Documentary, BBC - Timewatch Akhenaten and Nefertiti: The Royal Gods of Egypt
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00:00El Armana in Middle Egypt.
00:10Two centuries ago, French explorers made an amazing discovery here in the desert.
00:18Buried under the sand were the remains of an ancient city.
00:31It had been the capital of ancient Egypt more than 3,300 years ago.
00:39The city's fate was linked to one of the most powerful pharaohs in history, King Akhenaten, and to his queen, Nefertiti.
00:54It was in this city that Akhenaten set out to build his personal paradise.
01:00The king's life was a permanent religious ritual.
01:13This had been unthinkable under previous reigns.
01:17Akhenaten founded a completely new religion.
01:21His cult was dedicated to the worship of the solar disk and to the king himself.
01:27At his side, Queen Nefertiti.
01:36Why was she so much more prominent than previous royal wives?
01:40This is the story of two mere mortals who demanded to be worshipped like gods on earth.
01:54Of the king and queen whose desire to be living deities would result in one of the greatest political upheavals in the history of ancient Egypt.
02:02This is the story of ancient Egypt.
02:32Aknaten's desire to become a living god was chiefly influenced by one man, his father, King Amenhotep III.
02:49King of the Blackland, ruler of the Redland, who sets the two shores in order, Amenhotep III, given life and dominion.
03:02Aknaten was not the first choice to become king.
03:17Only after the untimely death of his older brother, Thutmose, did he become successor to his father's throne.
03:27It was now that Aknaten would have become fully aware of his father's enormous political ambitions.
03:33Egypt, during the early 14th century BC, was the most powerful kingdom in the Near East.
03:46For two centuries, the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty had expanded the empire's frontiers.
03:56Their armies returned with riches and slaves.
04:00Oh, pharaoh, your battle cries are like a fiery flame following after every foreign country.
04:10But Egypt was essentially an inward-looking country.
04:14And it was at home, in the ancient city of Thebes, that Amenhotep's strongest interests lay.
04:29This is the Temple of Karnak, at the heart of Thebes, modern-day Luxor.
04:38For centuries, it had been the religious center of the Egyptian kingdom.
04:42Soon, it would become the scene of one of the most bitter power struggles in the country's history.
04:50Karnak was dedicated to the cult of the god Amun, who dominated Egypt's complex religious system.
04:58Praise given to the god Amun, declare him to fool and wise, beware ye of him.
05:07Trying to make sense of the shifting balance of power between Amenhotep III and Karnak's priesthood
05:12is the Egyptologist Luc Gabold, who, with his colleagues, has studied the Temple for many years.
05:17We are approaching the holiest and most inaccessible place in the Temple.
05:27Only the highest priest, and of course the pharaoh, would have been allowed to enter.
05:34Here we have the antechamber, and we are coming to the holiest of holies.
05:43This was once a large room, and the most sacred place.
05:47At the back was the statue of Amun on this stone plinth.
05:56This was really the heart of the Amun cult, where they conducted their daily rituals.
06:04Amun gets his power from the fact that he is a god who can appoint a king through the use of oracles.
06:09So the fact that he chooses the king, and that he has the power of the oracle, means that he is a god of enormous political significance, who can make or unmake a king.
06:20The control of the oracle was one of the many powers that Amenhotep desired for himself.
06:35Like all pharaohs before him, Amenhotep III had divine status.
06:40He was the link between humanity and the gods.
06:43Not divine enough, it appears, for this extremely able and ambitious king.
06:50Evidence of the king's ambition can be found in a vast new temple built by Amenhotep close to Karnak.
07:03Luxor temple was also dedicated to the god Amun.
07:07It surpassed anything built by the king's predecessors in the 18th dynasty.
07:14The temple walls are covered with reliefs from Amenhotep's reign.
07:17They provide clues about the king's true intentions.
07:26Luc Garbold has evidence that Amenhotep was trying to assume the powers of the god Amun himself.
07:31Here you see the all-powerful god Amun, and next to him, Amenhotep III.
07:41And what matters is that Amenhotep is depicted with a ram's horn, which is an attribute of the god Amun.
07:47It's the beginning of the king's deification, and probably the beginning of a rivalry between the power of the king and the power of Amun, as the king is taking on the characteristics of the god Amun.
08:00Around 1350 BC, Amenhotep III died. He was mourned throughout the ancient world.
08:11On that day I grieved, saying let ten thousand men be dead, but let him be alive.
