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Chapter 1: Why did Egyptian priests wear animal masks?
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, ad-free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com. Now imagine that you are an Egyptian priest in the year 1350 BCE. Your world is already ancient, 3000 years old already.
Your temple has stood for centuries. Its walls blaze with colour, processions of gods, offerings of incense, hymns inscribed in hieroglyphs that will track the movement of the cosmos itself. Your day is structured by ritual, the waking of the god in the sanctuary, the presentation of food and linen, the sealing of the inner chamber at dusk, just as goes on in Hindu temples today in India.
Generations after generations of your family have done this. The god is Amun, king of the gods, lord of Thebes, the hidden one whose breath fills the entire world. And the temple you serve is the greatest religious institution on earth.
But just imagine that all of that, all of it is gone within a decade. Your temple gets closed down. The statue of your God is smashed to pieces. Everywhere the name has been chiseled, it is removed by a blunt instrument in Egypt. Everywhere. So the very existence of these gods declared to be lies.
A new theology will descend on the country, imposed from above by a pharaoh who has renamed himself, moved the capital, built an entirely new city, and decreed that from now on, there is only one divinity worthy of worship, only one, and that is the sun disk, the Aten. So no more myths. No more statues, no more processions, just this one round shining disc and the light it pours on the world.
And access to that light, access to the divine itself runs through only one man. And that man is the Pharaoh Akhenaten.
This is the most radical religious revolution in ancient history. Whether it was the world's first true monotheism, whether it planted a seed that would eventually produce Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Bible, of Christianity, of Islam, is one of the most debated questions in the study of religion. And that is exactly what we are here to explore today. And we're all very excited about it.
This is Empire, and I'm William Durand-Poole.
Yes, and I'm Anita Arnott. And you know, when you were saying, imagine that you are in this place and being venerated and worshipped, I could imagine that quite easily.
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Chapter 2: What was the significance of Akhenaten's religious revolution?
Anyway, we are at episode three of our Amana series. We're diving deeper into the question of what exactly was Akhenaten's religion?
Our guest today is someone who brings a quite exceptional combination of qualities to this conversation. It is our old friend Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. Welcome back, Lloyd. Hello, both. It's good to be back with you. It really is. Very nice of you.
So to remind everyone who doesn't know Lloyd's extraordinary credentials, he is both the professor of ancient history at Cardiff University and the author of The Magnificent Persians, The Age of the Great Kings, which first brought us together. I spent an entire summer driving around the country listening to Lloyd on his audio book, which I completely loved and warmly recommend.
But since he first came on the show, Lloyd became a priest.
I mean, it was a proper calling, okay? It's not like going for a job. It was something that I was moved to do. And I was moved to do it, actually, when I was very young, when I was in my 20s. You know, I first kind of got this call and I thought, no, no, no, just put it off, put it off, put it off. And then, you know, one day I was teaching a module on ancient Israel.
teaching the book of Isaiah to my students. And this overwhelming desire, this feeling came from deep within me, which said, okay, Lloyd, you've been doing this for long enough. You need to take this message elsewhere now. And that was the start of my journey towards the church.
When we first actually met in person, long after we'd first met on screen, you were all clericaled up. I was. I was all dog collared up. It was a surprise to everyone.
Oh, do you know what? If it wasn't such a warm day, I'd have had to do that again today. Mighty fine sight you make. Let's start at the very beginning, Lloyd.
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Chapter 3: How did Akhenaten's beliefs differ from traditional Egyptian polytheism?
Before Akhenaten, before the revolution that he brings about, there is a very rich tradition tapestry of a religious world that he's born into, where there are pretty much gods for everything. I mean, from the very, very small, you'll have a god of the liver to, you know, this sort of pantheon like Hindu gods, if you come from the Hindu tradition or Greek mythology.
And he is born to that richness, but he's about to destroy all of it.
What's going on? Well, the Egyptian pantheon was vast. When you go to Egypt today, you often hear local guides, I've overheard them say, how many gods do the Egyptians worship? I will tell you, 777. No truth in that. And in fact, I think nobody ever tried to count to tell you the truth. And you're right, Anita, to say that there were great state gods like Amun-Re, Isis, Osiris,
had huge temples and great pilgrimage followers, but also they're the tiny little gods as well. You know, the gods against scorpion bites or the gods of digestion, whatever it might be.
Oh God, I love it. There's a god of arthritis.
I mean, all sorts of things, you know, and it says so much, doesn't it, about ancient perception of self and society that you need this.
Not just ancient, Lloyd. You're paying your first visit to India to come to our festival next January and you'll find that there are still gods of for example, that are worshipped here. Little gods as well as great gods like Lord Shiva.
