← Empire: World History
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- [00:01]
William Dalrymple
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- [00:10]
William Dalrymple
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- [00:20]
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- [01:47]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
So good, so good, so good.
- [01:49]
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- [02:24]
William Dalrymple
Now imagine that you are an Egyptian priest in the year 1350 BCE. Your world is already ancient, 3000 years old. Already your temple has stood for centuries. Its walls blaze with color, processions of gods, offerings of incense, hymns inscribed in hieroglyphs that will track the movement of the cosmos itself. Your day is structured by ritual, the waking of the God in the sanctuary, the presentation of food and linen, the sealing of the inner chamber at dusk. Just as goes on in Hindu temples today in India, generations after generations of your family have done this. The God is Amun, King of the gods, Lord of Thebes, the hidden one whose breath fills the entire world. And the temple you serve is the greatest religious institution on earth.
- [03:27]
Anita Arnold
But just imagine that all of that, all of it is gone. Within a decade, your temple gets closed down. The statue of your God is smashed to pieces. Everywhere. The name has been chiseled. It is removed by a blunt instrument. In Egypt, Everywhere. So the very existence of these gods declared to be lies. A new theology will descend on the country imposed from above by a pharaoh who has renamed himself, moved the capital, built an entirely new city, and decreed that from now on, there is only one divinity worthy of worship. Only one. And that is the Sun Disc, the Aten. So no more myths, no more statues, no more processions. Just this one round, shining disc and the light it pours on the world. And access to that light, access to the divine itself, runs through only one man. And that man is the Pharaoh Akhenaten.
- [04:31]
William Dalrymple
This is the most radical religious revolution in ancient history. Whether it was the world's first true monotheism, whether it planted a seed that would eventually produce Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Bible, of Christianity, of Islam, is one of the most debated questions in the study of religion. And that is exactly what we are here to explore today. And we're all very excited about it. This is Empire and I'm William Duranpool.
- [04:57]
Anita Arnold
Yes, and I'm Anita Arnold. And you know, when you were saying, imagine that you are in this place and being venerated and worshipped, I could imagine that quite easily. It doesn't. I mean, actually, quite shocking how easy it was for me to imagine that. Anyway, we are at episode three of our Amarna series. We're diving deeper into the question of what exactly was Akhenaten's religion.
- [05:18]
William Dalrymple
Our guest today is someone who brings a quite exceptional combination of qualities to this conversation. It is our old friend, Lloyd Llewelyn Jones. Welcome back, Lloyd.
- [05:30]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Hello both. It's good to be back with you. It really is very nice to see you.
- [05:34]
William Dalrymple
So to remind everyone who doesn't know Lloyd's extraordinary credentials, he is both the professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University and the author of the magnificent the Age of the Great Kings, which first brought us together. I spent an entire summer driving around the country listening to Lloyd on. On his audiobook, which I completely loved and warmly recommend. But since he first came on the show, Lloyd became a priest.
- [05:59]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I mean, it was a. A proper calling. Okay. It's not like Going for a job. It was something that I was moved to do. And I was moved to do it actually. When I was very young, when I was in my 20s, you know, I. I first kind of got this call and I thought, no, no, no, just put it off, put it off, put it off. And then, you know, one day I was teaching a module on ancient Israel, teaching the book of Isaiah to my students. And this overwhelming desire, this feeling came from deep within me which said, okay, Lloyd, you've been doing this for long enough. You need to take this message elsewhere now. And that was the start of my journey towards the church.
- [06:34]
William Dalrymple
When we first actually met in person, long after we'd first met on screen, you were all clerical'd up.
- [06:39]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I was, I was all dog collared up. Came as a surprise to everyone.
- [06:43]
Anita Arnold
Oh, do you know what? If it wasn't such a warm day, I'd have had you do that again today. Mighty fine sight you make. Start at the very beginning, Lloyd. Before Akhenaten, before the revolution that he brings about. There is a very rich tapestry of a religious world that he's born into where there are pretty much gods for everything. I mean, from the very, very small, you'll have a God of the liver to, you know, this sort of pantheon like Hindu gods, if you come from the Hindu tradition or Greek mythology. And he is born to that richness, but he's about to destroy all of it.
- [07:19]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
What's going on? Well, the Egyptian pantheon was vast. When you go to Egypt today, you often hear, like local guides, you know, I've overheard them say, how many gods do the Egyptians worship? I will tell you. 777. No truth in that. And in fact, I think nobody ever tried to count, to tell you the truth. And you're right, Anita, to say that there were great state gods like Amun, revolution, Isis, Osiris, had huge temples and great pilgrimage followers. But also they're the tiny little gods as well, you know, the gods against scorpion bites or the gods of digestion, whatever it might be.
- [07:56]
Anita Arnold
Oh, God, I love it. There's a God of arthrosis.
- [07:58]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I mean, all sorts of things, you know, and it says so much, doesn't it, about ancient perception of self and society that you need this.
- [08:07]
William Dalrymple
Not just ancient, Lloyd. You're paying your first visit to India to come to our festival next January, and you'll find that the are still gods of cholera, for example, that are worshipped here, little gods as well as great gods like Lord Shiva.