08:27Aknatan now took over the kingship, initially under the name Amenhotep IV.
08:34In the growing conflict with the Amun cult, he would shortly force a confrontation with the priesthood.
08:53At first, Aknatan continued in the tradition of his ancestors, building structures dedicated to the god Amun.
09:15This wall from the Amun temple in Karnak shows the pharaoh smiting the enemies of Egypt.
09:20But then, the work in honour of Amun suddenly stopped.
09:28Aknatan began to construct a completely new temple east of Karnak.
09:35Unlike his father's recently built temple at Luxor, Aknatan's temple was not dedicated to Amun.
09:42His temple was intended for the worship of the sun god, the Atan.
09:50The cult of the sun becomes the dominant one.
09:54And from a multitude of gods, he very, very quickly proclaims a one and unique cult to the Atan.
10:03And the Atan is represented as the sun disk, its rays ending with the hand that hold the key of life.
10:13The emphasis is totally different, and there is a complete departure from the status quo and from the way things have been before.
10:23And, of course, this would create a cataclysmic change in the history and the religion of Egypt.
10:31For the Amun cult, the Atan temple had potentially catastrophic implications.
10:47The estates of Amun were extremely prosperous, controlling one tenth of the Egyptian population, as well as twenty percent of the country's arable land.
11:03Suddenly, much of its income and wealth was diverted to the king's new cult.
11:07Even more serious was the Atan's religious threat to Amun.
11:20The new Atan temple had one particular feature.
11:24It was adorned with huge and bizarre-looking statues of the king himself.
11:28His body is long and spindly, he has bony shoulders, he has slitty eyes.
11:44Many people have said it's because of some peculiar syndrome or disease.
11:49But modern interpretations tend to veer in a totally different direction.
11:54Rather, we now see this unearthly being as being represented different from the rest of the world, the rest of humanity, because he is a god.
12:05But this god wasn't complete without a goddess.
12:15Early in the reign, Nefertiti had become Akhenaten's great royal wife.
12:20Her name meant the beautiful one has arrived.
12:37Nefertiti, fairer face, mistress of joy, endowed with charm, great of love.
12:44One is happy to hear her voice.
12:46Nefertiti represents, in fact, the female element of creation, while her husband Akhenaten, the king, is the male element of creation, the two of them, of course, being essential for the continuation of the cult to their god, the Atan.
13:14Aknaten and Nefertiti considered themselves living gods.
13:19Together they made offerings to the Atan, represented by the solar disk.
13:24Their position as gods on earth, was unprecedented in Egyptian history.
13:25Aknaten justified his superior divinity through the claim that he was the son of the Atan, the solar deity that replaced him.
13:27Egypt's main gods, including the creator gods.
13:28Aknaten and Nefertiti.
13:30Aknaten and Nefertiti considered themselves living gods.
13:33Aknaten and Nefertiti, aknaten and Nefertiti, aknaten and Nefertiti.
13:34Aknaten and Nefertiti were the purest and the gods as gods, the gods.
13:35Together they made offerings to the Atan, represented by the solar disk.
13:36of the Aten, represented by the solar disk. Their position as gods on earth was unprecedented
13:43in Egyptian history. Akhenaten justified his superior divinity through the claim that he
13:50was the son of the Aten, the solar deity that replaced Egypt's main gods, including the
13:56creator god, Atum.
14:01The Egyptians thought that the world was created by a family of gods. And we have four generations,
14:12and the family tree is the following. We have Atum, who is a creator god, and he creates
14:17Shu and Tefnut, the first divine couple. And at the very end of the divine hierarchy is
14:25Horus. And Horus is identical to the ruling king of Egypt. So he is in between the divine
14:34and the earthly worlds. Now, what Akhenaten did is he wasn't very happy with this situation,
14:42his own situation at the very bottom of this family tree. So he places himself up to the
14:49first level after creation. And he himself wants to play the role of Shu. And since the creator
14:57created a couple at the beginning, he also had to have somebody who replaces Tefnut. And
15:04into this position, he put Nefertiti so that there is again a couple in the position directly
15:13after the creation of the world. This is very well proven because of her very unique crown.
15:19It's a crown of Tefnut.
15:22It is the religion of the king. So one always thinks of the Atum as a royal god. And it is
15:30only through the king that the rest of Egypt can worship the Atum. So you pray to the royal
15:40family. And through the royal family, you then have access to the god, the Atum.