Sometimes these gods, of course, you worship them as kind of preemptive strikes, really, don't you? You know, you worship a god of arthritis to say, please don't give me arthritis. You know, you worship the scorpion goddess, not because she's helping you daily, but please, please keep the scorpions away from me.
So Egyptian polytheism operates on all of these different levels, where we could say state religion and domestic religion, but also during the New Kingdom, and we're in the middle of the New Kingdom at this point, the Egyptians had expanded their empire and they were happily bringing home foreign gods from Syria, from Canaan.
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Chapter 4: What role did the Aten play in Akhenaten's new theology?
They all believe in these things. Listeners might remember that in the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a competition. Which god is the stronger? Not which god is real, which is the stronger. So even in the Hebrew Bible, the prophets are not saying there aren't any other gods, necessarily. There are other people's gods.
It also worked the other way around. I mean, when the Greeks came to Egypt, Lloyd, they would look at Amun and say, well, that's Zeus, obviously, because the parallels were so maintained and they were so respected that people felt they could intertwine very easily. So you had these teeny tiny gods. Was there not a god of the temple hinge whose only job-
was to make sure the hinge opened the door. And that had its own god. Isn't that glorious?
Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's evoked in things like the Book of the Dead, the Spells for the Dead. Because if your hinge sticks at that point, it means the soul can't get through the door. It means disaster for everyone. So yes, my favourite god of all, of all the pantheons in antiquity, is a goddess called Crypole. And she's the goddess of hangovers for the Greeks. I love that. I really do.
Goddess of Hangover. Well, bring her back.
Literally a god we can all pray to at some point or the other. The centre of the system in this period is Amun-Ra. Flesh Amun-Ra out for us because children will have seen the picture, you know, that line drawing of, you know, sort of, yeah, just describe it.
When he is depicted, he is depicted usually in the form of a man. His skin tends to be blue, a kind of cosmic blue, a universal blue, as it were. He wears a crown with two huge falcon feathers that come from it and a false beard on his chin.
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Chapter 5: How did Akhenaten's reign affect the priesthood of Amun?
Sometimes he's depicted as a ram. So kind of all the power of the kind of the male ram. But interestingly, within the theology itself of the New Kingdom, he is called the Invisible One. So although he is represented in iconography, people think of him, in fact, as an abstract, the great hidden one.
And that's very important because I think lots of people assume that Egyptians are going around worshipping gods who appear before them, very often with animal heads and so forth. But the idea of invisibility is also there as well. It's also part of it.
One thing I've always wanted to know, Lloyd, is that when you see these animal-headed gods, are worshippers being presented by priests with masks on, pretending to be the gods? And is that where it comes from or not?
I think there was an element of that, but we don't know much about it. But I think that certainly during... embalming ceremonies, for instance, when the body was prepared for the tomb, I think it's highly likely that a priest would don the mask of the jackal god Anubis, for instance.
But I don't think, as we get in kind of Hollywood films, that these priests were kind of, you know, cavorting around with the heads of cows and bulls.
It's not Brendan Fraser territory. No, exactly.
As lovely as I do. No, no, not quite.
And the priests, they were very, very powerful. I mean, not just powerful because they were the gateway to the great gods, but I mean, you also had them controlling. I think, you know, the priests of Amun-ad-Karnak ran, what is it, 80% of the country's industrial output, you know, all of the arable output. Absolutely. They were like little mini chancellors of the exchequer.
Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. So the Temple of Amun at Karnak in particular, I mean, a vast, vast structure, acres upon acres. It's an overawing experience to be there. And right at the heart of it is this tiny little holy of holies, which had at the centre a little gilded wooden box with little doors to it. And inside, a little gold statue of Amun.
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Chapter 6: What were the architectural changes introduced by Akhenaten?
were the wealthiest and most powerful priesthood in the whole of Egypt. And the temple itself was not just a place of worship, it was a farm, it was a textile industry, it was the center of education, it was the center of artistic production. So its economy It's unfathomable, really. I mean, it was so wealthy.
And many of the gods had this, you know, the Temple of Ptah in Memphis, for instance, or the Temple of Sobek in Upper Egypt, but nothing equals the Temple of Amun at Karnak, the superstructure.
And the pharaoh himself, where did he fit into this whole priesthood and religion?
This is an interesting question because... Since the Old Kingdom, the Pyramid Age, which, as you said in your introduction, Willie, is already 3,000 years old by the New Kingdom period. Since then, pharaohs had been accepted and indeed promoted themselves as living gods. This is a kind of hard concept for us to get our heads around, of course. Keir Starmer could do with that now, couldn't he?
