Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings (6 page)

Around 1500
BC
, the New Kingdom saw the greatest expansion of the Egyptian empire under the pharaoh Tuthmosis III. Often described as the Napoleon of ancient Egypt, Tuthmosis was a militarist who ensured that his campaigns were recorded for posterity. From the inscriptions and illustrations on the granite walls of the sanctuary at Karnak, we learn that he wreaked revenge on the hated Hyksos. He marched against their strongholds at Gaza, Yehem and Megiddo, taking them all within seven months. Even while Megiddo was still holding out, Tuthmosis led a second army to invade Syria, fought decisive battles, captured three cities and returned to his capital to celebrate his victories. By the end of his reign Tuthmosis had captured 350 cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean, conquered Nubia to the south, Libya to the west, and Syria and Canaan to the east.

On the religious front, the cult of Amun had already gained in importance during the Middle Kingdom under the patronage of the Theban pharaohs. Now the more powerful New Kingdom kings associated this deity with their own fortunes. With the wind-god Amun having assumed a premier place in the pantheon of Egyptian gods, he too had to become one with the supreme deity, Re. Accordingly, they were merged as the god Amun-Re, now represented in completely human form. As with Re and Re-Herakhte before him, Amun-Re was the father of the
king. As the Old Kingdom had become obsessed with the dead, the New Kingdom became obsessed with the worship of Amun-Re. From about 1567
BC
, Amun-Re became the chief deity of all Egypt and his temple cities of Karnak and nearby Luxor were expanded to an unprecedented size. Although the New Kingdom did nothing to rival the constructional achievements of the great pyramid, these huge temples were gigantic complexes of shrines, courts, halls and processional ways covering hundreds of acres. It is estimated that at the height of the empire's power an astonishing 60,000 people staffed the temple of Karnak alone: a multitude of priests, scribes, servants and religious officials, whose essential purpose it was to conduct the intricate daily rituals deemed necessary to assure the blessing of Amun-Re and the continued prosperity of Egypt.

With the foundations of the empire having been firmly laid by Tuthmosis III, and then consolidated by three successors, the subsequent reign of Amonhotep III in the early-fourteenth century
BC
was the most prosperous and stable period in Egypt's history. International trade flourished, tributes flooded in from foreign lands, and the god Amun-re was venerated like no other god before. When Amonhotep's son, Akhenaten, succeeded to the throne around 1364
BC
, everything mysteriously changed. Trade tricked to a standstill, the empire disintegrated, and Amun-Re was abandoned. Even today, no one really knows why. Called the Amarna period, after the site of a new capital built at the time, it is by far the most obscure era of Egyptian history. Nearly all official records of the period were destroyed by later pharaohs who considered it to have been a dark age of heresy. Yet it is during the Amarna period that we find ourselves in the age of Tutankhamun and Smenkhkare, and the time of the mysterious desecration of Tomb 55.

Even before the discovery of their tombs, Tutankhamun and
Smenkhkare were both known to Egyptologists though various inscriptions recovered from excavations. From the historical context of the inscriptions, it was apparent that they had lived during the early New Kingdom and had been Eighteenth Dynasty kings, yet, oddly, neither of them appeared on any royal list. Eventually, the reason became clear: like the other two kings of the Amarna period, Akhenaten and the pharaoh Ay, their successors had erased their names from history. In the eyes of later generations, they had committed acts of unsurpassed evil.

At the beginning of his reign, suddenly, and for no apparent reason, Akhenaten decreed that a new god, a minor solar deity called the Aten, should replace Amun-Re as the chief god of Egypt. Within a short time, he went even further and did something completely alien to everything in Egypt's ancient culture: he proclaimed that the Aten was the
only
god. After abolishing the priesthood, altering all religious practices and initiating a complete change in the style of ceremonial art, he recalled the imperial army to Egypt to work on the construction of a massive new city he deemed should be built at Amarna in Middle Egypt. That he should have completely upturned every aspect of a two-thousand-year-old civilization and reduced the mighty army to humble bricklayers is strange enough, but the fact that everyone appears to have gone along with it all is utterly mystifying.

