RedHanded - ShortHand: Akhenaten - The Heretical Forgotten Pharaoh

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

More people know about the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten today than knew about him just 100 years after his death. But Akhentaten was no average ruler. He fundamentally changed religious worship forever, and may even have started Judaism itself. So why did he disappear from history? Was he simply forgotten to the sands of time – or did he fly too close to the ‘Aten’?--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Hello. And welcome to Olden Timmy. It's not that fun. It's fun for me. I had fun writing it. Old and Timey episode of Short Hand. Everyone ready? Ancient Egypt, a remarkable civilization, which emerged around 3,150 BC, that is bonkers on the shores of the River Nile in northeastern Africa.

Did you know that ancient Egypt went on for so long that archaeologists, was a career in ancient Egypt. I've got it in the story. Have you? It's true. You don't need TikTok. You can do it yourself. It's true.

The ancient Egyptians gave us pyramids, mummies, and sparked an enduring fascination in history for modern children all over the world. We all read in awe about how they pulled the brains of their dead out through their nose and buried all the deceased organs in jars in their giant golden tombs. And if you're anything like me, you also wrote. casted, directed, and starred in your own classroom play about Cleopatra. I wore my water-themed leggings, especially for you.

I wish I'd brought a silk scarf to wave, so I could be the Nile to your Cleopatra. Just the vision. The vision of a year five, Surruti. And it's true, who can deny all of our obsessions? At some point at least, I cannot believe that we all did not have a minor obsession with dinosaurs, the Tudors, and the ancient Egyptians. Tuton Karmun and Cleopatra probably top of the list. I always think it's quite amusing that Tutankhamun was actually an incredibly minor. Yes.

Part of the story we just happened to have stumbled across his grave so we all give a shit. I'd be raging if I was a major pharaoh that they hadn't found. Definitely, definitely. Because arguably, Cleopatra and Tutankhamun are the most famous pharaohs. Cleopatra, yeah, fair do's. She did a lot. Last Pharaoh. Totally.

Fair, fair play. Tutankan didn't really do very much at all. He was very busy being a quite famous. sickly imbred boy king. But the same cannot be said for his father, the main character of our story today. Arcanatan may not be very well remembered like his son is, but to be honest, a lot more people probably know his name now,

3,500 years later, and definitely will do by the end of this episode, you'll even be able to say it, I promise. More people know his name than did just 50 years after his own thing. death when Ramsey's the Great took over. And that's because after Arcanartan's death, every preceding pharaoh, including his own son, Tutankhamun, did their best to wipe his name from history. Arcanatan, the heretic king, was maybe the most controversial pharaoh as far as the ancient Egyptians were concerned. And it wasn't even because he married his own daughters.

That was the least of it. Want to know more? Of course you do. This is the shorthand. Let's start, somewhere near the beginning, with his father, Amunhotep the third, or Ammonotep the magnificent. The ninth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty. If you had to choose Suruti the, what would be your signify? Is that the right word, honorific? Oh, yes. The, something with an S, just for the flow. Suruti, the, the, the, the word sneaky keeps coming to me.

I'm going to say sneaky as well. You're not actually that sneaky, though. Surity the... Sensational. Sensational. There we go. What about Hannah? Hannah the...

Cripplingly anxious. Honorable, but then it's not got the H. It's not got the H, hard H. H. H is difficult. We'll come back to it. I'm going to have a think. Hannah there. Nope.

No good words begin with age. Under Aminatep the Magnificence Rule, from 1388 to 1388 to 1351 BC things were going great. He was a savvy diplomat, and he built strong alliances with neighbouring kingdoms, making it a peaceful and prosperous period for Egypt. It is also seen as the pinnacle of ancient Egyptian civilization,

both in terms of political power and cultural achievement. Amonotep III was even the first pharaoh to issue royal news bulletins about his marriages, hunting trips and building projects, with the information being inscribed on large stone scarab seals and sent out across the empire. So he had a mailing list. Interesting. And Aminatep III also had a lot of children

because he had lots of wives, but most crucially, a son called Fatmos. Fatmos was the result of Aminotep III's main squeeze, his great royal wife, Queen Ty. But son Fatmos died and the position of heir to the throne fell to the second son. Quite controversial when that happens. And after Aminotep III died, likely in his early 50s,

after 38 years of rule, which is good innings, this second son took the throne in 1353 BC with the royal name Aminotep the fourth. The name changed to Akanatin. comes later, so bear with us for now. Upon his ascension to the throne, Amunhotep IV took Nefertiti. I know her.

