Akhenaten The Heretic Pharaoh

The pharaoh Akhenaten ruled Egypt during in the 18th dynasty and is one of the most written about rulers of ancient Egypt.

This infamy is due to his religious overhaul where he replaced the rich pantheon of deities with the Aten – the sundisc.

However, despite this post-mortem fame, Akhenaten was not an important king in the grand scheme of Egyptian history and he ruled for a mere 17 years (1350 34 BCE). This period of Egyptian history is known as the Amarna period, named for the new capital city during his reign, Tell el Amarna in Middle Egypt.

Throughout the modern era he has been referred to as the world’s first monotheist, a pacifist, an alien and the heretic king. Additionally he has been compared to Moses, Martin Luther, Oliver Cromwell, Adolf Hitler, Stalin and Christ. Eminent Egyptologist, Margaret Murray commented in 1949, “The Tell el Amarna period has had more nonsense written about it than any other period in Egyptian history … in the case of Akhenaten the facts do not bear the construction often put on them.”

So many theories abound about this king due to the lack of tangible archaeological evidence about his reign and we can thank the ancient Egyptians themselves for this fragmentary survival rate. Following his reign, Akhenaten’s contemporaries tried to erase his very existence from history. His name was erased from the monuments and his temples, his city was razed to the ground and the stones reused as