Text/A Zhi
Preface
During the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom, Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (Ekhnatun) launched a "religious reformation" unprecedented in the history of ancient Egypt.
For a long time, this historical event and the evaluation of related figures have been a hot issue in the field of ancient world history.
It is generally believed that this was a political struggle under the cloak of religion, a struggle for power waged by the pharaohs to get rid of the growing influence of the priesthood of Amun.
This "reform" lasted for more than a decade, and there were already some signs of compromise with the opposition in the latter part of Ehnatun's rule.
After the accession of Tuthamun, the famous revival stone inscription marked the complete return of Egypt to traditional religion, and at the same time, it also opened the prelude to the evaluation of Ekhnatun as an unusual monarch.
The forgotten heretical pharaoh: Ekhnatun in ancient texts
With the death of Ekhnatun and his two short-lived monarchs, the young Tutan Hathong took the throne and implemented a series of policies, including changing his birth name from Tutan Hatten to Tutan Hamun and re-worshipping the god Amun.
In the second year of his reign, the new king moved the religious center of the country back to Thebes and issued a series of edicts signaling a return to tradition, including the "Stone of Revival" now in the Cairo Museum.
This inscription depicts the deplorable state of Egypt at the time of Tuthamun's accession to the throne:
From Koh Chang to the swamps of the delta, temples and cities of gods and goddesses have collapsed, leaving their sanctuaries in ruins, with only weed-covered hills.
The earth is falling, their temples seem to have never existed, and their dwellings have become paths to be trodden on.
The gods ignored the land: if an army was sent to Zaheel to expand Egypt, they would gain nothing, if they prayed to the gods, the gods would not respond, and if they prayed to the goddess, they would not succeed.
Because of their (broken) bodies, their hearts are weak, and they destroy what has been built.
After that, Pharaoh began to rebuild the temple and make sacrifices, and the gods rejoiced and would protect Egypt.
The text makes no mention of Ekhnatun, but the people and events it refers to in the years of the Egyptian catastrophe are self-evident to the intended audience of the edict that had just lived through that period of history.
Therefore, during the Tutenhamun period, the official level began to make a clear negative assessment of Ehnatun and his time, but did not directly attack Ehnatun himself, but adopted a deliberate oblivion method, trying to completely erase this period of history from the official record.
This process began roughly with Tutten Hamun and continued through the reigns of Ayi, Holyamhob, Ramses I, and Seti I, and continued through the reign of Ramses II.
The first way to "de-list" Ehnatun is to simply demolish its buildings.
Holim Hobb, Ramses II, and many other monarchs removed large quantities of stone from Ekhnatun's buildings at the Karnak Temple and Amarna to build or fill their own monumental structures, such as the Pillar Hall of the Karnak Temple and the Second Tower Gate.
Thousands of these stones have been discovered, and archaeologists have tried to reconstruct them in their original order based on their patterns and inscriptions, from which much important historical information can be gleaned about the Ekhnatun era.
Opponents of Ekhnatun could not have imagined that what was supposed to be a way to erase the mark of the "heretical pharaoh" would have accidentally saved much of the key information.
The same was true of the city of Ammarna after the failure of the reforms, and although the stone of the main buildings was demolished and shipped elsewhere, the fate of its abandonment has left a large number of remains, including the layout of the city, many living quarters and tombs, less affected by later eras.
The Amarna era thus became one of the periods in which the ancient Egyptian civilization was relatively rich in historical materials.
The second way of "delisting" is to completely erase the monarchs of the Amarna period from the list of commemorative kings.
The selective preservation of Maneto's History of Egypt in Josephus's Appian, for the first time in history, connects Moses from the Old Testament with Ehnathon, inaugurating a tradition that reverberates even into modern times.
"Pioneers in the establishment of monotheistic religions": the establishment of the classic image of modern Ekhnatun
From the Ptolemaic dynasty through the Roman Empire to the early 19th century, travellers traveled to Amarna via the Romans, leaving graffiti or recording their sights and experiences at the abandoned site.
They did not know who the images in the ruins depicted or could read the meaning of the words, but they were often struck by the stark difference between the representation of these characters and scenes and the usual Egyptian art style.
The introduction of Ehenatun and Amarna into the eyes of modern scholars began with the Napoleonic expedition of 1798-1799, when a large number of scholars from the French army began a large-scale visit to the ancient Egyptian civilization.
In the twenties of the 19th century, Champollion successfully deciphered hieroglyphs and made a brief visit to Amarna, where he discovered the Great Temple of Atun and the feminine body statue of Ehnatun, believing that he might be suffering from illness.
At this time, however, Champollion, the "father of Egyptology," was still ignorant of the "new religion" of Ekhnatun, as well as the rest of the world.