For centuries, through thick and thin, the religious institutions of Egypt had remained virtually unchanged. The gods Horus, Osiris and Amun may have been assimilated into the principle deity, but it was essentially the same god, Re, worshipped in precisely the same way. Other gods had always been necessary, religious festivals remained essentially unchanged, and commemorative art had been rigidly tied to a specific
orthodox style. Even the minor changes, such as the introduction of the co-regency and the assimilation of the gods, had followed periods of national upheaval. Yet with Egypt apparently in the most powerful and stable period of its history, Akhenaten changes everything.

It is not just a question of why he should have done all this, but how he got away with it. The kings of the New Kingdom did not exercise such unchallenged authority as those of earlier generations. In theory, the king still had absolute power, but in reality this power was dependent on the continuing support of many other departments, in particular the priesthood. When the royal succession was disputed or there was a weak candidate, the priesthood could exercise unchallenged power by expressing or withholding divine approval. Moreover, if a king was considered unfit, the priesthood could also rule that he should be replaced. Although the pharaoh was seen as the son of Amun-Re, he was not actually considered an incarnation of the god; rather, a temporary vessel for the god to inhabit. Only when someone was actually appointed pharaoh did the god enter his body. If the circumstances arose which offended the god, the deity could quite easily inhabit the body of someone else. Accordingly, the Egyptian priesthood could simply have found another, more appropriate candidate for Amun-Re to inhabit and install him as pharaoh. In Akhenaten's case, the fact that there appears to have been no attempt to remove him is doubly puzzling. By abolishing the god whom he was supposed to personify he was actually nullifying his own authority.

It has been suggested that Akhenaten may have had the universal support of both the army and the civil authorities. Yet they too had every reason to oppose the king. With the growth of military power there existed a regular and powerful army and a hierarchy of senior officers. The expansion of empire had also
brought about an essential civil service of advisers and administrators. At Thebes this powerful bureaucracy was staffed with officials who dealt with the efficient organization of revenue and expenditure, the armouries, the granaries and the department of public works. Everything Akhenaten did went against the army's interests by neglecting the empire and leaving it virtually undefended, and against the civil authorities' interests by abandoning Thebes and almost bankrupting the country by building an extravagant new city.

Akhenaten's revolutionary changes were seemingly in no one's interests. However, they must have had the support of nearly every aspect of the Egyptian hierarchy. Otherwise, the usurped priesthood could have impeached him on religious grounds, the bankrupted nobility could have overthrown him in a palace coup, and the humiliated army could have mutinied and seized control.

Had they all gone along with it because they too had suddenly, and wholeheartedly, adopted Akhenaten's new god? It hardly seems credible. From what we can tell, the Aten, the god he established as the sole god of Egypt, was virtually unknown before Akhenaten's time. There are only a few brief references to the Aten, and then only as a minor sun god. The Aten seems to have been of no real importance and was revered by almost no one. From all outward appearances, what Akhenaten did would be like the Pope declaring that Jesus Christ was no longer the saviour and that everyone must worship an obscure saint like St Neots.

That an institution that had survived so long should be so completely overturned, seemingly unopposed, and replaced by a completely new god, religious concept and mode of worship, is completely mind-boggling. The only rational explanation is that there had been some unprecedented national upheaval –
something so remarkable that it completely challenged the entire social and religious fabric of Egypt. History, however, tells us nothing. Any records that may have existed were destroyed at the end of the Amarna period, when the old institutions were re-established and a wholesale attempt was made to eradicate all record of Akhenaten and his religious heresy.

There is almost certainly a link between this, one of history's greatest unsolved mysteries, and the enigma of Tomb 55. Akhenaten's name was found to have been erased from one of the shrine panels in the tomb, implying that Akhenaten had been a part of whatever sins Smenkhkare was imagined to have committed. More significantly, as the female coffin and Canopic jars in Tomb 55 had been specifically adapted for Akhenaten before being used for Smenkhkare, the bizarre desecration would seem originally to have been intended for Akhenaten. Smenkhkare certainly co-ruled with Akhenaten, and immediately succeeded him and, from all we can tell, shared his revolutionary ideas. Had Smenkhkare's tomb therefore been violated because of his role in establishing the new religion? Although this would tie in with the anti-Atenist reprisals a few years later, it does not fit with the reign of Tutankhamun, in whose name the desecration was evidently carried out.

