The bust of Akhenaten from the temple of KarnakThe bust of Akhenaten from the temple of Karnak
From Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten
Ascending to the throne around 1352 BC, Pharaoh Amenhotep IV soon changed his name to Akhenaten (‘he who shines for the sun’) in an act of nearly exclusive devotion to the sun god, relegating Amun-Ra, the almighty lord of the temple of Karnak in Thebes, to the shadows.
A royal makeover
East of the sanctuary of Amun, facing the rising sun, Akhenaten built an enormous courtyard with dozens of pillars against which sandstone colossi such as this one leaned. The manner in which the king is depicted is entirely new: the elongated sovereign has a long, narrow and angular face; enormous half-closed eyes; a very long, sharp nose; oversized lips; exaggerated chin; and an interminable beard. Some of the surviving colossi bodies are nude and sexless, with protruding bellies and womanly thighs. Never before had a reigning king been depicted in the nude. This is undoubtedly an allusion to the Aten – ‘the Sun’ in Egyptian – who, according to ancient texts, was both the ‘father and mother of mankind’.
A novel concept of power
The novel concept of power holds that pharaoh and his family emanate directly from the sun. Inscribed on rectangular surfaces, the three pairs of cartouches on his chest and wrists do not bear his name, as would normally be the case, but that of the sun that bestows on him its many blessings: ‘Long life to (the sun god) Ra-Horakhty who rejoices in the horizon’ ‘in his name of light that is the Aten’.
A radical new look and a political revolution
The cause – or causes – of these strange physical deformations remain a mystery. What is certain is that there was a desire to definitively break with the past through an immediate and radical upending of traditional Egyptian image conventions. This conscious and deliberate use of new art forms in favour of a political ideology is an incredibly modern intellectual strategy that seems not to have been employed at any other time or place in antiquity.