Mm-hmm, the other one that everyone knows. He took Nefertiti as his principal or great royal wife. Nefertiti, as Hannah has just shown us all, has displayed, is another very famous ancient Egyptian name that we all recognize today, much more than her husband, largely thanks to a bust that was discovered in 1912, Yeah, yes. It shows Nefertiti as a beautiful woman with almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and a long, elegant neck.

Fun fact, Nefertiti is actually now a type of neck Botox you can get. So that's quite the legacy for her. How do you feel about Morpheus 8, by the way? Eh, what? It's microneedling with lasers. We can talk about it later. Let's talk on under the two. Okay. And another fun fact I have for you about Nefertiti is that the famous bust of Nefertiti was a particular favourite of Advertiti was a particular favourite of Adel

of Hitler's, and for four years, he had it kept inside a fortified anti-aircraft gun tower next to Berlin Zoo. I think it's still in Berlin, that last. Yes, it is still in Berlin. With the big blue gate. Yeah, yeah. So as we said, Nefertiti was Amun Hotep the fourth's main wife. But over the years, he'd marry at least five more wives, including two of his own daughters.

More on that later. But Nefertiti was absolutely the one that Amman Hotep. the fourth was the closest to. She gave him six daughters, and she was a very, very influential queen. And during Amunhotep the fourth's reign, Nefertiti was the second most important person in all of Egypt. When Ammanhotep the fourth took the throne, he inherited a thriving empire and everyone was basically like, just keep doing what your dad did for nearly 40 years and everything's going to be completely fine. Did he listen? Did he fuck? They never do. Amonotep had big plans, plans that would earn him the nickname the heretic king.

Hannah the heretic, obviously. Hannah the heathen, heretics better. It's better. He earned that name as he set about turning centuries of religious belief upside down. And to put into context the massive upheavals that this pharaoh is going to embark on, we need to understand a little bit about ancient Egyptian history. Like for a start, ancient Egypt as a civilization spanned such a long period of time that during the time of the pharaohs, the study of ancient Egypt already existed as a concept, a thing, a school of thought.

By the 14th century, when Amonetep IV came to power, Egypt was already over a millennian old. And there had been several major periods, the pre-dynastic, the early dynastic, the old kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the second intermediate period. And his rule marks the beginning of the new kingdom. Throughout all of those eras and rulers, Egypt had changed and grown. But, crucially, the religion followed by the ancient Egyptians had remained remarkably stable. They worshipped nearly 2,000 gods in an elaborate pantheon of spiritual deities. And yes, of course, depending on the economy,

the politics, all the preferences of the king at various points, the main god that was in fashion would change. But there were also cults that followed basically every deity. These cults, it's important to know, are not cults in the way we think about cults today. In the context of history, cult refers to the religious practices, rituals and temples dedicated to a specific deity, God or saint. Each god would have a cult led by priests dedicated to that particular deity,

and these cults, depending on their wealth and saviveness, could elevate themselves and their god into the upper echelons of society. And at the time of Amunhotep the fourths rise to power, the king god, the big dog, was Amun Ra. Amman Ra or the hidden one, was at first just a local fertility god. But when his cult moved to the capital Thebes,

he gained national notoriety and met Hercules. And also grew in power and prestige. During the Middle Kingdom, Amon merged with the sun god, Ra, the falcon-faced god, and became Amman Ra, the king of the gods, representing the fusion of hidden power with visible solar energy. And by the start of the new kingdom, the cult of Amman was by far the...

