avatarRemy Dean

Summary

Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, revolutionized Egyptian art and religion by introducing monotheism and naturalistic portraiture, which were radical departures from established traditions.

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Akhenaten, The ‘Rock Star’ Pharaoh

The art of the Amarna Period (1353–1336 BCE) changed everything, and for them it was too much, too soon!

The Pharaoh Akhenaten was an original, a true radical. He’s been called, “the world’s first individual”. He seems to have ‘come-outta-nowhere’ with entirely unprecedented ideas — a visionary and revolutionary who rocked ancient Egyptian culture to its core.

For starters, he abolished the priesthood, closed many of the temples and introduced a new, effectively monotheistic, religion of sun-worship. He changed his name from Amenhotep IV and claimed to be the living personification of the Aten, which was both the solar disc itself and the god it represented. He also transferred the capital city from Thebes to a new site that he ordered to be built in the desert, Amarna.

He used words creatively to compose hymns in praise of Aten, and this makes him one of the earliest, if not the first, identifiable creative writer. The new religion, that usurped more than 2,000 named gods and goddesses and rendered their attending priests unemployed, is thought to have become the model for the many, more-or-less monotheistic beliefs that followed, such as Zoroastrianism, Mithra, and later Christianity.

Singing the praises of the Aten: Amarna Period relief and 1908 transcription of Akhenaten’s Great Hymn to the Aten [view licenses 1 and 2]

It was his shake-up of visual arts that left the most enduring mark of Akhenaten’s reign. Archaeologists and Egyptologists are still arguing over interpretation of the facts and recent discoveries have overturned many long-established theories…

Art by Formula

Before Akhenaten, official art in ancient Egypt had followed a very strict doctrine. Hieroglyphics are a form of picture writing found on temple walls and in royal and religious scrolls. Like any written language, they follow a set pattern and have many conventions. This approach was extended to all pictorial representations in the Old Kingdoms, the human figure and face were drawn, and carved, according to a grid of squares.

By the sixth dynasty, this grid had become standardised throughout the Kingdom. The face from throat to hairline measured two squares, the shoulders six squares across, the torso five squares deep and the waist two across, from the waist down was eleven squares and the feet were three from heel to toe, making a figure eighteen squares tall. In addition to this grid proportioning, all figures were drawn, or carved in relief, according to the rule of ‘frontalism’, which gives that clichéd ‘walk like and Egyptian’ sand-dance pose: the head and face are shown in profile, the torso is seen squarely from the front, and the lower half is twisted at the hips into a side-on view. This ensured that the person was shown to be ‘whole’.

It seems that the ancient Egyptians had a profound belief that the representation was, at least in part, the same thing as that which it was supposed to represent. In the same way that the statue of a god, actually became an aspect of the god itself, so the picture of a person was directly linked to the actual person it depicted. So, if a part of the body was not shown, it implied that the person was missing that part, or would soon be separated from it. By adhering to the rule of frontalism, it was clear that the person had two arms, two hands, two legs, two feet, and a face. The face was always in profile because this was seen as one body part and profile was the clearest way to show all the components of eyes, ears, nose, lips, chin…

This approach broadly corresponds to the prehistoric art found on cave walls in being a prescribed template and in many ways can be considered an unbroken tradition. With their statues the Egyptians also portrayed individuals according to established ‘templates’. A Pharaoh would be shown standing, left foot leading, weight on the right foot, arms crossed if holding the symbols of office (crook and flail) or stiffly at the sides, both hands as fists, the face looking straight ahead. A priest would be standing, both arms outstretched, one palm up in a receiving gesture, the other hand clasping an offering in a giving gesture. Other people giving praise or offerings to gods would be kneeling on one knee. A scribe would be sitting, cross-legged. To let the viewer know which Pharaoh, priest, scribe or person was in the picture, their name would be written nearby. There was little or no attempt to render a likeness of the actual individual and generally the artist carving a statue or relief would not have seen the person that it represents.

Pharaoh wearing the Blue Crown, believed to be a bust of Akhenaten [view license]

The importance of each figure was represented by comparative size. Gods and Pharaohs were the largest, Pharaoh’s wives and children were next down in scale, then priests and scribes, and so on… Most of these rules applied to paintings, relief carvings, statues and colossi.

Art from Observation

Akhenaten flouted this reactionary and formal method, directing his official artists to show things how they see them. In effect, under his new guidelines, artists produced the first portraits of individuals. This was the first time, since those first artist who first drew animals on cave walls and set the pattern, that an artist actually observes directly from the world and attempts to portray what they see in a realistic way. At the time, this approach would have resulted in a shockingly new visual style and an entirely new visual language.

Pictures of Akhenaten and of his family, including his son, Tutankhamen, became much more naturalistic than anything before. Although they did not break the rule of frontalism, the poses were arranged in a way that seemed relaxed and natural, such as an arm draped along the back of a chair, a gesture reaching towards someone else, rising from a chair, holding a child, and so on…

Family portrait: Akhenaten, Nefertiti and two of their children [view license]

The use of comparative size gradually changes and in the later art of the Amarna period, Akhenaten, his wives and children are shown in realistic human scale to each other and those around them. However, something even stranger and more radical happens in the art of Akhenaten’s reign…

Art as an Expression Individuality

For many years historians had believed that Akhenaten had suffered from some sort of genetic disorder because of the way he is depicted. During this early period of accurate representation in art, Akhenaten is shown with very striking and abnormal features. His head is elongated with a long, narrow face, protruding chin and a full-lipped mouth. His arms are overly long and willowy and he has thin spidery fingers. His belly, hips and thighs are heavy and rounded and, in some images, he also seems to have breasts. In the colossal statue held in the Cairo museum, he is clearly depicted as hermaphrodite.

