Empires: Egypt's Golden Empire (2001) s01e02 Episode Script

This plane has only one passenger.
And he is 3500 years old.
He was one of the most powerful kings of the ancient world.
His dynasty ruled the greatest empire on earth.
Today, some see him as a genius, the first king in history to believe in a single god.
For others, he was a madman, and a heretic.
He is the Pharaoh Akhenaten.
This is the story of Akhenaten and his family.
His father, Amenhotep, the richest ruler in the world.
His son, Tutankhamun, who was buried with the greatest treasure ever discovered.
And Akhenaten himself, who embarked on a revolution that brought the Egyptian Empire to the brink of disaster and changed the world forever.
1550 BC.
For over 100 years, Egypt had been overrun by foreigners.
But now a new dynasty of warrior pharaohs inspired Egyptians to rise up and reclaim their land.
Egypt's armies surged beyond their traditional borders.
On battlefields deep in foreign territories they created the largest empire the world had ever seen.
It was an empire controlled with an iron fist.
There were clear, bloody warnings to anyone who dared to question the new might of Egypt.
Egypt was now the most powerful and feared nation on earth.
And in 1390 BC there was a new young pharaoh on the throne.
His name was Amenhotep, meaning "the god Amun is satisfied".
His forefathers had led Egypt into battle.
Now this young pharaoh faced a completely different challenge.
There were no more wars to fight.
Egypt was rich, respected, and free.
Amenhotep's challenge would be to protect this peace and prosperity, ruling Egypt's vast sprawling empire.
An empire whose riches were the envy of the world.
When he comes to the throne, it really mams the beginning of peace.
It's a time when the wealth of all the empire pours into the coffers of the pharaoh.
You could probably think of it as the golden age of empire and Egypt.
Amenhotep III would have been the world's richest man.
He had the gold in Nubia, he was able to command the cedars of Lebanon, he was able to command silver from Anatolia, he had the trade running along the Red Sea.
There was hardly anything in the known world that Amenhotep couldn't put out his hand and touch.
But the world was changing.
For centuries, Egypt had been unchallenged.
Now Babylonia, Assyria and Mittani had emerged, powerful civilisations that could rival Egypt.
United, they could destroy Amenhotep's empire.
Amenhotep wanted to avoid war at all costs.
He had to find a new way of dealing with the outside world.
His solution was a master stroke and we know about it because of a remarkable discovery.
In 1887, a peasant woman was digging near the Egyptian town of Amarna.
She was looking for old mud bricks to use as fertiliser.
What she found were not the usual rough blocks, but rows of well-preserved clay tablets.
The bits of mud were covered with writing.
It looked like bird's feet had wandered over mud and the things had been set in the mud after the birds had gone.
The lady didn't know what they were but picked some up.
These humble clay tablets were not bricks, but letters, and they were the key to Amenhotep's success.
The peasant lady had stumbled across the diplomatic record office of the capital of the ancient world.
The Amarna letters throw a flood of light onto the politics of the Near East.
These small tablets were the correspondence between Pharaoh Amenhotep and the other rulers of the Near East, the strange marks covering them a minuscule writing.
They contain as much information as the inscriptions on all of Egypt's greatest monuments.
They reveal Amenhotep was controlling his world not with weapons but with words.
The pharaoh had become a diplomat.
I would describe it as THE most important discovery of the ancient world, probably, in terms of understanding of political life.
Not the most visible, not the most artistically appealing, but the politically most significant discovery of the ancient world.
At a time when most people on earth could not read or write, Egypt was conducting a lively dialogue with her rivals.
The king's messengers ran back and forth across the deserts of the Near East, carrying letters that reveal Egypt's status as a superpower.
International diplomacy in those days would be familiar to diplomats today.
It was really very much like diplomatic interaction between countries even in our own time.
The letters show Amenhotep was as good at diplomacy as his ancestors had been at fighting.
