Le site de vulgarisation scientifique de l’Université de Liège. ULg, Université de Liège

Akhenaton revisited
5/17/10

Dimitri Laboury's book lifts a part of the uncertainties which had until now hidden the succession of the monotheistic pharaoh. He explains how his eldest daughter, Mentaton, seized the throne around the age of 13 years, in momentarily sidelining the male heir, Toutankhaton, this little boy who would become Tutankhamen. These years are tangled up in a Machiavellian fabric, of duplicity and lies in comparison with which certain intrigues of the Italian Renaissance would have an air as innocent as a pasta dish cooked in butter. It is in any case certain that it was Mentaton, reigning under the name of Neferneférouaton, who initiated the restoration of a theocracy basing pharaonic legitimacy on a polytheistic religious system, as before the reign of her father. Exit Aton, return to the ancien regime! Why such a rapid turnaround? One can imagine that the teenager sovereign came under maximum pressure from her royal entourage, for a long time bristling over the Atonist 'heresy.' And that she had to bow before the members and auxiliaries of the court, indispensable cogs in establishing her power, which was still far from assured.

little temple aton

It was nevertheless her young brother Toutankhaton, climbing to the Egyptian throne a little later, under the name of Tutankhamen ('the living image of Amon'), who fully appropriated the decision to return to the previous regime. The young pharaoh and his entourage justified the abandoning of Atonism by the state of decay it had plunged the country into: if Egypt had been subject to reverses externally, if it had been heavily stricken by epidemics, it was because the gods had turned away from them to punish the king for having abandoned them. This restoration of 'the country as it had been the first time' went hand in hand with the abandonment of Akhet-Aton as the royal residence. Amarna was thus relinquished, its edifices to a large extent dismantled so that their materials could be reused for new constructions, and the site given up to a silence swept by the winds. Never again would official mention be made of the rule of Akhenaton, deliberately wiped from the collective memory.

Human, as he was able to be

Pilloried by his successors because his sacrilegious heresy had brought Egypt the worst calamities, Akhenaton has continued to fascinate Westerners since his 'rediscovery,' at the end of the 19th century. And that because of the to a greater or lesser extent romanticised multiple speculations, theories and fantasies which have since then gravitated around him. But the Akhenaton who emerges from Laboury's book will doubtless surprise many readers, as he is incompatible with the visionary mystic or the generous humanist that certain people will perhaps expect to encounter, such as he had been 'recreated' by the Western imaginary. The pharaoh we discover here is nonetheless indeed the character suggested to by the attested facts of his reign, in the current situation of Egyptologist science. He was above all an absolute monarch, who tried to hijack Egyptian religion to his exclusive benefit, to underpin his unrivalled theocratic power. Far from the qualities and faults which have been assigned to him, Akhenaton thus becomes once again simply human. As a potentate in Antiquity was able to be…

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