Akhenaten

The son of Amenhotep III and Tiye. He came to the throne as Amenhotep IV, ruled his first years at Thebes, then changed his name to Akhenaten, moved the court to a new city in the desert at Amarna, and raised one god — the Aten, the visible disc of the sun — above all others. His Great Royal Wife was Nefertiti.

This is the sharpest break in three thousand years of Egyptian religion, and it happened at Thebes first. His earliest Aten temples were built immediately east of the Karnak precinct, in a new architectural style, decorated in a new artistic style, and using small standardised sandstone blocks a single man could carry — talatat (a small standardised sandstone block, sized for one man to carry, from Akhenaten’s Theban temples). After his death the buildings were pulled down and those blocks were packed as fill inside later pylons (a monumental gateway formed by two massive towers). They were protected there for three thousand years, so more survives of his demolished Theban temples than of many buildings that were left standing.

In his first five years, at Thebes, he built a group of temples to the Aten east of Karnak — Gempaaten and others — open to the sky rather than roofed and dark, and lined with colossal statues of the king in a style that had never been used before: long face, narrow eyes, heavy hips, a body drawn nothing like the athletic royal figure of every earlier reign. In year five he took the name Akhenaten and founded Akhetaten, a new capital on virgin ground in Middle Egypt, and moved there.

What followed at Thebes was neglect and then attack: the temples of Amun were closed, their revenues diverted, and the god’s name and image were chiselled out of monuments across Egypt, including the word “Amun” inside his own father’s name. The empire’s correspondence from these years shows vassals in the Levant writing repeatedly for help. After his death the court returned to the old gods within a few years, Amarna was abandoned, and under Horemheb his Theban buildings were systematically dismantled.

The Aten temples east of the Karnak precinct, built in his first years and demolished after his death. Nothing of them stands. Their talatat blocks were recovered in tens of thousands from inside the Second, Ninth and Tenth Pylons, and reassembling them is a long-running project.

The Luxor Museum, where a long wall of his talatat blocks has been reassembled and put up as it would have stood: the king and Nefertiti offering under the rayed disc, and — unusually for Egyptian temple relief — the temple’s own kitchens, stores and workshops, the ordinary work of running the place. It is the best single argument in Luxor for going into that museum. At Karnak itself you are standing on him without seeing him: the blocks are inside the pylons you walk through.