- [08:20]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Sometimes these gods, of course you worship them as kind of preemptive strikes, really, don't you, you know, you worship a God of arthritis to say, please don't give me arthritis. You know, you worship the scorpion goddess, not because she's helping you daily, but please, please keep the scorpions away from me. So Egyptian polytheism operates on all of these different levels where we could say state religion and domestic religion, but also during the New Kingdom, and we're in the middle of the New Kingdom at this point, the Egyptians had expanded their empire and they were happily bringing home foreign gods from Syria, from Canaan, saucy
- [09:00]
William Dalrymple
goddesses who rather turned the Egyptian gods on. In some of the pictures, we have
- [09:04]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Nubian gods coming up from the south. And, you know, one thing I think is really important to recognize is that in the ancient mind, there was no contradiction in doing that. You know, the gods were gods, were gods. And it doesn't. And everybody acknowledged that different people have different gods, but they never say, oh, you know, the Hittite gods, they don't exist, or the gods in Canaan don't exist. They all believe in these things. Listeners might remember that in the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Elijah challenges the prophets of BAAL to a competition. Which God is the stronger? Not which God is real, which is the stronger. So even in the Hebrew Bible, the prophets are not saying there aren't any other gods necessarily. There are other people's gods.
- [09:51]
Anita Arnold
It also worked the other way around. I mean, when the Greeks came to Egypt, Lloyd, they would look at Amun and say, well, that's Zeus, obviously, because the parallels were so maintained and they were so respected that people felt they could intertwine very easily. So you had these teeny tiny gods. Was there not a God of the temple hinge, whose only job was to make sure the hinge opened the door and that had its own God. Isn't that glorious?
- [10:18]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Absolutely, absolutely. And it's evoked in things like the Book of the Dead, the spells for the dead, because if your hinge sticks at that point, it means the soul can't get through the door. It means disaster for everyone. So, yes, my favorite God of all. Of all the pantheons in antiquity is a goddess called Crypolae. And she's the goddess of hangovers for the Greeks. I love that. I really do. Goddess of hangover.
- [10:41]
William Dalrymple
We'll bring her back.
- [10:43]
Anita Arnold
Literally a God we can all pray to at some point or the other. At the centre of the system in this period is Amun Ra Flesh. Amun Ra out for us. Because children will have seen the picture. You know, that line drawing of, you know, sort of. Yeah, just describe it.
- [10:57]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
When he is depicted, he is depicted usually in the form of a man. His skin tends to be blue, a kind of cosmic blue, a universal blue, as it were. He wears a crown with two huge falcon feathers that come from it and a false beard on his chin. Sometimes he's depicted as a ram. So kind of all the power of the kind of the male ram. But interestingly, within the theology itself of the New Kingdom, he is called the invisible one. So although he is represented in iconography, people think of him in fact as an abstract, the great hidden one. And that's very important because I think lots of people assume that Egyptians are going around worshipping gods who are kind of, you know, appear before them very often with animal heads and so forth. But the idea of invisibility is also there as well. It's also part of it.
- [11:55]
William Dalrymple
One thing I've always wanted to know, Lloyd, is that when you see these animal headed gods are worshippers being presented by priests with masks on pretending to be the gods. And is that where it comes from or not?
- [12:07]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I think there was an element of that, but we don't know much about it. But I think that certainly during embalming ceremonies, for instance, when the body was prepared for the tomb, I think it's highly likely that a priest would don the mask of the jackal God Anubis, for instance. But I don't think, as we get in kind of Hollywood films that these priests were kind, you know, cavorting around with the heads of cows and bulls.
- [12:34]
William Dalrymple
And it's not Brendan Fraser territory.
- [12:37]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
No, exactly. The mummies love him as I do. No, no, not quite.
- [12:40]
Anita Arnold
And the priests, they were very, very powerful. And I mean, not just powerful because they were the gateway to the great gods, but I mean, you also had them controlling. I think, you know, the priests of Amun at Karnak ran, what is it, 80% of the country's industrial output, you know, all of the arable output.
- [12:58]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Absolutely.
- [12:58]
Anita Arnold
They were like little mini chancellors of the Exchequer.
- [13:01]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. So the temple of Am Amun at Karnak in particular, I mean, a vast, vast structure, acres upon acres. It's an overawing experience to be there. And right at the heart of it is this tiny little holy of holies which had at the center a little gilded wooden box with little doors to it, and inside a little gold statue of Amun. And he was responsible for this huge cosmic creation. I mean, and his priesthood were the wealthiest and most powerful priesthood in the whole of Egypt. And the temple itself was not just a place of worship, it was a farm, it was a textile industry, it was the center of education, it was the center of artistic production. So its economy is unfathomable, really. I mean, it was so wealthy. And many of the gods had this, you know, the Temple of Ptah in Memphis, for instance, or the Temple of. In Upper Egypt. But nothing equals the Temple of Amun at Karnak, the superstructure.
- [14:06]
William Dalrymple
And the pharaoh himself, where did he fit into this whole priesthood and religion?
- [14:11]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
This is an interesting question because since the Old Kingdom, the pyramid age, which, as you said in your introduction, willi, is already 3,000 years old by the New Kingdom period, since then, pharaohs had been accepted and indeed promoted themselves as living gods. This is a kind of hard concept for us to get our heads around.
- [14:34]
William Dalrymple
Of course, Keir Starmer could do with that now, couldn't he, really?
- [14:36]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Of course, we have some. Some leaders who believe that they may well be gods.
- [14:41]
William Dalrymple
You know, I can't think who you are indicating here.
- [14:44]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
It's a really strange one, because of course, the Egyptians saw their rulers become old and forgetful and decrepit and losing teeth and hair and yet still maintain that they are living gods. And eventually they die, of course. So the way in which this was kind of used in Egyptian theology was to suggest that the kingship, the pharaoh himself, is forever. The individual may change, but the institution of the pharaoh goes on and on and on. So as one pharaoh dies, he becomes the new Osiris, and his son or heir becomes the new Horus. So there's this constant cycle of life and death, life and death, life and death. But for most people in Egypt, they really did believe that the pharaoh was a God. And that's very different from the kind of things we get in Mesopotamia, for instance, where kings like Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, this kind, they were the viceroy of God. So they were charged with things, you know, by God. But here in Egypt, we have a mortal man who is also at the same time an immortal God. And in the iconography, you see the kind of closeness between pharaoh and the gods. They often hug him, they'll kiss him on the lips. He's depicted at the same size as the gods.
