363. Ancient Egypt: Destroyer Of Gods – Pharaoh Akhenaten (Ep 2)

Now imagine that you are an Egyptian priest in the year 1350 BCE. Your world is already ancient, 3,000 years old already. Your temple has stood for centuries. Its walls blaze with colour, processions of gods, offerings of incense, hymns inscribed in hieroglyphs that will track the movement of the cosmos itself. Your day is structured by ritual, the waking of the god in the sanctuary, the presentation of food and linen, the sealing of the inner chamber at dusk, just as goes on in Hindu temples today in India.

Generations after generations of your family have done this. The god is Amun, king of the gods, lord of Thebes, the hidden one whose breath fills the entire world, and the temple you serve is the greatest religious institution on earth. But just imagine that all of that, all of it, is gone within a decade. Your temple gets closed down, the statue of your god is smashed to pieces, everywhere the name has been chiseled, it is removed by a blunt instrument in Egypt, everywhere. So the very existence

of these gods declared to be lies. A new theology will descend on the country, imposed from above by a pharaoh who has renamed himself, moved the capital, built an entirely new city, and decreed that from now on there is only one divinity worthy of worship, only one and that is the sun disk, the Arten. So no more myths, no more statues, no more processions, just this one round shining disk and the light it pours on the world. And access to that light, access to the divine itself, runs through only one man, and that man is the pharaoh Akhenaten.

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