most powerful and wealthy with many believing that they had as much money as the royal family themselves. And the priests had possibly more land than even the king. Now whether it was this power that the cult of Amunra possessed or a genuine spiritual awakening that caused Amunhotep the fourth to start his crackdowns, we'll never know. But change was coming. At first the Pharaoh allowed the worship of all gods. But then he started putting Aten, front and centre. Now who or what Aten is

is slightly confusing. But essentially, at first, Arton was just the disc of the sun that was like an aspect of the sun god Rha. I know it sounds a bit confusing, but if you basically look up a picture of Rha, right, it's the falcon face god,

and above his head there is always this red or orange sundisk. Yes, right. That is Atten. Oh, okay, okay, okay. So it is literally not actually officially a deity in its own right. If it was, it's a very, very minor deity. Most people accept that at the time of Amunhotep, the fourth rise to power, Aton was literally just like an aspect of another god.

Kind of like, and I might be completely wrong, and any Egyptologists are probably seething. But I kind of was thinking of it like the halo in Christian iconography. It's the sun disk. Right. So that is Aten. What Aten is, who Aten is, however you want to put it. So basically there's one cult about Birdman and then there's another cult.

Okay, but have you seen his hat? Exactly. Right. So for a long time, Arton had just been a part of another god. But Amunhotep was about to make him a star. He elevated the cult of Aten and Solidarity. identified Atenism, and by his fifth year and reign, Amunhotep the fourth, changed his name to Akanaten, which translates to the living spirit of Aten.

And it was massive. Firstly, the most important thing to ancient Egyptian pharaohs was a legacy. They didn't build all those pyramids for nasync. They didn't build them at all. It was the aliens. Fight me. So imagine the idea of a son changing his name and the name. therefore ending the dynastic legacy of his own father, especially when that father had been so widely loved and revered. And doing it for the sake of an obscure solar disc god. That wasn't

even really a thing on its own, just a hat of another one. Soon all the carvings of the royal family heavily featured Arton above them with his rays coming down and touching the family. And it was also now that the depiction of Arton itself changed. He was given human hands that held up the hieroglyphs for dominion and life. Yeah, so it will be like the picture of the art and the disc now has human hands and it's holding the hieroglyph. It's not the whole world. In his hands and it's holding, literally holding the hieroglyph for dominion and for life and for power and all of these things. And he's always handing them down, sitting above the family, handing them down to Arcanatan.

So it's very, very, it's very symbolic of this shift. in power. Right. And also the Capra San logo. Exactly. Okay. By Akhnautin's ninth year in power, he declared Arton to be the supreme God

and the only one worthy of worship. This was a direct assault on Amun Rha and the king god's powerful cult of followers who've got more money and more land than the royal family. As far as some historians today are concerned, this was the birth of monotheaer. him. More on this later. What you need to know for now is, Arcanatan was not messing around. Soon, under his orders, Amun-Rah temples were being vandalised across the nation, and the King of

gods, along with the others in the old pantheon, were being chiseled out of monuments. People were angry, but it seemed like no one could stop him. The aristocracy knew that this was a clear threat to the stability of the empire, but with little choice, they were. went along with the reforms. The cult of Amman was stripped of their lands and wealth, and so couldn't fight back. Meanwhile, priests simply did their best to hide as many texts as they could, to avoid the destruction of centuries of Holy Scripture. Now, what about the common folk? It's hard to say for sure. It seems that the older generations may have been just as against Arcanatan's reforms as the priests and the aristocracy. But for the younger generation, it's

It seems that Akanaten may have been a bit of a hero. Again, this is thousands and thousands of years old. It's very, very hard to note. But there is some idea that he was taking away power from the powerful, people who had held it for centuries. He was shaking things up and reestablishing a new order. So to some people that may have been exhilarating. In 1346, Akanatin even moved the capital of Egypt from Thebes, which is modern-day Luxor, to a vast stretch of uninhabited land, 250 miles north along the River Nile.

