Aidan Dodson

Just to say, when you mentioned the question of the fact that there was no sun shown, it's worthwhile pointing out that it had never been tradition for royal suns ever to be shown on monuments.

And this goes right the way back to the days of the pyramids.

When you look at earlier examples of the limited number of royal family scenes, it's always the daughters.

When you've got in the Jubilee reliefs of Amenhotep III, for example, he's shown with Queen Tea and a load of his daughters.

No sign of the two known sons of...

We have no idea why this is, like with most of these things.

The point with the love of ancient Egypt, we know what we can see, but trying to get behind that into what it is, and most of the explanations you'll see in print about why the Egyptians did stuff is complete guesswork by an individual Egyptologist because they don't tell us this.

They knew what it was.

But yeah, for some unknown reason,

there seems to be a taboo against showing royal sons.

And the only time you see a royal son prior to the reign of Akhenaten anyway, because we do actually have one representation of a son, which I doubt this will be coming back to shortly, is when they've got a day job.

So, for example, the only reason why Akhenaten's elder brother, and who would have become pharaoh had he not died prematurely, Prince Jack Moser, the only reason why I have a depiction of him is because he was the high priest of Ptah.

And there is one context where he is being shown with his day job as high priest of Ptah.

Otherwise, he wouldn't be shown at all.

Yeah, I think the reason why we've got this sort of overload of the royal daughters, it's going back a second.

One of the oddest things about the whole Aten business is although the god is visible to everybody, it's the globe of the sun in the sky, the royal family have to act as the intermediaries between that god and people.

And therefore, that unit of the royal family, it's not just the king, not just the queen, but also the daughters,

are part of that almost point of nexus, if you like, between the divine and earth.

And I think that's, for whatever reason, it's the whole family is recognised as being that important point, not just simply the king and queen.

But once Akhenaten has done this, it changes everything forever.