Akhenaten: the heretic
King, Princeton University Press, Princeton New Jersey.1987. Author:Donald Redford. Review: BayoumiAndil Unlike the figure popular writers have brought forward for Akhenaten, the 10th
pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of ancient Egypt, as a Humanitarian romantic or a peace-loving or even a "Christ-like" king, our distinguished Egyptologist, D. Redford is attempting in his book a
historical Akhenaten. Redford recalls to mind that ancient Egyptian speculation about the origin and nature of the universe strongly tended toward expressing its differences, contradictions, and conflicts in terms of Polytheism i.e. worshiping many
gods at one and the same time. But it was Akhenaten who came up with a categorically astonishing, rather shocking doctrine: Monotheism. In our distinguished professor's words "Where other
cults had been consciously polytheistic, Akhenaten's was unabashedly monotheistic". In so doing Akhenaten sowed, in the human mind, the first grains of Absolutism, Self-righteousness, and in the last analysis, intolerance It was that Monotheism which filtered through to the Semites of Western Asia, before widespreading, in its Semitic version, allover the whole
world, including Egypt itself, under one or the other of the Ibrahimite three main religions: Mosaiism, Christianity and Mohammedanism. This version stipulates: unless you pay homage, venerate, worship my own god, in the way I ordain, you have no right to exist ( infidel, apostate, unbeliever, atheist, etc.) Redford says that even the casual observer will be struck first and foremost by the negative thrust of Akhenaten's so-called reform of the cults of his time. In the wake of the discontinuance of the old cults, the gods'
myths, which provided the hypothesis of many cults' elements, simply disappeared. The sun
God Akhenaten championed i.e. Aton , of course enjoyed no mythology; since the early months of the reign he was not even permitted an anthropomorphic i.e .human-like depiction. No archetypical symbolism informs the artistic style that celebrates the new god. The marvelously complex world of the Beyond is banished from the minds of men. No truth can come from anyone but the King, or the Pharaoh, and his truth is entirely apodictic, no gods but "Aton", no processional temples, no cults acts but the rudimentary offerings. No cult images, no myths, no concept of the ever-changing manifestation of a divine world. However this so-called reform was effected by force and coercion. Our great Egyptologist ascertains that the program of defacement that followed was so thorough that we must postulate either a small army of hatchmen dispatched throughout the realm, or parties of inspectors charged with seeing that local officials did the job. Everywhere, in temples, tombs, and casual inscriptions, any reference to the polytheistic elements were chiseled out; objects sacred to them were likewise defaced. People who bore names compounded with "Amun' or any god other than "Aton", were obliged to change them. And the Pharaoh led the way by discarding the now unacceptable "Amen-hotep" i.e. "Amun is satisfied" for "Akh-en-Aten" (the effective rather the "Servant for Aton") In Conclusion, our professor come up with this daring judgment: Akhenaten was not such an intellectual heavyweight. He failed to comprehend the true role of cultic mythology. Myths, he proceeds to say, are the building blocks of any religion. Akhenaten also remains in spirit totalitarian to the end. The right of an individual to choose freely was wholly foreign to him. He was the champion of a universal, celestial power who demanded universal submission. Redford expresses his belief that he could not concieve a more tiresome regime under which to be fated to live. However Akhenaten, in Redford's phraseology: possessed "unusual ability as a poet". But this is another story..
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