Celebrating King Tut's Tomb: Colleen and John Darnell on Ahkenaten and Nefertiti

"When people think of Egypt, they think of animal-headed gods. But from the time the pyramids are built, if not before, Egyptian religion is a solar religion."

A century ago this month, the British archeologist Howard Carter made the most spectacular find in Egyptological history: the largely intact tomb of the boy king, Tutankhamun. One hundred years ago today, November 27, Carter finally opened the door to the tomb and saw what he famously described as “wonderful things.” But far more consequential to ancient Egyptian history were Tut’s parents — the pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife, the legendary beauty Nefertiti — who presided over one of the most unique and unusual moments in the three millennia sweep of ancient Egypt, the Amarna Period, when art, religion, the economy and culture all underwent radical change. At its heart was Akhenaten’s singular focus on the sun disk — the Aten — as the one true god, leading many to consider him the world’s first monotheist. In a new ground-breaking joint biography of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Egypt’s Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth, the husband-and-wife Egyptologist team of Colleen Darnell and John Darnell of Yale, present a highly nuanced, erudite picture of one the world’s most famous couples, offering both a readable narrative and an approachable scholarly analysis of lives lived thousands of years ago. I caught up with the Darnells recently to mark the centenary of Carter’s legendary find by learning about two of history’s most beguiling figures and what exactly they were trying to accomplish before traditional society was restored, in part by Tutankhamun himself.

Face of Akhenaten, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Octavian Report: Who was Akhenaten and what was his real belief? Was he really a monotheist or is that too simplistic?

John Darnell: The concept of monotheism as most people in the modern world would define it is not a definition of monotheism that we seem to encounter anywhere in antiquity. There is a monotheistic aspect to ancient Egyptian religion in general that all deities are manifestations of a single creative force.

If you asked the ancient Egyptians "Is there one God?" they would say, “at the beginning of time, yes, but as a part of creation, as a part of creating all the different elements of the cosmos.” There's also a differentiation of that primordial deity into this cloud of polytheistic deities. So in Egyptian religion, what is often stressed before the 18th Dynasty is a kind of a clockwork universe where everything has its proper place. All the different deities function in balance. This is the concept of Ma’at. It means equilibrium or balance.

So what ancient Egyptian religion stresses then is a polytheistic universe which is the ultimate balanced creation of a primordial or we might say “omnitheistic” deity that gives birth to everything out of a primordial oneness.  So Akhenaten comes along at a time when there is a transition afoot to what Egyptian religion, and especially solar religion, is going to emphasize, this ever-existing, singular creator deity. And after Akhenaten, in what we might call Ramesses's solar religion, there's this stress on this primordial god who is everywhere and all-powerful, and yet cannot be limited to one spot, whom we perceive through a myriad of senses and yet whom we can never fully see or know, who is everywhere and yet supremely remote.

Octavian Report: Let’s talk about the changes Akhenaten brings in. To most followers of Egyptian history, he appears as a dramatic, outlier figure, bringing major upheavals in religion, art and society.  But you point out that some of the changes he ushers in were starting under his parents.  But then there is, in fact, also a major turning point in the fourth year of his reign where things accelerate.  What happened then that triggered all of it?   

Colleen Darnell: We begin the book with the reign of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten’s father, and how significant his mother was as well, Queen Tiye. And the origin of what Akhenaten will eventually do as king may be rooted in what happens during year thirty of his father's reign. During that jubilee festival, his father and his mother become the sun god and the sun god's consort on Earth. He may have already been born into this system where he sees his dad doing something pretty unusual but not beyond the realm of Ma-at or propriety.

The problem with looking at Akhenaten's motivations is that there's just so little evidence of what he was really thinking or why he did what he did. When he was still known as Amenhotep IV, he was looking for what the gods desired so that he was still keeping up with this facade of supporting the cults of all the gods while emphasizing the sun god. But it's only later in his reign that he seems to have crossed the line and done something that was then deemed to be inappropriate.

John Darnell: The year four of his reign is telling because it's when he gives a jubilee celebration. And the way he celebrates it, it's sort of like it's a joint jubilee between Akhenaten and Aten, the sun. Your first jubilee should be celebrated in your thirtieth regnal year. Now after that, you can celebrate them with greater rapidity throughout the rest of your reign.

