"NARRATOR:" "Ancient Egypt." "For over 3000 years." "the world's most vibrant and puzzling civilisation flourished through war and peace." "The Egyptians built great cities." "enduring monuments." "they advanced mathematics and technology." "Their astonishing legacy survives to this day." "They attributed that prosperity to the thousands of gods they worshipped." "who granted centuries of stability until the reign of one man " "Akhenaten. a heretic who dared to change it all." "New excavations shed light on Egypt's most controversial pharaoh." "who plunders the temples and banishes the gods." "triggering one of ancient Egypt's biggest dilemmas." "A crisis of faith." "What happens when the foundation of Egypt's success gets ripped away?" "Who rules in Egypt?" "Men... or gods?" "The priest of Amun-Ra... and the new king... the two most powerful men in Egypt." "Pharaoh Akhenaten has come to power." "His name means "the living spirit of the god Aten"." "For generations. kings and priests have worked in harmony to benefit the people." "Then came Amun." "a god that rose from obscurity to become the empire's untouchable deity." "threatening to eclipse even the pharaoh's power." "But the young pharaoh has other ideas... blasphemous ones." "He'll wield his ultimate authority to do battle against this upstart god and the priests who serve him." "No one has ever dared to challenge the gods before." "It violates the very core of Egyptian society." "The deities. thousands of them." "have ruled and protected the Egyptians since the beginning." "for more than 1 000 years." "They represent all aspects of life." "They keep the Egyptians safe." "Like humans. gods can rise and fall in importance." "Amun was the god of the capital city." "Thebes. 200 years earlier." "Pharaohs fought and won battles in his name and built an empire." "With Egypt's success." "Amun's significance rose fast." "the source of the nation's strength." "Eventually." "Amun merges with the sun god." "Ra." "the sole ruler of the gods." "to form the supreme god - Amun-Ra." "His temple becomes the wealthiest in the land." "And for the pharaoh." "that is the problem." "Akhenaten makes a bold and frightening move." "He wages war on the gods." "Amun's name is gouged from the temple walls." "Every single image of Amun is destroyed." "The priests do all they can to save their god from their renegade pharaoh and to save Egypt from Amun's wrath." "No one has ever tried to destroy a god." "Neither Akhenaten nor the priests know what will happen." "Both sides feel threatened." "I think that's the main thing." "Akhenaten's certainly threatened because he's going against the king of the gods. of all things." "A mysterious god who can attack him in ways he doesn't have any idea about." "To preserve his power." "Akhenaten shatters 1 5 centuries of tradition." "Generations of Egyptians have built temples to worship their gods." "And those gods have been generous." "With the gift of the Nile." "the Egyptians created paradise on earth." "And they know it." "Everyone is fed." "everyone is protected." "everyone knows his place." "The Egyptians lived in the best possible society in the best possible organisation." "And anyone who tried to change it was changing it for the worse." "And they avoided that." "People who advocated change were considered to be rebels. almost." "revolutionaries. and that was a bad word for the Egyptians." "But now the pharaoh has become the most dangerous revolutionary of all time." "The priests of Amun-Ra must hurry." "They must save the holy statues before the pharaoh closes or defiles the temples." "Akhenaten's radical break with religious tradition doesn't happen overnight." "It festered quietly for 30 years." "under the reign of his father." "ln Thebes." "Egypt's political capital." "stood Karnak." "a magnificent temple complex." "built to honour the god Amun-Ra." "For centuries. this was the centre of Egypt's religious tradition." "But slowly the focus started to shift to the west." "to the other side of the Nile." "where the sun sets and elaborate funerary temples rose." "The biggest temple of them all belonged to Akhenaten's father..." "Amenhotep lll." "He ruled over Egypt's most prosperous time." "made evident from the smoothness." "softness and sensuality of Amenhotep's portraits." "each cut from a single piece of precious stone." "The towering Colossi of Memnon are the most famous." "They once flanked the entry to his temple." "which has all but disappeared." "But in the last ten years." "archaeologists have uncovered this enormous building." "Hundreds of workers unearth gigantic stone body parts." "assembling dozens of colossal statues of Amenhotep and his queen." "Almost all the figures were shattered into bits and require painstaking effort to make them whole." "The fully assembled statues stand up to five storeys tall." "Archaeologist Hourig Sourouzian leads this dig." "She sees a royal couple that portrayed itself in a new." "confident way. as individuals." "And she sees a pharaoh who aspired to be more." "Amenhotep sees himself as god on earth." "And that's new." "Up to then. pharaohs had only been considered god-like." "But the centre of power in Egypt is not his funerary temple." "It is across the river in Karnak." "the cult site of the imperial god." "Amun-Ra." "This is where Amenhotep celebrates the most important Egyptian festival." "Opet." "dedicated to the supreme deity." "And his son Akhenaten joins in." "The pharaoh. as both head of government and high priest of the cult." "leads the festival..." "just as his father did before him." "And his son Akhenaten will lead it after him." "This is a glittering festival." "The priests sacrifice hundreds of animals." "The worshippers leave a fortune in offerings." "Dozens of musicians and ecstatic dancers join the sacred procession." "The god himself is carried from the temple in his own sanctuary - a holy skiff." "Led by the pharaoh." "the priests bring the vessel out of Karnak's temple's inner sanctum." "and on this rare day." "the god Amun-Ra moves among the people of the city." "The cult of Amun-Ra." "king of the gods." "became a kind of a national outpouring of loyalty on the part of the Egyptians." "He was the god of Egypt." "he had made Egypt