William Durand-Poole

So it's almost like if we do want to link this shining disc with Amenhotep III, there's some kind of rejuvenation going on.

It's almost like, you know, he's basking in the sun's rays and it's rejuvenating him, bringing him back a kind of boyhood.

But we can't pin any of this on Akhenaten just yet because he's not there.

As all of the old polytheistic gods are all there, all that's developing as well.

Absolutely.

Amenhotep IV, really, is his real title.

We see the change before the name changes, in fact.

And it was realised back in the 1980s, 1990s, when work was being done at Karnak, we discovered inside one of the great pylons, these huge kind of towering edifices, that they are often packed with rubble, you know, to make solid fill.

And Egyptologists realized that one of these pylons at Karnak was actually packed full of small, what we call talatat, small blocks like bricks, which were highly decorated.

And they belong to the opening years, the first five years of the reign of Amenhotep IV, Akhenaten.

And they show him worshipping this sun disk.

So he had actually built a temple for the Aten inside the domain of Amun.

which later after his death was then pulled down.

And the dramatic thing that we see here is the iconographic change.

So no longer that perfect symmetry that we think about in Egyptian art, you know, everything's in proportion, everything is in order.

Suddenly we see this image of Akhenaten with this elongated face, long, long chin,

swollen belly, long spindly legs and arms.

And behind him, with the same kind of bizarre distortion of her body, is Queen Nefertiti and three of their first daughters.

So almost from the beginning, he has in his mind the iconography is going to change entirely and the attention is going to be on the Aten.

But then he abandons, of course, as he said in the introduction, Thebes itself, and relocates upriver into Middle Egypt, and there establishes his new capital, Akhetaten, the horizon of the Aten, and with that comes the name change as well.