Why was Tutankhamun's reputation rubbed out of history? Credit: Borja B. Hojas/Getty Images
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Did Tutankhamun rule as pharaoh during a pandemic? Scattered pieces of evidence suggest that he may well have done. Letters found in archives across the Near East speak of plague gods putting kingdoms in their shadow, of prisoners infecting their captors, of entire cities falling sick. In Karnak, the great complex of temples that stood on the far side of the Nile from the Valley of the Kings, a stela was raised in the first year of Tutankhamun’s reign. “The land,” it proclaimed, “is in grave disease. The gods have forsaken it.”
This, however, does not conclusively prove that the plague recorded in other Near Eastern kingdoms had indeed reached Egypt. It may have been a metaphor. Even if the “disease” mentioned on the stela had manifested itself as the plague sweeping the Nile Valley, it was dreaded above all as a cosmic malignancy: one that had infected the dimension of the supernatural. The stela listed the symptoms. Temples stood desolate. Crumbling shrines were piled with rubbish. Thistles sprouted in the sanctuaries of the gods. “It was as if they had never been.”
What had prompted this great convulsion of iconoclasm? Only a pharaoh could possibly have commanded a people as respectful of their venerable traditions as the Egyptians to tolerate such a disorienting, such a revolutionary, such an unspeakably blasphemous programme.
Two decades before the eight-year-old Tutankhamun came to the throne, another, infinitely more domineering king had ascended to the rule of Egypt. Everything that Amenhotep IV did might have been calculated to shock and bewilder his subjects.
Amun-Re, the great god whose sprawling temple at Karnak was only one of a multitude of such complexes across Egypt, had been decisively repudiated. The king himself, to signal this as directly as he could, had changed his name from Amenhotep — “Amun is pleased” — to a new one: Akhenaten. “Effective for the Aten”, it meant: the expression of a radical new theology. The Aten, the sun disk, was, by Egyptian standards, a chillingly impersonal god. There was barely a hint of the anthropomorphic about it. In friezes, it was portrayed simply as an orb. It resembled nothing of the mingled human and animal forms that were characteristic of other Egyptian gods. Its rays, when they fell on Akhenaten or his queen, Nefertiti, were shown with open hands; but such a blessing was for the royal couple, and the royal couple alone. No one else served the Aten as its intermediaries to mankind.
“Sole god, without another beside him.” Akhenaten’s proclamation of monotheism, in a realm as crowded by gods as Egypt, struck at the very heart of how his subjects understood both the universe and themselves. No longer was the sun portrayed as descending at dusk into the realm of the dead, there to bring life to the departed. The cosmos, in Akhenaten’s imagining of it, was purged of all mythology. Knowledge of the divine was rendered a prerogative of the king alone. The festivals that had structured the rhythms of life in Egypt for centuries; the comfort of knowing that a great multitude of gods existed, familiar and much-loved; and the reassurance that in death these same gods might come to be seen, and eternal life be had, and everything serve as one perpetual festival — all that was swept away. It was Egypt’s — and the world’s — first experience of revolution.
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SubscribeMoses does not need to have been Osarsiph or have starred in Freud’s fiction, to have gained something from the Akhenaten episode which occurred in the century before his time.
St Stephen, testifying to the Sanhedrin (the Jewish theocracy) just before his martyrdom in the years shortly after the Christ’s Resurrection, pointed out that ‘Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians’ during his earlier life at the Pharaoh’s court, ‘and was mighty in words and in deeds’ (Acts of the Apostles chapter 7, verse 22).
By that date in Ancient Egypt the history of Akhenaten’s reign may have been known to privileged high-ranking Egyptians in the same way that Orwell’s writings were permitted reading for the Soviet Politburo; and Akhenaten’s monotheism could have fed into Moses’ preparatio evangelica, his being readied for his encounter with the true God at the Burning Bush.
This tends to happen to people who encounter the way, the truth, the life and are converted to it. It chimes with what they previously have learned or studied or experienced, makes sense of those phenomena, putting in order all the scattered pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of their existence to date and making of those shards of truth one coherent revelation.
What are the dates of the ‘Letters found in archives across the Near East’ which ‘speak of plague gods’?
If they were written about 1250-1230 BC, may they not relate to the Ten Plagues which afflicted Egypt at Moses’ behest?
That ‘In the Egyptian version’ of the Exodus ‘the “Jews” are shown as lepers, as impure people, atheists, misanthropes, iconoclasts, vandals, and sacrilegious criminals’ stands to reason.
How else would most Egyptians perceive a people which had called down upon them plagues of boils, lice, their waters all turned to blood, a murrain on their cattle, terrible giant hailstones, the death of all their firstborn?
I doubt if the townsfolk of Hamelin in retrospect had nice things to say about the Pied Piper.
It is also very worthwhile to read the very scholarly book and books by D.M. Murdock. Try CHRIST in EGYPT. first.
“IUSA the KRST was born in a stable on the 15th. December of a Virgin called IsisMary.
He taught in the Temple at age 12 and was baptised at age 30 by Anup the Baptiser. He has 12 disciples, walked on water, healed the sick and raised the dead.
He was crucified, died and was buried in a tomb of rock.
He was resurrected, naturally.”
It is all in the Pyramid Tests and the Book of the Dead – to this day.
Christiantiy was the religion of the ancient Egyptians and it was usurped by the Essenes at the time of the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria.
Which destruction of the Great Library are you referring to?
Tutankhamen wearing a tallit might have got Freud thinking.
Was he also circumcised do we know?
His lips weren’t.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bsm99krHbvg&ab&ab_channel=JulianSchoeman
This is a report by John McCarthy the English journalist who was held hostage in Beirut for five years of solitaru confinement. He later wet to the Holy Land and spent months with archaeologists of various nationalities, including Israelis
The book by Israel Finkelstein The BIBLE UNEARTHED. is also useful/
There was no Moses and no “Exodus” according the the archaeology.