The Rebel Pharaoh Egyptian Journeys with Dan Cruickshank

The great civilisation of Ancient Egypt

with its dramatic spectacle and mystery has always fascinated me.

I've been travelling the country to explore some of the intriguing

stories that have emerged from this historic land.

In this programme, I'm off on the trail of Egypt's

most controversial ruler and his beautiful wife, Nefertiti.

Of all the stories that come out of the great land of Ancient Egypt,

one that I find most fascinating is the epic tale of the ruler

who had everything, but ultimately sacrificed it all.

He was a rebel, a revolutionary.

To the ancient Egyptians, he was a heretic - a man with very dangerous ideas.

Ideas that would lead his nation to the very brink of catastrophe.

But this man was a pharaoh, a living god,

and he could and did change everything - religion, politics, art,

even language.

This pharaoh is now probably best known through his connection

with another man - Tutankhamun - who was probably his son.

My pharaoh's name though was Akhenaten and I'm fascinated to find out more about him.

My first stop is to see some of the rare statues of Akhenaten still in existence.

In this gallery are four colossal statues of Akhenaten

and are they not sensational? Just look at this.

What an amazing expressionistic piece of sacred art.

Here you're seeing a pharaoh as he'd never been shown before

and would never be shown again. Just look!

Usually, pharaohs are depicted as conventionally handsome, strong and manly.

But Akhenaten's statue is completely different.

So strange. Look at the elongated head,

pouting lips, almond eyes and the form of the body,

the bulging stomach and great hips.

He seems to combine both male and female qualities.

These images have worried people, disturbed people,

ever since they were discovered in the early 20th century.

But I guess one thing we know about Egyptian sacred art -

nothing happens by accident, everything has a meaning.

Akhenaten clearly meant to be seen as different from all other pharaohs.

His strange enigmatic portrait looks serene, but in fact, he threw Egypt into chaos.

To understand what happened, I have to go back to the beginning of Akhenaten's reign,

to the golden years of the Ancient Egyptian Empire.

At that time, nearly 3,500 years ago, Egypt was the richest and most powerful empire in the world.

It had vast resources and wealth.

Its people were well fed and the harvests were plentiful.

The pharaoh's sumptuous royal temples and palaces were laden with treasure.

The Egyptian army was all-conquering.

The Egyptians believed that all this wealth,

all this success, was only theirs because they kept the gods happy.

There were priests to ensure that the deities

were worshipped in exactly the right way to keep Egypt stable and prosperous.

There were about 2,000 gods in all, governing every aspect of life.

The king of the Gods was called Amun.

But in this deeply religious country,

to displease any of these gods could bring bad luck to the whole nation.

Virtually everything left to us from Ancient Egypt bears witness to

the importance religion played in the lives of the people in this land.

Great temples like this, tombs and pyramids.

Then, when this religion, these gods were at least 1,500 years old,

Akhenaten came along and changed everything.

From very early in his reign, the Pharaoh Akhenaten

and his beautiful wife Nefertiti

decided to challenge the entire belief system of Ancient Egypt.

This golden couple were prepared to rock the very foundations of the Egyptian world view.

And all because Akhenaten had undergone an extraordinary personal religious conversion.

He had a dramatic, revolutionary idea.

He wanted to replace the pantheon of Egyptian gods with just one god.

And at the time he proposes, this idea was heresy.

For the first time in history, a pharaoh was suggesting

that there might be just one god - the creator of everything.

Akhenaten's one god was the Sun. It was called the Aten.

Akhenaten decreed that the 2,000 traditional gods who had protected Egypt

for over a thousand years, were to be eliminated.

Can you imagine what the ordinary people of Egypt felt?

Their traditional beliefs challenged, swept away.

From now on, everyone was only to believe in the sun god, the Aten.

There's one place in Egypt where I can see that remarkable moment of religious change as it happened.

I've come to the tomb of Akhenaten's vizier, the chief minister, Ramose,

where the sudden shift from the old religion to the new

is captured right here on the walls of the tomb.

To proclaim his high status for eternity - vizier to the pharaoh -

Ramose has himself shown in his tomb with a pharaoh, Akhenaten.

