Akhenaten: The First Monotheist

Podcast Transcript

Approximately 3,400 years ago, Egypt was at the height of its power during the 18th Dynasty.

In the midst of this period came a Pharoah who completely upended Egyptian society. He built an entirely new capital, created an entirely new religion, neglected his empire, and ultimately caused the destruction of his dynasty.

Yet, despite his historical importance, we didn’t even know he existed for almost 3000 years.

Learn more about Akhenaten, history’s first monotheist, and his impact on ancient Egypt on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The story of Akhenaten is, I think, the most fascinating of any pharoah from Ancient Egypt.

It began during the 18th Dynasty approximately 3,400 years ago.

Egypt was a wealthy, stable empire with strong control over Nubia to the south and the Levant to the northeast. Built through conquests, it enjoyed prosperity, exercised diplomacy, and undertook massive building projects.

Religion was traditional Egyptian polytheism whose powerful priesthood had grown extremely wealthy and influential, creating a subtle tension beneath an otherwise successful system.

Amenhotep III was arguably one of the most successful pharaohs in Egyptian history, as he ruled during the peak of Egypt, benefiting from the conquests of his father, Thutmose III.

Amenhotep III ruled for about 40 years, a long reign at the time, and his successor was supposed to be his son, Thutmose, who would become Thutmose IV.

However, Thutmose died, and the crown passed to his youngest son, Amenhotep, in about the year 1353 BC, who became Amenhotep IV.

Amenhotep IV inherited a successful empire, and all he had to do was keep the engine running. Instead, he had ideas of his own, particularly in the realm of religion.

At the core of Amenhotep’s religion was his promotion of the Aten, the solar disc, as the sole, supreme deity. This was a radical break from Egypt’s thousand-year-old polytheistic tradition, which recognized hundreds of gods, foremost among them Amun, Ra, Osiris, Isis, and Ptah.

The Aten was not entirely new; it had existed as a minor solar deity during the Middle Kingdom and gained some prominence under the reign of Amenhotep III.

What Akhenaten did was unprecedented: he elevated the Aten to the status of the only true god.

This makes Atenism one of the earliest, possibly the earliest, experiments with monotheism in recorded history, predating Mosaic Judaism as a state religion, though scholars debate whether it was true monotheism or henotheism.

Henotheism is the worship of a single god, but it doesn’t deny the existence of other gods. Its is sort of a mix of polytheism and monotheism.

The Aten was depicted not as a human or animal figure, as Egyptian gods traditionally were, but as the sun disc itself, with rays ending in human hands that extended the ankh, the symbol of life, to the royal family.

Crucially, the Aten had no mythology, no consort, no cult statue, and no priesthood beyond the pharaoh himself. Akhenaten declared himself the sole intermediary between the Aten and humanity, and only through the pharaoh could the god be accessed.

Several years into his reign, Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning “Effective for the Aten.”

His wife, a woman you might have heard of, Queen Nefertiti, took the additional name Neferneferuaten, which means “Beautiful are the beauties of the Aten“. This renaming was a public, ideological declaration of total commitment to the new faith.

Akhenaten composed the Great Hymn to the Aten, one of the most remarkable religious texts of the ancient world. It celebrated the Aten as the universal creator whose light sustained all life, and whose rays were withdrawn at night, plunging the world into death-like darkness.

The hymn bears striking thematic similarities to Psalm 104 of the Hebrew Bible, a resemblance that has fascinated scholars for over a century.

Perhaps his most dramatic act was the founding of an entirely new capital city. Akhenaten chose a virgin site on the east bank of the Nile in Middle Egypt, a place untouched by any other god’s cult, and named it Akhetaten or “Horizon of the Aten”.

Today, it is known as Amarna, which is much less confusing that two words that sound almost identical. Construction began around the fifth year of his reign, and the imperial court relocated there by the ninth year.

The city was built with extraordinary speed, using a new construction technique involving smaller, standardized sandstone blocks called talatat, which could be assembled rapidly.

Amarna had features not found anywhere else in Egypt.

It had open-air temples to the Aten. This was a revolution in itself as traditional Egyptian temples were dark, enclosed sanctuaries where the god’s statue was hidden. In contrast, Aten temples were open to the sky, bathed in sunlight.

A wide Royal Road connecting the major palaces and temples. Elaborate boundary stelae were carved into the cliffs outside the city, marking the city’s sacred limits. There was also comfortable housing for officials, workers, and artisans who lived there.

Akhenaten swore by oath never to leave the boundaries of his new capital, binding himself and his court permanently to the new city.

If Akhenaten just adopted his new religion, that would be one thing, but his personal beliefs began to shape official Egyptian state policy.

He did not simply promote the Aten alongside other gods; he increasingly suppressed the traditional religious system altogether.

As his reign progressed, Akhenaten’s revolution turned aggressive. He dispatched agents throughout Egypt to enforce his new religious edicts.

He ordered that the name of the god Amun be chiseled out of temple walls, tomb inscriptions, and monuments, even from his own father’s cartouches. A cartouche is an oval-shaped frame in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that encloses and protects the royal name of a pharaoh.

He also closed temples to the traditional gods and even removed all plural references to “gods.”

Perhaps most importantly, at least politically, he redirected the vast wealth and estates of the traditional Amun priesthood to the new Aten cult. This was economically and politically devastating to the powerful priesthood of Amun at Karnak, who controlled enormous landholdings and wielded immense influence.

Their suppression was not merely theological; it was a direct power grab by Akhenaten to centralize religious and economic authority in the crown, and away from the powerful priesthood, which had served as the bureaucracy in Egypt.