A mummy, originally found in 1907, now in the Cairo museum, was identified as Akhenaten in 2010. This claim is upheld by the dating and decoration of its sarcophagus and by DNA analysis. Some scholars remain unconvinced, but if this is the mummy of Akhenaten, then the way he was portrayed in the art of his time was a remarkable visual fiction. The mummy, catalogued as KV55, has a longer than average head and a ‘strong chin’, but would not have appeared unusual in any obvious way. He certainly was not a hermaphrodite and did not have a strange body shape of any kind.

Sketches in stone of Akhenaten becoming more attenuated [view licenses 1 and 2]

It seems that whilst Akhenaten instructed his artists to portray everyone else in a realistic way, he had himself portrayed as a caricature in a distorted and highly stylised way. Why would he do that? We have three main theories to consider:

Theory one: he was the living Aten…

His new religion was entirely focussed upon the worship of Aten, the solar disc. In his proclamation of this new god’s superiority, Akhenaten describes it as, “both the mother and father of all”. He also claims to be the living personification of the Aten on earth. He may then have wished to be portrayed in a way that would express both these qualities as a father and mother figure for his nation.

Theory two: living in harmony…

Akhenaten may have been recognising the duality in the human condition and intended to express this as a harmonious balance, rather than a source of conflict. In much the same way as many figures of Buddha are ambiguous in their gender to emphasise that we are all much more like each other than we may think and our differences are much more the result of thought and deed than of our gender. Duality brought into equilibrium leads to harmony and strength. In comparison to many of his predecessors, Akhenaten was peaceful and strove to harmonise the kingdom, he did not go to war with neighbouring civilizations but sought solidarity through trade. Some of the wealth taken from the closed temples and disbanded priesthood, he redistributed among the people. Towards the end of his reign he shared rule with a co-regent and there is evidence that this may have been his Queen elevated to an equal rank of Pharaoh.

Theory three: he was different from you…

Across such large territories, most of the people’s experience of their Pharaoh would have been through artistic representations as relatively few would actually get to meet him or see him close-up. So in this new style of art where the pictures of people actually looked like the individuals they represented, it would be presumed that this was actually how their Pharaoh looked. This would mean that he was different — he was so different that he may actually be a divine being. He certainly looked unusual and that would imply that he also had unusual thoughts and was worth listening to. This would mean that he valued individuality and expected others to do likewise. A contemporary example would be rock stars who project a strange and otherworldly visual image as a symbol of their individuality — as David Bowie, Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga have done — they do not look ‘normal’ and so may have something more original and interesting to say.

Art Ahead of its Time

Scholars and Egyptologists are still unpicking the mysteries of Akhenaten’s reign. So this is my take, in relation to art history, after much reading around the subject and a research visit to the Cairo Museum... Whatever the reasons for his distorted, sometimes transgender portrayal, this represents a huge leap in terms of the visual arts. For the first time we have artists portraying the world around them, rather than merely signifying it. At the same time, we have someone using this new visual language to express complex and subtle concepts through distortion of the human form. This would be one of those ‘monolith moments’ and is something that does not happen in western art again until the Modern Masters such as Matisse and Picasso!

Queen Nefertiti, a realistic likeness attributed to Thutmoses [view license]

The famous bust of Akhenaten’s royal wife Nefertiti, believed to have been carved by the official royal artist, Thutmose (circa 1340 BCE), is one of the most striking works of portraiture from ancient art and is still held to be a paradigm of feminine beauty. Because of the huge step into observational art, we can be fairly sure that this is an accurate portrayal of her features.

The Pharaoh, Akhenaten had dramatically revolutionised ancient Egyptian culture — artistically culminating with the reign of his son Tutankhamen, whose death mask (circa 1346 BCE), when discovered by Howard Carter’s expedition in 1922, became the artefact to exert the most influence on the development of Art Deco. It is generally respected as one of the most important and influential pieces of ancient art and is one of the most famous works of art in the world.

Amarna Period aesthetics culminated in one of the most important objects in art history [view license]

Aesthetically it represents the pinnacle of Ancient Egyptian culture and the technical crafting is of an extremely high standard. The portrait is formed from gold and inlaid with glass, enamel and a variety of semi-precious stones.

During the short reign of the boy king, Tutankhamen, the culture of Egypt became reactionary and returned to strict traditionalism. Under the guidance of his advisors, he reinstated the priesthood and repealed the bans on many of the cults that had been outlawed by his father.

The official artists were instructed to discard the naturalistic approach to portraiture and once more return to the established grid system of proportioning. The desert city of Amarna was abandoned and the capital moved back to Thebes, where the city of Luxor now stands. Tutankhamen was the last in the bloodline of the ‘true’ Pharaohs. He was succeeded by Ay, a high-ranking official who had been an adviser to Akhenaten and an overseer during Tutankhamen’s rule.

After Tutankhamen’s premature death, there was a concerted effort to erase all record of Akhenaten’s reign and the monumental progress that he had achieved. His cartouche was chiseled away from hieroglyphics and statuary and, his tomb was unremarkable, unmarked and desecrated.

They tried, but ideas cannot be unthought.

Originally published at https://dean-evolution.blogspot.com.

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