Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Atenism: Controversy and Evidence. by Garry Victor Hill

1 Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Atenism: Controversy and Evidence. By Garry Victor Hill 2 Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Atenism: Controversy and Evidence. By Garry Victor Hill Revised and Expanded Edition Frisky Press Armidale Australia 2020 3 Contents Copyright Statement p. 4 Sources p. 4 Introduction p. 6 The Enigma of Akhenaten and Nefertiti p. 9 Amenophis III: His Era and His Influence p. 33 Akhenaten and Nefertiti Rule p. 57 The Amarna Years p. 79 The Beginnings of Decline at Amarna p. 100 Images and Reality: Akhenaten and the Royal Family p. 117 The Last Years at Amarna p. 140 Appendices p. 201 Bibliography p. 223 Illustration Acknowledgements p. 233 About the Author p. 243 4 Copyright © Illustrations: Where creators are credited in the original computer source they have been acknowledged in this work, both in captions within the text and in a list of acknowledgements after the bibliography. Many of the pictures are from Wikipedia/Wikimedia and/or Creative Commons. Others are in the Public Domain. Even so, all illustrations included here have also been put through the internet’s requested permission steps. Nothing that failed that process has been used. Illustrations are also allowable under Australian law through two rules, first the government grants permission for using illustrations for review purposes. Teachers are also allowed to use images for study and to use websites. The author is a qualified registered Australian teacher and this e-book has been used in two schools and three universities without financial or personal gain. Even bearing in mind their current allowability, readers and researchers should not lift pictures from this work. Find the original attribution and credit it. Attribution of images can found by holding the cursor arrow over an image. Freqently further links can be made by holding shift and a left click simultaneously. Despite allowability, if any illustration used here appears against the owner’s wishes the owner can either request acknowledgement under the caption in words of their choosing or request removal. Text: © The text is copyright. Fair dealings for purposes of study or criticism is allowed. For the whole book storage in electronic systems or bound printed out copies for library research is also allowed. The author would appreciate communication on this. Selling copies becomes another matter and is not allowed without permission. Sources American/English spellings have not been standardised in the text, but coloured website attributions have been made uniform in light blue. Few websites had posting dates at the time of initial writing several years ago and several were used before including the access date became standard, so few access dates have been given. Books and articles have been included with websites in the Bibliography as they often overlap in 5 form. By avoiding abrevationese in source notes and the Bibliography I have slightly altered some sources. Volume replaces vol. Editor for ed. Quoting for qtg and so on. Names from different sources have been standardised. The concept of the split infinitive was issued as a virtual edict and is beloved by anal retentives and grammar fascists: ignore them. Critics of the passive voice structure have a point, but in a topic such as this, when it is often unclear who did the action, it has a place. While fallacies and errors are referred to, the sources for them or references for their perpetuators are usually deliberately withheld. Litigation, retaliatory anonymous attacks from cyberspace, academic bunfights and humiliating others writing on the topic are all best avoided. 6 Introduction Even by the 1920s well over a hundred books had been written about Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Atenism and the Amarna era, so why write 1another? There are several essential reasons. In the last few years a great deal of new information about Amarna, Karnak, Tutankhamen, Nefertiti and Akhenaten and their families has emerged, much of it in television documentaries. It amazes that despite a deluge of media coverage from 1922 onward, our image of the last Atenist to rule at Amarna, Tutankhamen, was based on comparatively few of those found objects publicised in the 1920s. These were amongst over five thousand found then, but not studied in detail or generally even known of until recently. Howard Carter, the finder of Tutankhamen’s tomb and the cataloguer of so many objects there, did refer in the 1920s to boxes full of finds lying derelict in museum storerooms. 2 He then goes on to describe how if even rudimentary cataloguing and on site recording had taken place with these objects, 1920s knowledge of Ancient Egypt would have increased by at least fifty per cent. 3 Assessments of recent revelations show the truthfulness of Carter’s regretful statement. In the 1920s museum staff packed away this treasure trove and only over ninety years later are experts in Cairo studying some of its contents.4 Even within that smaller assessed proportion, many objects connect to the world of Tutankhamen’s parents. Studying only three such objects, a chest, a bow and a throwing stick, have changed already 2 Howard Carter, The Tomb of Tutankhamen. London, 1972. p. 54 3 Ibid., 4 ‘Tut’s Treasures.’ National Geographic. Producer Julie Nadezna. Narrator. Paul Mercier. SBS. 7:30 p.m. Episode 1. January 14th 2018; John Baines, and Jaromir Mâlek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt. Oxford; 1984. p. 101; Jamie Simpson, (Director). Tutankhmen: Life Death and Legacy. Three Episodes. BBC Studios, 2019. 7:30 p.m. 5th April 2020. Presenters Dan Snow. Rakasha Dave and John Sergeant. 7 how we see Nefertiti. Like the famous Nefertiti bust, the equally world famous gold mask of Tutankhamen has also come under reassessment, with some surprising results. Other surprises have come from reports and articles concerning recent finds at Amarna. Earlier indications that Amarna was not a paradise were essentially tentative. Recently archaeological evidence, much of it concerning the workforce there, revealed much, so Akhenaten’s utopia now appears very differently to earlier depictions. Experts and creators of fiction came to their conclusions based on art, architecture and idealistic hymns, not on the recent excavations. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Joann Fletcher, a Yorkshire Egyptologist, returned from Egypt and investigated an Egyptian mummy at a Yorkshire museum, having found a brief mention of this in an old newspaper clipping. This led to Fletcher finding and then cataloguing bequests, many from William Flinders Petrie’s 1890s excavation at Amarna. When delivered, museum staff found they did not have enough space to display Petrie’s bequeathed collection, so they left it in crates, where the collection stayed for seventy years. Many of these objects also change our image of Amarna. The work on the correct joining of talats of Karnak from early in Akhenaten’s reign has gone on much further and faster since being computerised and researchers revealed some surprises that also dramatically change perceptions. Kew’s documentary on the most famous Nefertiti bust also changes perceptions of that queen, perceptions that have lasted a hundred years. A single inscription found in 2012 disproved other theories about her and Akhenaten and validated others which were expressed as tentative or speculative. This inscription alone makes everything printed about this couple before its revelation outdated, incomplete at best, and more frequently, definitely wrong. Investigations using DNA has also confirmed some theories and discredited others. Most importantly, Egyptologists now know that they have the mummy of Akhenaten and have proved his link to Tutankhamen. These same investigations have created new conundrums and controversies. 8 Other underused or overlooked information used in this work comes from out of print books and frequently undervalued sources that this writer has found at last. These include E.A.W. Budge’s Amenism, Atenism and Egyptian Monotheism. (1923), Reverend James Baikie’s The Amarna Age: A Study of the Crisis of the Ancient World. (1926), Mary Chubb’s eyewitness report on the 1930 Amarna excavations, originally published in 1954 as Nefertiti Lived Here and Joann Fletcher’s The Search for Nefertiti (2004). Nearly a hundred years old, Budge’s and Baikie’s works survive as essentially relevant, despite some of their ideas being proved wrong. Evidence has proved much more of what they stated or suspected. Baikie’s other great virtue is that he reproduces so many rare and important documents and inscriptions in full. The Amarna Letters have also now appeared on the internet, many in English translation. While this book has the advantages of using recent revelations and sources, it can only be considered updated until yesterday. As a perfect illustration of that point, on last night’s news the accidental discovery of eighty royal mummies in well-preserved sarcophagi near Saqquara was a story. Some were from the old kingdom, some from the new and all are apparently royal. Today is the last editing day. Given the way so many new finds are emerging so rapidly and so many mysteries and gaps within the topic remain, it cannot be the final word – but then can any book? 9 The Enigma of Akhenaten and Nefertiti Many of the studies of Akhenaten and Nefertiti focus on different disputed points. These usually include the following: How long did his rule last? Was he a co-regent with his father? Was he suffering from diseases that left him physically and /or mentally odd? Was he a staid, happy family man,

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