Dr. Campbell Price
speaker
1,433 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 10 Jun
Dr. Campbell Price’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
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.
But so that settlement in Middle Egypt is the home of the king.
It's where the king and the elite are going to be buried.
And you get the sense that Akhenaten's really kind of sequestered himself away at Amarna
and is ignoring other things where traditionally the king in ancient Egypt moved around.
It was a peripatetic court, as in other traditions.
The king moves around to keep an eye on people, to make sure that they're loyal.
Showing 1121–1140 of 1,433 · page 57 of 72
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