When Tutankhamun became king, Akhenaten's cultural revolution had been in effect for well over a decade. As he was only about eight at the time, Tutankhamun's chief minister, Ay, appears to have been chiefly responsible for governing the country for the first few years. With Egypt close to bankruptcy and the empire in tatters, Ay and Tutankhamun soon abandoned the city of Amarna, returned to Thebes and restored Amun-Re as principal deity. However, both Tutankhamun and Ay continued to tolerate the Aten religion. This is demonstrated, for example, by the many items in Tutankhamun's tomb which
were decorated with depictions of the Aten, which even included the royal sceptre and throne. Indeed, as neither Tutankhamun nor Ay, when he succeeded Tutankhamun as pharaoh himself, made any attempt to reinstate the priesthood, the restoration of Amun-Re was seemingly a token gesture to appease opposition, rather than a heartfelt religious conversion. The later attempts to eradicate all evidence of the Aten religion, and those who sanctioned it, even shows that Tutankhamun and Ay continued to venerate the Aten. Along with Akhenaten and Smenkhkare, inscriptions concerning Tutankhamun and Ay were erased from monuments, their statues were defaced and destroyed, and their names were omitted from the list of kings.

Tutankhamun and Ay may not have been so fanatical as Akhenaten in their devotion to the Aten, but they made absolutely no attempt to suppress the new religion. Consequently, it is difficult to see either of them desecrating Smenkhkare's tomb simply because he had been an Atenist. Nevertheless, there does appear to have been something linking Smenkhkare with Akhenaten lying at the heart of the Tomb 55 enigma. We must therefore attempt to reconstruct the Amarna period by piecing together the few scraps of historical evidence that still survive, and search for any clues that may help us unravel the ever-more-bewildering mystery.

CHAPTER THREE

City of the Sun

About halfway along the Nile, between the Mediterranean Sea and what is now the Aswan Dam, lies the sandy plain of Amarna. Here, Akhenaten's capital lay ruined and forgotten for almost three thousand years before it was rediscovered in the early nineteenth century. In this scrub-covered desert tract around the village of Et Til (also called Tell el Amarna) on the east bank, low mounds of pebble-strewn rubble were all that remained of the once splendid city. The first proper account of the site was made by the British explorer John Gardner Wilkinson in the 1820s, when he surveyed a number of rock-cut tombs discovered in the hills to the east of the village. Although at the time the hieroglyphics could not be read, Wilkinson nevertheless realized that their decorations were unlike any previously found in Egypt. Concerned almost exclusively with the activities of a royal family, these illustrations differed markedly from the traditional religious or militaristic mode. The king, queen and several daughters were not depicted as triumphant conquerors, smiting their enemies, but in everyday domestic scenes, feasting, relaxing and embracing one another. Neither were they shown engaged in the formal cultic practices of the time, but in an altogether more dynamic attitude of worship. Likewise, their subjects, who would usually have been portrayed as sombre onlookers, were shown as a joyful congregation, dancing, singing and waving palms. Even the artistic style was distinct. The principal figures were not afforded the formal bearing of might and grandeur, but a demeanour of grace and sensuality, while a normally rigid and static affectation was replaced by a sinuous, more relaxed mien. Everything about the tombs was in stark contrast to the Egyptian norm. Gone entirely was the funerary ambience which pervaded the tombs at Thebes and Saqqara, and even the usual gods were absent from the scenes. It was quite clear that the people of Amarna had customs and religious beliefs very different from those practised elsewhere in ancient Egypt.

Early Egyptologists began referring to these people as 'disc worshippers', as the upper part of nearly every scene was dominated by a glyph depicting the sun's disc, from which shone forth a dozen or so rays, each ending in a hand holding an
ankh
(the symbol of life). So different was everything about the Amarnans that some scholars even concluded that they had not been Egyptians at all, but foreign settlers who had merely adopted the Egyptian language. Even when the hieroglyphics were eventually deciphered, it was some time before their identity could be determined. Throughout the site, the figures of the royal family had been defaced and their cartouches erased from inscriptions. This excising – clearly an act of desecration contemporary with the ruins – had been so thorough that it was hard to find an intact royal name, or any clue to the meaning of the revered disc. Nevertheless, there had been oversights in places difficult to access, and the arcane ruins began to relinquish their secrets. The king was found to have been the previously unknown Akhenaten, the son and successor of Amonhotep III; his queen had been Nefertiti, the mother of six princesses but apparently no sons; and the strange sun glyph
was found to represent a single deity called the Aten. The entire city was dedicated to this god and was even named after it. Called Akhetaten – 'the horizon (or seat) of the Aten' – the city was occupied for less than two decades, before being abandoned to the mercy of the desert.