Akhenaten celebrating one in year four is like him telling us, "You know, it makes no sense for me. I haven't been on the throne for 30 years. But if my father (Amenhotep III) was still alive, this would have been almost certainly about the time of his fourth jubilee." His father might very well have celebrated one at that time. What Akhenaten is telling us is that his father, Amenhotep III, had moved into this special jubilee time when he had literally become a god on earth. He had staged his own death and solar resurrection, the core tenet and story of Egyptian religion, and had actually had himself hauled on models of the mythical solar barque on lakes he had excavated. And so he moved into a special time, it seems, where he’s now living in perpetual “festival time.”

Amenhotep III also changes his art style and rejuvenated himself artistically. Many museums have examples of this post-jubilee style where the pharaoh has a big round sort of baby face.  He basically has the proportions of a baby.  So if we didn’t know about the even more extreme art of Akhenaten’s reign, people would probably focus on Amenhotep III much more and say, "Wow, this is really quite unusual. This is really very strange."

So building a new jubilee city, developing a new artistic style to reflect a religious change he had undergone during his jubilee, and living in a ritualistic festival time are things that Akhenaten does that his father also did. It's very much copying, building on and expanding things that his father did.

Octavian Report: What do we know about why he became focused on the incorporeal sun disc, the Aten, as opposed to any of the other deities or any of the other parts of the religion?

Colleen Darnell: When people think of Egypt, they think of animal-headed gods: Anubis, Isis, Osiris, the ruler of the underworld. But from the time the pyramids are built, if not before, Egyptian religion is a solar religion. The sun god is behind all things. And increasingly in the New Kingdom, in the 18th Dynasty, starting about 1550 BCE, we see the sun god gain importance in terms of how the king is talking about his relationship to divinity.

So there seems to be this very close connection between the king and the sun god early on. And it only becomes more prominent. That seems to be why Akhenaten focuses on the sun. It's already in the air, this transitional period where solar religion is already becoming more and more prominent, and all other gods are somehow being related to the sun.

And Amenhotep III did that by comparing himself to the sun god. So it's almost more of a natural progression than this sudden crisis or heretical movement on Akhenaten's part.

John Darnell: One thing we know is the sun as a manifestation of the creative force is there very early on for the Egyptians from some of the oldest monumental hieroglyphic inscriptions.which basically equate the power of the king on earth with the power of the sun in the sky. The king of Egypt is essentially the high priest of all of the deities. From the time of the new kingdom, we have this text that’s known as the The King of the Solar Priest, which describes all the knowledge the king is supposed to have of the solar arcana, of the workings of the solar cosmos.  So the king as this ruler who is high priest of the sun and keeper of solar mysteries is something that’s very central to Egyptian kingship and Egyptian religion. 

So for Akhenaten to be very, very interested in solar religion is something that we ought to expect. If Akhenaten came up one day and said, "We need to do something different even though it might be a little surprising,” it probably wouldn't really have shocked people. Akhenaten’s idea may have been a little bit unusual, in regards to the king as solar priest. But the fact that he does this, that he focuses on the sun god, is really central to Egyptian kingship.

Octavian Report: So how heretical was he and what was so controversial about what he was doing?

Colleen Darnell: We tried to show that what he's doing early in his reign is weird but not totally over the line. And even when he builds the new capital city at Akhetaten, it's unusual but not completely unattested.

Where he seems to cross that line is denying the half of the day that is the journey through the underworld at night. That's really bizarre for the ancient Egyptians: to be focused on your afterlife by staring at the sun during the day and participating in temples at Akhetaten and then to kind of rip out this massive importance of funerary religion, which is precisely the nightly journey of the sun. [ed. note—a major tenet of ancient Egyptian religion and critical to the journey to the afterlife heretofore]

In that he goes too far, and he starts to attack (or has goons who can't always read attack) the name of Amun, both in the name of his father Amenhotep and just randomly in temples, erasing it. And, I think most heretical of all, he sets up stelae of his family in households, which show him and Nefertiti with his daughters and then Aten in the middle.  He puts himself and Nefertiti between people and the gods. And that's something that no one seems to have done in Ancient Egypt. You could always talk directly to the gods or at least have a part of the temple where you could access the gods, but Akhenaten kind of gets in the way.

