# Akhenaten Source: https://luxor101.com/ancient-luxor/pharaohs/akhenaten Language: en # Akhenaten The king who shut the temples — and whose own buildings were used as rubble. **Reign**: c.1352–1336 BCE **Dynasty**: 18th Dynasty **Period**: New Kingdom **Also written**: Amenhotep IV · Amenophis IV · Neferkheperure Waenre · أمنحتب الرابع · أخناتون ## Who they were 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. ## Why they matter 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. ## What happened 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. ## What they built in Luxor 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. ## Where to meet them 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. How we label claims ## What is disputed Each claim below carries its evidence class. A claim marked interpretation or uncertain is not a weaker version of a fact — it is a different kind of statement, and the note says why. - Uncertain That the religion of the Aten was monotheism in the sense the word later carries. Other gods were suppressed and the Aten alone received the temple cult, which is not in doubt. Whether that amounts to monotheism, or to a cult in which the king was the sole intermediary and the god was addressed through him, is read differently by different specialists, and the argument turns partly on what the word is being asked to mean. - Uncertain That the Amarna body shapes record an actual physical condition of the king. The style is fact and it is unmistakable. The explanation is not. Various medical diagnoses have been proposed over the last century and none is established; the style is applied to Nefertiti, to the princesses and to courtiers as well, which is hard to square with a personal condition, and an alternative reading treats it as a deliberate religious image of a king who contains both sexes. This site does not repeat any of the diagnoses as fact. - Uncertain That the body found in tomb KV55 in the Valley of the Kings is his. The tomb held material naming several members of the Amarna family, and the identification of the body has changed repeatedly since 1907 — Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, and back again — with the estimated age at death the main sticking point. Genetic work published in 2010 supported a close relationship to Tutankhamun but did not put a name on the body. Who added what ## Before and after [18th Dynasty **Amenhotep III** c.1390–1352 BCE A king whose monumental building programme reshaped Thebes. ](https://luxor101.com/ancient-luxor/pharaohs/amenhotep-iii) [18th Dynasty **Akhenaten** c.1352–1336 BCE The king who shut the temples — and whose own buildings were used as rubble. ](https://luxor101.com/ancient-luxor/pharaohs/akhenaten) [18th Dynasty **Tutankhamun** c.1336–1327 BCE A short reign, a remarkable burial and an extraordinary legacy for the study of ancient Egypt. ](https://luxor101.com/ancient-luxor/pharaohs/tutankhamun) [18th Dynasty **Horemheb** c.1323–1295 BCE The general who took the throne and set about deleting the four reigns before him. ](https://luxor101.com/ancient-luxor/pharaohs/horemheb) Tomb ## Their tomb No tomb in this directory is recorded to them. [Tomb directory](https://luxor101.com/ancient-luxor/tombs) Continue reading ## Explore the connections 1–1 / 6 [Temple complex · East bank ### Karnak Temple Complex Two thousand years of building, rebuilding and royal ambition, gathered around the temples of Amun. ](https://luxor101.com/ancient-luxor/karnak)[Museum · East bank ### Luxor Museum A museum that brings objects from ancient Thebes into focus, from royal sculpture to reconstructed temple reliefs. ](https://luxor101.com/ancient-luxor/luxor-museum)[God ### Amun The hidden god of Thebes, who became king of the gods and the state god of an empire. ](https://luxor101.com/ancient-luxor/gods/amun)[God ### Ra The sun — and the night journey that every royal tomb in the valley is a map of. ](https://luxor101.com/ancient-luxor/gods/ra)[History ### Karnak: Finding Your Way Through the Layers Karnak grew through additions, rebuilding and reuse. Compare the western pylons, central obelisks and eastern Festival Hall; walking east does not follow a simple newest-to-oldest sequence. ](https://luxor101.com/journal/karnak-in-the-order-it-was-built)[Explainer ### Where the objects went Objects from Thebes are held in Luxor, elsewhere in Egypt and abroad. Each has its own history of discovery and movement; a museum label and object record can help you trace it. ](https://luxor101.com/journal/where-the-objects-went) Sources & further reading 4 Tier 2 The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, edited by Ian Shaw Oxford University Press Tier 2 Amarna Sunset: Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb and the Egyptian Counter-Reformation, Aidan Dodson American University in Cairo Press Tier 1 [Survey, excavation and restoration in the temples of Karnak](https://www.cfeetk.cnrs.fr/accueil/programmes-scientifiques/projet-karnak/) Centre franco-égyptien d’étude des temples de Karnak (CFEETK) Official page indexed · checked 2026-09-19 Tier 2 The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson British Museum Press Source review is incomplete. Consultation dates are shown only for checked references. Published works and institutional references for further reading. [Sources and review status](mailto:corrections@egyptmore.com?subject=Luxor101%20correction) [Pharaohs](https://luxor101.com/ancient-luxor/pharaohs)