Sadly, many of the inscriptions and illustrations no longer exist. Following various German, French and British expeditions to Amarna during the nineteenth century, the local population began to resent foreign intrusions. To deter the Europeans from returning, they began to smash statues and destroy carvings and reliefs. Thankfully, however, many of them were copied by these early visitors. The last scholar to work at Amarna before the destruction was Norman de Garis Davies, the surveyor for the British-based Egypt Exploration Fund in the 1890s. Over a period of six years he painstakingly copied all the decorations that still survived in the cliff tombs and published them in his six-volume
The Rock Tombs of El Amarna.
Together with some earlier drawings in the Berlin Museum, made by a German team led by Egyptologist Richard Lepsius in the 1840s, they were almost the only means by which later scholars could piece together the lifestyle of the citizens of Akhetaten.

The first archaeological excavation of Amarna was carried out by Ayrton and Carter's mentor, Flinders Petrie, in the 1890s, and for the first time the colossal scale and splendour of the city became apparent. Akhetaten was a straggling metropolis built along a ten-kilometre stretch of the Nile: a northern town with its royal palace and suburbs, a central city with its sacred temple, and a southern town with its mansions for the upper classes. The whole city was constructed around a great forty-metre-wide processional way, now referred to as the Royal Avenue or Kingsway, which swept down from the northern palace and on through the central city, where it was flanked by
a series of official buildings, a ceremonial palace, and the new style, open-air temple to the Aten. There were many smaller temples too, such as the sun kiosks along the routes to the cliff tombs to the east of the city, where devotees could bask in the life-giving rays of the sun. This central city seems to have been an administrative and religious centre, deserted at night except for guard patrols. Its day-time population of priests, clerks and artisans probably commuted from the suburbs, while the high officials had a separate district of mansions which stood in extensive grounds, surrounded by the lesser habitations of their attendants.

A specific feature of these great residences revealed just how different Amarna was. In one of the principal rooms there was a shrine consisting of a niche in which stood an inscribed and decorated stela. Similar shrines housing such a stela – an upright stone slab or pillar – were common to larger dwellings throughout Egypt and were dedicated to a particular deity or ancestor venerated by the residents. In the Amarna mansions, however, the decorations depicted no such gods or ancestors – only Akhenaten and his queen, accompanied by one or more of their daughters as they worshipped the Aten. The larger mansions even had their own chapels adorned with statues and votive images of the royal family. It was clear that Akhenaten not only dominated all official ceremony, but private prayer and meditation as well.

It was the same in the nobles' tombs, which would normally be decorated with scenes from ancient texts, such as the
Book of the Dead,
in which various gods would be depicted in order to invoke their influence as guides and guardians in the afterlife. These elaborate burial chambers were built to the same basic plan as those at Thebes, but were decorated very differently. Unlike the Theban tombs, the wall reliefs all focused on the
king and through him the Aten. Akhenaten, usually accompanied by Nefertiti and a number of daughters, was shown engaged in various ceremonial activities, such as proceeding in a chariot along the processional way to worship at the temple of the Aten.

Akhenaten's image completely dominated the city, and in life the man himself ensured that his subjects were continually aware of his physical presence. We can see from the tomb illustrations that the royal palace had an architectural feature unique to ancient Egypt: a special window where the king and his family could appear before their followers. Like the Pope from his balcony overlooking St Peter's Square, from here Akhenaten would regularly address his subjects
en masse
in a way that no other Egyptian pharaoh seems to have done.

Amarna was ringed by a natural amphitheatre of cliffs on both sides of the Nile, where a series of fourteen immovable tablets, ranging from two to eight metres in height, were hewn . into the rocks to delineate the city's sacred perimeters. These boundary stelae, carved with reliefs showing Akhenaten and his family adoring their god, had been inscribed with lengthy decrees made by the king. Not only were they damaged, like the rock tombs, by the hammers of the local populace in the late nineteenth century, but they further suffered the far more devastating attentions of treasure hunters. A legend had grown up that Ali Baba's secret treasure-cave was somewhere in the area, and in 1906 one of the stelae was actually blown to bits with dynamite in the mistaken belief that the entrance lay beyond it. Thanks to early explorers like the Scottish laird Robert Hay in the 1820s, however, original drawings of the stelae still survive in the British Museum.

