This sacred city had never been occupied prior to Akhenaton's moving his capital nor did it outlast Akhenaton's reign. After Akhenaton's death the backlash forced his son, Tutankhamen to reverse the move to monotheism and return to the worship of many gods. During his reign it appears likely that only the nobles embraced the Aten cult but even much of that may have been just to stay in favor with the king.
Even without their temples the common people apparently maintained their old worship practices. Besides the changes involving the king's position and title, the religious movements and the capital there was a new artistic style used as well. Bek, AAkhenaton's "Chief Sculptor and Master" proclaims in a stele that the king told the artists to create "what they saw".
This led to the development of a more realistic style in the official art that in many cases continued on after Akhenaton's time. When the first portraits of Akhenaton and his wife Nefertiti was uncovered they were thought to represent two women because of Akhenaton's body style.
Akhenaton's sculptures usually show him with an elongated neck, protruding belly and a lower body form more closely related to the way women were depicted. But there is this radical break right around And it's because the ruler, Akhenaten, changes the state religion.
So he actually changes his own name to Akhenaten, which means Aten is pleased. The key is he makes him and his wife the only representatives of Aten on earth. And so he upsets the entire priesthood of Egypt by making him and his wife the only ones with access to this new god, Aten.
So this period is a very brief episode in Egyptian history, but it also marks a real shift in style. And this small stone plaque that we're looking at, this sunken relief carving-- which would have been placed in a private domestic environment-- is a perfect example of those stylistic changes. It would have been an altar in someone's home, where they would have seen Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti and their relationship to the god Aten.
This has always been one of my favorite sculptures. It's so informal, compared to most Egyptian art. We really have a sense of a couple and their relationship with one another and their relationship with their children. And love and domesticity. On the left, you have Akhenaten himself.
This is the pharaoh of Egypt, the supreme ruler. You can see that he's holding his eldest daughter, and he's actually getting ready to kiss her. He seems to be holding her very tenderly, supporting her head, holding her under the thighs. She seems to be, perhaps, pointing back to her mother at the same moment. But the Karnak Jubilee buildings featured the Aten alone and represented in a new form: as the disc of the sun, its rays ending in hands reaching out to the royal family.
Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their daughters under the rays of the sun god Aten in the tomb of the official Aye at Amarna Photo: G. One of the Karnak buildings was also decorated with striking, colossal statues of the king with heavily exaggerated and androgynous features: drawn-out face, broad hips and distended belly. These statues set the king apart from the mortal world and highlighted his role as a divine provider of fertility and prosperity, like the Aten.
Another of the Karnak buildings showed the Aten not with Akhenaten but with his queen, Nefertiti, and the royal daughters. The Aten cult afforded a special place to royal women, especially Nefertiti, who was linked with Akhenaten and the Aten in a divine triad. Royal women helped to legitimize the Aten cult. They stood in for goddesses in contexts where female divine power was needed, and so became semi-divine themselves.
Teams of workers were dispatched to chisel out the names and images of other gods from the walls of monuments. Amun, Mut and Khonsu, the patron gods of Thebes, were especially targeted. In the fifth year of his reign, Akhenaten announced plans to create a new cult arena entirely for the Aten.
The site is known today as Amarna. Akhetaten grew quickly into a large, sprawling city on the east bank of the Nile River. Vast temples were dedicated to the Aten, left unroofed to be filled with light - thus eliminating the need for cult statues of the god.
Offerings of bread, beer, cattle, fowl, wine, fruit and incense were given to the sun god on open-air altars. Reliefs, paintings and statues of the royal family adorned cult buildings, less extreme in style than the early Karnak colossi but often still fluid and exaggerated. Occasionally the royal family was depicted kissing and embracing. Around the city's outskirts, Akhenaten built at least four Sunshade of Re temples dedicated to royal women, where the king connected with the regenerative powers of the sun god.
In a valley deep in the eastern cliffs, he created a new royal burial ground.
0コメント