- [16:08]
Anita Arnold
You know, I wonder if it's because they don't get much exposure to the pharaoh. Because if you think about Akhenaten's dad, Amenhotep iii, I mean, if you look at his mummy, it wasn't a beautiful thing to look at. I mean, he was Morbidly obese. He was, it's suggested that covered in abscesses, you know, riddled with something that looks like arthritis. So, I mean, could they maintain this godliness? Because no one saw them. No one saw the decrepitude of the flesh.
- [16:36]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I think there's a lot in that, Anita. I really do. The kind of mystique of monarchy is held up by that, isn't it? The very invisibility of the monarch, I think, is very important within all of this. And, you know, the pharaohs of Egypt did not go around pressing the flesh in the manner of sort of modern European monarchs at all. They didn't do their balcony presentations, this kind of thing. There was a mystery around them because they were sacrosanct, after all. So you treat them as a God.
- [17:04]
William Dalrymple
This distinction you draw between Egypt and Mesopotamia is the same, interestingly, in the Hindu world, between India and Southeast Asia. And in India, kings like Rajaraja Chola are the viceroy of Lord Shiva. And there are pictures of him standing below Lord Shiva in his temple. But in Cambodia, the Khmer temples, kings portrayed with divine attributes. They're holding the Concha, Vishnu.
- [17:31]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Absolutely. And it's a huge leap between the two of us.
- [17:35]
William Dalrymple
It's a big difference.
- [17:35]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
It really is a huge difference there. So that's the world. We're in Pharaonic Egypt. We've got a divine pharaoh.
- [17:41]
Anita Arnold
You've got the dad, okay, Amenhote, who is, you know, this glorious sun and all gods and, you know, divine and respects all gods. You know, I think isn't he responsible for just hundreds and hundreds of statues of Sekhmet? And, you know, his iconography is very, very strong. And you've got his son growing up in the shadow of this man. Is he growing up with ideas beyond his station even then? Do we have any indication that he's about to basically toss it all out of the window?
- [18:09]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
We have no indication of this whatsoever. Because our sources are completely silent on the man who would be Akhenaten until he appears as Akhenaten. And that's because generally in the New Kingdom, Princes didn't get much of a run in publicly at all.
- [18:27]
William Dalrymple
He wasn't the eldest son.
- [18:28]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
No, no, he wasn't. There was somebody else, a prince called Thutmose. Who seems to have predeceased his brother. We get no knowledge of him. Although I think it is important to expand your idea of what this world was like under Amenhotep III and his kind of divine status. The other person who was fundamentally important in Akhenaten's life is his mother, Queen Ti. And she was also going through a process of divinization too. In fact, under Queen Ti, Amenhotep iii, her husband creates her as a living goddess too. And we get from Amenhotep III a very developed theogony which stated that Amenhotep III himself was the offspring of Amun Ra, who had slept with his mother Mutemwiya, and progenerated Amenhotep iii. So there is a kind of theogony that's going on here. All of this is building up the divine status of Pharaoh and the royal women as well. And of course, the royal women become very important in the Amarna period.
- [19:34]
William Dalrymple
And we get some hints towards the end of his father's reign that he is making theological changes and there is a shift to the system. Nothing as radical as what will happen.
- [19:45]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
The name Aten starts emerging in the last decade of Amenhotep III's reign. Now, we can't pin that on Akhenaten at all yet, because as I say, he doesn't appear in the imagery or anything.
- [19:56]
William Dalrymple
And Anaton, we should say, is just the everyday Egyptian word for disk, isn't he?
- [20:00]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Sun, disc, a shining disc. And so we see, for instance, Amenhotep has a beautiful palace built at Malkarta on the west bank. And there he has a lake built, and it's called the Lake of the Aten. And a bark that floats on the lake is called the Bark of the Aten. And so this name is getting used more and more. And it's kind of interesting as well as this name becomes used, so Amenhotep III's iconography begins to change. And one thing Egyptologists have noticed is in the 10 years before his death, his iconography, his portraits, become more and more youthful all the time. So it's almost like if we do want to link this shining disc with Amenhotep iii, there's some kind of rejuvenation going on. It's almost like, you know, he's basking in the sun's rays and it's. And it's rejuvenating him, bringing him back a kind of boyhood. But we can't pin any of this on Akhenate just yet because he's not there.
- [21:03]
Anita Arnold
And also, I mean, there's a huge difference that these discs and this, you know, youthful Benjamin Buttoning of Amenhotep is happening alongside. It's not instead of you. Basically, you've just got more pictures and more statues and more Carvings, yes, but all of it is existing in the
- [21:21]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
same time as all of the old polytheistic gods are all there, all that's developing as well. Absolutely.
- [21:26]
Anita Arnold
Do we then pinpoint the moment some may call sort the of tragic madness, when, you know, the son decides everything his father has done is wrong and I'm going to destroy it all and start again. Does it happen when he changes his name? Because he's also meant to be an Amenhotep?
- [21:42]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Amenhotep IV really is his real title.
- [21:45]
Anita Arnold
He decides, no, I'm going to be Akhenaten.