Ambassadors flocked to Pharaoh's court, bringing gifts of friendship.
Less powerful countries sent endless streams of tribute to show their loyalty.
The principle in the ancient world was quite clean If somebody was rich, you made them feel even richer.
So when you visited them, you took produce of your country.
It's partly to acknowledge that the power of the pharaoh extends even to countries where he has not set foot.
Scenes painted in Egyptian tombs show how these dazzling displays of tribute must have looked.
Priceless objects flooded in from all over the known world From Minoan Crete to Biblical Babylon.
The Nubians would bring giraffes and lions.
The Syrians may bring bears, found in the mountains of Syria.
Others bring characteristic animals and birds of their countries.
It was a very dramatic, physical, dynamic expression of what the empire meant for the Egyptians, what it was composed of and, above all, how central the Egyptian king was to this whole system.
Amenhotep calls himself the King of Kings and the King of Kings is what he must have seemed to the rulers who shared his world.
Amenhotep knew he was the most powerful man in the world and he knew he had one great advantage.
Not military might but gold.
The letters that went back and forth from Pharaoh's court show that even the greatest kings of the Near East were desperate for Egypt's gold.
And they were prepared to beg for it.
FIRST KING: If you send me the gold I wrote to you about, I will give you my daughter.
Send me as much as your father did.
SECOND KING: In your country, gold is like dust and you just gather it up.
If it is your intention that a sincere friendship exist, send much gold.
THIRD KING: I have begun a new palace.
Send me as much gold as is required for its Amenhotep responded shrewdly to their requests.
He gave them gold but always left them wanting more.
The strategy was a triumph.
The kings of the Near East were exchanging gifts, not blows.
The most precious gift of all was a foreign princess as a wife, plus her dowry and retinue.
Amenhotep employed his personal ambassadors to find him the very best brides.
It was about much more than Pharaoh's sex life.
Amenhotep's harem was full of the most beautiful daughters of the most powerful kings of the age.
It's brotherhood between the great kings and they called themselves "brothers".
If you many the daughter of another king then you are part of a family.
But this was not a two-way process.
In one letter, the King of Babylon complains bitterly that Amenhotep has refused to send him an Egyptian princess.
"When I wrote to you about marrying your daughter, "you wrote to me as follows 'No daughter of a King of Egypt has ever been given to anyone! "Why not? You are a king, and do what you like.
" It was a useless complaint.
No Egyptian princess was allowed to marry into a foreign court for fear it would give a foreigner a claim to Egypt's throne.
But the Babylonian king suggested a devious compromise.
"Send me a beautiful woman as if she was your daughter.
"Who will be able to say this is not the king's daughter?" The Babylonian king's second request was denied.
Amenhotep saw himself as able to take princesses and give none in return.
They see him as a very, very intelligent man.
He obviously uses his position extremely carefully.
So, although there is great respect for the other kings of the time, he is always one cut above everybody else.
Amenhotep was more wealthy and powerful than any previous pharaoh.
And soon everyone would know it.
He would channel the vast resources of the empire into the largest building program the world had ever seen.
To embark on a building program was one of the best ways for an Egyptian king to present himself as a hero, as an achiever, as a doer.
It was work on an epic scale.
The countless sandstone blocks hewn from Egyptian quarries have left caverns that are themselves like temples carved out of the rock.
It was a triumph of organisation.
Soldiers, cooks, doctors and water-bearers were all sent into the desert to support the quarries.
Amenhotep's magnificent new temples did more than advertise his wealth.
They also honoured the ultimate source of Egypt's glory, her many gods.
Amenhotep thanked one god in particular for his success.
Amun-Re, the king of the gods.
To guarantee the support of Am un-Re, the pharaoh donated great portions of his wealth to the god's main temple.
And as the temple grew richer, the temple priests grew more powerful.
The priests who controlled these vast establishments have power.
They have financial power.
They have political power, as well.
The power of the priests of Amun-Re was beginning to rival Pharaoh himself.
