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00:01Ancient Egypt. For over three thousand years, the world's most vibrant and puzzling civilization flourished through war and peace.
00:13The Egyptians built great cities, enduring monuments. They advanced mathematics and technology. Their astonishing legacy survives to this day.
00:25They attributed that prosperity to the thousands of gods they worshipped, who granted centuries of stability, until the reign of
00:34one man, a heretic who dared to change it all.
00:40New excavations shed light on Egypt's most controversial pharaoh, who plunders the temples and banishes the gods, triggering one of
00:51ancient Egypt's biggest dilemmas.
00:53A crisis of faith. What happens when the foundation of Egypt's success gets ripped away?
01:02Who rules in Egypt? Men or gods?
01:18The priest of Amun-Ra. And the new king. The two most powerful men in Egypt.
01:29Pharaoh Ahenaten has come to power. His name means the living spirit of the god Aten.
01:37For generations, kings and priests have worked in harmony to benefit the people.
01:47Then came Amun, a god that rose from obscurity to become the empire's untouchable deity, threatening to eclipse even the
01:56pharaoh's power.
02:00But the young pharaoh has other ideas. Blasphemous ones.
02:08He will wield his ultimate authority to do battle against this upstart god and the priests who serve him.
02:16No one has ever dared to challenge the gods before. It violates the very core of Egyptian society.
02:26The deities, thousands of them, have ruled and protected the Egyptians since the beginning.
02:34For more than a thousand years, they represent all aspects of life.
02:40They keep the Egyptians safe.
02:45Like humans, gods can rise and fall in importance.
02:51Amun was the god of the capital city Thebes 200 years earlier.
02:56Pharaohs fought and won battles in his name and built an empire.
03:01With Egypt's success, Amun's significance rose fast, the source of the nation's strength.
03:10Eventually, Amun merges with the sun god Ra, the sole ruler of the gods, to form the supreme god Amun
03:18-Ra.
03:21His temple becomes the wealthiest in the land. And for the pharaoh, that is the problem.
03:29Ahanaten makes a bold and frightening move. He wages war on the gods.
03:34Amun's name is gouged from the temple walls. Every single image of Amun is destroyed.
03:43The priests do all they can to save their god from their renegade pharaoh and to save Egypt from Amun's
03:50wrath.
03:53No one has ever tried to destroy a god. Neither Ahanaten nor the priests know what will happen.
04:05Both sides feel threatened. I think that's the main thing.
04:10Ahanaten certainly threatened because he's going against the king of the gods, of all things.
04:14A mysterious god who can attack him in ways he doesn't have any idea about.
04:22To preserve his power, Ahanaten shut his fifteen centuries of tradition.
04:28Generations of Egyptians have built temples to worship their gods.
04:33And those gods have been generous.
04:39With the gift of the Nile, the Egyptians created paradise on earth. And they know it.
04:47Everyone is fed. Everyone is protected. Everyone knows his place.
04:53The Egyptians lived in the best possible society, in the best possible organization.
04:59And anyone who tried to change it was changing it for the worse.
05:05And they avoided that.
05:08People who advocated change were considered to be rebels almost, revolutionaries.
05:13That was a bad word for the Egyptians.
05:19But now, the pharaoh has become the most dangerous revolutionary of all time.
05:25The priests of Amun-Ra must hurry.
05:27They must save the holy statues before the pharaoh closes or defiles the temples.
05:38Akhenaten's radical break with religious tradition doesn't happen overnight.
05:42It festered quietly for thirty years, under the reign of his father.
05:49In Thebes, Egypt's political capital, stood Karnak.
05:54A magnificent temple complex, built to honor the god Amun-Ra.
05:59For centuries, this was the center of Egypt's religious tradition.
06:05But slowly, the focus started to shift to the west, to the other side of the Nile,
06:11where the sun sets and elaborate funerary temples rose.
06:16The biggest temple of them all belonged to Akhenaten's father.
06:23Amenhotep III.
06:25He ruled over Egypt's most prosperous time.
06:29Made evident from the smoothness, softness and sensuality of Amenhotep's portraits.