15:50One of the key questions of the Amarna period is whether Nefertiti's role as a living goddess
15:55was ceremonial or whether her power was real. In the past, the wives of the pharaohs had generally
16:02remained obscure. Akhnaten's temple, which may have provided evidence, no longer exists.
16:14But Karnak is one of the most carefully investigated archaeological sites in the world.
16:24It was here that archaeologists made some startling discoveries while restoring structures built
16:29by Akhnaten's successors. What they found has never before been shown to the public.
16:43The discovery consisted of thousands of highly decorated stones reused as filling material in
16:49other temple structures. The blocks, known as Talatats, in fact once made up the walls of Akhnaten's
16:57long-lost Atum temple. The Talatats provide some of the most valuable evidence about the Atum
17:04cult and the true role of Nefertiti. Professor Claude Tronica is one of the world's leading experts
17:15on the Talatats. This is a magnificent portrait of the king. It's a gem, just wonderful.
17:32Here is a classic scene in ancient Egyptian iconography of the king smiting the enemies of Egypt.
17:38It's a horrible image even if it doesn't represent reality.
17:42What is new and exceptional in Akhnaten's period is that the queen is present.
17:49In fact, there's even an image where the queen herself smashes the enemies' heads.
17:53So the king's wife is made a kind of female pharaoh.
17:59These images are very prominent at the time of Akhnaten and Nefertiti.
18:05We know of other important female royals in ancient Egypt. But with Nefertiti, you can truly say that she is on a par with the king.
18:18She does appear to have exactly the same powers as her male partner.
18:24Her male partner.
18:33The Amun priesthood undoubtedly showed a strong reaction to the new Aten cult.
18:37Amun was controlled by powerful noble families whose vested interests were at stake.
18:52It is likely that the conflict soon escalated.
18:56In year five of his reign, the king takes a more radical attitude towards Amun.
19:06His conflict with the Amun priest becomes an open one, and he decides to erase any traces of the name Amun in Egypt.
19:14It's a step that would have seriously shocked his contemporaries.
19:33All over Egypt, the name of Amun was hacked out.
19:38Akhnaten went to enormous lengths, because he even chiseled out the name Amun in the cartouches of his father and in his own cartouches.
19:50And it was at this moment that he changed his name from Amenhotep, which means Amun is pleased, to Akhnaten, which means he who is useful to the Aten.
20:02But already, the king was planning an even more radical step.
20:23The Egyptologist Mark Gabol, Luke Gabol's twin brother, is travelling to the site of Alamana, hundreds of miles to the north of Thebes.
20:32This tract of land was going to be the epicentre of Akhnaten's revolution.
20:48The king saw that the site was not dedicated to any god or goddess, to nobody at all.
20:57It was a virgin site.
21:03Alamana was also exactly in the middle of Egypt.
21:13The southern border was at Aswan, the northern border at Balamun.
21:17The exact halfway point between the two is in fact 200 metres north of the former northern palace.
21:25So this really was the middle of Egypt.
21:28It was the middle of Egypt.
21:29Here, Akhnaten took one of the biggest gambles ever made by a pharaoh.
21:39He declared his intentions in Steelers, carved into the cliffs of Amarna.
21:48In this place, Akhnaten, I shall make the mansion of the Aten for the Aten, my father.
21:59In this place, Akhnaten, I shall make the residence of the pharaoh and of the great royal wife.
22:06Never shall I leave this city.
22:14Away from the religious and political intrigues of Thebes,
22:17Alamana had been chosen to become the new capital of Egypt.
22:20Akhnaten's personal paradise.
22:33A hugely ambitious construction project, the city was built at enormous speed.
22:38It's likely that Akhnaten used all the resources of the royal treasury to build the city.
22:46A whole army of workers was brought here.
22:49They used a huge amount of mud brick, which is a very economical building material.
22:59Tens of thousands of ordinary people, as well as the entire royal court, were moved to Alamana.
23:04It was one of the biggest upheavals in the country's history.
23:15The city was primarily a royal city.
23:18The planning was centred entirely around the royal buildings.
23:27The whole population was at the service of the king.
23:29They were here to build the city or work in his palace.
23:36As far as ordinary people's houses were concerned,
23:39they were left to build them more or less however they wanted.
23:43Akhnaten devoted his new city entirely to his new religion.
23:48Akhnaten devoted his new city entirely to his new religion.
24:00At its centre were the Aten cult's massive temples, with their great open courts.
24:05Though the city no longer exists, scenes carved into the walls of the Amarna tombs provide clues about the daily routine of the pharaoh.
