Pod Insights Empire: World History 364. Ancient Egypt: The Fall of Akhenaten (Ep 3) About this episode **Unlock the entire Ancient Egypt series early and ad-free by joining the Empire Club at empirepoduk.com**
Why did Akhenaten’s name get struck from the historical record after his death? Why did he build a new city in the sparse desert? Who ruled after he died?
Anita and William are joined by Aidan Dodson, author of Amarna Sunset, to discuss the collapse of the Amarna Revolution.
Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com.
For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com.
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @empirepoduk
Blue Sky: @empirepoduk
X: @empirepoduk
Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott
Editor: Bruno Di Castri
Social Producer: Charlie Johnson
Producer: Anouska Lewis
Executive Producer: Dom Johnson
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goalhangers, the rest is football. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees.
0:44 Speaker 00 So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee, and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart, get wise, Ts and Cs apply.
0:58 Speaker 01 For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremfya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremfya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Tremfya, proper training is required. Tremfya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis, serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections, or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis.
1:41 Speaker 01 Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremfya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more, or visit tremfyradio.com.
2:09 Speaker 02 Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnn.
2:12 Speaker 03 And me, William Derempel. Now, in the 12th year of his reign, the pharaoh Akhenaten staged the most spectacular ceremony of his rule. From across the known world, delegations came to the new capital city of Amarna, bearing tribute. Ivory and gold from Nubia, painted pottery from the Aegean, horses and lapis lazuli from the kingdoms of the Near East, exotic animals, bolts of fine cloth, cedar wood from Lebanon, the tomb paintings of Akhenaten's officials recorded in extraordinary detail. Dozens of figures prostrated before the king and his queen, the rays of the artan pouring
2:57 Speaker 03 down on all of them. Akhenaten and Nefertiti at the absolute zenith of their power, the revolution triumphant.
3:08 Speaker 02 It was also, as it turned out, the last great moment. Within a year, the deaths would begin. Within five years, Akhenaten himself would be dead. Within two decades, his city would be abandoned, his name erased from every single monument in Egypt. And the priests he had suppressed, well, they would have taken their revenge so thoroughly, so entirely, that he would be remembered in later Egyptian records, when he was remembered at all, as the criminal of Akhenaten. Eric Klein brought us the world Akhenaten was born into. Lloyd Llewellyn Jones brought us the theology of what he built. Today, the story of how it all fell apart.
3:51 Speaker 02 And there is no better guide to that story than our guest, who joins us now for his first appearance in this series. He is the author of the definitive account of this extraordinary collapse, Amarna Sunset, the world's leading authority on the Amarna period. We're very happy to welcome Professor Aidan Dodson of the University of Bristol. A very warm welcome to you, Aidan. And I can't not notice the enormous, and I'm going to call it a sarcophagus because that's what it looks like to me, Aidan, right behind you. If you're listening, trust me, it's enormous.
4:23 Speaker 03 But you're not speaking for the British Museum, Aidan, I take it, no?
4:26 Speaker 02 Have you half inched something precious and put it in your house? What's going on?
4:30 Speaker 04 Sadly, it's an inflatable one.
4:32 Speaker 02 Okay.
4:32 Speaker 03 No, it's not one of those many missing pieces from the British Museum that we keep reading about in the papers.
4:38 Speaker 02 I know, that was quite the scandalous story, Aidan, if you have anything to confess?
4:41 Speaker 04 Not at all, no, no, this was bought from the museum shop in St Louis, Missouri, many, many years ago.
4:47 Speaker 03 That's very disappointing.
4:48 Speaker 02 So, William, where are we starting? Just remind us where we are at the moment.
4:53 Speaker 03 So, this is year 12 of the Amarna revolution. The great Durbar is about to take place. And it's worth spending a moment looking at this city at its peak. And Martin has had it built at astonishing speed. And some accounts say it's actually quite jerry-built, that when you look inside the kind of gleaming exterior, they've sort of shoved all sorts of rubbish inside. And it's like one of those sort of Indian airports that get built at double speed and then all the bits fall apart.
5:22 Speaker 02 Sure not flying in for some type of account.
5:25 Speaker 03 There was, can you remember when the Olympics happened? All the crooks in Delhi built these bridges that fell as soon as the Olympic crowds turned up. Anyway, it was that sort of thing. And within a decade, a city of 20,000 or 30,000 people had risen from the bare desert. And this is a time when, you know, there are no other cities of 20,000 or 30,000 people, except possibly Babylon or other than other 20,000 people cities at this period in history.
5:56 Speaker 04 One would suspect that Memphis in Egypt certainly is, because that's the really ancient capital and probably parts of, probably Thebes is a similar kind of size, but probably the idea is that...
6:06 Speaker 03 This is not Memphis as in Elvis Presley.
6:08 Speaker 04 No, this is the one just outside Cairo. But no, the basic idea is that Amarna replaces Thebes and Memphis. Because in the past, Thebes had been the religious capital, Memphis the political capital. And principal royal residence, Amanah Akhenaten, as it was called in ancient times, was intended to replace them both as the political and religious capital.
6:31 Speaker 03 And just to describe it, I'd like to just sort of the image of this city. At its centre, the great temple of Aten, an open-air enclosure of unprecedented size. None of the dark inner sanctuaries of traditional Egyptian temples, because Aten required no darkness, no ritual mystery, you just sunlight and you have all these complaints to you from foreign dignitaries.
6:52 Speaker 02 It's too hot. Why are we sitting out here? It's too hot and too sunny. But nonetheless, that was the most important thing, it was the light. And you've also got the cliff tombs cut into the hills on the eastern edge of the city, where Akhenaten's officials were preparing for their eternal resting places. It looked, it felt different. It was all, you know, everywhere around you was the representation of this new religion. And there are scenes of astonishing intimacy as well. Kings and queens and chariots, daughters playing beneath chairs. I mean, they look almost, you know, sort of like the kind of Victorian offerings we have of, you know, mothers dandling their children and everybody loving everyone else.