But out in the empire, Amenhotep made sure his subjects heard only of his triumphs, not his problems.
And Amenhotep had a surprising new way of communicating directly with his subjects.
Stones, carved into the shape of dung-beetles, had long been used in Egypt as amulets.
Now Amenhotep had these mass-produced.
Portable scarabs inscribed with news of his latest achievements.
Carried across the empire, these propaganda beetles were the first newspapers in history.
He wants to proclaim his power, his richness, his achievements, to the broadest possible strata of the Egyptian population.
And this news scarab was a way to replace A kind of earlier form of TM if you will Of sending information all over the place.
It was by news scarab that the outside world first heard Amenhotep had chosen his queen.
In addition to the minor wives in his harem, every pharaoh selected a chief queen.
To strengthen the royal line, she was often a sister or close female relative.
Amenhotep chose to ignore this royal custom.
He proudly announced that he was marrying a commoner, the daughter of a chariot officer.
A woman called Tiy.
"The chief queen, Tiy.
"Her father's name is Yuya.
Her mother's name is Tuia.
"She is the wife of a mighty king.
" We get the sense of a very strong woman.
The portraits are extraordinary and they do for once convey something of the person because there is no blandness to Queen Tiy.
You look at her and you think "Ooh "She really was something else, this one.
" MAN: Queen Tiy was not an easy queen.
She was so strong and you see that from the statues of this queen, how she equalled the king in size.
Queen Tiy was more than just a chief queen.
She was Amenhotep's near equal.
Far down the Nile in Nubia, Amenhotep made this stunningly clear by building a pair of temples.
One for Queen Tiy, and one nearby for himself, here at Soleb.
These temples were not just built for the royal couple, they were actually dedicated to them.
Deep in the southern part of his empire, Amenhotep and Tiy were worshipped as gods.
The shadow of Pharaoh extends in stone along the Nile to the African provinces of his empire.
He is there in a physical presence, looking out over the empire that he controls.
Amenhotep's message to his Nubian subjects was clear.
At the base of the columns at Soleb are images of captive Nubians.
A graphic representation of Pharaoh's power for all to see.
Here in Nubia, it was especially important that Amenhotep was in control.
Nubia's mines supplied most of Egypt's gold and gold was what allowed Amenhotep to control his rivals.
The requests from the foreign kings is for gold, gold, and more gold because, as says one of these kings, "In your land gold is as plentiful as dust.
" It's the Fort Knox of the ancient world.
Amenhotep had secured the gold supply.
But more and more of this gold was pouring into the temple of Amun-Re.
Amenhotep's priests in Thebes now controlled a third of Egypt's wealth.
They also interpreted Am un-Re's will, which Pharaoh had to obey.
At this stage, the priests of Amun-Re were probably more powerful than they had ever been in the history of Egypt.
The high priests of Amun at Karnak would probably have a power superior to that of the king.
To shift the power away from Amun-Re's priests, Amenhotep began to show interest in another minor god The Aten, the visible sun.
It could hardly have seemed important.
Yet it was about to change everything.
In 1352 BC Amenhotep III, the great king, the diplomatic genius, died.
Egypt was plunged into mourning.
The death of the king must have been a terrible event.
This is a man who had dominated politics, religion, the life of not only his subjects but the life of the empire, for so long.
Even in the Near East, Amenhotep was mourned by his rivals.
Foreign kings wrote to his widow, Queen Tiy, expressing their personal grief.
"I cried, I sat.
I did not eat or drink.
"I mourned, saying 'If only I were dead, 'or 10,000 were dead in my land.
'And that my brother, whom I love and who loves me, 'were alive as long as heaven and earth.
' Amenhotep III died in his 39th year.
In his last days, he could look out over the empire that seemingly the sun would never set oven He could think of a world at peace, where diplomacy ruled, where the wealth of Egypt was undoubted, and he could leave it all to his son Amenhotep IV.
