Amarna Sunrise: Egypt from Golden Age to Age of Heresy

326 Pages·2014·13.05 MB·English

by  Aidan Dodson

AMARNA
SUNRISE
AMARNA
SUNRISE
Egypt from Golden Age
to Age of Heresy
Aidan Dodson
The American University in Cairo Press
Cairo New York
First published in 2014 by The American University in Cairo Press 113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
Copyright © 2014 by Aidan Dodson All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Exclusive distribution outside Egypt and North America by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd., 6 Salem Road, London,
W2 4BU
Dar el Kutub No. 14514/13
ISBN 978 977 416 633 4
Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dodson, Aidan
Amarna Sunrise: Egypt from Golden Age to Age of Heresy/Aidan Dodson.—Cairo: The
American University in Cairo Press, 2014
p. cm.
ISBN: 978 977 416 633 4
1. Egypt Antiquities
932
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14
Designed by Adam el-Sehemy
Printed in Egypt
To the memory of Cyril Aldred (1914–99) whose
writings first introduced me to Akhenaten
CONTENTS
Preface
Abbreviations and Conventions Used in Text
Maps

Introduction: Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt
1. Dawn of the Golden Age
2. Gold Is as Dust …
3. The Road to Tell el-Amarna
4. The Horizon of the Aten
5. From Zenith to Sunset

Appendices
1. Outline Chronology of Ancient Egypt
2. Relative Chronology of Egyptian and Foreign Kings during the
Fourteenth Century
BC
3. Royal Names of the Later Eighteenth Dynasty
4. The Genealogy of the Eighteenth Dynasty

Sources of Figures
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
T
his 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.
Ultimately, however, the application of such models, reflecting religious
approaches that date from only the past two millennia, and political ones that are
but a century old, to data that is not only three-and-a-half millennia old, but that
is also woefully incomplete, can be argued to be fundamentally flawed—except,
perhaps, when using them simply as aids in considering how human beings may
operate when confronted by rigid religio-political doctrine. Rather, Akhenaten
and his times must be seen in the context of second-millennium-BC Egypt and
the wider Near East—crucially as seen through the prism of the surviving
evidence. The latter point is a key one: given the paucity of data, many
assumptions have to be made to produce any kind of narrative, and any single
item of new data can show a long-held and potentially crucial assumption to be
wholly in error. For example, depictions of Akhenaten in positions of affection
with a co-ruler have been the basis for confident statements as to Akhenaten’s
homo-or bisexuality that have passed into popular ‘fact.’ However, the proof that
one of his co-rulers was not only a woman but probably also his wife removes
any basis for this ‘fact’—although, given the difficulty of unpicking popular
‘facts,’ it may be decades (at best!) before this aspect of Akhenaten disappears
from the secondary and tertiary literature.
Another example of the limitations of evidence is the existence of the
Amarna Letters, an archive of diplomatic correspondence found at Akhenaten’s
capital. These documents shed a considerable amount of light on international
relationships of the time—but suffer from two issues. One is whether this is an