Of course, we have some. Some leaders who believe that they may well be gods, you know. I can't think who you are indicating here. It's a really strange one because, of course, the Egyptians saw their rulers become old. and forgetful and decrepit and, you know, losing teeth and hair, and yet still maintain that they are living gods. And eventually they die, of course.
So the way in which this was kind of used in Egyptian theology was to suggest that The kingship, the pharaoh himself, is forever. The individual may change, but the institution of the pharaoh goes on and on and on. So as one pharaoh dies, he becomes the new Osiris, and his son or heir becomes the new Horus. So there's this constant cycle of life and death, life and death, life and death. But
For most people in Egypt, they really did believe that the pharaoh was a god. And that's very different from the kind of things we get in Mesopotamia, for instance, where kings like Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, this kind, they were the viceroy of god. So they were charged with things, you know, by God. But here in Egypt, we have a mortal man who is also at the same time an immortal God.
And in the iconography, you see the kind of closeness between Pharaoh and the gods. They often hug him.
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Chapter 7: How did Akhenaten's policies impact Egyptian society?
They'll kiss him on the lips. He's depicted at the same size as the gods, you know.
I wonder if it's because they don't get much exposure to the Pharaoh. Because if you think about Akhenaten's dad, Amenhotep III, if you look at his mummy, it wasn't a beautiful thing to look at. He was morbidly obese. It's suggested that he was covered in abscesses, riddled with something that looks like arthritis. Could they maintain this godliness? Because no one saw them.
No one saw the decrepitude of the flesh.
I think there's a lot in that, Anita, I really do. The kind of mystique of monarchy is held up by that, isn't it? The very invisibility of the monarch, I think, is very important within all of this. And, you know, the pharaohs of Egypt did not go around pressing the flesh in the manner of sort of modern European monarchs at all. They didn't do their balcony presentations, this kind of thing.
There was a mystery around them because they were sacrosanct after all.
So you treat them as a god. This distinction you draw between Egypt and Mesopotamia is the same, interestingly, in the Hindu world between India and Southeast Asia. And in India, kings like Rajaraja Chola are the viceroy of Lord Shiva, and there are pictures of him standing below Lord Shiva in his temple. But in Cambodia, the Khmer temples,
kings portrayed with divine attributes, they're holding the conch of Vishnu or whatever it is.
Absolutely. And it's a huge leap between the two of them. It's a big difference. It really is a huge difference there. So that's the world we're in. In Pharaonic Egypt, we've got a divine pharaoh.
You've got the dad, okay, Amenhotep, who is this glorious son and all gods and divine and respects all gods. Isn't he responsible for just hundreds and hundreds of statues of Sekhmet? His iconography is very, very strong. And you've got his son growing up in the shadow of this man.
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Chapter 8: What happened to Akhenaten's legacy after his death?
Is he growing up with ideas beyond his station even then? Do we have any indication that he's about to basically toss it all out of the window?
We have no indication of this whatsoever because our sources are completely silent on the man who would be Akhenaten. until he appears as Akhenaten. And that's because generally in the New Kingdom, princes didn't get much of a run-in publicly at all. He wasn't the eldest son. No, no, he wasn't. There was somebody else, a prince called Thutmose, who seems to have pre-deceased his brother.
We get no knowledge of him. Although I think it is important to expand your idea of what this world was like under Amenhotep III and his kind of divine status. The other person who was fundamentally important in our Akhenaten's life is his mother, Queen Ti. And she was also going through a process of divinization too.
In fact, under Queen Ti, Amenhotep III, her husband, creates her as a living goddess too. And we get from Amenhotep III a very developed theogony, which stated that Amenhotep III himself was the offspring of Amun-Ra, who had slept with his mother, Mutemwia, and progenerated Amenhotep III. So there is a kind of theogony that's going on here.
All of this is building up the divine status of Pharaoh and the royal women as well. And of course, the royal women become very important in the Amarna period.
And we get some hints towards the end of his father's reign that he is making theological changes and there is a shift to the system. Nothing as radical as what will happen.
The name Aten starts emerging in the last decade of Amenhotep III's reign. Now, we can't pin that on Akhenaten at all yet because, as I say, he doesn't appear in the imagery or anything.
And Akhenaten, we should say, is just the everyday Egyptian word for disk, isn't it?
A sun disk, a shining disk. And so we see, for instance, Amenhotep has a beautiful palace built at Malkata on the West Bank. And there he has a lake built. And it's called the Lake of the Aten. And a bark that floats on the lake is called the Bark of the Aten. And so this name is getting used more and more. And it's kind of interesting as well.
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