7:32 Speaker 03 Rather prettier than Victorian versions. I mean, I have to say that I know that everyone who's looked down on that, I think it's the most, the supreme moment of Egyptian art. The art from this period is astonishingly gorgeous and these very simple lines.
7:46 Speaker 02 You say that, but I think they all look like aliens. They are basically ET's family. I don't like them at all. I think they look weird, so, you know.
7:55 Speaker 04 Now, Amanah art is a bit of a Marmite thing, I think. And I think that most people probably quite like the, what you might call the mature Amanah art style, when it's gone beyond its real sort of shock value stuff at the very, very beginning of the reign. But certainly some of the early stuff where... That somebody has as beautiful as Nefertiti and certainly her later representations and actually her very, very early ones, she's gorgeous. She looks like some kind of famine victim during that during those first few years.
8:27 Speaker 03 And there's that weird head of, I mean, not head, there's that colossus of Akhenaten himself in the Cairo Museum, isn't there, with with these sort of weird lips and tummy, which one originally of seven or eight lined up against the Temple of Aton?
8:41 Speaker 04 More of that, I think we're doing dozens of them originally. In fact, they were a mixture of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, although there's only one Nefertiti one surviving in a decent, in a vaguely decent state. But yeah, they are heavily distorted. Although somebody has pointed out that if you're standing directly below them and looking up, they're less distorted.
9:00 Speaker 03 Interesting.
9:01 Speaker 04 They've actually, the artist has actually adjusted things so that when you're at their feet, because these things are what about 10, 12 foot tall, if you're standing sort of looking up at them, everything isn't quite as out of line as.
9:15 Speaker 02 I love that. So it's a perspective thing. So it actually, it's made for purpose. So that if you're an ant like human, you'll see a, that's really interesting. I never thought of that.
9:24 Speaker 04 Yeah. And you actually said in some other colossal statues from Egypt of other periods, the ears appear to be too high. But when you're sort of at the right, at the optimum viewing distance, they're okay.
9:36 Speaker 02 Will he use the word, apart from lapis lazuli, use the word derbar to describe that that opening scene of, you know, this splendor and this wealth. And we should explain that the derbar is, Aidan, it's a show, isn't it? It's a show of gifts. It's a show of abasins, you know, that people are coming and they're bowing to the most powerful. And it's when you put all your glitz and glamour on full display. That's right, isn't it?
10:04 Speaker 04 Yeah. And we've actually, and the term is simply borrowed from, from, from the Indian Empire, whereby you've got the derbars of George V and people like that. It's one of those, one of those cases where we've sort of picked up a word from another culture. And it just seems to be the most appropriate thing for this major. This major event with everybody coming to bring gifts to the king.
10:28 Speaker 02 To bend the knee, as it were. So, I mean, you know, this all has a utopian quality to it.
10:33 Speaker 04 Hmm. Yeah. And I think that's the, that was sort of the concept of building this entire new city was to start from the idea of the art possibly representing a year zero, but also the idea of building a completely new capital city from scratch on a completely virgin site as well, because all the other cities in Egypt go back thousands of years to.
10:56 Speaker 03 Were already incredibly ancient.
10:58 Speaker 04 Yeah. Whereas this was taken, and in the texts which Akhenaten provides relating to its foundation, he makes that point. This belonged to no god or goddess. So he's starting from a clean sheet of paper. And in doing so, he then produces what presumably the city planners of the time thought was the optimum, what a capital city should be like. So in many ways, you could argue it being sort of an ancient Egyptian Brasilia or Canberra, or perhaps less kindly Milton Keynes. It's what was thought to be it.
11:34 Speaker 03 I can never look at a barn in the same way again now. Your roundabouts with plastic cows on them.
11:40 Speaker 04 But that's the idea. But it seems to be the idea is that clearly this is the opportunity for his engineers, his town planners to build what they believed would work as a capital city. And it's also important to note, it's not just simply the urban area. They've also taken over a whole slice of the Nile Valley on the other bank, which has got lots of fields. So the idea is the whole thing is a self, self sustaining community with on the east bank. So they have the, what you might call the urban area and then on the west bank.
12:13 Speaker 04 Many, many acres of fields to support that.
12:15 Speaker 03 And this is all one man's vision, but that contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, right? It's so personal.
12:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
12:24 Speaker 03 And so centred on, on this one extraordinary figure, uh, that when he falters, though, and he doesn't bring everyone with him either.
12:32 Speaker 04 No, it's very much like a classic case of revolution from above. You've got somebody who has come to a position of absolute power and they decide they can do whatever they like, and they do. But of course, yeah, that does mean that often that kind of personal vision may not be shared by everybody or even anybody else. It's imposed while that man is still alive. But after that, yeah, it's, it's amazing how rapid the whole thing then just collapses. You know, within three years, the royal family's moved away, back to traditional areas. And within probably, you know, a couple of decades, the place is just simply a, is a village with a few rather, sort of with a rather dilapidated, ruinous buildings on the edge of it.
13:16 Speaker 02 Now, is that possibly? Because this is such a personal revolution. I mean, you know, it is obviously one man's vision. But I, let me ask you the question that you're never going to be asked in your lectures. Is it because Akhenaten had daddy issues? Because why? Why? Do we understand why? He suddenly woke up this morning and said, "My father, my father's father, my father's father's father, and everyone else has got it all wrong, but I know the true way." I mean, do you have any, um, theory as to why?
13:43 Speaker 03 Well, his daddy was quite keen on Aton too. Yeah.