Amenhotep IV had grown up in the most powerful family on earth.
Now he found himself Pharaoh and ruler of Egypt's empire.
In the first years of Amenhotep IV's reign, it must have seemed like nothing had changed.
But at his court, the new pharaoh was encouraging ideas that would soon transform Egyptian society.
A radically new style of art was flourishing.
According to the artists, the pharaoh himself had taught them.
The artists rejected the conventions of traditional Egyptian art.
Instead, they celebrated the vibrancy of the real world.
Their work was sensual and filled with movement.
But what shocked Egypt most were the new depictions of the royal family.
To a modern eye, they seem peculiar.
To conservative Egyptians, they must have been staggering.
Suddenly you get a sort of celebration of ugliness.
The bodies become extraordinarily proportioned.
You've got sort of a thin torso, and thin shoulders, massive hips on male figures as well as female figures.
Big buttocks and pendulous thighs which must be quite extraordinary for an Egyptian to see.
Presumably he was just trying to make a statement.
Sort of "Hey, I'm different.
" Doing something which completely breaks with tradition must have been very shocking.
It's a very good way of getting yourself noticed as someone who is going to do something really quite radical.
Amenhotep IV was embarking on a religious revolution.
The seeds had been sown in his father's reign.
But nothing could have prepared Egypt for what was about to happen.
In the second year of his reign, Amenhotep IV abandoned Egypt's traditional gods.
Even Amun-Re, the king of the gods, was discarded.
His temples were closed and his priests were evicted.
If you want to make a break with the past, you close the temples.
You remove the means for these people to use or abuse their power.
For this pharaoh there would be only one god.
The Aten, the visible sun.
Amenhotep would become the first monotheist in recorded history.
He would also be the only priest of his new religion.
The pharaoh stands alone, bathed in the rays of the Aten.
At a stroke, all the certainties of life that had marked the golden age of his father were swept away.
He discarded the name Amenhotep, meaning "Amun is satisfied".
He would take a new name, Akhenaten, meaning "one who's beneficial to the Aten".
Akhenaten seems to have been a very driven person and must have had enormous energy to carry through all the changes he's making.
They're much more substantial than just religion and the art.
At the end of the day, he must have restructured in some way the whole way the country was working.
Akhenaten had only just begun.
Now he planned another astonishing act.
To seal the break with the past, he ordered the construction of an entirely new capital city, far to the north of Thebes.
It was a desolate site known as Amarna.
He called it "the Horizon of the Sun".
On vast boundary stelae cut into the cliffs, Akhenaten claimed the Sun God had led him here.
And he made it clear his decision to move here was irreversible.
"It was my father, the Aten himself who pointed out the site.
"Before I came here "it didn't belong to any god or goddess, or to any king or queen.
"I will never say 'I am leaving it.
' "And I have no intention of breaking this oath.
" Amarna can't have been a very welcoming place for the first people that had to go there and try and create a city.
It was desert, really.
It seems a rather strange place, really, to build a city.
Abandoning Thebes, the new pharaoh could escape the influence of Egypt's high priests.
We have a situation in which Thebes, the city traditionally celebrated in Egyptian hymns, had in fact become a threat to the king, to the most important inhabitant of the city.
Everything in Thebes was packed up.
Akhenaten and his entire government Officials, scribes, soldiers and artisans Would move to the new desert site.
They were leaving behind their houses and their carefully prepared tombs.
They were leaving behind the most cosmopolitan city in Egypt, built by Akhenaten's father.
I don't think you would have had any choice.
If Akhenaten decides he wants to go, everybody y goes.
The whole court would have to go there.
All the hangers-on, everybody who would be part of court life, would have had to get up and move to Amarna.
Tens of thousands set out for Amarna.
Ahead lay a 200-mile journey, up the Nile to a new life in the new city All part of Akhenaten's great experiment.
The new capital city had been built on an unprecedented scale.
