Akhenaten

Amenhotep IV ascended the Egyptian throne around 1353 BCE as the tenth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. In the fifth year of his reign he changed his name to Akhenaten — "useful to the Aten" — and instituted the most radical religious reform in the ancient world: the abolition of the traditional Egyptian pantheon of gods and the establishment of the Aten, the sun disc, as the sole legitimate object of worship. The temples of Amun-Ra at Karnak were closed; the priesthoods were defunded.

He moved the capital from Thebes to a virgin site in the desert, Akhetaten — modern Amarna — which he laid out from scratch as a planned city of perhaps thirty thousand inhabitants. He commissioned a new style of religious art in which the king and his queen Nefertiti and their daughters were depicted with exaggerated, almost surreal naturalism — a sharp break from the formal stylization of three thousand years of Egyptian iconography. The Great Hymn to the Aten, composed at his court, is among the earliest known monotheist texts; many scholars have noted its echoes in Psalm 104 of the Hebrew Bible.

His reform did not survive him. Within a generation of his death the capital was abandoned, the temples of Amun reopened, his city flattened for building stone, his name struck from the official king-lists. He was known to the Egyptian scribal tradition only as "the criminal of Akhetaten."

What he accomplished, however, has not been undone: the proposition that a sovereign may articulate a new theology, displace the priesthood, and assert that there is one god. Every monotheist tradition descends from that proposition.

He is honored here as the first sovereign known to have established state monotheism.