13:46 Speaker 04 I think there's, I think there's a number of issues here. One, I think, is that there, it is that during that period, not only in Egypt, but elsewhere in the, in the Middle East, there is a move towards an idea of a singularity of divinity, to put it that in those terms. Not necessarily one god, but the very, but the idea that there is a single sort of fundamental divinity and the gods may well be sort of various aspects. So that's a bit way in Hinduism, where you've got some of these various avatars of, of deities. So there's sort of a, there's sort of a zeitgeist going on. And indeed, his father... Amenhotep III had been particularly keen on elevating the status of the physical
14:28 Speaker 04 sun, not necessarily to a full scale god, but in Egypt, there's a bit of a fine line between being a god and not being a god, because there's only one word for divinity, which embraces what we would go from sort of saint all the way through to the first god. So Amenhotep III had been very much a promoter of this. And really, what Akhenaten does is just takes it one step further. From recognizing that the physical globe of the sun is a fundamental building block of life almost, he then takes it further and makes that thing an actual deity in its own right. So nobody had worshipped the Aten before Akhenaten.
15:10 Speaker 02 I mean, we talk about this in enormous detail with Lloyd in another podcast. I'd love to know from you, because this is all, you know, the moment of crumbling, when did the first signs of trouble start appearing? Because I mean, if you went to that bar, you'd think this is a man who's got it all sewn up, but it's not. So when do you see the first cracks appearing?
15:30 Speaker 04 It looks like it happens almost immediately afterwards. And those cracks you see in the form of the deaths of half of Akhenaten's daughters within probably two or three years, and probably his mother as well. So he's lost half of his young family almost overnight. And I suspect that that is that is possibly seen as something of a bad omen to start with. But also by that time, probably people who don't share his vision are becoming more vociferous about it. And also, they may well have, there's a more real recognition of the dark underbelly of what's going on at Amarna, in the sense that in the last few
16:13 Speaker 04 couple of decades, we found the cemeteries of various workmen who clearly have been worked to death at a very young age.
16:21 Speaker 03 They're showing signs of malnutrition.
16:22 Speaker 04 Or just simply that they're dying in their twenties with skeletal problems and all these sort of things.
16:29 Speaker 02 I mean, I found the thing in National Geographic was like two thousand and thirteen, where they went to the Commoners cemetery.
16:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
16:36 Speaker 02 And they said that they found, I'll quote it to you because it's just astonishing with all of that, you know, sort of bling going on in in in the royal court. The most stressed and disease ridden of ancient skeletons of Egypt that have been reported to date. So Egypt, in fact, had never had it so bad as it had under Akhenaten.
16:57 Speaker 04 So I think what you've got though is there's there's the superficial glamour. But all of the but the actual cost of that, the human cost of that was vast. And I suspect that once they'd actually got to the point of having the big party, then people start looking at each other, you know, know what this, okay, this beautiful city. What's it actually done? And it wouldn't surprise me is if that is when sort of real whispering against the king might have begun.
17:24 Speaker 03 We should say that that the same workmen who are malnourished and looking as if they're they're they're being overworked and having a miserable time. They have as their gods, the old gods, they're not interested in in all this sun nonsense. They they they're still wanting to hit upon them as gods and and best if they're giving birth and all the things that they believe in, that their mothers believed in, their grandmothers believed in, everything that really matters to these people.
17:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, because when you so when you when you go to the workmen's villages, which are on the outskirts of of Amarna. Yeah, you find that you're finding all these traditional amulets. So it looks as though really that the at although, of course, everybody or nobility has shown being, you know, favorable to the art and I suspect that most people actually had in their in their bottom drawers. Now, they're the old amulets. So I think most people, it was clearly a show of devotion to to the regime. And that's what if one looks at history, that's a pretty good example where as soon as the one the the man who has been dictating effectively what people believe has gone.
18:33 Speaker 04 Everybody then reverts as rapidly as possible to what they've always believed.
18:37 Speaker 02 The commoners may have held on to their secret amulets and their, you know. Eyes warding off the evil eye or, you know, whatever it is. But what about the royal family? Because you started talking about the deaths which preceded the collapse. So, so what are the scenes in the tombs that go along with these deaths? Can you describe them?
18:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, in the royal tomb, there are a number, there's a couple of side chambers which were intended for members of the royal family. There's the king's main burial chamber and there's a number of side ones. And in, there are three examples of, of, of the same sort of stereotype scene whereby you've got a dead, a dead princess lying on a bed without, with over, leaning over it, her parents and her surviving sisters all mourning her. We've got three of those. One of those is labelled as the death of Meketaten, who is the second daughter. And then there are two more. Unfortunately, they're too badly damaged, so we don't know, they're not labelled.
19:38 Speaker 04 Which one? However, by a process of elimination, they have to be the two youngest daughters. Um, Nefenefru Ray and Tetepen Ray, who are likely to only have been sort of, no, no older than five at the time of their deaths. Meketaten is probably perhaps 10 when she dies.
19:55 Speaker 02 Well, Willie, you dug up this really quite moving passage describing that tomb of Meketaten. I mean, can you, can you maybe share it? Because you shared it with me earlier. Can you share it now with the class? And read it for us in your sonorous voice. Is that all right?
20:11 Speaker 03 Of course, I'd be happy to.
20:14 Speaker 02 Shocker. Okay, you go then.
20:17 Speaker 03 In the chamber, prepared for the dead princess, the walls show Akhenaten and Nefertiti standing before Abiah. Their bodies bent forward, their arms raised in the gesture of mourning. Beside them, attendants hold their hands to their faces. The king and queen weep openly, an image without precedent in Egyptian royal art, where the ruler was always shown incomposed divine authority. Outside the chamber doorway, a nurse holds an infant. Scholars have debated for generations what that infant signifies. Did Meketaten die in childbirth? Was it a ritual image of the princess reborn? We do not know.
