‘The exceptional popularity of Akhenaton and the diversity of his romantic reinterpretations remind Egyptologists of their primary duty to society,’ cautions Dimitri Laboury, FRS-FNRS Senior Research Associate at the University of Liège. ‘To spread amongst the widest possible general public the knowledge related to Ancient Egypt that it is possible to establish through scientific methods.’ In sifting clearly between what things we do know and the things we don’t know. In taking care to distinguish certitudes from what is only probable, likely and plausible, or uncertain, cannot be demonstrated, hypothetical or simply seductive. This is the precept which the author has taken pains to respect in his biography, which has just been published by Pygmalion.

The new sun theology

A late child of the pharaoh Amenhotep III and the queen Tiy, prince Amenhotep, the future  Akhenaton, came into the world during one of the most sumptuous periods of Ancient Egypt: never had the country been so rich and powerful as during the reign of his father (+/- 1391-1353). Around 1352 B.C., doubtless still an adolescent, he came to the throne of a country in which the modern distinction between political power and religion had no meaning, as the Pharaoh was considered a god, the earthly progeny of the divinities. But, since the reforms initiated by Amenhotep III, each of the pantheon’s divinities was more and more considered as a particular manifestation of the supreme god, which the sun had incarnated since the dawn of the pharaonic civilization, for obvious reasons linked to the Egyptian biotope. There thus emerged an omnipotent god who was superior to the others, and who, without breaking it up, structures the pantheon as a ramified emanation of his power. Under Amenhotep III, Egyptians began to think their connection to the world from a perspective influenced by the new imperial status of their civilization, which seemed to dominate the known world. This profound transformation made the reign of Amenhotep III a period of a genuine intellectual and religious turmoil, in which the ancestral paradigms of pharaonic thought began to be called into question, notably in terms of their polytheistic representation of the world.

Amenhotep IV (Akhenaton) was to radicalise the ‘new sun theology’ shaped by his father. His religious policy evolved in stages, over the course of which he increased the innovations which accentuated the royal and exclusive dimension of the god who was the guardian of his power. By beginning to stress the living character of the divinity, now represented in the form of a simple luminous disc whose rays, turned towards the ground, ended in hands which took care of the king and the members of his family. The appellation of the sun king could now be encapsulated by ‘Aton’, ‘the solar star.' It was in year four of his reign that Amenhotep IV married Nefertiti and started thinking about his line of descendents. But it was above all then that he imposed his new theocracy, a new ideological system which legitimized his power. Aton, the tangible and deified manifestation of the sun’s luminous energy, became the only source of his legitimacy to rule, of his theocratic power. T