Francesca Stavrakopoulou

for Freud, I think, one of those great, great forces.

And it's a force that for him is repressed and denied and eradicated, but then suddenly reemerges much later for some scholars, but for Freud, reemerges at the time of Moses, who he dates to around the same time as Akhenaten.

And it's Moses that passes this monotheism on to the Israelites.

I find it very hard to, as an academic, to say this is what he got right or this is what stands up.

I think he's on the right trail to say that there is a certain kind of, that one God religion, that it does pop up, it re-emerges because it's a very powerful notion.

It's a very powerful idea.

And because it's so contrary, it's so different in some ways to the norm, to the cultural norm.

So in the ancient world, across ancient Southwest Asia, North Africa, the Mediterranean, there's

polytheism is the norm the worship of many gods and the gods are all networked right through to obviously the hindu gods of of india once i'm absolutely some could argue due to certain forms of christianity today as as well that's another story for another time another one for another day we're gonna get you back francesca don't worry you're not getting away with just one episode here

It's a very controversial idea, one God theology in this context.

And so I think the idea that somehow these sorts of things can come back with a force, that they can't be, that these things don't just disappear.

You can't just get rid of, like you can't get rid of the whole notion of polytheism without it re-emerging or kind of adapting later on.

And so too with the notion of one God religion.

You can't just get rid of that idea.

It does come up later on.

Now, whether there's a direct DNA link, if you like, between Akhenaten.

If there's a direct link between Akhenaten's theology and his religious preferences and those that we find in the Hebrew Bible and in ancient Judaism, Christianity, etc.

No, there's no direct link, I would go as far as to say that.

But there are cultural similarities, and it's not a surprise that we find cultural similarities in this part of the world.

Yeah, so in essence,