By Mursi Saad El-Din The Pharaohs are still the main subject of books and articles about Egypt. One reason is, with its history that spans over 7000 years, ancient Egypt provides enough material for dozens of books. Besides, there are always new discoveries which often call for a new assessment and which shed new light on the ancient history of Egypt. One of the great scholars preoccupied with ancient Egypt is Professor Donald B Redford. I am currently re- reading his book Akhenaten: The Heretic King, published by Princeton University Press in 1984. Amenophis IV (Akhenaten) was the subject of great many books by Egyptologists, but Redford's work remanis a classic, and the author's profile of Akhenaten, included in chapter IV of the book, is one of the most illuminating scholarly works on this Egyptian monarch. Many writers on Akhenaten have accorded to him a period of co-regency with Amenophis III, but this remains unsubstantiated since the formative years of Akhenaten are not described on the monuments of his predecessor. Neither do the vignettes appertaining to the first five years of his reign, for which a hiatus existed until the reconstitution of the talatat, support an inference of this kind, sustaining only a building programme initiated at his accession and a jubilee taking place in the third year of his reign. Redford's book describes the recovery of the talatat and the stages of intensive work by those associated with the Akhenaten Project and deals with the abandonment of Thebes and the establishment of Tell El-Amarna, the centre of government during the remainder of the king's reign. The book also examines Akhenaten's spiritual cultic philosophy, providing a short summary of the cult of Amun, an amalgam of earlier sun cults expanded in Amenophis III's time into a powerful hierarchy. In the absence of Akhenaten's earlier antecedents, Redford is not able to offer any premise as to what motivated the king to spurn the royal cult, though it is probable that political inadequacy may have played some part in his thinking which inspired him to create an image suitable to his mode of thought. Declaring that the older gods were redundant and no longer operative, he substituted the entire structure of Egyptian theogony for a single deity, though one derived from it, that of Aten (disc). The latter, a manifestation of Re-Harakhty derived from the ancient Heliopolitan cult was first represented as a falcon- headed male, but as the king's iconoclasm developed, all forms of anthropomorphic representation were expunged and Aten became transformed into a figurative rayed disc. As Redford emphasises, all that remained was a deity whose concepts were transcendence, creativity and cosmic regularity symbolising the absolute. As is remarked, for Akhenaten, Aten was an abstract deity mirroring the sun-disc, the hypostasis of divine kingship. The final part of the book wraps up the last part of Akhenaten's reign and the notables of his court. The king is featured as vascillating and prone to sycophancy and his indecisiveness is exemplified in the Tell El-Amarna tablets. He provided Queen Nefertiti, however, with three daughters, but his consort seems to have fallen into disfavour. Another woman, Kiye, makes a brief appearance. Even in death Akhenaten has remained an enigma. The controversy over the mummified body thought to have been his, but more likely Smenkhare's, is well known and briefly discussed by Redford on page 189. One may speculate on Akhenaten's funerary obsequies. Was there some vestige of an afterlife akin to the Heliopolitan doctrine of the fifth and sixth dynasties, but stripped of its anthropomorphic implications and envisaging he would be assimilated with the sun-disc, an apotheosis with its father? Redford visualises the latter as a totalitarian deity, an embodiment of a celestial power who claimed universal truth and submission.