Thebes had been the home, like the capital of Egypt for centuries. It's his ancestral homeland, the place of the gods, everything, where his father ruled. So again, to do this, can't stress enough how big of a change this is. It's for no other reason than to completely sever the power that anybody who was in Thebes at the time, time had because that's where their palaces are, that's where their houses are, that's where the wealth is, fucking cut it off at the neck and move it to just like a bit of desert where nobody lives so he can start again. And he named his new city Arcanteran, which translates to his man skirt.

It translates to horizon of the Arton and is confusingly similar to his own name, Akhenaten. Again, this was hugely destabilising. Thebes had been the centre of power for the empire for centuries, and now this whole new city had been built. All of the temples there were also very different to the traditional style. They faced east towards sunrise. They didn't have any roofs, so the sun's rays could pour in on the worshippers.

And a whole new style of architecture and art had been developed as well. The stones used in Accintartan were much smaller, allowing for this city to be built in just a few years, and without the help of the aliens. And their art markedly different too. All the people depicted are shown to have elongated facial features, wide hips and unnatural-looking limbs.

Some have speculated that the king was shown like this because he had some rare condition like Marfan syndrome, which can result in elongated body parts and make you an incredibly good basketball player. But it's quite painful. However, everyone in these images from Akinthartan look like that. It's not just the king or even the royal family, so it does feel like more of a stylistic choice than some sort of medical record.

So why did Akanaten move the capital? Why did he demote Amun Rha and his cult? Why did he go so far with his religious overhaul? Again, it's hard to know for sure. Was he really a religious maniac? Or, as Nicholas Reeves, in his book Arcanatan, Egypt's 4th, false prophet puts it, was Arcanartin, quote, dictated less by a theological insanity than by caught intrigue and politics? I.e., was he just trying to seize total and absolute control

away from powerful cults and religious groups within Egypt at the time? We'll never really know for short. And as for all the talk of him being a revolutionary new leader, well, what we do know for certain is that Arcanaten was an absolutely terrible king. He completely neglects. He completely neglects. to diplomacy and politics, and he actually undid a lot of the work his dad had done, and destroyed many alliances that had been hard work to build. For example, a key way to maintain relations with other rulers is to help them out when they ask. We know that the king of Biblos wrote to Akanatan over 50 times asking for the pharaoh's help, fighting a canonite leader.

His peasants were also revolting, and he was in big trouble. But Akenartan didn't give a shit. he only responded once, basically telling his fellow king to fuck off. He also royally pissed off another ruler, whose daughter Akinartan had married. In exchange, he was supposed to send the king two solid gold statues, but he sent wooden ones that had been gold-plated instead. Big no-no in ancient world.

Bad phopar. But once again Akanaten felt untouchable. He was far more concerned with his life. in the palace and all of his religious reformation. Which is what makes us think that he really did just care about Arton. If he was so bothered about simply consolidating power, surely he would care a bit more about the connections he had with other leaders, who you might need if your own people decided to kick back at you.

Having said that, by this point Akanaten was now openly referring to himself and Nefertiti is living gods on earth, which could explain why he didn't care so much for the squabbles of other. earthly rulers. During this time, it's believed that Arcanatan also married his two daughters. Now, it's debated, however, and the records are not clear, so I can't confirm it for sure. But it's certainly not impossible. Incessuous marriages were common amongst ancient Egyptian royal families to maintain bloodlines and inheritance. Brother-sister marriages were pretty common, with the president for it, having been set by the gods Osiris and Isis themselves.

but father and daughter was definitely less common. However, like we said at the start, people don't really care too much about this. Not after everything else he'd got up to over the course of his reign anyway. And finally, in 1336 BC Akanaten died, bringing to an end the Amarna period and 17 years of controversial rule. At first, because his son, Tutankarman, was too young to take power, two other pharaohs, Semankar and Nefana Faro, and temporarily took over the throne.

The capital was swiftly moved back to Thebes in Akanathen's original tomb, in Ackentartan, which is modern-day Amarna, was desecrated. His body was actually removed, and to this day we don't know where it is. It's believed that it was moved to the Valley of the Kings, and a sarcophagus believed to belong to him was discovered in the 20th century. The facial features of whoever it was had been destroyed, and no personal items were found buried within the tomb, so it's hard to conclusively identify Akinarton.