20:59 Speaker 03 We know only that a father and mother stood in that chamber. And wept.
21:05 Speaker 02 See, I knew you'd do that very well. And the thing I wanted to say, Gilgood adjacent, uh, next town. Um, the thing is, Aiden, what, what is to me quite striking about this, and I don't know whether it is you, that this is, this is the court of Akhenaten where every image is so controlled. You know, the way in which people see things is so sort of organized and at a distance. And yet here you have something that anybody who's ever loved a child or a, um, a parent will understand. It's so human.
21:38 Speaker 04 Hmm. And I think that's the thing about a lot of the, of the art. It is that, that you see the king and queen operating as, as parents. You know, both at this sort of the wor- the worst time we've got here, but also in some of these other scenes where they, the, uh, children are shown playing on their laps. There's amazing painting now in Oxford from while the palaces, which shows all the various princesses lounging around on cushions at their parents' feet. So that's, it's one of the most attractive sides of the whole Amana episode is the way, is the humanity shown in the art,
22:19 Speaker 04 which in some ways then makes it even more jarring when, as we've been talking about, it appears that the-
22:24 Speaker 03 The workmen are dying of starvation. Yeah.
22:26 Speaker 04 That the people who are build, who are building this vision are actually being treated probably worse than at any other period of Egyptian history, uh, which suggests to me something about Akhenaten's view of himself as being above everything.
22:41 Speaker 02 Yeah. And the, the most plausible explanation is that the family is sort of dropping like flies, not because of overwork, like workers and everyone around them, but because of some kind of epidemic disease. I mean, what evidence do we have from that?
22:54 Speaker 03 Get you to read Anita soon. I think we hit a plague prayer.
22:58 Speaker 02 Me? No. Okay. Sure. But, uh, before we do that, is there, is there actual evidence that there was a plague? She says, warming up her vocal cords. Yeah.
23:07 Speaker 04 It's, it's certainly circumstantial and that we know that within a decade of Akhenaten's death, there is certainly a major plague. Raging in the Hittite lands. Given that we know that there is plague a bit later on, we've got this whole set of sudden deaths in Egypt, only a couple of, only a year or so after, half the known world has actually descended on Egypt. So although we can't prove it, I think a good working hypothesis is that the people who came into Egypt to bringing the gifts from diplomatic gifts and so on, for the Durbah, also brought with them the bacteria or virus, which then becomes a major
23:46 Speaker 03 This is like sort of Boris Johnson's Ten Downing Street. This is a
23:50 Speaker 04 Very slight, yeah. But also then what interestingly happens, Mephisto came in there, it's then re-exported again at the end of Tutankhamun's reign, when the Hittite plague prayers say that the people who brought in the infection which kills half the Hittite royal family actually came from Egypt. So I think what we've got here is a pandemic, which is sort of, there's a wave of it, it comes into Egypt in one direction, and then possibly with mutations and so on, then goes back out again, and then kills even more people.
24:22 Speaker 03 So this is the perfect cue for our Jane Fonda or
24:29 Speaker 02 That's a current reference. It's lost.
24:34 Speaker 02 It's fine, I'll take it. She's amazing. Okay, let me, let me do this. So this is the, the, the, one of the plague prayers from the Hittites. Hattian storm god, my lord, and you gods, my lords, it is so that people are dying in Hattiland. The plague has been rampant in Hattiland ever since the time of the Egyptians were brought back as prisoners. The matter of plague, I have not suppressed. I have told it to the storm god, my lord. Now the storm god, my lord, save me, save me. Let the plague cease in Hattiland.
25:08 Speaker 03 Oscar, Oscar nominated performance, Jessie Buckley, if you want to bring it.
25:12 Speaker 02 At the least. I, I feel we should take a break here.
25:15 Speaker 03 To recover from the perfection of that performance.
25:19 Speaker 02 Join us after the break and when we talk about sort of the rest of this collapse of a, of a, an extraordinary moment in Egypt, ancient Egyptian history.
25:38 Speaker 05 There we are getting a statement from Number Ten on that flight with 350 passengers on board.
25:47 Speaker 06 The great game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.
25:54 Speaker 07 We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.
26:00 Speaker 06 Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!
26:19 Speaker 06 We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.
26:30 Speaker 03 A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?
26:34 Speaker 06 Yes.
26:36 Speaker 01 New from Goalhanger.
26:38 Speaker 03 Who is going to be able to pull this off?
26:41 Speaker 01 You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom Macduff, Duffy! An audio drama journey like no other. Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons. Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.
26:54 Speaker 03 We have two types friendly KIA.
26:56 Speaker 01 Where Britain plays its strongest hand.
26:58 Speaker 03 He's the best.
26:59 Speaker 01 Against its strongest foe.
27:01 Speaker 03 Go do it, Duffy!
27:03 Speaker 01 Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
27:21 Speaker 02 Welcome back. So while you're all having a little lie down and recovering from that epic reading, I was informed by our learned guest. Yes, Anita, Hattie rather than Hattie Land. Hattie Land sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland. Hattie is what I should have said. Anyway, I hope that didn't detract from any of your enjoyment. Willie, I mean, you know, let's talk more about this deteriorating situation because we have a really good glimpse into how bad it got, don't we?
27:48 Speaker 03 We do. And we touched on this with our Eric episode about the Amarna letters, these wonderful little bits of riveita that were dug up, as Adushka likes to put it, our producer. All these extraordinary letters that were dug up when someone was looking for fertilizer. And they contain the diplomatic archives. And what they have over and over again, Aidan, we believe, is that they please for help from Egyptian allies further north that remain unanswered. And people write in and in and in without ever getting a reply, saying, what's happened?
