Akhenaten Influence

Akhenaten, previously Amenhotep IV, was one of the most famous Egyptian pharaohs. He ruled in the eighteenth dynasty from 1353 to 1336 BCE after his father, Amenhotep III (Harris 144). During his reign, one of his reforms was to annihilate all the gods except one, thus creating one of the first monotheistic religions. The worship of all gods that were not Aten was banned and their temples were closed (Ngo). This led to a large divide between the priestly caste and the dynasty (Ricart 58). Akhenaten also abandoned his palace in Thebes and moved to a newly created city (Harris 143). In that city, which he named Akhetaten, he built two elaborate palaces and multiple places of worship for Aten (Crosher 24). When Akhenaten died, he was erased from

Akhenaton was not following through with his duties as Pharaoh and was not thinking of the people, and only of Aten. He left people to take care of things themselves and without supervision from the dynasty or from officials, malpractices took a firm hold and the people became corrupt in aspects such as payments (Aldred 166). Other civilizations, such as the Hittites,”flourished” while Egypt was lagging behind (Mertz 219). Another important effect of Akhenaten's sole concern for his god was political. Akhenaten's preoccupation with his religion led to exclusion of things important to Egypt, such as its foreign relations. “Egypt’s foreign dependencies in Syria and Palestine had got out of control, and had only been kept together by the ability and energy of Akhenaten's Great General of Lower Egypt, Horemheb” (Sewell 73). Akhenaten was not interested in foreign affairs while isolated in his palace, and did not help allied nations who asked for military support, thus losing those supporters (Pemberton 95-96). One of these people was the Prince of Lachish, who sent a letter requesting that Akhenaten stand with them against conspiring nations. This letter was one of many from the Tell-el-Amarna letter series (Letter of Pabi). Akhenaten’s lack of fulfilling his Pharoah duties to take care of his country affected Egypt in a negative way because it allowed the

Akhenaten’s “neglect of local government increased the problems of maintaining an effective administration and introduced a whole new system characterized by corruption and arbitraries.” This ruined the process of “production and redistribution without providing any new structure to replace it.” Another way that this affected Egypt negatively was that Akhenaten’s mistreatment of his country also affected the army, leading to an unprotected and later unsafe country (Grimal 232). The country was left vulnerable and open to attacks. The Hittites were able to take over the Northern part of Egypt and this happened despite of the warnings Akhenaton received firsthand in the forms of letters. One was from an “elderly nobleman” who was the Prince of Byblos, a coastal city that didn’t fall right away when all of Egypt’s other coastal allies fell. Other leaders tried to warn Akhenaten to prevent any further capturing of Egypt or the countries’ allies. Another example of a letter is from the “Egyptian deputy in Jerusalem.” Akhenaten’s ignorance toward his country's safety also led to the fall of the southern half of Egypt’s Asiatic empire to “fierce desert raiders called the Habiru.” They were strong and “ferocious fighters, and the fortresses of Palestine, weakened by years of neglect under [Akhenaten], fell to them