John Darnell: There are mummies from Akhetaten, from the city. There is evidence of popular worship of some of the lesser deities of the pantheon, even some of the higher deities on the side. So he doesn’t seem to be very zealous in pursuit of worshipers of the old gods. By denying the night, he's not saying there are no other gods, he's saying, "Well they don't exist yet. We're at the beginning of time." Aten's the creator god and he's created Akhenaten and Nefertiti as his two children. We're at the second generation, so we haven't gotten beyond that.

By denying the night, what's apparently happening at Akhetaten is you never really get to leave. You die, but then you come back every day and every day's a festival day. It’s almost like a religious experiment. So it's almost like he's saying, "Can I have one gigantic festival day that never ends just like my father's jubilee and can we all move into jubilee time and just never get out of jubilee time?" So the dead stay in jubilee at the temple, the dead stay in the festival.

Every day he and Nefertiti and the kids ride in and out of the city, literally going into the horizon of the disk and out of the horizon of the disk, just like the sun itself goes in and out every day. And so he's going to work, his daily work commute becomes a religious procession. So he's in those elaborate state chariots. He has soldiers running along beside him just like you would see on these big festival events. So his daily commute is a religious festival. So every day is one of these giant festival days. He sets up giant offering tables with the food that seem almost like they basically serve in lieu of storerooms. And everyone is probably being fed from those offering tables through reversion of offerings. So it's almost like he's even saying, "Yeah, we don't put things in storerooms anymore. They get offered to Aten and then everybody gets to go to Aten and then everybody gets food.

Octavian Report: How many people lived in his new city?

Colleen Darnell: If only we knew. Estimates range from 30,000 to 50,000.

Octavian Report: Out of how many people in Egypt at the time?

Colleen Darnell: That's another basically incalculable number. The number most often given from calculations back in the 1960s were about a million people prior to the Roman period.

Octavian Report: Were these elite people that lived there, or was it just a subsection of the people?

Colleen Darnell: It was a real mix. Archeological work in 2017 found some burials of just everyday individuals. We also have the tombs of the elite and we have their names and we have their inscriptions, although none of those seem to have actually been buried there permanently. So it's everyone from the vizier and high priests to the chief of police of Akhetaten to artisans and farmers, and everybody.

Octavian Report: One thing that jumps out of your book is the very strange art style that emerges during Akhenten’s reign. Egyptian art seems to have been fairly constant for millennia and then you have this sudden change to very strange looking imagery.  Did Akhenaten really look like that?

John Darnell: So we do see changes in style and iconography. If you look at Egyptian art in great detail over a long period of time, there’s some of this. But even so, Akhenaten is extreme. However, what's interesting is he's not that extreme when seen in the light of the post-first-jubilee art of Amenhotep III where he and Tiye both take on these very, very odd appearances. And the proportions of the face are the proportions of an infant’s face. What we see with Akhenaten is in his early style, interestingly, he looks exactly like his father did in the art of his second and his third decades.

And other odd things are done to the features.. You get the outlined mouth where for some reason it has this very unnatural outline around the edge of the lips. Why? I don't think we really have a good idea. We have the rejuvenated sun god king who has this infant-like appearance. So, with Akhenaten and Nefertiti becoming Shu and Tefnut, the first male-female pair, the first created deities of the creator god, they both look similar and they're only slightly differentiated one from the other. So both are more diverse than androgynous. Nefertiti shows slightly more traditionally Egyptian female iconography. Akhenaten shows slightly more traditional Egyptian male iconography. And yet they're very, very similar one to another.

There is a type of mannerism. There's almost an El Greco-like elongation of the limbs and the fingers and they play with the canon of proportions. They play with the number of squares you expect the artist to have in their mind when they're laying it out. So they are stretching out the figures on purpose. So it is unusual, but it's a little bit less unusual than it looks if we remember what Amenhotep III does, and if we remember that Hatshepsut [ed. note—a female 18th Dynasty Pharaoh] literally visually transforms herself into a male ruler so that some of her statuary is almost indistinguishable from that of Thutmose III. Now that doesn't seem that odd to us, but it's as extreme a transformation from her earlier depictions as Akhenaten's are from his earlier as Amenhotep IV.