Here he is. Behind Akhenaten

sits Ma'at.

Ma'at was a traditional goddess of Egypt.

So on this wall, carved when the tomb was first being created, Ramose had the old gods depicted.

But a dramatic change takes place as I walk across.

This image could only have been created a few months, maybe a few years later.

But a revolution has taken place in art, and indeed in theology, I suppose.

In front of me is Akhenaten, but above all is the Aten.

The gods have gone. The gods of Ancient Egypt,

the gods in human and animal form were replaced by the abstract single god of the Aten.

The sun, pouring down rays of life upon the king.

This is an amazing image.

From one to the other one sees, at a glance,

the revolution that took place during the reign of Akhenaten.

For the traditional priests, who's entire lives were devoted to the old gods,

and who had been extremely powerful up to that point,

Akhenaten's earth-shattering new religion was a catastrophe.

The priests had practically run the whole country,

but now they'd been made redundant.

Akhenaten was already beginning to make dangerous enemies.

But the royal couple's next announcement would be even more shocking.

Akhenaten now abandoned the ancient, sacred city of Thebes,

the heart of the whole nation, and headed north along the river to found a new utopia.

And that's just where I'm going.

I'm following in the footsteps of Akhenaten.

In the fourth year of his reign,

he chose to leave Thebes, present day Luxor, city of his ancestors,

to sail up the Nile in search of a location for a new city.

He clearly wanted a clean break with the past.

He wanted a break with the old gods, to found a new city for his new god, the Aten.

He travelled north for about 200 miles along the river,

away from Thebes, looking for the perfect spot

for his magnificent new metropolis.

Eventually he ended up here, at modern day El Amarna.

And he built a city, the remains of which can still be seen.

It's in ruins now.

But Akhenaten and Nefertiti chose this bleak, lonely piece of desert for their vast new sacred city.

I couldn't help wondering why they built their paradise here,

so far away from civilisation and comfort.

Up in the hills that surround the ancient metropolis, there's a place to start looking for the answers.

In front of me is the site of Akhenaten's great new city.

In the distance I can see the fertile plains of the Nile.

The site of the city itself now is incredibly arid.

In the rocks up here is a huge engraved stone called a stela.

This one carries a public proclamation composed by Akhenaten himself.

We know exactly why Akhenaten chose this site because he explains it on the stela in front of me.

The site was chosen by him alone and he was following the dictates of the Aten.

The great sun god said, "build here", and it came to pass.

The city was built.

Akhenaten called his city 'Horizon of the Aten'.

But why did he think the Aten was telling him to build here?

Well, it appears that he'd seen a sign.

Standing here, looking ahead into the mist now,

but there's a range of hills around the site, one can see up there

a cleft in the hills and it forms a shape rather like this.

At certain times of the year

the sun, the Aten, rises

between the peaks in this cleft, creating this shape,

and that is the hieroglyph

for horizon.

A hieroglyph which incorporates the sun, the Aten.

And so Akhenaten believed

that the Aten was telling him this was the place

in which to build this sacred site, this sacred city.

The great city was built at breakneck speed.

It took thousands of people, dragged in from far off Thebes,

to build it, decorate it, administer it.

Against all the odds, Akhenaten's vision of a religious utopia

was becoming a living, breathing city.

Wells were dug, trees and gardens planted.

The arid desert burst into bloom.

There were imposing villas and palaces all over the city.

They were beautifully decorated, as these wall paintings, discovered amongst the ruins, clearly show.

Up to 50,000 people came to live here.

Courtiers, administrators, advisors.

This became the new political and religious heart of the nation, the centre of the new cult.

Akhenaten vowed never to leave this place and, as far as we know, he never did.

I'm on the king's highway, the royal road, running through the city.

And each side of me are the remains of a bridge.

These are the footings of piers that rose up.

And this bridge linked two of the palaces.

The king's house over here and the great palace over there.

Detailed carvings discovered here at Amarna have revealed how the royal family lived.

These incredibly tender images

show Akhenaten and Nefertiti cuddling their six little daughters.