This is a testament to the excellence of Egyptian civilization and Ehnathon. Although Brested took Egyptology as the starting point of his academic career, he went on to engage in macroscopic studies of the world's early civilizations and published a number of influential monographs.
Ekhnatun and his attempts to create a monotheistic religion still occupy an important place in his civilizational development coordinate system, as evidenced by the relief directly above the entrance to the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.
As the founder of the Academy, this relief was designed by Brested himself.
If Brested's anti-Catholic stance gives Ekhnatun the image of a break with tradition, the British Egyptologist Wigel's Ekhnatun is more moderate and humane.
Wigel agrees with his predecessors about Ekhnatun's earliest attempt to establish a monotheistic religion, and also agrees with Brested's view that Ekhnatun was the first "idealist" and the first "individual" in history.
But in this biographical treatise, he provides more details of Ehnathon's life and also makes it more complete.
Coming from a family with a strong Anglican religious atmosphere, Wigel did not want to embarrass his family by discussing even the religious disputes of ancient Egypt too much in the book.
He spends more time emphasizing the similarities between Akhnathon's new religion and Christianity, such as comparing the image of the sun disc of the god Akhnaton with the Christian cross, both of which are symbols of the gods rather than objects of worship themselves.
It is noteworthy that from his letters, it is clear that Wigel himself was quite accommodating, even almost deist, in terms of religious beliefs.
His books were so popular because he knew what kind of content the Victorian public liked and deliberately did what he liked.
To this day, this judgment remains the most widely circulated view of the nature of the Reformation in Ehnatun, of which Wigel was one of the most important propagators.
White or Black: Ehnatun from a Racist Perspective
Ekhnatun's image as a pioneer in the establishment of monotheism has been widely recognized by European and American intellectual circles and the general public, and it is a topic that can be openly discussed in the context of a common cultural and religious tradition.
At the same time, the reasons for Ekhnatun's reforms have also attracted much attention, and among all possible factors, "royal blood" has become another label for Ekhnatun because it is closely related to racist tendencies.
In the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, almost contemporaneous with the rediscovery of the cities of Ekhnatun and Amarna, Darwin proposed the theory of biological evolution through The Origin of Species.
Later, Spencer transplanted this theory into the field of social development, becoming the father of "social Darwinism", and the influence of this theory of social evolution reached its peak at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
At the same time, the fact that the white dominance represented by the Anglo-Saxon race was established in the world, and this fact, with the "blessing" of biological evolution and social Darwinism, made the white people's sense of racial superiority swell unprecedentedly.
Thus, the Ehnatun Reform and the Amarna era are the "new knowledge" that the intelligentsia of the time gained through the discovery of new documents and archaeological materials.
Encountering the new theory of social Darwinism and its derivatives, the Reformation was naturally seen as a "mutation" in the 3,000-year-long development of ancient Egyptian civilization.
Combined with the fact that the Egyptian royal family during the New Kingdom had repeatedly married foreign princesses and the growing internationalization of the Near East, foreign factors as one of the reasons for the reform became an attractive direction of speculation.
epilogue
The archaeological and documentary material on the Ekhnatun reforms, although in many respects richer than in other eras, is incomplete, leaving much room for interpretation in the details of the reconstruction of the history of this period.
Even since the 19th century, with the establishment of Egyptology and the scientific and systematic excavation of Egyptian archaeology, Egyptology has gradually become a research work mainly carried out by professional scholars rather than amateurs, it is still inevitably influenced by cultural trends in social change, and individual scholars often show selectivity or tendencies in their research.
As the average level of education of the public has increased and the mind has become more active, the image of Ehnatun has become richer than ever, including whether he can be seen as a representative of black African civilization, whether he can speak for sexual minorities such as homosexuals because of his sexual orientation, and so on.
People are Xi to look to the ancient sages for examples when they encounter problems today, in order to obtain a rational explanation or even legitimacy for today's actions or identities.
Review the "intellectual history" of the "ever-changing" image of Ekhnatun, the "heretical pharaoh", in the changes of ancient and modern social trends, and its causes.
It can be seen that while it is extremely important to constantly renew the understanding of Ekhnatun and its time, it is equally important to restore the process of knowledge production of important conclusions in the context of social change.
As far as the idea of Ehnatun as a pioneer in the establishment of monotheism is concerned, there is ample evidence that it is relevant to Western intellectuals and people in the Christian tradition.
It is of interest to Judaism and Jewish civilization, so it is a conclusion that cannot be bypassed in Western Egyptology in terms of the evaluation of Ekhnathon.
However, it is questionable whether this is still a meaningful question for both China and the intellectuals and the people of ancient Egypt.
For this period of history, and similar questions, we may be able to reconsider the perspective from which we should study it more effectively.