364. Ancient Egypt: The Fall of Akhenaten (Ep 3)

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnim. And me, William de Rimple. Now, in the twelfth year of his reign, the pharaoh Acnaten staged the most spectacular ceremony of his rule. From across the known world delegations came to the new capital city of Omarna, bearing tribute, ivory and gold from Nubia, painted pottery from the Aegean, horses, and lapis lazuli from the kingdoms of the Near East, exotic animals, bolts of fine cloth, cedar wood from Lebanon, the tomb paintings, of Agnartan's officials recorded. in extraordinary detail, dozens of figures prostrated before the king and his queen, the rays of the Arton pouring down on all of them, Aknaton and Nefertiti, at the absolute zenit of their power, the revolution, triumphant.

It was also As it turned out, the last great moment. Within a year the deaths would begin. Within five years Akhenaten himself would be dead. Within two decades his city would be abandoned, his name erased from every single monument in Egypt, and the priests he had suppressed, well, they would have taken their revenge so thoroughly, so entirely, that he would be remembered in later Egyptian records, when he was remembered at all, as the criminal

of Akenaten. Eric Klein brought us the world Ahenaten was born into. Lloyd Llewellyn Jones brought us the theology of what he built today, the story of how it all fell apart. And there is no better guide to that story than our guest who joins us now for his first appearance in this series. He is the author of the definitive account of this extraordinary collapse, Amana

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