24:19The daily ritual is carried out in virtually the same manner every day.
24:23The king leaves his palace, which is depicted here, and makes his way to the temple.
24:30He then enters the great temple through the gateway,
24:34and finds before him the great central altar covered in offerings, as well as rows of side altars.
24:39When he moves from his palace to the Aten temple, he goes by chariot.
24:48Why? Because the king hardly ever touches the ground.
24:52Even though the ground at Amarna is sacred, it has been warped on by ordinary people, and is therefore impure.
24:59Only the ground of the palace and temple were considered to be pure.
25:04At the palace's window of appearance, the king and queen would present themselves to their subjects, in their role as living gods.
25:21It's a little bit like the balcony at Buckingham Palace.
25:31This is where the population can actually view the king, and if anybody has done something great and good,
25:39they will be recompensed by the king and the queen.
25:41These images of Akhenaten and Nefertiti are very prominent at the time.
26:05These are the images that replace the traditional images of the gods.
26:12So, the royal family is what appears everywhere, whether it's in a palace, in a private house, or in a tomb.
26:20The Aten temples and much of the Amarna imagery was later destroyed.
26:31But the Talatats from Akhenaten's temple in Karnak do provide evidence of what it meant to be considered a living god.
26:38This is an exceptional image from the reign of Akhenaten.
26:50For the Egyptians, one of the religious rituals was to feed the god, and it's here that something extraordinary was done.
26:56Akhenaten said that the only representative of the god on earth are me and Nefertiti.
27:04I am the male and she's the female aspect.
27:07So, when the king eats, when the king drinks, it's a ritual act.
27:14These are astonishing blocks, because we have representations not only of the king and queen, but also of the interior of the palace.
27:20And inside the palace, we see the king's marital bed, with small steps leading up to it.
27:27Why? Because it's a highly significant place where the king and queen perform an act as important as eating.
27:34They ensure the reproduction of royalty in Egypt.
27:43The whole life of the king was a permanent religious ritual.
27:46These are things that were unthinkable under previous kings.
27:51So, it's during Akhenaten's reign that this intimacy is given the highest importance in what are effectively scenes of cult.
28:03There is a scene from Karnak, unfortunately incomplete,
28:07where we see Akhenaten very clearly leading Nefertiti towards the marital bed.
28:22So, everything that exalts the wonder of life, especially sexual relations, must be depicted, particularly in relation to the king.
28:29The intimate nature of the Amarna images, as well as the prominent position given to the queen,
28:39are without parallel in Egyptian history.
28:44But there was one factor in the king's private life that remained true to the tradition of the great pharaohs.
28:49The harem that surrounds Akhenaten must have been quite an extensive one.
29:06We know of a number of royal women from other countries who are sent to Egypt to become the wife of the pharaoh.
29:10It's, in a way, cementing an alliance with a foreign king.
29:19So, during the reign of Akhenaten, and during the reign of his father before,
29:23there are Babylonian princesses, there are princesses from the country called Mitanni,
29:30all these foreign princesses who arrive and who become part of the harem.
29:33One woman who seems to rise to prominence is a queen called Kia,
29:47who remains still rather mysterious.
29:54And Kia, in the representations and the images, is also shown as a very beautiful woman,
30:00and greatly beloved by the king he's often referred to as the greatly beloved wife.
30:12There must have been some kind of rivalry between Nefertiti and Kia.
30:19Most importantly, they're never depicted together.
30:22When Akhenaten is with Nefertiti and Nefertiti's children,
30:26Kia is never present.
30:28And when the king is with Kia, Nefertiti and her children are never shown.
30:36So it seems as though there was some kind of arrangement,
30:39with two different residences for the two families,
30:42who hardly seem to have met.
30:48But the first lady was Nefertiti.
30:50As the great royal wife, Nefertiti had one main advantage.
31:00She was considered a living goddess.
31:09And not just her.
31:10All of Nefertiti's six daughters were held to be divine.
31:14Led by the eldest, Princess Meritaten.
31:23The whole royal family would make offerings to the Supreme God,
31:27from whom their own power derived.
31:30Oh, living Aten, whose name is great.
31:35As your rays shine upon your son, whom you set on the throne.
31:40May you grant him valour and victory.
31:48Twelve years into his reign, Akhenaten was in a stronger position than ever.
31:52Year 12 is undoubtedly the high point of the reign.
31:58The empire is powerful.
32:01The king has no real opponents in Egypt.
