Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti ruled Egypt just long enough to transform the empire’s religion, art, and architecture. Digs at Amarna yield clues to their enigmatic dynasty. Akhenaten’s rebellion began with his father, the strong-willed pharaoh Amenhotep III, who ruled for 37 years during a golden age of the Egyptian empire. Amenhotep III tapped the wealth of that empire to build an unprecedented series of monuments. These included elaborate constructions at Karnak and Luxor, religious centers of the god Amun, patron of Thebes. Amun became increasingly powerful after Thebes regained control of Egypt around 1520 B.C. His name means Hidden One, and he resided in the inner sanctum of his temple at Karnak, where his priests fed, washed, and clothed a statue of him. Amun soon merged with the ancient sun god Re and became Amun-Re. Pharaoh himself was regarded as the son of Amun-Re. His divine authority could be renewed only by the Hidden One each year in a festival called Opet. Late in his reign, and perhaps chafing from political friction with the priests of Amun, Amenhotep III decided that he was not only the son of Amun but also the incarnation of Re—and thus at least equal to Amun. He began building monuments to his own divinity, including a vast funerary temple across the Nile from Thebes. This temple featured two 65-foot-high (20-meter-high), 720-ton quartzite statues of himself that he declared should gleam into people’s eyes like the rising Aten. The ruins of those statues are famed as the Colossi of Memnon. The stage was thus set for the entrance of Akhenaten, who came to the throne as Amenhotep IV. Some scholars argue that Akhenaten and his father ruled together as co-regents for several years. Ray Johnson, a specialist at the University of Chicago, believes the father lived on for many years, yielding power to his son and accompanying him to Amarna. But most now contend that Akhenaten ruled without his father, perhaps driven to outdo him. Akhenaten was probably already married to Nefertiti when he ascended the throne. Perhaps both were children when they wed, as Akhenaten’s father and mother, Queen Tiye, had been. No one knows where Nefertiti came from. Her name means “the beautiful one has come,” which once led scholars to assume she was foreign-born. Today many believe she was from a town now called Akhmim and belonged to the same influential family as Queen Tiye. Wherever Nefertiti was born, she was a part of Akhenaten’s revolution from the beginning. On a morning in the year 1353 B.C. a young pharaoh of Egypt rose before dawn to greet the sun with a poem he loved and perhaps had written: "Beautifully you appear from the horizon of heaven," he prayed as sunlight began to flood Egypt's capital city of Thebes. To him the rays of the sun were the embodiment of an ancient god named Aten, whom he passionately revered. "Oh living Aten, who initiates life. . . . Oh sole god, without another beside him! You create the Earth according to your wish. . . . You are in my heart, and there is none who knows you except your son." This was no ordinary morning for the king—nor for ancient Egypt. Pharaoh Amenhotep III had died, and this teenage son now had the power to elevate Aten above all the other gods in Egypt's pantheon, even above the all-powerful Amun, who for hundreds of years had ruled in Thebes as king of the gods. Soon this enigmatic young man would change his name to Akhenaten, "he who is effective for Aten." With his queen, the fabled Nefertiti, he would plunge Egypt into a religious revolution that shattered centuries of tradition. He would elevate Nefertiti to divine status, giving her more influence than perhaps any other queen had known. And he would abandon Thebes to build a huge new capital, today known as Amarna. Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun—perhaps Akhenaten's son born to a secondary wife—have been called the Pharaohs of the Sun. Their reign was brief. Akhenaten ruled just 17 years, and within a few years after his death in 1336 B.C., the old orthodoxy was restored. Akhenaten's enemies soon smashed his statues, dismantled his temples, and set out to expunge all memory of him and Nefertiti from Egypt's historical record. But the controversy the couple created lives on. Egyptologists still struggle to piece together the story of this renegade pair. Swept up in religious passion, they brought the vast and powerful Egyptian empire to the brink of collapse.

• published: 25 Nov 2014
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