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The Unparalleled Power of Akhenaten

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Part 3: A New Capital

Staying one step ahead of his enemies, the young king next declared that he had had a vision of a new home for the Egyptian palace. This vision had directed him to have built a new palace, at a placed that he called Akhetaten, "The Horizon of the Aten" and that we now call El-Amarna, north of Thebes. This was hugely significant in that Thebes had been the seat of Egyptian government for a great many years. The palace or any of its outlying buildings didn't exist yet, of course, and so the pharaoh got the chance to make the whole thing in his image and to his specifications. And since the pharaoh's word was law, it got done just the way he wanted it. (It should be said here that not everyone moved to El-Amarna nor did the king and queen stay there the entire time. Egypt at this time had several large cities, Thebes chief among them, and people lived elsewhere as well as they could, traveling to Thebes for large ceremonies, like the coronation of a new king. The same became true of El-Amarna.)

The priests of Amen were taken by surprise at this bold stroke at their power. They were stripped of their status as the chief priests of Egyptian society, and they even lost membership in their temples as people flocked to worship the new "state god," Aten. Naturally, these men, who had held increasing power for generations, were not too happy with the sudden loss of their status. One can imagine them plotting the death of the young king. Their rage was increased when he closed their temples, having first constructed a temple to Aten alongside the Temple of Amen at Karnak and then realized that such competition couldn't be good for his new regime. In another bold stroke, he eliminated the Amen temples and their priests and, further, ordered destroyed all statues of Amen. This was indeed a severe blow to the establishment, not to mention an affront to the god himself.