06:36Each cut from a single piece of precious stone.
06:48The towering Colossi of Memnon are the most famous.
06:53They once flanked the entry to his temple, which has all but disappeared.
06:58But in the last ten years, archaeologists have uncovered this enormous building.
07:04Hundreds of workers unearthed gigantic stone body parts,
07:07assembling dozens of colossal statues of Amenhotep and his queen.
07:15Almost all the figures were shattered into bits and require painstaking effort to make them whole.
07:30The fully assembled statues stand up to five stories tall.
07:42Archaeologist Hurig Sorosian leads this dig.
07:46She sees a royal couple that portrayed itself in a new, confident way, as individuals.
07:53And she sees a pharaoh, who aspired to be more.
07:57The colossal statues are of course the king, but he is the divine king.
08:05Or you can also see that this is an appearance of God.
08:20Amenhotep sees himself as God on earth.
08:24And that's new.
08:26Up to then, pharaohs had only been considered godlike.
08:32But the center of power in Egypt is not his funerary temple.
08:36It is across the river in Karnak, the cult site of the imperial god Amun-Ra.
08:47This is where Amenhotep celebrates the most important Egyptian festival, Opet, dedicated to the supreme deity.
08:57And his son Ahenaten joins in.
09:00The pharaoh is both head of government and high priest of the cult leads the festival, just as his father
09:07did before him.
09:09And his son Ahenaten will lead it after him.
09:16This is a glittering festival.
09:25The priests sacrifice hundreds of animals.
09:29The worshippers leave a fortune in offerings.
09:36Dozens of musicians and ecstatic dancers join the sacred procession.
09:47The god himself is carried from the temple in his own sanctuary.
09:53A holy skiff.
09:58Led by the pharaoh, the priests bring the vessel out of Karnak's temple's inner sanctum.
10:04And on this rare day, the god Amun-Ra moves among the people of the city.
10:12The cult of Amun-Ra, king of the gods, became a kind of a national outpouring of loyalty on the
10:19part of the Egyptians.
10:21He was the god of Egypt.
10:24He had made Egypt strong.
10:26If there ever was a personification of the nation, it was he.
10:30Amun-Ra, king of the gods.
10:32But behind the scenes, conflict is brewing.
10:36As Amun-Ra gets more popular, his priests gain wealth and power.
10:41They begin to wield their influence on the royal family and decisions of state.
10:48Amenhotep watches his priests carefully.
10:52Suspiciously, a clash is coming.
10:56A struggle that will change everything.
11:02For now, thousands of gods live on the Nile.
11:05Each city has its own god with its own temple.
11:09In southern Egypt, on the island of Elephantine, one of the empire's most ancient holy sites was already 1500 years
11:17old by the time of Pharaoh Amenhotep.
11:21For generations, priests have prayed here for the Nile's nourishing floodwaters, always worshipping on behalf of the Pharaoh, the only
11:30mortal who can communicate with the gods.
11:39As Egypt prospers, more and more temples spring up on the banks of the Nile, run by an increasing number
11:48of priests.
11:51Certainly from the time of the new kingdom, from the empire, the priesthood was a very genuine way of life
11:59for a huge segment of the population.
12:02And from that point on, we can speak of a professional priesthood with whole families of priests that generation after
12:11generation function in the same temple.
12:17The most powerful serve in the capital, Thebes, in the temple of Amun-Ra, Karnak.
12:25Today, Karnak is one of the grandest archaeological sites in the world.
12:35During Amenhotep's time, the period of the new kingdom, it is a gigantic complex with bakeries, breweries, huge grain silos,
12:45thousands of priests and 80,000 temple workers.
12:48The temple controls 400,000 animals, 240,000 hectares of land.
12:54It is a state within a state, a world within a world, and dedicated to one god.
13:01The powerful, but inaccessible, Amun-Ra.
13:08At Karnak's Opet festival, average Egyptian citizens can get closer to their chief deity before the priests shuttle him back
13:17to his home in the dark inner sanctum of the temple.