28:22 Speaker 02 To the point where the pharaoh actually says, would you stop writing to me now? It's really important to say, would you stop? Stop writing now.
28:29 Speaker 04 I think the issue here is that this is an area where we have some scholarly debate, as you're probably well aware that we have quite a bit of that, is how far these, because these pleas for assistance all come from one guy, a guy called Ribadi. And there's question whether or not he is symptomatic of Akhenaten's of ignoring pleas for help.
28:50 Speaker 03 Or just saying, Martin didn't like him very much and was longing for him to be overthrown?
28:54 Speaker 04 Or the fact that he is simply somebody who is a tension seeker.
29:01 Speaker 03 A notorious bore of biblos.
29:02 Speaker 04 Basically, yeah, that's the other view. That's the other view. But actually, and all the people who allegedly are the enemies of the king are actually just his local personal enemies. And he simply wants to use Egyptian forces to put down his local quarrels. And this is one of those problems when we try, when we've just simply got these things. And also, the problem with the archive is that by its nature, it's only the incoming post.
29:27 Speaker 02 We don't know what the replies are. Yes.
29:29 Speaker 04 Exactly. There's a couple, there's a couple of odd drafts, but not nothing to do with Ribadi particularly. So I think we have, there's an issue here of whether or not this represents another aspect of the decline of what's going on in Egypt, i.e. that he's so worried about plague and whatever, he's not actually helped doing, sending. Or alternatively, he's just saying, look, we know this guy just has, has been whinging for years, we'll just forget about him.
29:58 Speaker 02 Okay, I mean, just to give you some idea of Ribadah's enthusiastic writing from Byblos, sixty or more letters to the pharaoh, each one more desperate than the last. And he is a loyal Egyptian vassal.
30:11 Speaker 04 He claims to be.
30:12 Speaker 02 Okay, he claims to be.
30:14 Speaker 03 You're very sceptical about reading about it.
30:16 Speaker 02 Pretty much everything. I mean, I think I quite like him because he is a mona, but he's consistent and he's saying he's watching his city being eaten away. And he writes quite poetically about how awful things are. And I put it to you, expert friend, Aidan, that if you have a man in charge, like Akhenaten, who doesn't care about his workers, who doesn't care about the people who are right around him, it isn't such a stretch to think he doesn't care about people who are further away. I mean, he's not the most caring of... We've seen pharaohs, for example, in the past, who have responded to famine in that area, who have said, you know, okay, you're having a hard time, I will send grain. Egypt is the
30:57 Speaker 02 centre for all of this. But here you've got a man who's in charge who doesn't really seem to give much of a damn.
31:03 Speaker 04 Yeah. The question is, if we knew what letters may go in the other direction. And this is the trouble. I think all we're looking at is just one side of the correspondence. And this is the biggest problem in academia in general, is that whether one tries to remain even-handed over this, or whether or not one sort of then becomes more involved with and sort of being in support of them from that direction. So it's a tricky line.
31:32 Speaker 02 I have made no secret of the fact I don't like this pharaoh. He's my least favourite pharaoh.
31:38 Speaker 03 This is the first argument we've had since Rudyard Kipling.
31:40 Speaker 02 Yes, I know. And it's almost as heated. But, you know, I don't know whether it's such a stretch, Aidan, to think that a man who didn't care about his workers.
31:49 Speaker 03 But loved his wife.
31:51 Speaker 02 God, but he didn't care about anyone other than his immediate family. I mean, you know, it's Trumpian in many ways. But, you know, people are starving in his kingdom. There's plague. He's not really doing very much. So is it such a stretch to think he doesn't really give that much of a damn about people further away? I mean, I really want to know, Aidan, what do you think?
32:11 Speaker 04 My own view, this is a problem with being as an academic, is whether you're sort of going with your heart or your head or a combination of the two.
32:20 Speaker 03 Always go with your heart, Aiden, always go with your heart.
32:22 Speaker 04 I've always taken the view that Ribadi is overdoing it.
32:27 Speaker 02 Right.
32:27 Speaker 04 That's always been my sort of gut reaction to the whole correspondence. However, certainly in the context of Akhenaten in general. And also, there is a later text of Tutankhamun's, which basically says that Egyptian foreign policy went to rats under his predecessor.
32:45 Speaker 03 Do we actually have that?
32:46 Speaker 04 Yes.
32:47 Speaker 03 Because we also have the fact that the Hittites are clearly making gains. They are moving southwards, aren't they?
32:52 Speaker 04 Indeed. So the question is really whether or not, certainly the scenario is that there are problems up that end of the Levant. But the question is whether or not Ribadi's pleas should be taken at face value. I, nothing is being done, or whether something is being done, but not as much as Ribadi would like there to be.
33:17 Speaker 02 I understand. You think Ribadi is moaning Myrtle. I think he's quite justified in speaking foul for someone who doesn't give a damn. Okay, fine, fine. Can we then talk about Akhenaten's own death? When does that happen and what do we know about it?
33:31 Speaker 04 All we know is it happens in his 17th regnal year. Well, that's the last regnal year we have recorded for him, so we assume it's happening.
33:39 Speaker 03 Which means he's what, about 30, 35?
33:41 Speaker 04 Probably, I suppose. The trouble is, we don't know how old he was when he came to the throne, although the fact he was unmarried at the time would suggest he's in his late teens.
33:50 Speaker 03 Or early teens, yeah.
33:52 Speaker 04 Well, somewhere in his teens anyway, when he comes to the throne. But we have got no real.
33:56 Speaker 03 The normal time of marriage for an ancient world was 14 or 15, wasn't it?
34:01 Speaker 04 It's certainly somewhere around there. But again, we haven't got enough, because we have very, very little data on the actual ages of most ancient Egyptians. They don't sort of happen to say that I'm 16 years old or whatever. There's a couple of people who we data, but it's very unusual to have that stated. So anyway, we've got, so yeah, that's probably a reason. Kind of thing, you know, from if he gets married around fifteen, sixteen and then is dying in year seventeen. That's probably that adds up quite well.
34:30 Speaker 03 And as he's dying or as as he seems to be approaching the end, there's some sense that there's actually desperation. Isn't that the the iconoclasm of previous gods increases that he wipes out everything that's left that he hasn't already wiped out.
34:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, one of the big one of the big questions about Akhenaten is at what point he starts persecuting the god Amun. There's also there's two levels to this because going back into um about when about year five is when the Aten becomes the sole god who he's actually going to bother with. Whether he actually believes he is the sole god or the only god he wants to worship is another completely different debate. Then most of the other gods is instantly ignored. They basically in modern terms have their funding withdrawn. But but there's no real attempt to actually sort of remove them. People like Pata and all the other great gods. There's no there's no then their names aren't erased. The exception is Amun, the previous king of the gods.
35:29 Speaker 04 And my view is the reason why they he's got it in for Amun is because Amun's title is king of the gods. Which of course is almost blasphemy if he believes that the Aten is the is the supreme god. The date he starts attacking Amun is another matter for debate. I'm very much of the the view that it's very much towards the end of his reign. Because there are mentions of Amun sort of around around about year twelve.
35:55 Speaker 03 Does that mean he's he's getting more fanatical or he's getting desperate? Which what do you think?
36:00 Speaker 04 I think he's I think he's I think it's a bit of both. And I think that he may be deciding that the person to blame for his misfortunes, the death of his mother, his daughters, may be Amun. So I think I'm I'm of the of the opinion that the attack on Amun, which basically destroys every extant image of the god. Also erases every mention of his name on inscriptions. That should be dated to the last couple of years and is possibly part of a mental collapse of Akhenaten in the face of. The various, these various calamities.
36:35 Speaker 02 Okay, so, I mean, look, he does die eventually, very sad for some.
36:40 Speaker 03 I'm not sure that's quite an emotional farewell to our friend who you've seen through three episodes now.
36:45 Speaker 02 Can I just, can I just say what I, what I am very interested in knowing is at what, what point do people start turning on him? Because we mentioned at the beginning that, you know, he's remembered in, in ancient Egypt at the time as, as a, as a, the criminal of Akhenaten. So at what point do they start turning on the dead pharaoh? And, and, and sort of, there's, there's, you know, visceral defacing that goes on. Tell us about that.
37:12 Speaker 04 I think it's probably, probably takes a decade or so to get to that level. Because of course, immediately after his death, the power is in the hands of his widow, Nefertiti, now a female pharaoh, and also his son, Tutankhamun, so I think, and what seems to happen is that the dismantling of the idea of, of the art and being the soul god happens very, very rapidly, within the first three years after his death. But actually, any attacks on Akhenaten himself, in the sense of erasure of figures and so on, is probably after Tutankhamun is safely in, in his tomb, if not even beyond, slightly beyond that.
37:55 Speaker 02 But can we talk about what it was? I mean, there was a mummy that's found in a tomb called KV 55 in the Valley of the Kings. And that mummy is clearly subject to deliberate desecration, it looks like.
38:07 Speaker 03 Has had his, literally his face beaten in.
38:09 Speaker 02 Just, yeah, yeah, just destroyed and, and the royal insignia chiseled off. Now, was that Akhenaten?
38:16 Speaker 04 Now, I think we're into something which could be about three podcasts worth.
38:20 Speaker 02 All right, okay, we haven't got that. Okay, let me rephrase it. What do you think, Aidan? Do you think it was Akhenaten?
38:27 Speaker 03 Put on a rack, made to make a decision here.
38:30 Speaker 02 Do you think it was Akhenaten?
38:31 Speaker 04 No.
38:32 Speaker 02 Oh, oh, okay.
38:33 Speaker 04 I'd better explain, expand on that. Okay, well, this tomb, KV fifty five, what it originally was, was the evacuation team from Amarna. So when Amarna is shut down as the capital city, they evacuate the royal tomb. And three of the royal, of the mummies which were in that royal tomb were moved to KV fifty five. Akhenaten.
38:58 Speaker 03 And is that the girls?
38:59 Speaker 04 No, no, the girl, we don't know where the girl, we assume the girls went to another tomb in the same area of the Valley of the Kings. But KV fifty five has, certainly had Akhenaten in it originally, Queen Ti, his mother, and the third individual. And Ti and Akhenaten were both removed from the tomb at a later date, leaving one body behind, which, as far as I'm concerned, is Svenkaray, who is, who was Akhenaten's short-lived co-ruler around about year thirteen fourteen.
39:30 Speaker 02 But, okay, if you don't think it's Akhenaten, which made me gasp, it is somebody associated with him. So it does show anger and rage. And we do know that Akhenaten is called, you know, a criminal. So, I mean, just, just, how, when, just, you know, in a nutshell, when do we see that bubble over and change what comes next, if you like?
39:56 Speaker 04 It's either directly following the death of Tutankhamun, or directly following the death of Ai, his immediate successor. And we don't, we don't know. We know that this, this is all, all well underway, once you get significantly beyond that. But the exact point, but I don't think anything will happen before Tutankhamun dies. Because, well, you're not going to start.
40:17 Speaker 03 He's the same family.
40:19 Speaker 02 Well, you wouldn't, this is dad.