It was eight miles long and three miles wide.
Four huge palaces rose from the desert floor, surrounded by ornamental lakes and gardens.
And dominating the city was the Great Temple of the Aten.
A temple open to the sun, surrounded by wide roads and open spaces.
To a certain degree, Amarna was conceived very much like an American city.
It was conceived and planned in a way that would Account for openness and freedom, we could call it.
The whole city was one great stage on which Pharaoh could demonstrate his devotion to the Aten.
With him at the head of these processions, his subjects could see the woman who'd helped him realise his vision.
One of the most remarkable women of the ancient world.
But her face would not be seen again until the beginning of the 20th century.
In the winter of 1912, a German archaeologist, Ludwig Borchardt, came to excavate at Amarna.
"On December 6th, just before the lunchbreak, "I was called by an urgent note from Professor Ranke, "who was supervising the excavations.
"There, at about knee height in front of us, "a flesh-coloured neck appeared.
" As his workmen brushed the sand away, Borchardt began to see a stone face looking back at him The most beautiful he had ever seen.
It was the face of a queen whose name meant "a beautiful woman has come".
Nefertiti.
Stunned, that evening Borchardt wrote just one line in his diary.
"Description is useless.
See for yourself " In real life, Nefertiti was as remarkable as her statue.
Like her mother-in-law, Queen Tiy, Nefertiti played a prominent role in public life.
She and Akhenaten stood together at the head of the new regime.
If you look at the role Nefertiti plays in the Amarna period, it is almost as important as that of Akhenaten.
So she's there, present all the time.
She's even shown in some reliefs smiting the enemy, as a pharaoh is always shown.
So Nefertiti is not just a beautiful woman, she's a very, very important element in this new and incredible experiment.
Nefertiti is also the only Egyptian queen intimately described by her husband.
Verses of love and devotion over 3000 years old.
"She stands out in the palace, fair-faced and beautiful.
"At the sound of her voice, rejoicing breaks out.
"Her appearance fills the king with pleasure.
"She is the chief queen, "the king's beloved.
"The mistress of two lands Nefertiti.
" Nefertiti was not the only woman in Akhenaten's life.
In the northern apartments of the palace Nefertiti brought up their six daughters.
In the few surviving reliefs, we see the princesses, six little girls growing up in the City of the Sun, well loved by their father and mother.
No other royal family in the ancient world seems so human, so real.
Stelae show Akhenaten and his wife playing with their children, a brief moment in time captured 3300 years ago.
The representations of this divine family are unique.
Never before do you see the king or the queen with their children climbing all over them, or the king kissing his child.
These are family situations which we'd recognise as very human and they appear at this time.
Free from the constraints of the old order, life in Amarna was good, at least for now.
This success was celebrated in a new type of hymn which the king himself claimed to have written.
The greatest of these hymns is carved in a tomb above the city.
A hymn so powerful that phrases from it found their way into the Bible.
In it, Akhenaten praised the sun as the creator of the natural world.
Plants, animals, Egyptians, even foreigners.
"When you cast your rays, the herds are happy in their pasture.
"Trees and plants grow green.
"All the flocks gambol and all the birds come to life "because you have risen for them.
"Even the fish in the rivers leap towards your face.
"You created the earth to please you.
"People, cattle and flocks, "everything which walks on land or takes off and flies, using wings.
" The general message of the great hymn to the Aten in Amarna is that life comes from the Sun God, and life is distributed equally, over the earth.
Equally among nations, among people, equally among animals.
Egypt appeared to have accepted the new religion of the Aten.
And in the 12th year of his reign, Akhenaten organised a massive celebration to give thanks to his god with thousands of offerings.
Even the elderly Queen Mother Tiy paid a royal visit.
Ambassadors came from all over the world to deliver their tribute.
At the head of it all was Akhenaten and sitting beside him, Queen Nefertiti.
There had never been a partnership like it.
The incredible experiment appeared to be working.