- [21:48]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
We see the change before the name changes, in fact. And it was realized back in the 1980s, 1990s, when work was being done at Karnak. We discovered inside one of the great pylons, these are these huge kind of towering edifices that they are often packed with rubble, you know, to make solid fill. And Egyptologists realized that one of these pylons at Karnak was actually packed full of small, what we call talatat, small blocks like bricks, which were highly decorated, and they belonged to the opening years, the first five years of the reign of Amenhotep iv, Akhenate. And they show him worshipping this sun disk. So he had actually built a temple for the Aten inside the domain of Amun, which later, after his death, was then pulled down. And the dramatic thing that we see here is the iconographic change. So no longer that perfect symmetry that we think about in Egyptian art. You know, everything's in proportion, everything is in order. Suddenly we see this image of Akhenaten with this elongated face, long, long chin, swollen belly, long spindly legs and arms. And behind him, with the same kind of bizarre distortion of her body, is Queen Nefertiti and three of their first daughters. So almost from the beginning, he has in his mind the iconography is going to change entirely and the attention is going to be on the Aten. But then he abandons, of course, as you said in the introduction, Thebes itself and relocates upriver into Middle Egypt, and there establishes his new capital, Akhet Aten, the horizon of the Aten. And with that comes the name change as well.
- [23:37]
William Dalrymple
We're gonna go to the new city in a second, but just before we do so, just dwell on that body that you mentioned.
- [23:45]
Anita Arnold
It looks feminine, doesn't it, to me? The rounded hips and the buttocks in particular, and the belly, they're normally the kind of thing we expect on a statue of a woman.
- [23:55]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Absolutely.
- [23:56]
William Dalrymple
The question is, is it a new aesthetic that he champions. And I mean, to my eyes, I have to say, I think the whole thing of Nefertiti and her daughters with these same things is very beautiful. I love the style.
- [24:06]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I think they're striking. I mean, they really are, and new and fresh.
- [24:10]
William Dalrymple
If I had one piece of Egyptian art to loot and take into my home, it would be the one of the daughters of Akhenaten from the Berlin Museum.
- [24:20]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Absolutely. With their elongated skulls and so forth, made out of pink granite very often. Yeah, absolutely.
- [24:25]
Anita Arnold
I mean, you say very beautiful. I think they look like sort of protean, ET's extraterrestrial. I. I don't find them beautiful.
- [24:31]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
You could say aliens as well. Right. I do find them beautiful, but disturbing at the same time, you know? So what's going on with Akhenaten's body then, in reality? So so much ink has been spilled on this, as you can imagine. So people thought, for instance, he suffered from various diseases in which fat deposits were different, or there were skeleton deformities or whatever there may be. I don't think any of that applies, because we're thinking here, we have to look at Akhenaten, always with theological eyes. What Akhenaten is trying to do here, if he's getting rid of all the other deities. Okay, what does he do then with the great female principles of Egyptian religion? Isis, Nephthys, Shu, Tefnut, all these great goddess types, you know? Well, what he does, I think, is he brings them all into his body. So he is deliberately kind of sexually ambiguous in that way. His body emphasizes both the male and the female within himself, because it is himself. That's the most important thing in Akhenaten's world.
- [25:39]
William Dalrymple
So he didn't look like that, you're saying?
- [25:41]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I don't think so. No, I don't think so at all. If the mummy that we have found in Kings Valley 55 is indeed Akhenaten, and it's possible, then we can say he didn't look anything like that at all.
- [25:53]
Anita Arnold
So that's interesting, because in Hinduism, you've got the concept of the male and female divine in the same person, Adin Shakti. You know, the power is both things.
- [26:00]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I think something like that's going on.
- [26:02]
Anita Arnold
You've mentioned that he moved the capital. Can we talk about that? Because that sentence is so easy to say, isn't it? Just, how the hell do you do it? I mean, we're talking about a massive set of edifices and infrastructure and people. So why does he Suddenly decide, I don't like this anymore. I want something different and I want it somewhere else.
- [26:23]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
He wants a virgin site that nobody's built on before he kind of has a vision from his God. You know, he's not the only person in history to have this. Alexander is a good example, you know, a new place untainted by any other God. That's what he says actually in the great hymn Untainted by any other God. A new place. And he goes to this place, Middle Egypt. It's about maybe three hours drive south from Cairo today, which has a flat base. And then there are two mountains with sort of plateaus, really rises out of the horizon. And this was basically the physical manifestation of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph akhet, which means horizon. So he saw in the landscape a hieroglyphic which said, this is the place,
- [27:18]
Anita Arnold
because she really thinks God is talking directly to him.
- [27:21]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Oh, my goodness me, yes. I think that's the thing. This is Atenism is a personal relationship between Akhenaten and the Aten. Nobody else matters.
- [27:31]
Anita Arnold
We're going to take a break now, but after the break, find out what this private conversation between Akhenaten and his God is going to make him do to all the other gods that existed before. Join us. Then
- [27:46]
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- [28:18]
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- [28:47]
Empire Show Announcer
Very exciting news. After our first sellout Empire show, we've got a second show at the Rest Is Fest this September, and we've got a brilliant session lined up. We're calling it Three Ayatollahs, An Iranian Dynasty. We're going to be joined by great friend of the show, Ali Ansari, one of Britain's foremost experts on Iranian history, but also an excellent storyteller. Together we're going to unpack one of the most fascinating and urgent stories in the world right now. How has the influence of Ayatollah shaped Iran, shaped since the 1979 revolution, does the grip of the Islamic Republic appear to be fracturing? What role have other nations played in shaping Iran's fate? And as the regime faces economic pressures, regional setbacks and a disillusioned younger generation, what comes next for a civilization that has outlasted empires? Expect sharp analysis and the usual storytelling and warmth and wit and the usual mischief that you've come to expect from from US2. The rest is fest runs from the 4th to the 6th of September at London's South Bank Centre. Empire members, you can get your tickets on 28 May. General sale opens on 2 June at 10am Visit southbankcenter.co.uk to find out more.
- [30:15]
Anita Arnold
Okay, welcome back. So just before the break, we had Akhenaten having private conflabs with God and seeing his messages in the landscape and deciding he's going to build his new capital in the middle of a virgin landscape. Not an easy thing to do. How long does it take him to do it, first of all? And what does he create?