Erected while the city was being built, the boundary stelae enable us to reconstruct something of the city's brief history and
the thinking behind its creation. Now identified by a different letter, three of them bear a series of initial proclamations that are dated to Year 5, Month 8, Day 13 of Akhenaten's reign, while the others bear proclamations made exactly a year later, and all but three of these bear a postscript of Year 8, Month 5, Day 8. From the assorted inscriptions we learn that eight months into the fifth year of his reign, Akhenaten came to Amarna officially to found the city, set up an altar and establish the city's perimeters, and by the end of his eighth year construction was largely completed.

In the initial proclamations we are told that something terrible had happened which had evidently persuaded Akhenaten to build the city. The king declares that something had been heard which was more evil than what he had heard in the fourth year of his reign, more evil than what he had heard in his first year, and more evil even than what his predecessors Amonhotep III and Tuthmosis IV had heard. What was this evil? Could it offer a clue to the mystery of Smenkhkare's eternal imprisonment in Tomb 55?

Infuriatingly, this inscription had been badly damaged even when the early explorers made their drawings and we can no longer tell what the great evil was meant to be. This damage was clearly the work of Akhenaten's anti-Atenist successors, and seems to have been an attempt to eradicate what would otherwise have been a vital clue as to what lay behind the establishment of the new religion. All that can be discerned from the surviving text is that certain observances could somehow make amends, such as festivals of the Aten, the imposition of dues, and an enigmatic reference to the land of Kush to the south of Egypt.

We can tell, though, from the surviving inscriptions that the changes wrought by Akhenaten were truly revolutionary. In
the undamaged section of the text that follows we learn how Akhenaten founded the city in the location he believed the Aten originated:

His majesty mounted a great chariot of electrum, like the Aten when he rises on the horizon and fills the land with his love, and took a goodly road to Akhetaten, the place of origin which the Aten had created for himself that he might be happy therein. It was his son, the only one of Re, who founded it for him as his monument when his father commanded him to make it. Heaven was joyful, the earth was glad, every heart was filled with delight when they beheld him.

Akhenaten himself then vows that he will build the city in that particular location and nowhere else, and no one – not even the queen – will persuade him otherwise. He continues by listing the buildings to be erected on the site, including an estate of the Aten, a temple of the Aten, and a 'house of rejoicing'. There were also to be built the apartments of the pharaoh and his queen, and tombs were to be prepared for them and their daughter Meritaten in the eastern hills. He goes on to declare that if any of them died elsewhere they must be bought back here for burial.

From the later proclamations, dated exactly a year after the first, we learn that the king is now residing in a tent in the city, from where he set out to re-establish his decrees and make a new vow. Accompanied by Nefertiti, Meritaten, and a second daughter, Meketaten, he mounted his state chariot, drove to the southernmost edge of the town and swore that he would never again leave the holy city. He then travelled to the northernmost boundary and repeated the oath. Finally, in the eighth year of
his reign he travelled around the boundaries reaffirming the city's perimeters, presumably now that construction was completed, and inscriptions were added to some of the stelae to commemorate the event.

Apart from revealing something of the city's sacred associations, the stelae further acquaint us with the growing royal family. Depicted either as reliefs or statues, the king and queen are first shown being followed by their eldest daughter Meritaten, later joined by the second daughter Meketaten, and finally by a third, Ankhesenpaaten. Although this would seem to suggest that Meketaten was born after the proclamations of the fifth year, and Ankhesenpaaten after the proclamations of the sixth year, we know from the reliefs in the rock tombs that they both had children of their own within twelve years. It would seem, therefore, that the daughters were only included in the royal entourage once they reached a certain age which, going by their depictions, would seem to be somewhere around five.

The extent to which the royal family had broken with tradition is demonstrated by their attire. Although the habit worn by the king conforms to contemporary royal fashion – a kilt tied around the waist by a broad sash from which hangs an apron in front and an imitation bull's tail behind – his upper body is often bare, lacking the usual collar and armlets. Also the queen, although wearing a traditional robe with a shawl covering one shoulder, wears no jewellery. Likewise, the daughters' traditional gowns lack the customary adornments; even their hair, which is plaited into the conventional side-lock of infancy, is not confined by the usual slide.