But that same year, in the midst of apparent triumph, Akhenaten's new world suddenly began to fall apart.
At the height of her powers, Nefertiti simply vanishes from history.
Egyptologists have failed to discover exactly what happened to her.
Personal tragedy heaped upon the pharaoh.
Nefertiti was gone.
His mother, the great Queen Tiy, died soon afterwards.
So too did one of his minor wives and even one of his daughters.
After 12 years of tolerance, Akhenaten began to turn his power to destructive ends.
Once, he had been content simply to replace Egypt's traditional gods.
Now, he actively began to persecute them and Amun-Re bore the brunt of his fury.
The reformer had become a fanatic, incapable of tolerating other gods.
Akhenaten was certainly the first monotheist but also certainly the first religious oppressor in the history of the world.
Wherever they could be found, the name and image of Amun-Re were destroyed.
No reference to the god was too far away or too inaccessible.
He sent out what must have been armies of men with chisels along with people who could read the walls and find the names of the gods to be removed.
Akhenaten even attacked the memory of his beloved father, Amenhotep, gouging out the part of his name that mentioned Amun.
The name Amenhotep means "Amun is satisfied".
Akhenaten removed the Amun portion of the name of "Amun is satisfied" because under his reign Amun was certainly not satisfied.
So he in fact inflicted a punishment on his own father's name in order to comply with his own religious views, with his own religious fanaticism.
Consumed by his religious fervour, Akhenaten had lost touch with the outside world.
Letters poured in to warn Pharaoh that his empire was under threat.
Old allies, princes and vassals, wrote, begging him for help.
FIRST ALLY: The King my Lord should be informed the King of Hatti has seized all countries that were vassals of.
.
SECOND ALLY: We have been writing to the King our Lord for 20 years, but we haven't heard a single word back THIRD ALLY: In Canaan, locals beat my merchants and stole their money.
Canaan is your country, its kings are your slaves FOURTH ALLY: I keep writing to the palace, but you never reply.
Those princes and those people in the East were crying "Help us.
" But his ears did not hear anything.
Akhenaten ignored the desperate pleas of his subjects.
The empire his father had worked so hard to maintain was now in danger.
As their world began to fall apart, Akhenaten's oldest officials must have remembered how it had been under his father.
One could say that Akhenaten did all he could in his power to destroy his father's legacy.
So, at the end of his reign, what used to be a very cohesive power in the international arena is a country on the verge of crisis.
Only the pharaoh's personal charisma held the dream together.
Then, in 1336 BC, Akhenaten died.
With Akhenaten dead, the keystone of Atenism was gone.
In the hills above the deserted city work was abandoned on the tombs of Akhenaten's courtiers.
The tombs at Tell el-Amarna are all unfinished and unoccupied.
The paintings are barely finished in some cases.
It's almost as though somebody has just heard the king has died.
"We're going away.
Drop your tools and go.
" Now, with Akhenaten dead, traditional forces took hold of Egypt.
Once-loyal courtiers, artisans, even priests of the Aten flocked back to Thebes, eager to wrest order from the chaos that threatened to engulf Egypt.
After just 20 years Amarna, the setting for Pharaoh's great experiment, was abandoned.
Emerging from the chaos came a new king, a nine-year-old boy.
This child pharaoh had grown up in Akhenaten's palaces, his son by a minor wife.
His name was Tutankhaten, meaning "the living image of the Aten".
Tutankhaten inherited a dynasty, a country, and an empire staring disaster in the face.
But he was only a boy.
Those who had lost out under Akhenaten seized their opportunity.
They would use the young king to their own ends.
First they would have to change his name.
Tutankhaten became Tutankhamun "the living image of Amun.
" Tutankhamun is, to a certain extent, a dual personality.
He is a personality in between, between the Amarna and the post-Amarna age.
He certainly breathed Amarna air.
He was imbued with this intellectual innovation.
On the other hand, he was also the first pharaoh of the post-Amarna era.