- [30:34]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Very quickly? It's an overnight change almost, you know, I mean, first of all, he has to send his architects and builders to Middle Egypt and they construct very hastily a very large city, including two palaces, workshops and two enormous temples. And two temples built on a completely different model to the ancient temples of Egypt. So when the ancient temples, remember I told you about that tiny little shrine in the middle, could be vast, they came in closer and closer and closer, darker and darker and darker, until you got to the center, which was the holy of holies. Akhenaten's temples in Amarna are all open to the sky. That's the whole purpose, of course. These vast courtyards with no shade whatsoever, apart from one little sunshade where he
- [31:24]
William Dalrymple
would stand, which ambassadors complain about, don't they?
- [31:27]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I'm not a fan of Akhenaten, let's put it that way.
- [31:30]
Anita Arnold
Thank you. I am also not a fan. Willi, what about you? You want to steal a statue?
- [31:35]
William Dalrymple
But I saw the Opera Akhenaten in 1984 when I was about 19 years old, and it had the most mesmeric effect of me. And I find it difficult to sort of divorce the historical Akhenaten from the.
- [31:47]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Oh, will you Old romantic.
- [31:48]
William Dalrymple
The glorious image that I am a romantic.
- [31:51]
Anita Arnold
So the lines are drawn. You love him, I hate him. And Lloyd's going to be a bit more diplomatic about it.
- [31:56]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
What I see in him is a zealot, an absolute zealot who gives no room to anybody else for interpretation, belief, or unbelief, okay? It's his relationship with his God. Even Nefertiti, I get a feeling, doesn't really. You know, she's there because he has to have a female principal. But I think about these sun temples. Everybody standing in the open in the glare of the sun, in the draining heat of Middle Egypt. This is not a kind thing. This is not about, you know, let's rejoice in this together. This is absolute oppression of the people. And one thing that Don Redford, great Egyptologist, noted about the iconography of Akhenaten's reign, it hates him. And I'm with him all the way that Akhenaten's court are always depicted bent over, doubled over in obsequiousness before him, you know, and crouching on the ground very often, as though they're afraid to stand up. You know, I think he was a real tyrant.
- [33:01]
Anita Arnold
Not only did he make them, you know, keel over and die in the sun, ridiculous new place, his new pad, but also, I mean, the things he expected. He wanted an obliteration of any name, any image, any iconography to do with the past gods. Some of these things are difficult to get to. I mean, we're talking about very tall obelisks that he's sending, you know, these poor workers up to right to the top to chisel off names. The pettiness of. It feels a bit bonkers to me that it all has to be scrubbed out.
- [33:34]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
The process of hacking out the name of a deity is important. Whenever you know, those people who could read in Egypt, and these are the priests, of course, whenever they read, they had to read aloud. There was no such thing as silent reading. And so immediately they would say, you know, they saw the hieroglyphs, Amun. It would come out by cancelling their names. Of course, they cannot say the name of the God. And if the name of the God isn't there, does the God exist in that case, does a tree in a forest fall and make a sound? You know, it's that kind of thing. If we don't say the name of the God, does he exist at all?
- [34:07]
William Dalrymple
We haven't talked about motives. And your friend Don Redford has an inscription where Akhenaten seems to be saved because it's a broken inscription and it's fragmentary and there's these kind of frustrating gaps. But he seems to be saying the old gods aren't working anymore.
- [34:22]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Yes, it's not that he's denying the presence of the old gods. But they are rivals to his new God. I think that's an important thing, you know, and he wants to foreground his new God, which of course is so completely linked to him. So really, I mean, it's self aggrandizement. I think more than anything else here.
- [34:42]
Anita Arnold
It's egomaniacal to the point where actually, I mean, even if, you know, you had a name that was associated with the old gods, let's say your father had a name associated with the old gods, he would have that name scrubbed off your father's teeth.
- [34:55]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Absolutely, absolutely. And what I can't get my head around. Okay, so it's rather like if you think about Britain in the 1540s, say with, you know, the way in which the old church images were being whitewashed over or hacked to pieces. But what do we do with the belief, you know, there's been a group of people, you know, worshiping an image of Mary, you know, or at least venerating Mary for centuries, and then somebody from the same village says, I'm only doing my job and knocks her head off, you know, how did Akhenaten bring the people with him? Did he ever bring the people with him? That's the big question. And I think the way in which at his death the whole revolution was reversed so quickly suggest to me he wasn't successful.
- [35:38]
William Dalrymple
Plus they found sort of secret Amun worshippers in Amarna, haven't they?
- [35:43]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
All their old prayers that they knew were Amun related or Isis worship we found in Amarna in private households, little votive plaques showing Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the disk which locals were supposed to worship in their homes as opposed to the old hippopotamus goddess that they used to worship, you know, but you can't tell me that, okay, they paid lip service and put up these little plaques, but I'm sure the lady of the house, when she was pregnant, going through childbirth, still went back in her mind to the hippopotamus goddess Tawaret.
- [36:20]
William Dalrymple
And we found images of the different gods.
- [36:21]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
We have indeed. Exactly. So there's this tension there.
- [36:25]
Anita Arnold
Lloyd, can we talk about the Aten itself? This is, you know, sort of the centre of this, this cult new. I mean, it feels to me like a new cult really. It's a boy rebelling against his dad and he knows everything and this is going to be the way and it really. And it's all about him. The art in theologically, what is it? Because we know it's a round disc, we know it's got these Rays that end up in sort of unk shapes. What is it meant to represent? What is it?
