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Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Akhenaten: what really happened?

Most have heard about Akhenaten, Egypt's "heretic king" who overthrew the old gods (for the 20 years he was king, anyway) and instituted what may have been the first monotheistic religion. (Quite possibly, the Israelites were working in Egypt at the time and got the idea from Akhenaten to merge all of their previous cannanite gods into Yahweh, but that is another story.)

I think there is more to it. I have never seen my particular theory of Akhenaten in any book on Egyptology, so maybe some day some college student will search for Akhenaten, find the post, research it, promote my theory in his doctor's thesis, (this theoretical student is welcome to steal the idea), and change the view of Egyptology and Akhenaten forever.

I think it goes back a couple of centuries before his time, to Hatsepshut, the female pharoh. (She wasn't the only one, but those are other stories.) Egypt had always had a triple power structure: the priests, the Army, and the bureaucrafts. Hatsepshut was the "king's wife" (there is no word for queen in ancient egyptian) for somePharoah I forget and am too lazy to google. Hubby died and left the throne to an under-age son, with Hatsepshut as regent. A few years on, she decided to make herself king. She had the bureaucracy behind her, but the army was against her. To hold power, she had to bribe the priests. She gave them a lot of land and instituted a system that the priests would be given some amount of new real estate every year. A few centuries later, and Akhenaten becomes king only to find that the priests own more of his country than he does! Hence, the phony new religion is created not for religious reasons, but to overthrow the priests and take back all the land they had been given over the years.

When Akhenaten died, Queen Nefertiti (or someone else, much debate) became king, then that king died and we got Tutankaten. Horemheb (general of the army and later a pharoah) took defacto power, forced Tut to change his name to Tutankamen, and restored the old gods (just not all of the land given to the priests.) Tut died in a chariot accident, the old man Ay (Tut's father in law) became pharoah, and finally Horemheb took power and picked the Ramses family to be the new dynasty.

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