Great adventure over

Great adventure over

For some three years, the boy-king reigned at Akhet-Aton and Memphis, with Aton and Amun uneasily sharing the headship of the gods. Finally, in ancient Memphis, the young king issued a decree for the full restoration of the temples and cults of all the gods of Egypt from Amun downwards; Aton goes unmentioned, and the sun-god is once more Re or Harakhte. The greatadventure was over.

Now knownas Tutankhamun, the young king died prematurely as a mere youth; the throne then passed briefly to Ay, a close associate of the royal family, and then to Ay’s Deputy of the Realm, the general Haremhab whose queen Mutnodjmet may have been the last heiress of the old royal line. He took in hand the internal renewal of Egypt, and it was left to a new dynasty of kings — the Ramessides to attempt recovery of Egypt’s role abroad. They at last brought the wheel full circle, destroying the monuments of the Aton-kings, eliminating them from official records, and grudgingly referring to Akhenaton only as ‘yon criminal of Akhet-Aton’. Thereafter, the Horizon of the Disc remained almost undisturbed until, as El Amarna, its ruins, art and archives came back into human knowledge hardly a century or so ago.

The royal family making offerings to the sun. Atonism, the
worship of the sun-god, was very much acourt fad and never
captured the enthusiasm of the people, who reverted
to the old gods after Akhenaton's death.

What, then, did the Amarna episode achieve? Politically, it was a setback for Egypt at home and abroad. In art, its adventurous developments led to the panoramic depiction of events like the Battle of Qadesh. In language, there followed a flow of short stories and lyric poetry composed in the colloquial idiom. Culturally, older values had been challenged, but not worthily replaced. In religion, Atonism merely gave an outwardly extreme form to concepts long known and which long continued in Egypt; only the short persecution was untypical. The cult had neither a foreign origin nor any farreaching effects. In a wider context, the age of Akhenaton is one of the most complex and difficult to evaluate in all of antiquity, not least for the interaction of a powerful individual with his society; but its fascination still grips the modern imagination.