- [36:52]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
It is merely the sun, that's all. And Egypt had been following a solar cult since the pyramid age. Okay, so Ra is a sun God. So there's nothing unusual in that per se, apart from the fact that now Akhenaten's fetish is actually on the disc itself. So this round ball of energy is the thing that he venerates. Rather than the abstract concept of the sun giving light and so forth, it is now the disc itself which becomes all consuming form himself. And as you say in the iconography, the rays of the sun come down and they often end in hands very stylistically depicted. And some of those hands give the angkh sign, the sign of life, to Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their daughters.
- [37:43]
Anita Arnold
Hang on, how do you say it? I say unk. How do you properly say it?
- [37:48]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Okay, so it's an abstract, really. I mean, it's a strange thing. It's. The sun has always been around. And in fact, I always think with Akhenaten, oh, couldn't you have gone for something more interesting? You know, it's so obvious, you know, and of course it's a great benefit. But also sun worship provides difficulties. So what happens at night for Akhenaten? What happens when the sun goes? Well, the Egyptians had thought all about that in their previous theologies. You know, we know that the sun is swallowed by the sky goddess and it travels through her body and she gives birth to the sun every morning. But the Aten doesn't do that because the Aten can't acknowledge a sky goddess. So what happens when darkness comes?
- [38:31]
William Dalrymple
You know, you've hinted at it before, but he does not believe that there are no other gods. It's just that he's not worshipping other gods. So you could technically still have the sky goddess swallowing.
- [38:42]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
You could technically.
- [38:43]
Anita Arnold
Now, how do you have a theology that doesn't answer a question? I mean, the thing is, a new theology normally has an answer for something.
- [38:48]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Yes, yes, indeed.
- [38:49]
Anita Arnold
That's the problem, isn't it?
- [38:50]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Yeah, but I think if we were to try to find a question. What's the question Akhenaten is putting for this new theology? It is, what am I all about then? That's the feeling I get. You know, that's what he's asking, what am I? Where am I in all of this cosmic thing? And he finds his answer in the sun disc.
- [39:08]
Anita Arnold
It's so interesting. I mean, I sort of think I Wonder if his dad had hugged him more, whether we'd got into this situation.
- [39:14]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
The other thing that's really conspicuous is when he builds Akhet Ahnemanna, that all the court go up. Obviously, there must have been cohorts of priests of Amun left behind wondering, what the hell is going on now? And what's going to happen to our land and our powers and our families. But he puts around him a cohort of priests and courtiers who are sycophants to the letter, you know, which, again, is something that we see in current politics as well, isn't it? And if people are not saying to him, are you sure you want to do this? Because we know that international reputation of Egypt just sinks. The Amana letters show that Egypt is in crisis in period, because Akhenaten has no interest in pursuing, you know, military pursuits or even just settling the colonial expansions of this period.
- [40:00]
William Dalrymple
There's lots of letters from the king of Byblos saying, I'd be surrounded by enemies. Please send help, please send help. Then another one saying, and they're getting closer. You haven't sent any troops, Please.
- [40:10]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And Pharaoh has not responded. Oh, my Lord, I crawl upon my belly seven times and seven times like a dog. Please send us troops. And, you know, they just get the answer. I'm sorry, I'm not in the office right now.
- [40:26]
Anita Arnold
He does actually write back to one saying, why are you writing to me so often? He's uninterested in any of these things.
- [40:34]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Completely uninterested, yeah.
- [40:36]
William Dalrymple
We haven't mentioned what actually happens to the old priesthood. It isn't just that they're out of a job. The head priest is sent to the quarries. I mean, it's a gulag situation, isn't it?
- [40:45]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Yes, absolutely. I mean, and you've got to wonder again, what was Hanaten's relationship to these men when he was growing up? Because I can't get past the feeling of personal vendettas going on here on that kind of Stalinist level as well, really going for the people who matter. So I suppose if we run a scenario that under the age in Amenhotep iii, the high priest of Amun and the high priest of Ptah had inordinate influence at court. And maybe we're dismissing Akhenaten with his bizarre ways, then of course, it's all about comeback, isn't it? You know, and retribution.
- [41:21]
Anita Arnold
I'm still trying to understand the theology. So Aten simply is the sun. And, you know, we're going to have New architecture. And you're all going to be too hot in the daytime because it's all about the sun. That's, you know, that's what we're going to do. Does the sun care? Can you, as in before, you know, go and pray and make an offering to the Aten and be blessed and have, you know, is that the relationship? Or is it just a sun which is beyond you and above you? And your life doesn't matter at all.
- [41:45]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Your life doesn't matter at all. It has no interest in you. And really, you're not encouraged to offer to the Son. You're encouraged to offer to Akhenaten. He is the intercessor. He is the only one who can hear the Son. And the Son speaks to him, and he speaks back to the Son. So it's not at all this idea of personal faith. He's not asking for that from anyone. And one of the things I think that's really difficult is that marthe, a concept which is absolutely central to Egypt's theology. Maat means truth, order, balance, justice. She's represented as a young girl with a feather on her head, a delicate thing that could easily be broken. What happens to Maat in this new theology? Because there's no real place for it, you know, Does Akhenaten therefore become Marth himself? Probably. We are dealing here with an absolute religious zealot and a narcissist, I think, who is piling honors upon himself.
- [42:52]
William Dalrymple
Now just to again, exactly get this theology in our heads and where it stands on the various spectrums of monotheism or not. Tell me if I've got this right. Monotheism, strictly defined, is the belief that only one. One God exists.
- [43:08]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Exists. Yeah, absolutely.
- [43:10]
William Dalrymple
Then you have. Is it monoluctry, Monolectri, which is the exclusive worship of one God, but not denying.
- [43:17]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Yeah, many gods exist, but one tends to be exclusively worshipped, which is what
- [43:23]
William Dalrymple
you get in early Canaan.
- [43:24]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I wouldn't even say early Canaan, but by the 6th century BCE, something like that is happening. Yeah, yeah.