40:20 Speaker 04 And also, Ai may actually have been. His father, Akhenaten's father-in-law, so possibly not, but certainly much getting into the reign of Horemheb, that's definitely happening. But there's been lots of debate over exactly when KV55 is desecrated. Some people have argued within weeks of Tutankhamun's death, but others have suggested it could be significantly later. And unfortunately, the archaeological evidence, which is all to do with flood debris and the Vaeyah the Kings, is there's been, it seemed it was already made clear, and then somebody pointed out some major methodological errors in the assessment. So, again, it's going to be somewhere
41:00 Speaker 04 within, within five years probably of Tutankhamun's death, but whether it's right on his death or a little bit later on, we just don't know at the moment.
41:09 Speaker 02 Okay, and we're going to do a whole episode on Tutankhamun and, you know, get into that mystery. Okay, if he still was so loyal to his dad, why did he change his name? And I go back to the Amun bit, rather than his dad's son god bit. But we'll save that for another episode. What actually happens to Amarna after the death of Akhenaten?
41:30 Speaker 03 Before, before we get there, I'm looking to know if KV55 isn't him. Have we got his mummy at all? Or has it been totally destroyed?
41:37 Speaker 04 My personal view is that what happened when they decided to clear KV55 is that Ti is moved off to a new, to a new, new location. Smecharay is deprived of his identity but left in place, and Akhenaten is taken off and burnt. That's my personal view of what happened.
41:57 Speaker 03 Huh.
41:57 Speaker 04 There's a graduated sort of view, but Ti, okay, she had a dodgy son, but she can, she's okay. And her mummy is now, is now in Cairo. Smecharay, probably misled, wasn't a bad lad, will take his names away, but we will leave his body, his body will survive. Akhenaten, completely beyond the pale. And the worst thing which can happen to an ancient Egyptian is to be consumed by fire.
42:26 Speaker 02 Because what? They don't enter the underworld then, or they're...
42:29 Speaker 04 It seems to be that. And when you read the Book of the Dead, one of the things which the dead are terrified of is being, is fire. So therefore, I think the most logical solution is that he was, that he was taken out and a bonfire kindled in the middle of Vaeyah the Kings.
42:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:47 Speaker 04 That's my, that's my personal view anyway.
42:49 Speaker 02 Okay, no, I don't know. I mean, goodness me, you know more about this than anybody. If you do want more mummy moving chat, we've got a bonus episode about the curse of Tutankhamun, just for our members. So do sign up for our brilliant club and you'll get that extra. So it's a rip roaring story. But just getting back to the people of Amarna. So after the death of Akhenaten, what happens to them? Do we know if they thrive after he's gone or do they continue a downward spiral?
43:19 Speaker 04 I think basically within three years of Akhenaten's death, they've decided Amarna is finished. And therefore what we have, what seems to happen is that everybody who is living there, royal family downwards, start going back to where they'd always been. So probably the people who had been building the tombs at Amarna, go back to the workmen's village at Thebes, at Luxor, where they've always been. And everybody else starts drifting back to their own, to wherever they were. I suspect the majority will have gone back to either Memphis or to Thebes, which are the two older capitals. And then the whole play, and in doing so, they start dismantling their houses because there are bits which are made of now good quality imported wood. So gradually the whole thing starts falling into ruin.
44:05 Speaker 04 We know that there is still something going on in the reign of Horemheb there. The riverside temple is still active, but it looks as though the whole place fat rapidly sort of falls down from being the capital city of an empire through down to simply being.
44:20 Speaker 03 Milton Keynes roundabouts get overgrown and.
44:23 Speaker 04 It's getting, it's getting to that sort of level. And as far as we can tell, it just simply withers away. And by the time, a few decades later on, it's basically tumbleweeds going down the streets. But the important point is that by that time, when you're talking about the time of the reign of Ramses II, a few decades later, what they're doing is now knocking down the temples and reusing the stone for the foundations of new temples on the other side of the river.
44:48 Speaker 03 Now, at what point do we get the sensation that the old priesthood, some of whom have been sent off to the quarries and really had quite serious punishments and ostracism?
44:57 Speaker 02 Some sent to the Egyptian equivalent to the Gulag. Um, yeah. When do they rise up?
45:01 Speaker 03 They begin to kind of trickle back and and and.
45:04 Speaker 04 Immediately, because we've got the Amen cult is up and running again within a year or two of Akhenaten's death. So it's quite clear that it's the moment, it's well, those cases, a bit like when the death of Stalin, when suddenly the the.
45:18 Speaker 03 Bloody Mary in in the English Reformation, yeah. Back to back to Protestantism again.
45:23 Speaker 04 The moment that the the tyrant, or whatever you want to call call him, is dead, I think immediately, everybody goes, breathes a sigh of relief. And simply says, okay, we're going to forget all that happened. Let's so let's just move on and and say, it looks that we've certainly got Amen cult. Back without any kind of um kind of problems. Almost the big issue is to is tidying up the mess. Because you've had temples which have had no funding for, you know, for for a decade. And you've also got the Amen temples with no statues of Amen left because they've all been pulverized by Akhenaten. So what the big thing is then, and this takes decades for them to actually restore all of this.
46:07 Speaker 03 Now, at what point do we get the restoration stellar? Because this is a crucial piece of evidence, isn't it?
46:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, this is the early early part of the reign of Tutankhamun. Unfortunately, the year date is broken away. It's typical of these kinds of inscriptions.
46:22 Speaker 03 But people people kind of agree it's thirteen thirty two, that sort of date.
46:26 Speaker 04 Wait, wait, wait. It's probably the year. I my view is it's probably year three. Because I think year three is the is the crucial point, I think. So I think that that's year three is probably when Nefertiti dies.
46:36 Speaker 03 I feel another Gil Good moment coming on. I have to have to keep up with Liz Taylor over there and and do another.
46:42 Speaker 02 You're so you're so current.
46:46 Speaker 03 Jesse Buckley, Jesse Buckley, here we go.
