlier periods, they would show scenes of, for example, fishing and fouling as symbolic of order versus chaos,

the kind of maintenance of mart that Kate was talking about, these types of scenes disappear from tombs at Amana. You have the immediacy of royal reward. Amana being the new city. So these new tombs that are built in the city of Amana remove these symbolic scenes, and it's about the immediacy of royal presence, the immediacy of royal gift giving, your relationship to the king. But everything else is kind of removed.

And this is what I mean by this purification. There's no symbolism. There's no history. We'll get on to this massive entirely new city he built and in a moment, a few moments I have, but Richard Partelson, let you stay for one more moment, or one more, as it were a paragraph, on this religious.

It's been said he was history's first monotheist. Now, that's a very disputed area. We have the Zoroastrians, we have Hebrews, we have lots of people being, but still, it has been said, so will you tackle that? Yes. He, as Liz says,

the other gods are quietly removed from the official representations on temple walls early in the rain. And then in year nine, one of our key documents is his name for his new god, which was issued the dogmatic name of the Aton in around year three at the beginning of the reign in quite a traditional sort of form. And he issues the new name of the Atten, removing all references to the old gods. And at about this time, it looks as if he starts removing, hacking out, on the walls of all the monuments, the name of the chief previous god Ammon, which of course is involved in his father's name, Ammon Hotep, and even goes so far as to remove the word for gods, in the plural, wherever it occurs. And this must have been a colossal undertaking. It's really sending military bands throughout the country hacking out this word. And so he is very concentrated on a single God.

And in the great hymn to the Ayrton, he produces this wonderful hymn to the sunrise where he says manifold to your works, but you are one alone, unique. It is you who has created all this. And when that was first identified by modern scholars, it sounded amazingly like passages in the Psalms. And various complicated modern myths have been invented

to try and link Moses, in with the reign of Aknartan. And there seems to be no direct link at all. What we have is something that grows out of Egyptian religion, but is taken to quite an unnatural extreme. And some people have seen it as a foreshadowing of European monotheism. Some have seen it as a completely cynical political strategy. There is only one God, and I am the only person who knows him,

and therefore all of the temple's wealth comes back to me, the king. Or some, as Liz said, have really seen him almost as an atheist, somebody who believes in the physical power of the sun as the only God. And what we have is through these very slim bits of evidence, we've got something we can project our own fantasies onto. And that's one of the great things about Acknartan. And Nefertiti, they look so familiar. And yet we're not quite sure what he is thinking of.

We don't even know really how truly monotheistic he is. Can we continue on with these qualified speculations about someone? At least we may exist and exist in years 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, not given to most of us, right? Kate Spence, this must have caused an immense disruption because the different gods worshipped were associated with burial rights, which are, as I understand, is three of you a lot, essential part of the

of the life, the religious life, and to a certain extent the social life of the people there. So he ripped those out. What evidence do we have of disorder or disruption or discontent? One of the real

problems we have, as we've I think all alluded to, is the fact that we have very little direct evidence for things like this. There is one statement. Arcanatan produces these boundary Steely, which are big inscriptions carved into the cliffs

around the site where he chooses to build his new town, which we'll talk about soon. And on these, he does give some hints as to his motivation for building the town, and he hints there is a very, very broken passage

at the end, which has got lots of bits which have been knocked off and we can't read the text, but which talks about things being bad and things being worse than they were in the time of my father and worse than they were in the time of my grandfather, and he manages to go through most of his predecessors in a long line, but it only tells us that things were bad, and what this bad was is not entirely clear. So we really don't have a lot of firm evidence for this,

but in terms of what we know about Egyptian religion and the things that people held dear to them in life, in particular burial rights, the belief in an afterlife, the belief in the belief in in traditional gods who would protect them in times of crisis, childbirth illness and these areas, it seems extremely likely that this must have been very, very traumatic to ordinary Egyptians. The only real thing we can really bring in to sort of develop that is the fact that in some of the houses at Amarna, this new city that Arcanartan builds, images of traditional gods are sometimes found little, usually rather small images. which might have been sort of squirled away and kept hidden by somebody who was having a lot of difficulty letting go

of their traditional local gods who had always protected them and their family. Elizabeth Frood, can you give us some idea of... We have evidence from the material remains, though. I mean, the lack of evidence is in the textual area, isn't it? So we're not talking without any foundation whatsoever. Things did change in buildings, things did change in statues, even from the textual.

so he knows that things did change in language. So we're talking about something that really happened, a person who was really alive, were in dangerably evaporating the old thing. If you're not going to blow as dust from the desert. So, Elizabeth, can you explain in this small period 17 years? Actually, what change was undergone in Egyptian art that we can see? Well, the Egyptian art is one of the areas where we can see Akanaten seeking to shock.