32:04While foreign tributes add to the country's wealth.
32:09To celebrate his achievements, the king invited representatives from neighbouring states
32:20to attend a spectacular royal derba.
32:32Giving adoration to the good god Akhenaten.
32:34The chiefs of every foreign country have come.
32:39Presenting tributes to the king.
32:41Bearing every sort of good thing.
32:44So that they may live.
32:50The event would have demonstrated to the ancient world
32:53that Egypt was entering a glorious new era.
32:55Akinaten, may you celebrate jubilees and lead future generations like the Aten,
33:09while I follow you continually.
33:10It is the culmination of the reign of Akhenaten, where the peak of his power has by now been achieved,
33:26and in many ways his political and religious programme has been acted through.
33:30Akhenaten's gamble seemed to be paying off.
33:37And then things began to go wrong.
33:42The Near East was in turmoil.
33:48For years, Akhenaten had neglected the running of the empire.
33:52The powerful kingdom of the Hittites in central Turkey took advantage.
34:02Their target was the state of Mitanni, a traditional Egyptian ally in Syria.
34:07Soon Mitanni fell to the Hittites.
34:19The loss of such an important ally was a major problem for Akhenaten.
34:25But back at home, worse was to come.
34:28Around year 14 of Akhenaten's reign, the royal court was struck by a series of tragedies.
34:49The king's mother and three of the six princesses died.
34:58Around the same time, Keir disappeared from the records.
35:17But what had caused these sudden deaths in the royal family?
35:22It's a mystery that has always puzzled Egyptologists.
35:25The Egyptian sources provide few clues.
35:30But Mark Gabold believes that the answer can be found in a discovery
35:34originally made in the sands of Armana.
35:39Small clay tablets known as the Armana letters
35:42constituted the correspondence between Egypt's powerful neighbours and the pharaohs.
35:49Written in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the time,
35:52the letters allow historians to look at Egypt from a foreign perspective.
35:57We know that at this time, a plague was raging in the Middle East,
36:04and that this plague is mentioned in four of the Armana letters.
36:07In these letters, we learn, for example, that there was a plague in the town of Samer, in present-day Syria.
36:19And in the Hittite archives found at Bouazgoy in Turkey, there are also references to a plague that was brought to the Hittites by Egyptian soldiers.
36:44A plague epidemic generally would kill 30 to 40% of the population.
36:57The epidemic dies down, but then it returns.
36:59So I wonder if one of the reasons for the royal deaths from year 14 onwards was in fact due to this plague that is referred to in the Armana letters and in the Hittite archives.
37:14But how did the deaths of the princesses affect the royal family?
37:29And what were the wider implications for the kingdom?
37:32Looking for answers, Marc Gabold travels up the royal wadi in the east of Almana.
37:36His destination, the royal tomb.
37:43Here in one of the burial chambers is evidence of the tragedy's impact on Akhenaten and Nefertiti, over 3,300 years ago.
37:51Here we see a very emotional scene.
38:01The royal family, the king, the queen, and the three surviving princesses are mourning the loss of Princess Makhetaten, who is depicted on the left by her statue.
38:13This is the first time in Egyptian history that we see a king and queen affected by such suffering and expressing it so clearly.
38:28It's a very pragmatic, yet deeply moving image.
38:32The whole family is absolutely overcome by grief.
38:35It really is exceptional.
38:36The death of so many divine royal children was undoubtedly seen as a bad omen for the new religion.
38:49The Aten cult was running into trouble.
38:54During excavations in Egypt, archaeologists have found numerous statues of traditional Egyptian deities dated to the Amarna period.
39:02They suggest that the new religion was never fully accepted by the wider population.
39:14It appears that in private homes, people carried on worshipping their ancient gods.
39:21We must remember that this is a very short period of time.
39:2417 years of the rule of Akhenaten does not really give people time to alter their beliefs, nor to have access to the cult of the Aten.
39:35This is a royal religion only.
39:38And in private houses and amongst the people of Egypt, the ancient gods go on being worshipped as they had always been before.
39:45The combination of royal deaths, plague and the loss of control in the empire was a major setback for the kingship.
39:59What happened next is one of the final mysteries of the Amarna period.
40:03This stela holds the key.
40:09It shows that in the last year of Akhenaten's reign, a female co-regent appeared at his side.
40:17It has long been believed that the co-regent must have been Nefertiti, promoted to Queen Pharaoh.
40:23It's a theory challenged by the recent reconstruction of a funerary statue found at El Amarna.
