Dr. Campbell Price

So yeah, internationalism, it's a sign of kind of cosmopolitan life at court for the wealthy.

But while people are enjoying, you know, the latest imported pottery and very fine designs and jewellery, other military things might be slipping.

And that is in proportion to the ambition of other powers.

Okay, so what follows Akhenaten?

Yeah, you could say that, I suppose.

We don't know what exactly happens.

Akhenaten's very experimental.

The experiment backfires, and they have to undo all the revolutionary... Sorry, very briefly, this experimental stuff.

Well, right, so Akhenaten decides there are no gods but the sun god, a special form of the sun god, and he is the unique interlocutor with the sun god, the Aten.

So that's why he changes his name from Amenhotep, the god Amun, is satisfied, to Akhenaten, effective for the Aten.

And then for, gosh, 15, 16, 17 years, he and his immediate successors, to a degree we're not quite sure of, espouse the worship of the Aten and they close all the other temples.

So quite apart from it just being a religious revolution, it is an economic challenge.

Because imagine you're the high priest of the god Amun and the king says, nope, we're closing the temple of Karnak.

Yeah, I mean, people have compared it to Henry VIII and monasteries and trying to wrest power from these religious institutions into the hands of the king, which I think there's a good argument that that's what Akhenaten's trying to do.

But it creates all kinds of issues.

Anyway, Akhenaten says he himself is going back

well, going back, going to a new virgin site, his capital city, what we call Amarna now, the city of Akhet.

Hence the Amarna letters that you mentioned.

Exactly.

So this is the source of the so-called diplomatic correspondence in the foreign office.