Octavian Report: You talk about the famous Nefertiti bust, which is presumably some sort of version of her. But do we actually know what she and Akhenaten looked like?

Colleen Darnell: We don't actually know what their physical appearances were. Likely Nefertiti's bust is a version of her, yet idealized. And there is some art showing Akhenaten also from slightly later in their reign where things get softened a bit from the more extreme stylization of the earlier art phases. And there he looks not that unusual. We point out that even if Akhenaten's features resembled his art more than a standard Egyptian's features, the fact that he would show himself that way is for ideological reasons, just like Hatshepsut going from being a woman to a man is because of ideology or Amenhotep III becoming a baby is ideology. So we certainly don't know what they look like. But the mummy of Akhenaten does not suggest any pathologies. And the bust of Nefertiti suggests that that's kind of what she looked like.

Octavian Report: Can you talk a little bitabout Nefertiti? She's maybe more famous than Akhenaten to the average person. What was her role?

Colleen Darnell: We decided to write about the two of them together because they're almost always with each other in the art.  Akhenaten and Nefertiti play on their identity as gods on earth who are the first offspring of the creator god. They can only function together. The whole thing doesn't work if it's only one or the other. It has to be a pair.

Octavian Report: And their daughters seem to play unusually prominent roles as well.

John Darnell: Daughters are not always depicted by other rulers, because not everyone in their standard scenes shows themselves in a special ritual setting. Most kings we see in military scenes. We see them in daily ritual scenes. But royal women and daughters do have a prominent role in festivals and they have prominence in the jubilee in particular. So Akhenaten's depicting himself and Nefertiti going around every day with the kids trailing along is going to say to an ancient Egyptian, "Wow, it's just festival day in the court every single day."

There's no normal day in Akhenaten. There's no day where the princesses are off here and the king is over there and the queen is maybe doing this. It's like they're always together. It's always this festival event. And I think that's the reason that we see their prominence. It's not so much that the queen and the daughters are not prominent for other rulers. It's that other rulers don't make every day a festival. And Akhenaten literally tells us every day is a festival.

Octavian Report: But did Akhenaten and Nefertiti have an unusual relationship?

Colleen Darnell: We just can't say. If we put all the evidence together to write a biography and make these people come to life, we have to fill in some gaps. There’s  no evidence of the relationship between Akhenaten and Nefertiti or their personalities. But the fact, for example, that they're shown kissing in the chariot: could they simply not get enough of each other? Or is it again, a religious icon? So we kind of try to bridge that by showing in the Egyptian context how we interpret kissing in the chariot. But at the same time, when we recreate that scene, we have Akhenaten reciting to Nefertiti actual lines of Ancient Egyptian love poetry. So we say, let's not be cynical and claim all of it was for show, all of it was propaganda, all of it was religion. These were real people and they had a lot of kids. So, it’s clearly something going on.

John Darnell: Nefertiti’s name is not a common Egyptian name by any stretch of the imagination. It’s actually unusual and it means “the beautiful one has come” and it’s a perfect name for her as a manifestation of the solar goddess. Her name sounds a lot like it’s an adopted name, just like Akhenaten's. It’s funny that people says we know all this stuff about Akhenaten and we don’t know anything about Nefertiti. Actually, they claim to do everything together. So what little we actually know about Akhenaten we know about Nefertiti as well. It’s sort of odd, now people think they know him because of all these motives that have been ascribed to him principally in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Octavian Report: You present this theory that his daughter, Meritaten, actually became pharaoh right after his death. Is there anything to read into that about the place of women at his court?

Colleen Darnell: It does seem that Meritaten has a real diplomatic function. She does seem to be elevated to this prominence that we wouldn't otherwise see for a princess and that may lead into her becoming the king. Also, she was married to this incredibly ephemeral figure, Smenkhkare, who was possibly Akhenaten's co-regent, but died before Akhenaten died. Again, there's a million different readings of the evidence.