It's so intimate. It's like a family snapshot.

There's one daughter on Nefertiti's shoulder,

while she cradles another on her lap.

And here her daughter hugs the Pharaoh Akhenaten himself.

No royal family had ever been depicted showing affection like this before.

But the place the royal family spent most of their time was here, worshipping.

This is one of the temples to the Aten.

The main entrance was through a mighty pylon standing here,

and these are the mud brick remains of the pylon,

once rising right up high above me.

In that respect, this temple would have looked outwardly

much like the traditional temples to the old gods.

But once one got in here, all was very, very different indeed.

The old temples culminated in a series of increasingly small and dark rooms.

But here all was open to the sky, to the life-giving

rays of the sun, to the Aten. And here,

a series of altars. These are stones marking the sites of the altars,

and here worshippers would have placed their offerings to the great sun, to the Aten,

and stood and basked in the energising life-giving rays.

However, the only worshippers allowed

in this and all the other temples were Akhenaten and his family.

By now, Akhenaten and Nefertiti

had come to believe that only they could communicate with the Aten.

In fact, we know from writings and carvings, that Akhenaten

now believed he was the son of God and that Nefertiti was also divine.

They were both to be worshipped as gods.

In the tombs of Amarna, you can see carvings of the citizens bowing down to the royal couple,

praying through them to the Sun God, the Aten.

This was the pinnacle of the royal couple's fabulous dream.

Akhenaten had successfully established a new city, a religious paradise in the desert.

He had declared himself the son of God

and he seemed to have brought about a religious revolution in Egypt.

But then it all started to unravel.

It soon became obvious that most of Akhenaten's subjects,

even those living right here under his nose in Amarna,

didn't really believe in the Aten, the Sun God, at all.

Buried in the back rooms of people's houses, archaeologists have found statues of the old gods.

It seems that Akhenaten must have found out about his people's disloyalty.

He became grimly intolerant of those who didn't believe in his new cult.

He ordered that all images of the old Gods were to be found

and destroyed, especially those of the chief of the old gods, Amun.

Even their names were to be obliterated.

Here you can see evidence of the intensity of the campaign

of obliteration that Akhenaten launched against the old god, Amun.

This is the top of an obelisk that once stood 27 metres high and here,

at its very tip, one can see this cartouche here that's been cut away.

Simply the surface of the granite, the very hard granite, removed, chipped.

This was achieved by Akhenaten's soldiers climbing

to the top of this obelisk, which was standing in Akhenaten's time.

Incredible - chipping, chipping, chipping,

to consign the god

to obliteration.

To remove his memory, to literally kill him.

Sometime later, someone's tried to recut the name, I think.

You can just make it out.

This sort of eradication, this attack, was happening throughout the land.

It's clear evidence that towards the end of Akhenaten's reign,

his revolution was turning very nasty indeed.

The Army was now called in to help find and destroy

every trace of the old gods, rather than defending Egypt's borders.

And because Akhenaten refused to leave his beloved city,

he was seen as weak and the country vulnerable to invasion.

A fascinating archaeological find here in Amarna sheds light

on the problems Akhenaten's policies were causing Egypt and its empire.

In 1887, peasants digging around here found a remarkable treasure,

not of gold,

but of clay.

Clay tablets on which was written fascinating and revealing information.

These, I guess, are the walls of one of the archive rooms.

And the tablets they found were like this.

These are exact replicas of some of the tablets.

These tablets are very, very revealing, about the nature

of his court, about his diplomatic relations, about his foreign policy.

This letter is from the ruler of one of Akhenaten's vassal states,

a neighbouring country protected by Egypt.

He's asking Akhenaten for troops to help ward off the Hittites - Egypt's arch-enemies.

This poor king is begging Akhenaten to send troops.

He says, "I've asked you and I get no reply.

"You won't send me the aid I need".

Akhenaten doesn't and this vassal state falls into the hands of the Hittites - lost to Egypt.

It's incredible, so obviously what the picture gives is of Akhenaten

not coming to grips with the real world, the temporal world, the world of power, the world of politics.