I think, and seeking to mark and signal a complete transformation of Egyptian culture and Egyptian traditions. And how he does this is by changing bodily proportions. And we see this in particular in images of the king, his colossal statuary from the temple of Karnak, where he has these pendulous breasts, the elongated face, which make people think that he suffered some sort of medical disorders. order that feminized his body and made him look actually extremely strange. And so we see this change in bodily proportions. And this is mirrored by his officials, by Nefertiti, and even by some of the representations of gods very early on before he gets rid of anthropomorphic representations also have

this type of change pendulous body form. You also have change in terms of the themes of art as well So he has these scenes of domesticity with his children Where they're kissing and cuddling He's holding his kids on his lap And they're eating food as well Which is a very strange thing You don't normally see

Egyptian kings and queens Or officials eating actually consuming food So he's doing all of these kind of shocking And the scopes come in as well as landscapes, don't they? Well, one of the things that people say about Akanatans art is that he brings a sort of naturalism and this interest in nature and wanting to represent the natural world.

Well, I think that's kind of overstated because this interest in precise and beautiful representation of nature is part of Egyptian representation from the earliest periods. And I think people hook into this and say, oh, look, he's being really naturalist. Well, I mean, I'm not sure I entirely follow that.

A good example of this is the depiction of feet. So traditional Egyptian representation of feet is both feet in two-dimensional art are represented from the inside with the big toe. And for Akanaten, you start to see the outer foot with all the toes. But it's only the king and the queen, the royal family, that have that representation. Only they have natural-looking feet

while the rest of the Egyptian population have the traditional form. And with the cityscapes, what we see are the wonderful naturalistic, modern-looking, cityscapes, what we forget is this colossal megalomaniac figure of the king dominating the composition and everything, we can't quite say what happened or how it happened, but everything is centred around this one individual and everything, absolutely everything and the culture changes. Can we talk about the biggest act of megalomania, which was the removing of the bureaucratic capital away from Memphis and capital from

Thieves to somewhere in the desert where he built an entirely a new city in short order about 10 years. He completed this massive city. Can you tell us about that and what was new and different about that, Kate Spence and Ercan Artan seems to have decided fairly earlier in the rain

that he actually wanted to move his major city, his royal residence, somewhere else other than the traditional capitals. And he chooses a very, very strange site in Middle Egypt, strange because basically it's a desert plateau

it has a very, very little fertile land associated with it on that side of the river. And he says in his boundary inscriptions, which are carved around the site, that the God led him to it and the God showed him where to build it. His motivation seems to be that it was approximately central in Egypt, so it's in the middle of the country, which may have been symbolic. And there's also, there's a little niche in the cliffs right at the back, which you can see from the river, which looks a little bit like the Egyptian hieroglyph for a horizon with the sun rising out of it.

So it may be that there is actually some symbolic reason for building there. He seems to have first visited the site around year of five, and he actually talks about camping, and then he builds a city which has massive temples on a really megalomaniac scale. They are much, much larger than the temples built in any of the other major centres. And they differ from traditional Egyptian temples in that they're not enclosed.

They don't have dark interiors with statues in them. It's simply a massive enclosed open space within which you can worship the sun, which you can see in the sky above you. So he does away with the idea of a recreated image and he's actually worshipping the sun itself. So he builds temples, institutions, palaces, and then the court seems to have followed him

and built their own houses around the place. Do you know what about this site? Because it eventually, when he left, After his time, people fled and went back to the seams and Memphis or so on. We know a lot about the city. It's one of the things we really know most about from this period, largely because Arcanatan chose such a stupid place to build a city, and it's not a natural place to build.

So usually with Egyptian cities, later cities have been built on top of them. This was simply abandoned, and it crumbled down into the desert, and it's been excavated over a period of over 100 years. So we actually do know an awful lot about the archaeology of the site. And that informs much of the discussion of his reign. And is that itself indication enough of the difference of Akanatant or the pharaohs? The building of the city. No, the city itself.

The city itself is definitely different. The palaces are bigger. The focus in many cases of construction is on the palaces rather than the temples. Some of the palaces are big stone structure. with statuary, very impressive buildings. Most of the temples have substantial mud-brick elements with some stone bits in them. So the temples are big, but they're very, very simple.

They don't have the complexity of a traditional Egyptian temple, while the palaces are really, really... Again, it's all focused on Arcanarton. Can we, Richard Parkin, can we switch to the most difficult area which is to do with words, really? Or you'll tell me it isn't... Well, anyway, it's amazing. We're told, it is good, thank you.

We're told that the formal, well, I'm told, I read that the formal Egyptian language was also changing. Can you? Yes. In the boundary, in the boundary steely, things are normally written in a classical form of the language that was probably spoken around 1900 BC. And when Acknartan speaks on the boundary steely, he speaks something that is much less archaic, it's much closer to colloquial speech.

And this begins quite, a major shift in the registers of the language. And so the great hymn to the Aten is written in a language that is also consciously different from the traditional language of hymns, subtly different, but the layers of metaphor of symbolism, the changes there that Liz has mentioned, are also reflected in the language. We know that the traditional teaching practices went on in the new city of Amman of Akatatan, of Akhtartan.

but they actually altered the spelling of traditional schoolboy texts. So when the old classic poem of Sunuja was copied out at Amarna, they altered the list of gods to reflect the new religion. And possibly the classic poem, the teaching of Aminemhat, centuries before, was changed into the teaching of Aten Emhat. So it's not just that you are getting rid of whole cultural institutions. You're going back and you're rewriting even the schoolboy textbooks to make sure everything conforms. And that change is found in courtiers' names.

Courteers will change their name so it includes the name of art and not everybody, but some of them. And you get this sense that the change is being imposed on absolutely every level of life. Elite life. Elite life, because we don't know anything about the poor people, except if he closed the temples, they must have lost the festivals. And the festivals were where the people are actually related to the religion and the king. The whole relationship must have changed. But elite life was quite severely disturbed by all this, as I understand it, Elizabeth.

Yes, yes, it was. The priests were no longer required to be that much or at all in attendance. The gods were not to be, many gods not be worshipped. As Richard said, festivals dropped away. There were no festivals and these must have carried their own social consequences and so on. Can you give us some idea of the disruption caused? I think Richard encapsulates it well when he says, you know, the temples are closed. By year nine, year ten, probably most of the major temples in Egypt are closed or replaced by artinous temples as in

Memphis maybe in Thebes as well. And so the festivals and the kind of the large-scale religious practices that structure people's lives are probably gone. On the day-to-day level, as Kate pointed to, people's relationships with their gods may not have changed all that much. You know, the level of kind of evidence for minor deities at Amarna is actually quite significant. You have little figures of these gods and goddesses that Kate referred to found in people's houses alongside, you know, Steele of Akanat and the Nefertiti that was supposed to be worshipped as well. So you have the sense that maybe on a day-to-day level

for ordinary people and perhaps some of the elites as well, maybe their lives didn't change that much. Kate? I do wonder sometimes whether we focus too much on the God itself when we deal with this. Because in fact, a lot of what's going on is simply shifting a focus from the God to the king himself.

And it says Richard said, in the tomb scenes, the king's in the middle of everything. And you do wonder how much of the sort of festival practice is actually replaced simply by things the king does being associated with sort of handouts of food and things. So it may be that we're seeing a shift at that level, a shift between king and God and a realignment of that relationship.

I think that fits really well with how we understand the structure of Akitatan, of the city of Amana, because it is set up almost as a royal performance ground, isn't it? Everything's oriented to the royal road that runs right through the city that Arcanatan would have gone through on his chariot. But there's only one king, whereas before there were many temples to many gods, many festivals, when things are centred around one individual, everything is concentrated. It's easy to say there's a cultural revolution. I think as modern view as we forget, culture was very much an elite phenomenon. The farmers and the fields would not have had their lives affected.

What we get is just this government upper middle class. Yes, but just as government, that shifts. Before we leave Akanata and talk about the consequences now, but before he leaves us, which he did after a mere 17 years reign. Can you just give us a brief summary of the impact of this very short period in the history, in Egyptian history, and it does seem to have had a distinct, traceable, verifiable, despite not all that much of impact, which we can still see today, and more and more as that great city becomes more and more excavated.