John Darnell: There's one unfinished scene from a tomb at Amarna [ed. note—traditional name for Akhenaten] showing Smenkhkare with Meritaten as his Great Royal Wife. It shows Smenkhkare's name written in a cartouche, meaning his coronation name, not a birth name. Also, there’s a Hittite prince sent to Egypt and he doesn't stay around very long. We don't know what happens, maybe he dies? There's a Hittite letter that even suggests that Maritaten may have taken over as king while this Hittite prince is en route to Egypt possibly to marry her, to become pharaoh.

So, what goes on may just be everything's really starting to get out of hand and whoever's there has to sort of stay on the bridge so to speak to try to keep the ship going.

Octavian Report: You refer to Akhenaten as megalomaniacal at one point. But you also say that, contrary to popular belief that he became obsessed with the solar disk and completely neglected his duties, allowing Egypt to turn to chaos and depression, he seemed to be doing a decent job as a pharaoh. So, which is it?

Colleen Darnell: The megalomaniacal comment we make is because he appears so prominently in the tombs of his courtiers and seems to have taken over their afterlife.  He does seem to exert this overwhelming pull for anybody in a high level of office at the capital city. But then, people have extrapolated from the sun worship that he was a pacifist and thus wouldn't go to war.

This trickled down in the interpretation of the Amarna Letters [ed. note—a large cache of documents from Amarna], where people are like, "Aha, Akhenaten's not making a good decision," or, "He's clearly distracted and not really focused."

And we basically suggest that he was a little bit more cutthroat than even some other pharaohs. He allowed a buffer state of Amurru to rise between Egypt and the Hittites.  In his longstanding alliance with Mitanni, Akhenaten was willing to completely discard it, possibly because Mitanni might have been making some moves against Egyptian territories to begin with.

That’s not to say we can definitively identify Akenaten as a brilliant grand strategist, but that’s as possible if not more likely than he had no clue what he was doing because he was starting at the sun so long.

John Darnell: We have no document setting out Egyptian foreign policy, really at any point. With the Amarna Letters, everyone has read them as evidence of Egyptian weakness and Akhenaten’s incompetence or pacifism or whatever because of this view that people often take that ancient rulers have to respond to everything and if you don’t clobber somebody immediately, you lose face or something like that.

What if Akhenaten really is a little bit more of a Bismarck? What if Akhenaten is playing a little bit more realpolitik with these people? With very minimal losses and with certainly very minimal expenditure of his own effort, Akhenaten sets up what goes from the superpowers of Egypt and Mitanni to the superpowers of Egypt and the Hittites, and he arranges for a buffer state the would have been much more well-placed than would've been the case for Mitanni. And he sees duplicitous Mitanni get carved up by the Hittites with no cost to Egypt. So, you can just as easily see Akhenaten as a rather coldblooded, but rather astute, strategist or you can see him as an idiot or as a pacifist. And we know he's not a pacifist because he does mount a military campaign in the area.

Octavian Report: So, why was he so hated? So much so that he was almost forgotten until the 19th century?

Colleen Darnell: We suggest that where he crossed that line was iconoclasm. The fact that he sent people out to hack out the names of Amun and ceased apparently the operations of the temple of Karnak to Amun. And if you shut down the temples in Luxor, where all the main temples are dedicated to Amun, you are canceling everybody's annual parties.

Akhenaten has essentially canceled Christmas for Luxor and focused too much of the economy and worship in on himself. And then, by the last five years of his reign, he actively attacked other cults. And that equals going against Ma-at for the ancient Egyptians.

John Darnell: And you can say it's the economy when you come right down to it because the local temple economies are very important in the overall economy of ancient Egypt. You've got a kind of a state economy, a royal privy purse with foreign tribute and foreign income. You have local temple economies that get donations out of the royal privy purse that also take in local taxes, et cetera. And then they pay some things to support the military or this, that or the other thing. And we know there are private tradespeople. So you’ve got this tripartite economy. It’s a pretty resilient sort of system.

But all of a sudden you say, "The royal economy doesn't have to give to the temple economies. The temple economies don't even exist anymore. There's just one temple economy, it's mine. And everything that goes to the royal privy first goes to me. Everything that goes to the temples comes to me and I don't have to redistribute anything really except to the people here."