It was only ever confirmed that the body belonged to a man. Curiously, though, the sarcophagus seems to have been made for a woman. Hand me down coffin. Yeah, I think we do know that they certainly didn't treat Akanatans remains his city or his tomb with much respect. So I think they were just like when he wanted desperate. to remain in Arcontartan. But they were like, fuck you, no, so they dug him up and definitely moved him. So I could see that they just gave him this sort of ridiculous,

almost humiliating re-barial in the Valley of the Kings. I'm amazed they moved in there at all. So Arcanatins' son would eventually become King Titan-Karmun. And the boyfarer's advisors told him to move away from his father's reforms as quickly as possible. and to totally and publicly reject artanism, restoring the old gods and re-establishing Amun Ra as the king of the gods. And fun fact, and this I do think is very interesting, Tutankhamun's real name, as in his birth name given to him by his father,

was actually Tutin Acton, for the god Arten. He changed his name to Tutankan to show his commitment to the king god Amun. That is interesting. Future kings tore down Akanatin's buildings and removed his name from history. In fact, Akanaten's name doesn't even exist in the list of kings compiled after his death. Fucking savage. We only know of his existence because of the discovery of his capital city in modern day Amarna, which was found during Napoleon's expeditions in the 18th century when they also kicked up the Rosetta Stone.

And in a show of how much contempt future rulers had for Akanaten, the stones from his destroyed city were found used as filler in Luxor, identifiable by their small size. And today, despite the fact that some of you may never have heard of him before, he is widely regarded as one of the most notable pharaohs, because of his profound impact on world civilization. He does seem to have shaped the concept of monotheism, the worship of a single god, which back then would have been a completely,

unique concept. Now some historians argue that what Akanatin brought about was more henotheism, not monotheism, which is basically where you worship one god, but you acknowledge other lower deities. Because while he destroyed the temples of Amman and defaced images of this god, Akanatin didn't touch all of them. For example, he didn't touch Osiris. So I do understand people who say that this was just more of an attack on the powerful cult of Amman rather than a total move away from polytheism to monotheism. But it is also important to say, and I thought this was quite interesting,

that Akanaten did try to scrub out the plural word for gods. Interesting. Again, we can't say for sure, but it was definitely a bold move. Another fascinating theory about Akanatan's rule is that after his death and the destruction of his capital, his followers, the followers of Atenism, knew that they would possibly become victims of persecution. So they left under the leadership of a priest that some believe may have been Moses.

Total. Controversial. It is. It is. I think this is so interesting. Let my people go. Which ones? Obviously.

Can't prove it. But some historians theorise that this group of Akanatenaten Lawyllists may have been. the start of Judaism itself, which was founded around the same period with the ideology of just one God and prohibition of idol worship. The great Atten Him was also discovered in the 1800s, and there are striking similarities

between this hymn and Psalm 104 in the Hebrew Bible, verses 20 to 30 in particular. Which one is that? See, I started to write it down and I was like, We don't have fucking time for this in 20 minutes. But it is really interesting. So the art and hymn...

Oh, I know this one. The art and hymn was commissioned by Arcanatan. And yes, there are a lot of religious scholars and historians that point out the similarities between this hymn and passages in the Hebrew Bible. Go do that in your own time, but it is very, very interesting stuff. Oh, it's good. Yeah. You bring darkness, it becomes night.

Yes, I saw this, yeah. It's really interesting. So, was Arcanatan the father of monotheism? And inadvertently, perhaps Judaism? Was he a bold thinker and revolutionary? Or was he a crazy religious fanatic who was willing to upend centuries of religious belief and decades of stability and economic prosperity to bring a minor sun-disk god to power? Who knows? Maybe all of the above.

And that's the shorthand. Very interesting. I thought you'd like that. do very much. And hopefully you guys liked it too and we will see you next week for another short hand. Goodbye. Bye.