13:20Only the priests and the pharaoh have access to the holy of holies.
13:25They protect the god, and so the god protects the people.
13:35In gratitude, the citizens leave offerings for Amun-Ra, which the priests record in the temple walls.
13:43The generous display not only pleases the god, but encourages the people to open their purses wider.
14:00Gifts of meat, grain, wine, beer, and much more flood into the temples to win the god's good will.
14:13These offerings, of course, would then be redistributed to the priests, to their families, to the people who worked on
14:20the farms owned by the temples,
14:22to the people who worked in the workshops or led trading expeditions on behalf of the temples.
14:28It was an army of people who had to be supported.
14:31The temples were, in a very real sense, one of the most important economic elements in the entire bureaucracy of
14:40Egypt.
14:42By the time of Pharaoh Amenhotep, the priests of Amun-Ra control much of the economy.
14:50By employing a large percentage of the Egyptian people, the priests take credit for maintaining the empire's crucial balance, keeping
14:59Egypt a paradise on earth.
15:05They represent this stability through a feathered goddess called Ma'at.
15:11Ma'at was supposed to be presented to the god every morning when he woke up in the form of
15:18a little goddess sitting on a plate with a feather on her head.
15:21That was Ma'at, personified.
15:23And the priest, as soon as he had opened the doors of the shrine at dawn, would immediately present Ma
15:28'at to prove to the god that in the darkness hours, evil had not triumphed and order was still there.
15:37The priests dedicate their lives to rituals designed to maintain this order and to please the gods who guarantee prosperity.
15:48The people are taught that if they neglect their deities, the gods can die and chaos will rule their country.
15:56For over one thousand years, no one has ever dared to challenge the system.
16:01The Egyptians make daily offerings to the gods, which are collected by the priests.
16:10There is a whole process in ancient Egypt of what is called the reversion.
16:15The reversion, which means that once the offerings have been placed out and the god has been satisfied with their
16:22counterparts,
16:23then the offerings revert to the priests as their salaries.
16:28Or anybody working in the temple, he gets part of the offerings as his salaries.
16:32And they sign a contract with the temple saying you will get one, I don't know, one sixty-fourth of
16:39all the offerings that are presented.
16:44The greatest offerings come after a successful military campaign.
16:49When an enemy begs for peace, he must pay tribute.
16:54The pharaoh makes sure that the priests collect their share of the spoils,
16:59to thank Amun-Ra for victory and to help guarantee the continuation of Maat.
17:08With every success, the pharaoh and the priests amass more wealth and power.
17:16As long as there are battles to fight, the pharaohs could ride the wave of military glory,
17:21protecting Egypt from foreign enemies and becoming heroes to the people.
17:38Pharaohs portrayed themselves through showy marketing campaigns,
17:43carved into temple walls like billboards on Times Square.
17:47What we moderns do not realize is that all these relief scenes in antiquity were brightly colored.
17:55Lavish, lurid, poster color type paints were applied all over these scenes.
18:02For the Egyptian artist's palette was very highly keyed with reds, yellows, blues.
18:07The whole purpose was to cause the scene to almost bounce out at you from the stone
18:13and to cause the entire courtyard almost to glow.
18:16This was all, of course, in the service of propaganda to promote the king as a heroic figure,
18:22a conquering heroic figure, who could not be resisted.
18:28These kings were shown on the front lines, fighting side by side with their men.
18:34But Amenhotep has no war to fight.
18:37No foreign power threatens Egypt.
18:40He has no traditional path to glory.
18:43So he decides to elevate the status of Pharaoh to that of a god.
18:51And for this new god, he plans to build the biggest temple Egypt has ever seen.
18:59Today, Amenhotep's complex, the most expensive since the pyramids,
19:05is one of the largest excavation sites in Egypt.
19:11It takes 100 people to put but one of his statues back together.
19:16To erect them took many more.
19:20And he erected over 1,000.
19:25Each represents Pharaoh Amenhotep, designed to confirm his status as god on earth.
19:34He is a god.
19:35In his office, he is a god.
19:37Everyone knows that he is a man.