It looks like Akhenaten just kind of abandoned the rest of the country. There was rampant corruption locally if we believe the decree of Horemheb, his ultimate successor after Tutankhamun dies. So, I think it's that he focuses the economy more fully on himself than any other ruler before or after really attempted to do until the Ptolemaic Period.

And by shutting down the temple cults, what happens to local religion? We know that the barque shrines were places of popular worship. What are you supposed to do now, do you go outside in the morning and say, ‘Aten’? Maybe. We have evidence of personal prayer like that even before. But we don’t know. One interesting thing that Akhenaten does is he doesn’t just attack the gods later in his reign, he attacks the human priest rank of Iunmutef, the ones wearing the leopard skin, the one who can officiate in the opening of the mouth ritual for mummies. So it looks like Akhenaten’s trying to say, “There’s no intermediate priests. You don’t get one there in your little village. I’m the only priest there is.”

So, it really looks like, by doing this, focusing both the religion and the economy on himself, he's taken a very complex society and economy and says, "No, it's all mine."

Octavian Report: So, what led to the Akhenaten Renaissance? Was it the discovery of Tutankhamun’s Tomb?

John Darnell: It starts in the late-1800s when excavations really get going at Amarna with the British excavations under William Flinders Petrie. And there's just spectacular discoveries of palace paintings. And then it transitions to the German expedition and the discovery of the bust of Nefertiti and entire houses that are being excavated.

This leads to a pre-Tutankhamun Egyptomania that you see pretty prominently in advertising and art and fashion. Even Grauman's Egyptian theater opens in October of 1922. Obviously, they didn't build it knowing that Howard Carter was about to, with Egyptian excavators, find the tomb of Tutankhamen a month later. So, Akhenaten and Nefertiti actually caused their own little Egyptian revival movement, and then it just redoubles and I would say grows exponentially with Tutankhamun.

But because there was this obsession with finding the origins of, say, Moses's teachings and Freud writing about Akhenaten’s influence, it really snowballed. And then, once people knew Akhenaten and knew that he was unusual, people got attracted to him.

Colleen Darnell: James Henry Breasted wrote a couple of influential books, including The Dawn of Conscience, where he wanted to emphasize to people that Egyptian religion really was a significant thing. It should be taken seriously..

And he wanted people to realize that everything didn't begin with Greece and Rome. So, he builds Akhenaten up almost into something that he probably knows he wasn't. Just to try to get people that don't understand Egypt to see him as important as Breasted saw him. Breasted thought he was the first individual. Breasted thought he was the first person that really put his stamp on the universe.

Octavian Report: It’s amazing that the hymn of the Aten, which you include in the book, survived intact.

Colleen Darnell: Well a lot of the decorations in the private tombs survived remarkably well just because people moved away and they just forgot about Amarna.

John Darnell: When it comes to the psalm that is very similar to the hymn to Aten, one of the things I found on an earlier expedition a few years ago was a prayer from the reign of Amenhotep II, so a few decades before Akhenaten, and it’s a De Profundis. He says, “I cried out to Amun when I was in trouble in the midst of the deep and the waves were high.” It’s the earliest De Profundis that we have. It’s a record of a prayer of someone who’s shipwrecked in the Nile in a huge storm.

Octavian Report: So how did Akhenaten see things? Was he a monotheist, a god on earth, a high priest, the founder of a new religion?

John Darnell: If you look at solar hymns after Akhenaten, there really is an emphasis on the uniqueness of the creator god and texts that will say, "All gods are one god. The creator god really is this singularity out of which all other deities come."

It's almost like he's on the crest of this wave of a change in how the solar religion is going to be viewed. And rather than riding that purely as high priest as pharaoh, he really takes it to the extreme with the economic aspects and everything. But the extreme of what you might call quasi-monotheistic aspect, the emphasis on the creator who is still there, even though perceived everywhere and seen specifically nowhere because they are omnipotent and omnipresent and yet they can't be singled out and they're partly hidden by those deities they've created that orbit around them.  That’s really quite significant.

Octavian Report: Thank you both. It seems like a great way to celebrate the finding of Tutankhamun’s tomb is by reading your fascinating book about his parents!

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.