- [43:31]
William Dalrymple
And then there's henotheism, which is the elevation of one God above all the others as supreme. So where are we? Where does Atenism sit on this?
- [43:39]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I would say that this is a henotheistic religion. Okay. He doesn't get rid of the other gods. He acknowledged they exist. They're not functioning correctly, and there's no power there. I don't think he can ever claim, really, in monotheism, and of course, Velikovsky and people like that back in the 50s were all over Akhenaten saying, this is the origins of monotheism. But I think we're far from that, actually, very far from that.
- [44:04]
Anita Arnold
We need to talk about one of the greatest mysteries. And it's delicious. The Great Hymn to the Aten and its relationship with a book that we may be more familiar with. Right. So first of all, just tell us what we're talking about. The words themselves, I wrote them out, but I think you probably know them off by heart, don't you?
- [44:22]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Yeah. So found in one of the tombs in Amarna is this glorious composition that we call the Great Hymn to the Aten. Some people think it is the work of Akhenaten himself. Others that have court scribe wrote it. I don't think it makes a difference whether it was Akhenaten or a scribe. I think the sentiment is what's important. And it talks about the supremacy of the creator God, the Aten, that when the earth is in darkness, there is nothingness, but then the light comes from forward. The rivers are full of fish. The deeds of this God are just purely benevolent. This sun shines down not only on Egypt, but on all lands, which I think is really fascinating.
- [45:07]
Anita Arnold
It says, every lion comes forth from his den. When you rise, they live. When you set, they die. Now, the reason I picked that one is because of the parallels with the other book. Okay. Which is. Okay, drum roll. The Bible. So in Psalm 104, there is this line. Okay, so I'll read the one I just read. The great hymn says, every lion comes forth from his den. When you rise, they live. When you set, they die. Psalm 104. The young lions roar after their prey. They seek their meat from God. The sun ariseth. They gather themselves together, and they lay them down in their dens.
- [45:43]
William Dalrymple
It's very close, isn't it?
- [45:45]
Anita Arnold
The proximity between stuff that you find in the Bible and in the Great hymn.
- [45:50]
William Dalrymple
But there's 600 years between the two.
- [45:53]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Yeah, at least 600 years between the two. James Henry breasted around about 1900. Great Egyptologist. He firmly believed that the Author of Psalm 104 knew the great art and hymn somehow, you know, and this is his version of it. Nowadays, few people think that, although there are a couple of adherents still to it. Miriam Lichtheim, a great scholar of hieroglyphs in the 1970s, 1980s, she thought that this is really standard or generic creation imagery we have in Egypt, in the Levant, in Mesopotamia. I agree with her on all of that. But what I can't quite qualify is the structural similarities between the two. Because, in fact, if you take them verse by verse, they do echo one another all the time. I mean, there's a constant toing and fro in between them.
- [46:50]
William Dalrymple
Is there any other Canaanite or any other thing that is, you know, like, we have many different versions of the Flood, and we now know that there are several flood myths. Do we have any other things that talk about lions going out and all this stuff?
- [47:04]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Oh, so many, so many. The metaphors and similes are absolutely standard across the whole of the ancient near east, which includes Egypt. Okay, so that's not an issue for
- [47:14]
William Dalrymple
me at all, which itself is interesting, because we kind of think of Egypt as being different.
- [47:19]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
No, it's not so different. Honestly, when I speak of the ancient Near East, I always include Egypt in it. I think it is part of that world. The zeitgeist is there. And we really see it in things like Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Egyptian love songs draw on the same parallels all the time. Oh, my sister, your hair is like a flock of sheep. Your breasts are like twin gazelles.
- [47:41]
William Dalrymple
Pomegranates.
- [47:42]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Exactly the same exact pomegranates next to the, like, the tower of ivory. It's exactly the same imagery that shed. And I don't find that difficult at all. But I do find it puzzling, and I can't answer really why the structure is the same.
- [47:57]
Anita Arnold
No, no, I'm not having that because that's why we booked you.
- [48:01]
William Dalrymple
Your bishop's gonna be getting at you now. Come on.
- [48:03]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I know, I know, I know.
- [48:04]
Anita Arnold
You're basically in the two food groups that matter here. You're clergy and you're historian of ancient Egypt. So for some people, this is a, you know, actually it's a mic drop moment. For those who believe, you know, this is the revelation of God, and look at how constant and consistent it is. You know, this message is the same, and it may have been diluted in parts, but can you see that line that stretches straight to that one true God? This is where it all starts. And then the atheist going, told you. It's basically a bunch of people stitching up pretty poetry. Mic drop.
- [48:35]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Here's the difference, and it's in the difference that's fundamental.
- [48:39]
Anita Arnold
Okay?
- [48:39]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
The great hymn treats the darkness, the absence of the sun as the enemy, as death, as nothingness, whereas the psalm treats darkness as God's creation as well. It is still God's. God is still there. In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth, and he said, let There be light. And he divided the darkness from the day, and he called the light day, and he called the darkness night. So dark, in Hebrew thought is still part of God's world. Akhenaten sees darkness as an absence of his God.
- [49:17]
William Dalrymple
It is a huge difference. But you're also a scholar of Persia.
- [49:20]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
I am.
- [49:21]
William Dalrymple
And the light in the dark is a big concept in Persian religion.
- [49:25]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Huge concept there as well.
- [49:26]
William Dalrymple
Are we bringing Persia into this?
- [49:28]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
If we want to do this, yes, we can. Because my belief is that much of the Hebrew Bible as it stands is written in Persia, is written in the Persian period, or at least edited in the Persian period. So Persian religion, including this polarity of dark and light truth and the lie gets filtered into all of this. So while we can say, oh, look, there are are Bronze Age elements here in the Psalms, most of them had their redaction in the Persian period and that makes a big difference. We cannot just read the Hebrew Bible as, you know, some old Bronze Age mythology all going on because actually it's being filtered over centuries, in fact, and massively edited.