19:39But when he has his crowns and his crowns,
19:42and when he appears, he is a god.
19:45With the time, he is the son of the god.
19:49And then, in this time, Amenhotep III, he is the god.
19:57Amenhotep built his funerary temple as the physical expression of his boundless ambition.
20:03The temple walls, 750 meters long and 8 meters thick,
20:09were adorned with colorful painted reliefs and statues of the Pharaoh.
20:13All made from precious red granite, white alabaster and quartzite from the north and south of the country.
20:22He fashioned a masterpiece, built for eternity.
20:30But today's dig reveals something more than the monumental statues that dominate the terrain.
20:44Horig Sarusian and her team have made subtler finds that expose another side of the sphero.
20:53They are digging out illustrated blocks of stone that show intimate scenes from the pharaoh's personal life.
21:03Scenes unthinkable for a pharaoh to reveal before Amenhotep's time.
21:31For the pharaoh, even mundane scenes from his family life are worth recording.
21:39His young son, Ahenaten, growing up in the shadow of his father's gigantic temple,
21:45learns the importance of pictures and symbols in religious life.
21:53Inside and out, his father's temple incorporates the traditional elements of cosmic harmony.
22:04The pillars represent Egypt's plant life.
22:13The temple ceilings recall the sky and the heavens.
22:19The floor symbolizes the Nile and its fertile mud.
22:25The art is a reflection of this orderliness that we call mat, that the ancient Egyptians called mat.
22:31You see it in Egyptian temples where on the outer walls of the temple you have battle scenes with pharaoh
22:37going after the enemies of Egypt and of course always winning the battle.
22:40You go inside the temple.
22:43You go inside the temple and you find peace and tranquility.
22:45You are in the home of a god and the scenes are very different.
22:48You have moved from the symbols of disorder and chaos to the symbols of order, peace, tranquility, mat.
22:57You are in the home of a god.
23:03Entering the traditional Egyptian temple, the priests transition from light to dark as they approach the Holy of Holies.
23:17It's where the gods live, hidden from the eyes of the people.
23:31But Amenhotep reimagines the temple.
23:34He wants to let the light shine in.
23:38He identifies himself with Aten, the sun disk, another form of the sun god.
23:45He even has himself addressed as shining sun disk.
23:54What goes on in a boy's mind when he sees his father turn himself into a god?
24:00For Aten, the message is clear.
24:03The sun disk now rises above all other gods.
24:09The sun is the source of all life.
24:13It feeds the people of the empire.
24:16It makes the cattle thrive.
24:18And the harvests abundant.
24:26Aten is a god who is everywhere.
24:30Visible to everyone.
24:32A god of everyday life.
24:35Always present.
24:37No need for priests to mediate.
24:41And so, Amenhotep's new Aten cult is a not-so-subtle threat to the priests of Amun-Ra.
24:49To control them, he also appoints loyal friends and family members to some of the highest positions at the temples
24:55of Luxor and Karnak.
24:57By altering the politics and the scope of throne and temple, Amenhotep tips the balance of power away from the
25:06priests.
25:06He did at one point, this is true, sort of engineer a shift in the status of the pharaoh, the
25:17god-king, by considering himself to a certain extent an enhanced god.
25:24Now, every Egyptian pharaoh was a god, a perfect god or the great god.
25:28But Amenhotep III did something more than that.
25:32He considered himself in a special way divine.
25:36The priests of the old cult of Amun-Ra see this new sun god, Pharaoh, eclipsing their power.
25:44They are not pleased.
25:47As Aten grows up and marries Nefertiti, he has a difficult act to follow.
25:55Eventually, he will succeed his father.
25:57But how can he outshine a man who is already a god?
26:06Amenhotep, pharaoh, family man and self-made deity, dies at the peak of his power.
26:14He has obtained immortality by building more than any pharaoh before him, by redefining what it means to be a
26:23god, and by revealing more of himself as a man.
26:28He leaves behind an incredibly rich country and a simmering conflict, the rivalry between the pharaoh and the priests of
26:37Amun-Ra.