He seems to be too busy with his god, with his religion.

He won't leave his sacred city.

He won't see to affairs of state.

And for that reason, Egypt is the loser.

It loses power, it loses possessions, it loses income, it loses its status in the world.

It's very very serious indeed.

It seems that in his remote desert utopia, Akhenaten's dream was beginning to crumble.

And then personal tragedy struck.

It's a tragedy that is heart-breakingly depicted on the walls of Akhenaten's own tomb.

Despite being terribly damaged, these images do offer

startling insights into Akhenaten's solar-based utopia.

Here, we see a scene of mourning.

One of the princesses has died.

I can just about make out figures of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

There's something very strange about this depiction here.

We see the royal family showing grief, literally crying.

That's unprecedented in Egyptian art.

The royal families are never shown

displaying such human emotion.

They're weeping, they're crying over the death of one of their children.

There's a small body lying dead on a little bed here.

There's evidence to suggest that Akhenaten didn't lose just one daughter.

It seems that another princess died at around the same time.

But what was it that was killing Akhenaten's family?

It seems likely it was plague.

Archaeological evidence suggests that plague was sweeping the country at the time.

And this type of epidemic could have killed up to 40% of the population.

Because he was the pharaoh, Akhenaten would have been held

personally responsible for any plague in his reign.

People would have begun to believe that this catastrophe was because the old gods were offended

because Akhenaten had replaced them with a single deity.

But just when it seemed that nothing could get any worse,

Akhenaten lost the woman who had been at his side from the start.

This is, as far as we know, one of the last images of the great Queen Nefertiti.

She seems to have disappeared around the 13th year of the reign.

Presumably she died.

Therefore this, these are probably the last depictions

ever made of the great queen.

What we get from this,

is the idea that something is going wrong in the land.

It's ravaged by the plague, royal children are dying -

as if to say that the great Aten was not bathing the land

and the royal family merely with energising rays of light.

Something was definitely amiss.

Perhaps the implication is that Akhenaten himself was wrong.

Akhenaten's paradise was now on the verge of collapse.

For those around him, his advisors and courtiers, he must have seemed a dangerous liability.

The country was losing its wealth and power.

Perhaps the pharaoh had to be replaced.

13 years after the foundation of the city, Akhenaten died.

Some people believe he was murdered by courtiers or generals

who felt that the circumstances of Akhenaten's reign could not continue.

They believed that Egypt was losing power, prestige and wealth.

The old gods had to be reinstated - their favour was needed.

Akhenaten's death meant the cult of the Aten was over and Amarna lost its purpose.

The city died, was abandoned,

and I imagine the population was quite glad

to leave this strange site,

no doubt feeling the city was cursed,

cursed by the old gods.

And then,

all was systematically demolished, obliterated.

The idea, I suppose, was to remove the memory of this city,

along with the memory of Akhenaten

and the memory of the heresy of the Aten.

It was Tutankhamun, Akhenaten's probable son,

who was Pharaoh when Amarna was abandoned.

He restored the old gods and set Egypt back on the path to power and prosperity.

He took the court, the army, and the entire population of Amarna

back to the ancient capital city of Thebes.

The priests returned, more powerful than ever.

And life in Ancient Egypt returned to normal.

No Egyptian pharaoh ever again tried to change the established order or challenge the traditional gods.

Those who came after Akhenaten tried to destroy all trace of him and his heretical cult.

His statues were toppled, his image was plastered over,

his name chipped out of every carving.

Then they used his toppled statues and temple blocks as rubble to fill the walls of new temples.

The very stones had to be robbed of meaning.

They had to be buried from the sight of man.

This was done by taking the stones from the temples of Akhenaten

and building them into new structures with their carved faces concealed.

And ironically, that's exactly what preserved Akhenaten's image for us today.

In the 1920s, the stones from the temples to the Aten started to emerge,

and now we know much about Akhenaten and the Aten from these stones.

And so the strange irony, by burying the stones,

Akhenaten and the cult of the Aten

have lived on for posterity, for eternity.

Next time, I explore how the beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians

led them to make monuments and mummies that would last for eternity.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd