We remain in the old Egyptian Museum for a moment, but this guy deserves his own page.
For 3000 years the guiding principle in Egypt was: change is bad. The one exception was Akhenaten, alias the heretic pharoah, sometimes called the world's first monotheist (1350 BCE). He forbid the worship of any god except Aten, the sun disk. As you can imagine this did not win him any friends among the assorted priests of dozens of other gods. He also imposed an artistic style very different than what came before or after.
The statue on the left is our boy Akhenaten. The one on the right is probably him but some think it was his wife Nefertiti. You are no doubt wondering: What the hell is wrong with their abdomens? Nobody knows. It is probably symbolic rather than literal. It is hard to know much about this period because it didn't last very long and the monarchs who replaced him did their best to erase him.
The ol' A-guy built a new capital for himself , far away from the temples of the forbidden gods. We call it Amarna which is the modern name for the place, because the name he gave it is so close to his own as to be confusing. When he died and the old order was restored Amarna was abandoned which, as you can imagine, left archaeologists with some fun ruins to dig through.
And, amazingly enough, they found the city's archives, by which I mean copies of letters the pharoah sent to and received from other monarchs. Can you imagine what a gold mine of info that contained? They are written on clay in cuneiform, the "wedge writing" of Mesopotamia rather than Egyptian heiroglyphs.
One letter is from Abdi-Heba, Canaanite king of Jerusalem, asking for military assistance to protect his city from nomadic marauders known as Habiru - the Hebrews? Tempting, but this is 3000 years before the traditional date for David's conquest of that city.
And here are some of those letters.
We aren't sure who was Akhenaten's immediate successor but the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt eventually landed on the one pharoah everyone has heard of: Tutankhamen. He was probably Akhenaten's son, but he might have been a younger brother (messy records). What we know for sure is during his six year reign Amarna was abandoned and the old religion restored. And he died around age 18, ending monotheism, but not forever.
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