26:39As his son Aten ascends the throne, what do the priests expect of him?
26:45Perhaps he will want to avoid confrontation and reconcile with them.
26:53But instead, Aten will take his father's policies and extend them even further.
27:02If pharaoh is a god, then he must have no competition.
27:13Aten will attack the cult of Amun-Ra head-on.
27:21In the process, he will undo 1,500 years of tradition and rattle Egypt to its foundation.
27:37He starts by escalating his father's conflict with the priests, ordering the temples of Amun-Ra closed and banning the
27:48god.
27:49His supporters storm the sacred sites and confiscate the toppled gods' treasures.
27:57Amun-Ra is struck from history.
28:01His name obliterated from the temple walls.
28:03Egypt has only one god now.
28:08Aten.
28:09The sun disk.
28:11The supreme and final ruler.
28:16No pharaoh had ever dared to attack the cherished pantheon of Egyptian gods.
28:24Nothing will remain now but the sun disk and his children, Atenaten and Nefertiti.
28:32With the removal of the gods, their mythology went too.
28:37There was no more mythology.
28:39He didn't have a myth about the sun disk at all.
28:42And so we're told that the sun disk created the world.
28:45We're not told how.
28:47All the old creation stories, the mythology, is gone.
28:54For the priests of Amun-Ra it spells disaster.
28:57They stand to lose power, money and authority.
29:02Secretly, they try to save some statues of their god, hoping to stay in his favor.
29:08Look upon us, Amun-Ra.
29:10You were here when there was nothing, and you will be here for eternity.
29:14Banish our fear.
29:18Their prayers go unanswered.
29:20Atenaten closes the temples and sentences the priests to hard labor.
29:26Now, offerings flow to the new god.
29:29And to Atenaten.
29:36Immediately, the tax revenue, as he calls it, that poured into the granaries of the sun disk was enormous.
29:45And all other temples were very quickly pushed into economic hardship.
29:52Their doors closed, they couldn't sustain themselves, and they lay idle.
30:01But Atenaten hasn't finished.
30:03He envisions grand temples to Aten to rival the gigantic complex of Karnak.
30:09He wants to outdo even his father's colossal constructions.
30:14And he wants it now.
30:22The quickest way to build an ancient Egypt is with mud bricks,
30:26which take no time to manufacture.
30:32But mud bricks don't last for eternity.
30:35And so they're unfit for building temples.
30:42So the resourceful young pharaoh builds with smaller, easier-to-carry blocks instead of massive stone slabs.
30:53With these sandstone blocks, Atenaten can erect an enormous temple to Aten in just a few years.
31:01And he builds it right next to Karnak, the old seat of Amun's power.
31:07He envisions a revolutionary temple with a new architecture.
31:12His god, the sun-disk Aten, is worshipped under an open sky.
31:18The whole complex has no roof, so the sun-god's rays can flood the interior.
31:25After a short time, Atenaten has already surpassed his father's temple.
31:30But then, he abandons it.
31:35Perhaps to show his defiance of the old order, or to demonstrate the strength of his new god,
31:41Atenaten decides to leave Thebes.
31:45But the air is still thick with the spirit of the old god, and starts from scratch.
31:50He relaunches a new Egyptian society, 400 kilometers north of Thebes,
31:56in an almost deserted region, creating a new capital city.
32:01It's a crazy idea, a complete break from tradition.
32:06Atenaten takes his architects into the desert, where his vision will become reality.
32:17Atenaten rises on the eastern bank of the Nile, a sprawling metropolis to rival Thebes.
32:24It boasts 50,000 subjects, colossal temples dedicated to Aten.
32:30A vast palace, and wide streets.
32:38And yet, at the site of Ahetaten, today's Amarna, little remains.
32:55Egyptologist Barry Kemp has spent his professional life studying Atenaten city.
33:01We know its borders, marked by boundary plaques carved deep into the rock face of the surrounding mountains.
33:09They proclaim that the god of the sun disk told the pharaoh to build here.