While consumed by his religious revolution, Akhenaten largely neglected Egypt’s empire. The Amarna Letters, more on this in a bit reveal desperate pleas from Egypt’s Canaanite vassal rulers and Syro-Palestinian allies for military aid against the encroaching Hittites and local raiders.

Akhenaten’s replies were largely dismissive or nonexistent. Egypt’s influence in the Levant, built painstakingly over generations, eroded significantly during his reign.

Akhenaten died around 1336–1334 BC, after approximately 17 years of rule. His tomb was prepared in a royal wadi near Amarna. What happened to his body remains uncertain, as his tomb has never been found.

The aftermath of Akhenaten’s death threw Egypt into chaos.

His successor was Smenkhkare, a pharoah about whom we know almost nothing and who had an extremely short reign of less than 2 years.

They were replaced by Neferneferuaten, who was probably Queen Nefertiti, as she had taken the same name, but this has never been confirmed. Assuming this was Nefertiti, she too reigned for only a short period before she was replaced by the son of Akhenaten, although not necessarily her son. It’s someone you have probably heard of, Tutankhaten, better known to the world as Tutankhamun, aka King Tut.

Tut ascended to the throne at around 8 or 9. He was heavily influenced by his advisors, including the Egyptian General Horemheb and a court official named Ay, who persuaded him to reverse his father’s policies.

He abandoned Amarna, restored the traditional gods, reopened the temples of Amun, and changed his name to Tutankhamun.

The priestly class finally had its revenge, and the Aten experiment was over.

Tutankhamun only reigned for nine years. His replacement was Ay, one of his advisors, who might have been a relative, and who in turn was replaced by Horemheb, who might also have been related.

In the introduction to this episode, I mentioned something that might have seemed odd. I said that we had no knowledge of Akhenaten for over 3000 years. If that’s true, how did it happen, and how do we know about him today?

Ay and Horemheb were the last pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty. While Tutankhamun reversed many of his father’s policies, Ay and Horemheb, as well as early rulers of the 19th Dynasty, sought to completely eliminate Akhenaten from history.

They pursued one of the most complete damnatio memoriae policies in world history. If you remember my episode on the subject, damnatio memoriae is a Latin term referring to the complete erasure of someone’s name.

The city of Amarna was torn down, and its blocks repurposed as fill material within other temples. Akhenaten’s name was chiseled off monuments across Egypt, and the few surviving texts that referenced him at all called him only “the enemy” or “the criminal of Akhetaten.”

His reign was entirely struck from the official king lists, with the Eighteenth Dynasty recorded as ending with Amenhotep III, as though Akhenaten, Smenkhkare (SMEN-kah-KAR-ay), Neferneferuaten, Tutankhamun, and Ay had never existed.

Horemheb further muddied the historical waters by usurping Tutankhamun’s monuments for himself. The net result of this sweeping campaign was that Akhenaten vanished from human memory for more than three thousand years.

The rediscovery of Akhenaten began in the 19th century. Early Egyptologists began investigating a site on the Nile, now known as Amarna, the ruins of Akhenaten’s capital.

Travelers had noticed unusual boundary stelae carved into cliffs that described a king founding a new city for the Aten, but no one understood what it meant.

The breakthrough came in 1887, when local villagers accidentally discovered a cache of clay tablets, now known as the Amarna Letters. Written in Akkadian, they turned out to be diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian court and other Near Eastern powers.

These letters anchored the site firmly in the 14th century BC and revealed the existence of a pharaoh operating from this previously unknown capital.

Excavations soon followed, led by archaeologists such as Flinders Petrie, who uncovered the city’s layout, its temples, palaces, and distinctive art style. The strange, elongated depictions of the royal family and the repeated references to the Aten made it clear that this period represented a major break from traditional Egyptian religion.

One of the most famous finds came later, in 1912, when a German team led by Ludwig Borchardt discovered the stunning painted bust of Nefertiti in a sculptor’s workshop. This single object helped bring global attention to the Amarna period and its unique artistic style.

By studying inscriptions, reliefs, and artifacts alongside king lists and other Egyptian records, scholars were able to reconstruct the identity of the “heretic king” who had been erased. The name Akhenaten re-emerged, along with the story of his religious revolution centered on the Aten.

The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 dramatically raised public awareness of the period.

What makes this rediscovery remarkable is how complete the erasure had been. Unlike many ancient rulers who were forgotten over time, Akhenaten was deliberately written out of history. It took archaeology, chance discoveries, and decades of scholarship to bring him back into the historical narrative.

There are many different lessons you can take away from the reign of Akhenaten. One is the danger of instituting changes that alienate and anger the ruling class. Another might be about implementing an idea like monotheism before everyone is ready for it.

But perhaps the greatest lesson that I take away from this is that even if you institute the most historic and groundbreaking changes in a society, there is no guarantee that history will remember you.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

The first review today comes from listener Paul1662829285 from Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write:

Great overviews

Each episode is such a good overview of world monuments and other interesting topics. I just started listening after visiting the Gateway Arch a few weeks ago, and it just so happens to be the topic of the episode today. Love this podcast.

The next review comes from cellies6 on Apple Podcast in the US.

Great show!!

This is my favorite podcast, and I love the historical podcast. Please do more Roman and world war podcasts! Also is there a different context for you to use the difference between Muslim vs Islam?

Thanks both of you, and Cellies, Islam is the name of the religion, and a muslim is the person who practices the religion.

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