The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World by Kara Cooney

Author:Kara Cooney [Cooney, Kara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, history, Ancient, Egypt, political science, Political Ideologies, Fascism & Totalitarianism
ISBN: 9781426221965
Google: T3hXzgEACAAJ
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2021-11-02T23:57:41.330262+00:00

ATENISM’S ENDGAME

Even god-fearing kings may live to see their ideas come crashing down around them. In Akhenaten’s unfinished tomb, carved into the rock of his capital’s eastern necropolis, we see reliefs presumably taken from real life. One shows the king and the royal family grieving, a hand on each head as a sign of mourning. They seem to have been devastated by a great loss—possibly the untimely death of a young princess. Akhenaten’s new religion would offer nothing much to heal their pain; that part of the ideology hadn’t been developed yet. Thus, they had no incantations, no spells, no Osirian intercession: only the positivism of food offerings and grief. Akhenaten had stripped away too much. The only solace was mourning and money.

When Akhenaten himself died, he was placed in a gilded coffin set in a red-granite sarcophagus carved with an Aten sun disk upon it.96 But archaeologists found that stone container smashed into tiny bits—an indication of the true feelings of his subjects and a testament to how reviled the king had become as a heretic among his own people. His capital city was abandoned; it had been overplanned with single-minded vision and was not sustainable for the organic use of its citizenry. Its statues and reliefs would be left in place, to be obliterated or buried in the ensuing years.97 Seventeen years of such ideology had been enough, his people tell us in their actions. And so the court quickly moved back to the old ways, worshipping many gods, returning to their former towns and villages, and busily populating courtyards in front of sprawling and disorganized temple spaces.

After his death, Egypt may even have lived under the short rule of Akhenaten’s erstwhile co-king, Nefertiti, who possibly ruled alone under the name Ankhkheperure Smenkhkare. The nine-year-old Tutankhaten, possibly Akhenaten’s son, would be crowned as the next king.98 He and his entourage would feel compelled to remove the Aten element from his name and declare his allegiance to the Amun cult of his Theban family by renaming him: Tutankhamun. Everything the child had grown up with had now been rejected—a confusing reality for a boy god-king, to be sure.

Although Egypt rejected Akhenaten’s Aten religion, the profound political and ideological changes would have long-term repercussions. Akhenaten—not to mention his Great Royal Wife and the later kings associated with this regime, Tutankhamun and Ay—would be forever reviled in Egyptian history. He would not be included in the monumental king lists, because he was considered an aberrant blip in a long line of good kings. He had held all the power of divine kingship, only to use it to tighten the noose around the necks of his people and paint himself a victim—awakening an insight among Egypt’s elites of the potential fallibility of their king.

Akhenaten started out with ideologies that seemed, at first light, to be beautiful and equalizing, only to use those same belief systems to cruelly control those who did not follow along. In the end, there is not much difference

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