33:17He tells us in the boundary text, the boundary stele, in his own voice, that the Aten directed him here,
33:27and that he had certain, the Atenaten had certain criteria in mind.
33:33It had to be on the east side, in a mountainous area, and it had to be a place which
33:40had not belonged to any god, or goddess, or king, or queen, or anyone before.
33:45So it was a clean, pure place that had not been claimed by anyone.
33:51In the fifth year of his reign, 1347 BC, Atenaten dedicates his city, Ahetaten.
34:01To the tens of thousands of people he is forced to move here, he announces a new beginning in Egypt's
34:08history.
34:09From now on, they are all under the protection of the sun god, Aten.
34:14It's a time of new opportunity and equality.
34:24Today, archaeologists preserve the remains of Atenaten's city.
34:35After years of studying the foundations and thousands of area photographs,
34:40they have traced the outlines and finally know what Ahetaten looked like.
34:47The officials live in the north, beside the palace complex.
34:56Every day, Ahenaten and his wife, Nefertiti, travel the broad avenues to show themselves to the people.
35:11On many of the Aten temple walls, reliefs depict the royal couple praying to the sun god.
35:24The palace and the temple are both arranged so that at sunrise and sunset,
35:30Ahenaten's rays flood the sacred buildings of the new capital.
35:39The sacred buildings of the new capital.
35:49Ahenaten and Nefertiti are obsessed by their holy role as children of the sun god.
35:57They've replaced the crowded pantheon of Egyptian gods with the single god, Aten.
36:04It's a simple idea, foreshadowing the monotheism of later religions, but radical in its day.
36:14However, in spite of their promise of a better society, the royal couple shows no interest in their subjects,
36:21putting their own immortality in jeopardy.
36:29I don't think he was intending to reform society.
36:32It's a very personal reform of how the state god should be defined and approached.
36:41And an important part of that approach is to create a special place.
36:46Ahenaten decorates this special place with a new form of art.
36:51No more strange animal gods or victorious warrior pharaohs.
36:55For the first time in Egypt's history, the pharaoh is depicted as an individual,
37:01with human emotions, and shown in the circle of his family as a loving husband and father.
37:11And always the royal family is seen basking in the light of the sun god, Aten,
37:16who caresses his family with his rays.
37:20Ahenaten's art is all about the here and now,
37:25not about eternal life or the gods.
37:34One aspect of his reign that I find intriguing is that some of the courtiers, the officials in their tombs,
37:43claim to have been guided by him in moral instruction,
37:47that he was the one that helped them to distinguish between right and wrong.
37:51And Ahenaten, through that, becomes perhaps a teacher, a guider of people.
38:01In the rock tombs of Amarna, a new elite presents itself.
38:08Proud of the exalted position Ahenaten has granted them,
38:12they are unified in their belief in Aten, whom they worship through splendid festivities.
38:25There are also a couple of letters from a very ordinary person that have survived,
38:30which was sent from Amarna to Thebes,
38:32in which the writer claims to have been guided in personal decisions by the Aten,
38:38as if the Aten is becoming the man's conscience.
38:42And perhaps that was some aspect of Ahenaten's teaching.
38:47We don't know if this is what they really felt, or if they wrote it to win favor.
38:53But either way, as never before, the emphasis is on the individual.
38:58Perhaps life in Ahenaten is best understood by looking at how it ended,
39:03in its cemeteries.
39:07Unlike other periods of Egyptian history, most people were buried straight into the desert soil.
39:18This rare wooden sarcophagus probably held a high official.
39:26The more they dig, the more Berry Camp's team realises it's witnessing a brief, unusual moment in Egypt's past.
39:38Almost invariably, ancient cemeteries cover a period of time.
39:43Whereas here, the period of time, it's so short that it is a real population of people alive more or
39:51less at the same time.
39:53Many of them probably related, knowing one another.
39:55So if you study the people from here, you really are studying a cross-section of a population.
40:06Most surprisingly, many of the remains Camp and his team have unearthed were young children or babies.
40:16Like this 15-month-old child.
40:23Ancient sources say an epidemic raged here.