40:29That Nefertiti never succeeded her husband Akhenaten as a ruling person, as a ruling king of Egypt, is proven by two parts of a funerary figurine, a so-called shabti figure, which I have assembled from two pieces in two different museums.
40:54And there is a text written on them.
40:59And the whole text ends with the information that this figurine depicts the great royal wife, Nefertiti, may she live forever and ever.
41:09These small objects were only prepared shortly before the death of the person.
41:15You would need a couple of days to produce them, not much more.
41:19And since Nefertiti is mentioned to be a wife of Akhenaten, she was certainly never the successor of Akhenaten, never a ruling king of Egypt.
41:29As the shabti figure suggests that Nefertiti died before her husband, what were the implications for the king and his new cult?
41:42The problem of the Amarna period was certainly that they, in their whole system, continued to ignore death, which worked fine as long as the royal family itself was not affected by something like death.
42:06And suddenly she died.
42:14Akhenaten didn't succeed to answer this one vital question, maybe the most important question which men could possibly ask is, what happens after death?
42:24Nefertiti was so important in Akhenaten's theology, she was a goddess as much as Akhenaten himself was a god.
42:39So, when she died, there was certainly a very, very big problem.
42:48Nefertiti's death would have been one of the final blows for the kingship.
42:52Then, in the seventeenth year of the reign, the unthinkable happened.
43:03Akhenaten, pharaoh and living god, was himself dead.
43:11His coffin was taken to a burial chamber in the royal tombs.
43:14It was in this room, at the bottom of the royal tomb, that one of the last acts of the Amarna drama took place.
43:32The king was buried here by the surviving members of the royal family.
43:39On the ground, you can see what's left of the plinth that supported the sarcophagus.
43:43On the walls, there are traces of reliefs. We see the solar disk, the arten.
43:53The whole family was accompanying the king, weeping at his funeral.
43:57As the evidence suggests that Nefertiti died before her husband, who was the mysterious co-regent who now succeeded?
44:12The latest thinking is that it could only have been Akhenaten's eldest daughter, Mary Tartan,
44:19and that she used the co-regency to justify her succession to her father's throne.
44:23What actually happened was that the stela and other such monuments were carved after the death of Akhenaten.
44:34So the co-regency never existed in reality.
44:40Mary Tartan became a regent, but had never been a co-regent.
44:45She was close to the king, she even had the title of royal wife,
44:48but it was only after his death that she depicted herself as though she'd been the co-regent.
44:52of her father Akhenaten.
45:02But now that the two living gods had died, the main focus of the Aten religion was gone.
45:17It's believed that Mary Tartan was unable to maintain the new cult.
45:20Three years after Akhenaten's death, the royal court moved back to Thebes.
45:29It was the beginning of one of the greatest political reversals in Egyptian history.
45:35After Mary Tartan's death in the following year, Akhenaten's only son, Tutankhaten, became king while still a very young boy.
45:49Soon after, he changes his name to Tutankhaten, and that means a return to the way things were before.
45:59And it's at this point that Tutankhamun proclaims that the Aten is to be eliminated, that the ancient temples to the Amun are to be reopened, things have to go back to the way things were before.
46:15When his majesty became king, the temples of the gods and goddesses had fallen into oblivion.
46:22The country had gone through great trials and tribulations.
46:26The gods had turned away, overcome by what had happened.
46:34But the true power behind Tutankhamun's throne was the supreme general of the army, Horemheb.
46:40Soon after Tutankhamun's early death, Horemheb would himself become Farah, branding Akhenaten a heretic.
46:55After Horemheb, they dismantled the sanctuaries and reused the stones on the other side of the Nile and in the north and south of Egypt.
47:05The city lay dormant. It faded away. Left without care, it had been abandoned.
47:22The events after year 12, the terrible plague, and the sudden death in the royal family of so many members of the family,
47:31could very easily have been perceived by the rest of Egypt as a punishment on the part of the gods for the unethical or unorthodox behaviour of King Akhenaten towards the gods themselves.
47:48So this extraordinary departure from the norm was seen by the ancient Egyptians as a disaster and a great mistake.
47:57In fact, it was annulled, cancelled and forgotten from the collective memory of later Egyptians.
48:04In an age of exploration, how an intrepid Victorian adventurer opened up an ancient civilisation, Flinders Petrie, the man who discovered Egypt on BBC iPlayer.
48:29I forgot the Possibly iPlayer.
48:36Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
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