The Unparalleled Power of Akhenaten

The Unparalleled Power of Akhenaten

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Part 2: Tradition at First

Amenhotep also kept his father's name, which meant "Amen is content." Amen, the local god of Thebes who, tradition held, had helped the Egyptians expel the Hyksos interlopers, was viewed as the chief Egyptian god. At this time in Egyptian history, the cult of Amen was very strong, as were the priests who led the people in worshiping Amen. The Egyptian people at this time were content to serve their pharaoh and their gods and little else. The men worked, the women took care of the family and the household, and they all went to temple as often as possible. Religion was a primary concern for the Egyptians, who were obsessed with preparing themselves for the next life. And in their pursuit of knowledge of what came after, the people naturally turned to the priests for guidance. The priests wielded so much power, in fact, that Amenhotep III had worked actively for the latter part of his life to curb the power of the priests, fearing that their influence over the Egyptian people was encroaching on his assumed power as king. It was at this time, of course, that father and son were working hand-in-hand to govern the country. The young prince, then, who became Amenhotep IV inherited his father's intense distrust of the priests and their power over the people.

Not long after he became king, Amenhotep decided that he had had enough of the current power structure. A young, powerful king, he had both his father's suspicions of the Amen priests' motives and a sense of his own invincibility. He therefore decreed that his name would thereafter be Akhenaten, meaning "He who is in service to Aten." Aten, a god worshiped in earlier times, was thought to be the Sun itself. Aten provided a very convenient god for the early Egyptians to worship because he was ever watchful during the day and then hid his influence during the night. Many an Egyptian went to bed praying that Aten would return to bestow favor on his children the following day. As has been noted, Amen became the chief god that the Egyptians worshiped, supplanting Aten. Many accounts of this period even go so far as to associate Amen with Ra or Re, who is also said to have been the Egyptian sun-god. In a way, the worship of Amen could be seen as an updated reverence for the same thing as what the Aten-worshipers held dear–the Sun. At any rate, the pharaoh had suddenly, in one bold stroke, taken all the power out of the hands of the Amen priests and put it squarely in his own hands, for with this name change, the young king also proclaimed that he was the chief priest of the cult of Aten and that in order to worship Aten properly, Egyptians would have to follow the interpretations of Aten's words and wishes as given to them by Akhenaten, Aten's new chief priest. An inscription in the tomb of Ay, Akhenaten's chief adviser, contains the "Hymn to the Aten," written by Akhenaten himself. Its words speak volumes of the change that the pharaoh envisioned in the very way that his people thought about him and their god:

Thou arisest fair in the horizon of Heaven, Living Aten, Beginner of Life—there is none who knows thee save thy son Akhenaten. Thou hast made him wise in thy plans and thy power.

In effect, the pharaoh had made himself god-king, head of both religion and government. He was, by all accounts, the most powerful man in Egyptian history. That he had the courage to do something so monumental and expect people to follow him in it speaks more to his self-esteem than to anything else, for the Amen priests' power at this time was still very great. He had tradition and the law on his side, however, and the Egyptian people, by and large, went along, as they had for hundreds of years.