Aidan Dodson

There is very much a before and after.

It's a bit like almost nowadays we talk about before and after COVID almost, that his reign marks that.

And although on the face of things, things return back to normal, in detail they don't.

A really good example of that is when you look at the decoration of private tombs in Egypt.

Before Akhenaten and going back thousands of years, a major part of the decoration of a private tomb was representations of agricultural scenes, recreating the world which the dead person wanted to be in in the next world.

After Akhenaten, they've gone completely and never come back.

All the scenes in tomb chapels are now to do with ritual, funerary processions, and so on.

No, actually, I completely reject the idea of the priesthood power being a major issue here.

I think it's actually due to genuine belief.

And I think what it is, is that having had everything thrown up in the air, people start to rethink, to start thinking again about what matters.

How do things work?

How should things work?

And so on and so forth.

And I think part of that is rethinking how tombs should be decorated.

Because they've had a point where no tomb has been decorated in the traditional way for a decade or so.

Now they're thinking again.

I think there are other areas where, again, there's a different feel after Akhenaten because they've had to restart, start thinking again.

Another one, an interesting one, is that prior to Akhenaten, the royal family was very rarely shown on public monuments.

After him, and certainly when the new dynasty, the 19th, comes in a couple of decades later, the royal family appears regularly in spades.

So although the reason why the royal family was being shown by Akhenaten was probably to do with the theology of the Aten, the idea that the royal family was now a thing to be shown on temple walls has now come in, and Ramesses II does it massively later on.