- [50:17]
William Dalrymple
And again, on the return from. From Persia.
- [50:20]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So it's never a question of saying A plus B equals C. There's also always something that's going to get in the way of that.
- [50:31]
Anita Arnold
You sort of teased us a little bit at the beginning that you were a team, Anita.
- [50:36]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Yeah, I'm happy to be on your
- [50:38]
Anita Arnold
team, Anita, but also, so was all of Egypt. It turns out.
- [50:41]
William Dalrymple
You're sounding a bit like Akhnaten now.
- [50:45]
Anita Arnold
I see the irony in this. Yes. How soon after he dies? And we'll go into that in more detail in the next episode. How soon do people just say, nah, don't like it.
- [50:56]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
It collapses almost immediately.
- [50:58]
William Dalrymple
So much has been channeled through him, hasn't it?
- [51:00]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
You know, without him, like the Maga movement, without the leader, the charismatic leader, we hope things will just disappear, you know, as though they never were. And that's the interesting thing. They didn't want to just say, we've got through this blip. Later, Egyptians erased him from history completely and utterly. So if you look at king lists, and the Egyptians loved their lists of monarchs. One at Abydos, for instance, showing Seti I and his son and heir, Ramesses ii, in front of all the katushes of the pharaohs of Egypt. Conspicuous in his absence is Akhenaten, and we see it far closer to his time with his son Tutankhamun, as we know him, originally had the name Tutankhaten and changed his name to Tutankhamun to take in that old faith again. And very famously, in Karnak temple, Tutankhamun, this young king, under the tutelage of the old priests of Amun, I dare say, establishes a huge edict, basically saying, okay, back to normal. Let's open the temples again, let's reboot them. Because Egypt was in flux. He says, you know, this last 10 years have been chaos when Egypt was without its gods. So we have to restore the order through getting the old gods back again.
- [52:27]
Anita Arnold
One interesting thought, though. You know, the people of Egypt decide very quickly they don't want to borrow this anymore, but it does come back. And just maybe this is a good place to end. But Sigmund Freud was obsessed with the fact that actually this lived on. I mean, he was obsessed with Egypt, apparently, and he had little statues from ancient Egypt all over his desk. But he says Moses was the last Egyptian priest of the Aten.
- [52:51]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Freud needs a good lie down, I think, to really think that through. No, there's nothing there. But it was very popular in 1900s, Velikovsky in the 50s, claiming that Moses the monotheist, Akhenaten the monotheist, and linking the story of the Exodus to this period. It was, you know, kind of natural thing to do. There's nothing there. And all this kind of esoteric stuff was going on. You know, there's a brilliant book that was written early in the 2000s by the late Dominic Montserrat, a colleague of mine, looking at the traditions of Akhenaten since his death, which is a great read. I recommend for anybody he's been portrayed in film. There's a 1953 movie called the Egyptian, which stars Edmund Purdham and Gene Tierney.
- [53:33]
William Dalrymple
Your face is lighting up, Lloyd.
- [53:35]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Widescreen ethics, you know, in which Akhenaten is shown as this kind of monotheist. He chants the hymn with all of these kind of Hollywood singers in the background shaking sistra and doing the ahs. And of course, very famously in Philippe Glass's opera Akhenaten, which I think is a masterpiece. I think it's absolute masterpiece.
- [53:57]
William Dalrymple
Everyone who doesn't know this has got to go. Maybe the Metropolitan recording.
- [54:01]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
That production is staggering.
- [54:03]
William Dalrymple
I saw the first one in 1984.
- [54:05]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
The hymn to the Art Nissi is a masterpiece. Whoever wrote it, it is a beautiful, beautiful literary work, a lyric work. And what Glass does in that, the whole opera is sung in ancient Egyptian until we get to that moment where Akhenaten, who is sung by castrato, which you know, Well, a counter tenor, which of course has all that sexual ambiguity about the voice. He sings the hymn to the Aten in the language of the audience, whoever it will be. So English or Catalan or Spanish or French or whatever it will be just to bring that closeness, that proximity home. And then Glass does the amazing thing. He puts on the end of that wonderful hymn, the Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew singing of Psalm 104. So it all comes together really beautifully. Yeah, I really recommend people listen to it.
- [54:58]
William Dalrymple
Now, we love that opera, we love that hymn. But you have shown us, I think, very persuasively that he was not really someone you would have wanted as your ruler or indeed as the man leading your religious life. Should we think of him actually as the man who brings intolerance into religion, that he's the first guy to say, you should not worship this, you should worship that?
- [55:25]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
That's a really good question. I'm tempted to say yes, you know, because I really don't know of any other individual before the late Bronze Age that does that at all. Because all kings and all priests recognize the authority of other gods and other kings, and he just doesn't do that. So, yes, you know what? I think you're absolutely right. I think there is something there. Another nail in his coffin.
- [55:53]
Anita Arnold
This has been such a deep and winding spiritual journey. It's been brilliant. And I can't think of anyone else we would rather have done this with.
- [56:00]
William Dalrymple
You were wonderful, Lloyd. Thank you.
- [56:02]
Lloyd Llewelyn Jones
Thank you, Lloyd.
- [56:03]
Anita Arnold
Lewenna Jones, professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University, priest of the Church of Wales, friend of Empire. All of those things matter equally. I find so lovely to have you. Next time on Empire, the story of how it all fell apart. And if you want to listen to that right now, you don't have to wait. Head to the link in the description. Become a friend of the show today. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand.
- [56:29]
William Dalrymple
Goodbye from me, William Dalrymple.