I think our problem is so much of evidence is concentrated on that capital city when we try and trace its impact on the rest of the country where things have been built over, we're destroyed in the following period. it's hard to get a sense of how outrageous everything was. The erasure of the names of the gods systematically on the monuments does suggest it had a huge impact. And there must have been considerable resentment from vested interest in traditional priesthoods. The must have been resistance. And yet he pushes it through with ruthless efficiency.

It doesn't last long. But my God, he sets it up bloody quickly. Right. Akanan disappears from the archaeological record 1336 BC. What happened to him? Oh dear. No wonder. We don't know what happened to him. He almost certainly died in year 17.

He died in year 17. He died in year 17. We assumed that he was buried in the Royal Valley at Amarna with some sort of pomp and circumstance parallel to usually. Egyptian tradition. The real issue is who takes over from him. But have we found his tomb? We have the tomb. The tomb had been emptied with nothing in it and the images had been defaced. But we know it's his tomb? We do know it's his tomb. But it's nothing like Tutankar, his son's tomb, of course. No, it didn't have any, well it would

originally have been full like his son's tomb, but we don't have it. What seems to have happened is that probably during the reign of Tutankhamen, all of the royal bodies were taken out of the Amarna royal tombs and transported to the valley. So we now had a tomb. What about Nefertiti? What happened to her? Nefertiti may have died. She also may not have died. Oh, it's bad. It's very bad. She certainly died eventually.

But this is a massive debate within Egyptology. Did Nefertiti die and was she buried in the Valley of the Kings, which I have to say I tend towards. I think she probably just died and was buried. There is another group of Egyptologists who, at actually, But we haven't found her to? No. She was probably, possibly buried in Arcanartan's tomb.

But there is another group of Egyptologists who think that she actually was given kingly titles and she actually took over as Arcanatan's successor. The reasoning behind this is that she has a name which is also held by Arcanartan's immediate successor. Shadowing figure. Right. So he's gone and he's gone. and we don't know much about her at all, but we do it. So there we are.

And then these men come in, and Tutankhamen comes, and the older men control him, and they go immediately, they want to get rid of him, don't they? They want to get rid of his image. Can you tell us, Elizabeth, how radically they reacted to his radical changes? Pretty swiftly.

Once Aachen Aten dies, you have this shadowy four years or so where we don't really know what's going on. then Tutank Arten comes to the throne and fairly quickly, he's a boy king, but fairly quickly he changes his name to Tutankhamen. And although he's young, but he seems to be surrounded by very strong officials who then take the lead. So very quickly they move the capital city back to Thebes and Memphis. The court is shifted. Amana, the city of Amana is still lived in for a while, but it's no longer the central point.

It's no longer the capital anymore. Tutankhamun issues a decree that is set up probably throughout Egypt, but we have two copies at the Temple of Karnak and Thebes, where he talks about the restoration of the temples of all the gods. And it's a wonderful text. He describes the time under Akanaten as being a time when the gods would no longer talk to anyone anymore. Temples were filled with weeds, were destroyed,

a time of desolation, and then he renews it by bringing back the plurality of Egyptian religion. And for more than 3,000 years, Richard, as we come to the end. The sand blows over the name even and the reputation of Achanaten until we get down now with trowls. 1714, people see it, the city for the first time. Champolian visits it in 1828 where he thinks Nefertiti looks so weird in the statue. She must have suffered from a horrible disease. Was it kind of been the same statue as the German found?

No, it was one of the boundary-steen. statues, which are quite grotesque. The main excavations produce the Great Bust in 1912. And as the archaeologists get to work, everybody starts projecting their fantasies onto Acknarton. So you have the Derek Jarman unfinished film. You have the Philip Glass Opera of Acknarton, this sublime dreamer crushed by the traditional pagan priests,

Moses, Edipus. Everybody has been attached onto this strange, figure simply because his art is different in some ways, simply because there's this emphasis on the one God. And now we're left with a state where we clutch at straws and have a wonderful sight. Well, you made quite a lot of bricks this morning. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much to Richard Parkinson, Elizabeth Frouet and Kate Spence. Next week we will be talking about the Dreyfus affair, the scandal of a wrongly convicted Franco-Jewish soldier which tore France apart in the 1890s. Thank you very much for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.