Seeing King Tut November 13, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : London , trackbackMary Beard, my favourite academic blogger, has a piece today about the Tutankhamun exhibition which opens shortly at the Dome. I hadn’t been planning to see it – I saw a smaller version in Auckland years ago, and the full thing at the Egyptian Museum when I went to Cairo in 2001, but she mentions that there are many artefacts from the reign of the previous pharoah, Akhenaten, as well.
My favourite memory of the Egyptian Museum is the statues of Akhenaten, completely different from everything else, tucked away in a corner away from the standard guided tour. These huge alabaster works are completely different from everything else in the museum, with naturalistic faces and deformed bodies which may actually show how he looked.
Akhenaten was a much more interesting character than Tutankhamen, who is really only famous for having his tomb survive more or less intact. He introduced monotheism to Egypt, building on the existing creator sun-god and transferring worship from the traditional Ra-Horus to Aten, literally the ‘sun-disc’. Banning other gods, and defacing or destroying their statues and temples, he attempted to centralise all worship to a single cult.
The statues I saw came from Akhetaten in Amarna, the city Aknenaten built as his religious centre, and possibly his capital. The city was built on a less formal plan than older Egyptian cities, with temples open to the air, and the sun.
Akhenaten reigned for 17 years, and although relics of his achievements survived for modern archaeologists, his city was abandoned and the old cults were restored early in the reign of his successor, the boy-king Tutankhamun.
Unlinked Sources :
Wikipedia article on Akhenaten
The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt
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