He was the puppet of the new leaders in Egypt, the priesthood and military.
In a carefully scripted decree, Tutankhamun blamed his own father Akhenaten for neglecting Egypt's traditional gods and plunging Egypt into chaos.
"When His Majesty's reign began, "the temples of the gods and goddesses were in ruins.
"Their shrines had crumbled into piles of rubble, choked with weeds.
"Their chapels were little more than footpaths.
"And the land was in chaos because the gods had abandoned it.
" Tutankhamun's solution to these problems was simple.
There is a very important proclamation to the effect that order is being restored and things are going back to the way they were before.
So this is the bringing back of Amun, of the ancient gods, of the old orden The old gods, the temples, and, above all, the power of the priests of Amun-Re were restored.
The Aten was relegated to a minor place in the pantheon.
No one went to its city, no one spoke of it.
Akhenaten's heresy had simply never happened.
By the time Tutankhamun was 19 and able to rule in his own right, everything seemed to have returned to normal.
But that same year Tutankhamun died, suddenly and mysteriously.
An examination of his skull has recently produced yet another theory concerning the Aten family, and that is that Tutankhamun may have been murdered.
By whom, question mam.
It's a disaster for the family, for the royal family.
There is no heir.
Tutankhamun would only have been a footnote in Egyptian history if it had not been for the perseverance of a 20th-century archaeologist named Howard Carter.
In 1922, Carter discovered a tomb in the Valley of the Kings that few else believed existed.
In a single, breathtaking moment he would bring the age of Tutankhamun back to life.
"The dusty floor itself maintained eerie footprints "of the last people to breathe that very air "3500 years earlier.
"As you note the signs of recent life around you "the blackened lamp, finger marks on a freshly painted surface, "the farewell garland dropped upon the threshold "you feel it might have been put there yesterday.
"Time is annihilated by such intimate details as these "and you feel an intruder.
" Carter's find was unique.
He had not just rediscovered Tutankhamun.
He had unearthed the most fabulous treasure ever found.
32,000 objects and vast quantities of the gold of Egypt's empire were buried with the boy king.
DOUEK: There were thousands of objects.
Six chariots, four ceremonial beds, endless containers in the antechamber alone.
When Howard Carter describes opening the tomb and removing these objects And it took ten years to clear the tomb He tells us that they had to rig up platforms above ground to avoid trampling on these objects and breaking them.
In spite of its astonishing contents, Tutankhamun's tiny tomb was not complete.
His treasures had not been carefully placed, but randomly crammed in.
This was no normal burial.
On the back of the golden throne found in his tomb is a clue.
Tutankhamun and his wife are shown sitting beneath the rays of the Sun God, Aten.
Tutankhamun's officials had taken the opportunity to seal away this reminder of his father's reign and the period they found so shameful.
Tutankhamun was doomed to spend eternity with the very god he had renounced.
Tutankhamun died without an heir.
The backlash could now begin, and it was savage.
Every mention of the Aten that could be found was destroyed with ruthless efficiency.
Every reference to Akhenaten, to Nefertiti and their children, was hacked out.
The entire royal family was torn from the pages of history.
Everything is obliterated.
Akhenaten, Nefertiti and this period become as though they had never happened.
Akhenaten is a non-person.
He is referred to, if ever he is mentioned, as "that heretic".
Amarna, the once great and beautiful city that witnessed the birth of monotheism, gradually crumbled back into the sand, abandoned for all time.
I would say that Egyptian society as a whole saw the Amarna experience as one of its most tragic moments.
So much so, that the Amarna experience left its trace for hundreds of years.
The memory of this very dark period of Egyptian history remained in Egyptian consciousness.
A turbulent episode in the history of Egypt was over.
The dynasty of the great pharaohs who had founded the empire came to an end.
The stage was now set for a new beginning, and a new family of pharaohs would struggle to recapture the glory of Egypt's Golden Empire.