40:27This seems to be accurate, as evidenced by these decaying bones here being gathered for analysis.
40:39The opinion of the anthropologists is that the pattern of death with a peak amongst young people
40:49matches records of death of populations in whom an epidemic is running.
40:57But back then, was this pestilence seen as a curse from Amun-Ra, the god abolished by the Pharaoh?
41:10Ahenaten and Nefertiti worship only themselves and their new god, Aten.
41:15But behind their backs, most of their subjects disobey their sovereign and secretly worship their old gods.
41:30Even in his own new city, the extent to which his new religion took root is very minimal.
41:37Because in certain of the suburbs of the city, we can see the fetishes and little idols and other paraphernalia
41:46of the old cults.
41:48Still there, the people are still worshipping.
41:50What the people don't have, of course, are the big temples of the gods, where they can go and worship.
41:56Or where their relatives can find employment.
42:01Atenaten will die young after just 17 years in power.
42:06And his revolution will die with him.
42:11Shortly after his death, his subjects abandoned the capital city, Atenaten.
42:17The survivors returned to Thebes.
42:20There wasn't much else they could do.
42:23Atenaten's self-important cult was nothing without him.
42:27There seems to have been no provision made for the succession.
42:31Who was going to follow him?
42:33And was he going to be the beautiful child of the Sundisk too?
42:36What would the role be of the new king coming?
42:41Back in the old capital, the priests bring the images of Amun-Ra out of their hiding places.
42:47For them, Atenaten meant only chaos.
42:54Now, true order, Maat, can be re-established.
42:59The priests and the people can celebrate their gods openly once more.
43:17The Egyptians believed that Amun-Ra cursed their late pharaoh and all his works.
43:23So they tear down Atenaten sun temples just as fast as they went up.
43:29And thousands of ready-made sandstone blocks, called Talatat, find a new use.
43:37Very practical Egyptians decided to use this masonry as fill and core material in later walls and pylons and under
43:49floors and things like that.
43:50The result is that in the Karnak area, well over 100,000 Talatat, each with a fragment of relief, has
44:02been preserved and has been secreted in their new beds within the pylons and under the floors and so forth.
44:13Ironically, the decay of Karnak's temple over the centuries has been a godsend for archaeologists researching this period.
44:21As its walls collapsed, they exposed Atenaten's Talatat blocks.
44:27Donald Redford and his colleagues have spent decades cataloguing them.
44:32Piecing together tens of thousands of photos, they have reconstructed some of the temple walls of the heretic king.
44:42The mighty reliefs that adorned Atenaten's cult sites show an uncompromising pharaoh who insisted that everything revolve around the god
44:52Aten.
44:57Atenaten was convinced that the rays of the sun disc would grant him and his family eternal life.
45:04His goals were grandiose, but his fall was complete.
45:12Even his heir, the boy king Tutankhamun, curses his legacy.
45:20To distance himself from his father, he erects plaques listing all of Atenaten's abuses.
45:31He complains in his great reformation stela that the gods had turned their backs on Egypt.
45:37If the Egyptian army went into Syria, they would be defeated all the time and other disasters would follow because
45:45the gods had turned their backs.
45:47And now I'm going to make them turn around. I'm going to reopen the temples.
45:53After a period of drastic harmful change, the priests and pharaoh embrace conservatism, a time-tested order.
46:06In their magnificent temples, the illustrations depict the pharaoh and his renewed role as high priest, talking to the gods.
46:15And the gods in return guarantee the prosperity of Egypt and its people.
46:24Atenaten never appears in the official list of Egypt's kings carved into the temple at Abydos.
46:30His name is obliterated from history.
46:36Fifteen hundred years of tradition are stronger than the mightiest pharaoh.
46:41The old rituals will continue for another thousand years.
46:48Atenaten's dangerous vision of a single all-seeing god was repellent to most Egyptians who worshipped at thousands of altars.
46:58We will never know what motivated him to empower Aten.
47:03But the pharaoh was a visionary, a monotheist born too soon.
47:08Long before the idea took hold in much of the world.
47:18AEN
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