Akhenaton revisited
‘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 theologyA 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. |
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