46:49 Speaker 04 So my my view, and I think the general view is, there are other there are other views available, but um. Is that year three is when it happened, is the key point. Because at the point when Nefertiti dies, and also with her, any sort of moderation. Because I I got the feeling I tend to get from what's. Happening during those first three years when when Nefertiti is still in is in charge is she's trying to triangulate between the old and the new. She's keeping wants to keep at the Arten going, but also is perfectly happy for him to be coexisting with the older gods. Once she's out of the way, um, that is the point probably where you've got
47:29 Speaker 04 new people deciding what's happening. Because remember, Tutankhamun is still his child when this is all happening. And we'll be discussing, of course, we'll be exploring this in the in the in the later in later podcasts. But once that's gone, that's when he gets his name changed from Tutankhamun to Tutankhamun and they start and the Arten is starts to be forgotten. I think it's a I think at that point it's a question of they're they're doing what Akhenaten did to all the other gods. Forget about, like, remove redraw funding or whatever.
47:56 Speaker 02 Delete, delete, delete, delete is what it is.
47:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, but it's not until you then get him dead and therefore the last blood link with Akhenaten's gone is when they do right. And now let's let's let's erase all of this from history.
48:10 Speaker 02 And to sum up that kind of decrepitude of a once great civilization, I hand over to William Dalrymple, who is going to read from the Restoration Stella of Tutankhamun.
48:23 Speaker 03 Now, when His Majesty appeared as king, the temple of the gods and goddesses from Euphrates to the marshes of the delta had fallen into ruin. Their shrines had become desolate and had grown to mounds overgrown with weeds. Their sanctuaries were as though they had never been. Their halls were a footpath. The land was in confusion. The gods had forsaken this land. If an army was sent to Dejahi, which is Palestine, to extend the boundaries of Egypt, no success of theirs came at all. If one prayed to a god to ask something of him, he did not come.
49:05 Speaker 03 If one beseeched any goddess in the same way, she did not come either. Their hearts were weak in their bodies and they destroyed what was made.
49:18 Speaker 02 The Basil Wrathbone of podcasts. Thank you very much, William. Can I ask you, Aidan, just tell us, what do you think Akhenaten's legacy is?
49:29 Speaker 04 There's a couple of things, I suppose. One, which is often they don't, isn't really often mentioned, is the fact that in his public pronouncements, he used the current form of the Egyptian language rather than more archaic ones. So actually, from his point, from that point onwards, we have a much more, it's in some texts, public texts, a much more up to date version of Egyptian being used. The other, I think, is that-
49:57 Speaker 03 That's quite niche.
49:58 Speaker 04 Yes, but it's quite an important one.
49:59 Speaker 03 That's not for a man who, for a man who built this wonderful city and did all this stuff.
50:03 Speaker 04 The other thing, though, is his reign represents a very much a watershed. There is a, there is a very much a before and after. A bit like, almost nowadays, we talk about before and after Covid, almost. His reign marks that. And although, on the face of things, things return back to normal, in detail, they don't. A really good example of that is when you look at the decoration of private tombs in Egypt. Before Akhenaten, and going back thousands of years, a major part of the decoration of private tomb was representations of agricultural scenes, recreating the world which the dead person wanted to be in, in the next world. After Akhenaten,
50:44 Speaker 04 they've gone completely and never come back. All the scenes in tomb chapels are now to do with ritual, funerary processions and so on.
50:54 Speaker 03 Does that imply that the priesthood has now increased in power? It's come back with the vengeance?
50:59 Speaker 04 No, I actually, I completely reject the idea of the priesthood power being a major issue here. I think it's actually due to genuine belief. And I think what it is, is that having had everything thrown up in the air, people start to rethink, to start thinking again about what matters. How do things work? How should things work? And so on and so forth. And I think part of that is rethinking how-
51:28 Speaker 04 Tombs should be decorated because they've had a point where no tomb has been decorated in the traditional way for a decade or so. Now they're thinking again. And I think there are other areas where, again, there's a different feel after Akhenaten because they've had to restart, start thinking again. Another one, an interesting one, is that prior to Akhenaten, the royal family was very rarely shown on public monuments. After him, and certainly when the new dynasty, the nineteenth, comes in a couple of decades later, the royal family appears regularly in spades. So although the reason why the royal family was being shown by Akhenaten was probably
52:09 Speaker 04 to do with the theology of the artan, the idea that the royal family was now a thing to be shown on temple walls has now come in, and Ramesses the second does, does it massively later on. So I think there's, it's, it's, it's, it's a fault line in Egyptian history that things sort of come back to normal, but in some ways they don't.
52:32 Speaker 02 Okay, okay. Always a good place to end it. Aidan, thank you so much. Professor Aidan Dodson, and Akhenaten, gone but not forgotten. Amarna Sunset is Aidan's brilliant book, which covers this period of time, highly readable.
52:45 Speaker 03 Top book, really, really wonderful. It's short, but absolutely brilliant.
52:49 Speaker 02 Short but very, not sweet. I mean, it's quite awful stuff happens, but it's very interesting. Thank you very much.
52:55 Speaker 03 Our next episode is all about one of the most beautiful and easily recognizable women of all ancient history, Nefertiti. If you want early access to that, then join the Empire Club at empirepoduk.com, and you'll get exclusive access to our fantastic bonus on the Curse of Tutankhamun's Tomb.
53:19 Speaker 02 Till the next time we meet, though. It's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon.
53:22 Speaker 03 And goodbye from me, William Gilgood-Durimpel.
Previous 363. Ancient Egypt: Destroyer Of Gods – Pharaoh Akhenaten (Ep 2) Next 365. Ancient Egypt: Who Was Nefertiti? (Ep 4) Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated