Akhenaten, The ‘Rock Star’ Pharaoh
The art of the Amarna Period (1353–1336 BCE) changed everything, and for them it was too much, too soon!
The Pharaoh Akhenaten was an original, a true radical. He’s been called, “the world’s first individual”. He seems to have ‘come-outta-nowhere’ with entirely unprecedented ideas — a visionary and revolutionary who rocked ancient Egyptian culture to its core.
For starters, he abolished the priesthood, closed many of the temples and introduced a new, effectively monotheistic, religion of sun-worship. He changed his name from Amenhotep IV and claimed to be the living personification of the Aten, which was both the solar disc itself and the god it represented. He also transferred the capital city from Thebes to a new site that he ordered to be built in the desert, Amarna.
He used words creatively to compose hymns in praise of Aten, and this makes him one of the earliest, if not the first, identifiable creative writer. The new religion, that usurped more than 2,000 named gods and goddesses and rendered their attending priests unemployed, is thought to have become the model for the many, more-or-less monotheistic beliefs that followed, such as Zoroastrianism, Mithra, and later Christianity.
