Preface

doi:10.5743/cairo/9789774166334.002.0006

Front Matter

Preface

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https://doi.org/10.5743/cairo/9789774166334.002.0006

Pages

ix–xii

Published:

June 2014

Extract

This book in many ways serves as a prequel to my earlier volume, Amarna Sunset, published in 2009, which traced the history of the Eighteenth Dynasty from the high point of the reign of Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BC down to the accession of the first of the Rameside kings, nearly half a century later. The reign of Akhenaten and his ‘heretical’ religious reforms has for the past century been one of the most written-about topics in Egyptian history, the province not only of the archaeologist, the historian, and the theologian, but also the novelist, the dramatist, the filmmaker, the philosopher, and the crank (not to mention combinations of at least some of these categories!). Indeed, Akhenaten’s building of a brand-new capital city, Akhet-Aten—modern Tell el-Amarna, which has given its name to the king’s era—has also made him the object of studies in town planning as well.

One of the key elements that has drawn many of these individuals—together with a significant swathe of the Egyptophile population—to the man and his era has been the fact that his religious reforms focused on the cult of a sole god—the first such deity securely attested in human history. As such, Akhenaten has been seized by a number of modern monotheists as their own spiritual ancestor, with aspects of some present-day faiths reflected back onto assessments of the king and his Aten cult. Linked to this, on the basis of the view in many Christian and Muslim societies that monotheism is by definition ‘good’ and polytheism is by definition ‘bad,’ the king and his god have often been given particularly positive assessments. Most notably, the early-twentieth-century Egyptologist James Henry Breasted lamented of Akhenaten that “there died with him such a spirit as the world had never seen before … the world’s first individual.” Such views have passed into wider culture as ‘facts,’ and still strongly color pictures of Akhenaten, his family and times painted by those outside the academic Egyptological community. Indeed, negative assessments of Akhenaten by some modern Egyptologists have roused some enthusiasts to fury for “libeling” the “Father of Monotheism”! Such less positive views have in some cases been harnessed as alternate models for Akhenaten’s reforms in totalitarian political creeds such as Marxism-Leninism and fascism, which in many ways mimic monotheism in their insistence on a single ‘truth’ to which all other things must be subordinated.

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