Word: akhenaten
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Fourteen centuries before Christ, the mystical pharaoh Akhenaten tried to sweep away the ancient pantheon of gods worshiped in Egypt. To replace the gods, he devised a kind of monotheism. Since monotheism is the modern preference, Akhenaten is now considered to have been one of civilization's heroes. But at the time his religion was very bad politics. Akhenaten failed; the ancient gods won: The surprise is not that Allen Drury, the Advise and Consent man, has written a book about Akhenaten-a pyramid could be made of books about him and his queen Nefertiti-but that his viewpoint...
Perhaps Amenhotep was one of the first student radicals. At any rate, he succeeded to the throne at about 16 and set out to revolutionize the age-old system of multiple deities, substituting a single god, Aten, symbolized by the sun. In fact, he changed his own name to Akhenaten, meaning Useful to Aten. Women's Lib would have loved him: he gave equal billing, in bas-relief and statuary, to his Queen, Nefertiti. She was portrayed in the sleek drapery she might actually have worn, one shoulder bare, a clasp under her right breast. In dark red quartz...
...Akhenaten himself had a pot belly, epicene limbs and a receding forehead, and he had himself portrayed that...
...founder of a new religion, Akhenaten needed a new capital for his god, and he found it at Tell el Amarna, a scoop in the hills along the Nile halfway between Memphis and Thebes. There, with an authority today's modern planners can only envy, Akhenaten laid out and had built a whole city. But when he died, the traditionalists took over and tore the whole place down. Thus there are few surviving works of monumental size, but the smaller objects, dug out of the rubble of Tell el Amarna and now on exhibition in Brooklyn, testify dramatically...
...Nefertiti, "The Beautiful One Is Come." Now University of Pennsylvania Archaeologist Ray Winfield Smith has suggested that she had brains to match her looks. His evidence: carvings on the scattered fragments of a temple erected at Karnak in the 14th century B.C. by the Queen's husband, Pharaoh Akhenaten. After analyzing photographs of 35,000 pieces of this archaeological jigsaw puzzle, Smith reports that Nefertiti is depicted more often than the Pharaoh-an unheard-of honor for a woman of her time. Akhenaten's own portraits depict thick lips, feminine hips and thighs, and rudimentary breasts. The King...