Aidan Dodson

You've got somebody who has come to a position of absolute power, and they decide they can do whatever they like, and they do.

But of course, yeah, that does mean that often that kind of personal vision may not be shared by everybody or even anybody else.

It's imposed while that man is still alive.

But after that, it's amazing how rapid the whole thing then just collapses.

Within three years, the royal family's moved away, back to traditional areas.

And within probably a couple of decades, the place is just simply a village with a few rather dilapidated, ruinous buildings on the edge of it.

quite keen on Aten too yeah I think there's a number of issues here one I think is that there it is that during that period not only in Egypt but elsewhere in the Middle East there is a move towards an idea of

a singularity of divinity, to put it in those terms.

Not necessarily one god, but the idea that there is a single sort of fundamental divinity and the gods may well be sort of various aspects.

That's the way in Hinduism where you've got some of these various avatars of deities.

So there's sort of a zeitgeist going on.

And indeed, his father, Amenhotep III, had been particularly keen on elevating the status of the physical sun.

Not necessarily to a full-scale god, but in Egypt there's a bit of a fine line between being a god and not being a god, because there's only one word for divinity, which embraces what we would go from sort of saint all the way through to three-fledged god.

So Amenhotep III had been very much a promoter of this, and really what Akhenaten does is just takes it one step further.

From recognising that the physical globe of the sun is a fundamental building block of life almost,

he then takes it further and makes that thing an actual deity in its own right.

So nobody had worshipped the Aten before Akhenaten.

It looks like it happens almost immediately afterwards.

And those cracks you see in the form of the deaths of half of Akhenaten's daughters within probably two or three years, and probably his mother as well.

So he's lost half of his young family almost overnight.