strong." "If there ever was a personification of the nation." "it was he." "Amun-Ra." "king of the gods." "But behind the scenes." "conflict is brewing." "As Amun-Ra gets more popular." "his priests gain wealth and power." "They begin to wield their influence on the royal family and decisions of state." "Amenhotep watches his priests carefully... suspiciously." "A clash is coming." "A struggle that will change everything." "For now. thousands of gods live on the Nile." "Each city has its own god." "with its own temple." "ln southern Egypt." "on the island of Elephantine." "one of the empire's most ancient holy sites was already 1 500 years old by the time of Pharaoh Amenhotep." "For generations. priests have prayed here for the Nile's nourishing floodwaters." "always worshipping on behalf of the pharaoh." "the only mortal who can communicate with the gods." "As Egypt prospers." "more and more temples spring up on the banks of the Nile." "run by an increasing number of priests." "Certainly. from the time of the New Kingdom. from the empire." "the priesthood was a very genuine way of life for a huge segment of the population." "And from that point on. we can speak of a professional priesthood with whole families of priests that. generation after generation." "function in the same temple." "The most powerful serve in the capital Thebes in the temple of Amun-Ra..." "Karnak." "Today." "Karnak is one of the grandest archaeological sites in the world." "During Amenhotep's time." "the period of the New Kingdom." "it is a gigantic complex. with bakeries." "breweries. huge grain silos." "thousands of priests and 80.000 temple workers." "The temple controls 400.000 animals." "240.000 hectares of land." "It is a state within a state." "a world within a world." "and dedicated to one god - the powerful. but inaccessible" "Amun-Ra." "At Karnak's Opet Festival." "average Egyptian citizens can get closer to their chief deity before the priests shuttle him back to his home in the dark inner sanctum of the temple." "Only the priests and the pharaoh have access to the holy of holies." "They protect the god and so the god protects the people." "ln gratitude. the citizens leave offerings for Amun-Ra." "which the priests record on the temple walls." "The generous display not only pleases the god." "but encourages the people to open their purses wider." "Gifts of meat. grain. wine. beer and much more flood into the temples to win the god's goodwill." "These offerings. of course." "would then be redistributed to the priests. to their families." "to the people who worked on the farms owned by the temples." "to the people who worked in the workshops or led trading expeditions on behalf of the temples." "It was an army of people who had to be supported." "The temples were." "in a very real sense." "one of the most important economic elements in the entire bureaucracy of Egypt." "By the time of Pharaoh Amenhotep." "the priests of Amun-Ra control much of the economy." "By employing a large percentage of the Egyptian people." "the priests take credit for maintaining the empire's crucial balance." "keeping Egypt a paradise on earth." "They represent this stability through a feathered goddess called Ma'at." "Ma'at was supposed to be presented to the god every morning when he woke up." "in the form of a little goddess. sitting on a plate with a feather on her head." "That was Ma'at. personified." "And the priest. as soon as he had opened the doors of the shrine at dawn." "would immediately present Ma'at to prove to the god that in the darkness hours evil had not triumphed and order was still there." "The priests dedicate their lives to rituals designed to maintain this order and to please the gods who guarantee prosperity." "The people are taught that if they neglect their deities." "the gods can die and chaos will rule their country." "For over 1 000 years." "no one has ever dared to challenge the system." "The Egyptians make daily offerings to the gods which are collected by the priests." "There is a whole process in ancient Egypt of what is called the reversion." "The reversion. which means that." "once the offerings have been placed out and the god has been satisfied with their counterparts." "then the offerings revert to the priests as their salaries." "Or anybody working in the temple." "He gets part of the offerings as his salary." "And they sign a contract with the temple saying "You will get one..."" "I don't know... "1 /64th of all the offerings that are presented."" "The greatest offerings come after a successful military campaign." "When an enemy begs for peace." "he must pay tribute." "The pharaoh makes sure that the priests collect their share of the spoils." "to thank Amun-Ra for victory and to help guarantee the continuation of Ma'at." "With every success." "the pharaoh and the priests amass more wealth and power." "As long as there are battles to fight." "the pharaohs could ride the wave of military glory." "protecting Egypt from foreign enemies and becoming heroes to the people." "Pharaohs portrayed themselves through showy marketing campaigns." "carved into temple walls." "like billboards on Times Square." "What we moderns do not realise is that all these relief scenes in antiquity were brightly coloured." "Lavish. lurid. poster-colour-type paints were applied all over these scenes." "for the Egyptian artist's palette was very highly keyed with reds. yellows. blues." "The whole purpose was to cause the scene to almost bounce out at you from the stone and to cause the entire courtyard almost to glow." "This was all. of course." "in the service of propaganda to promote the king as a heroic figure." "a conquering heroic figure who could not be resisted." "These kings were shown on the front lines." "fighting side by side with their men." "But Amenhotep has no war to fight." "No foreign power threatens Egypt." "He has no traditional path to glory." "So he decides to elevate the status of pharaoh to that of a god." "And for this new god." "he plans to build the biggest temple Egypt has ever seen." "Today." "Amenhotep's complex." "the most expensive since the pyramids." "is one of the largest excavation sites in Egypt." "It takes 1 00 people to put but one of his statues back together." "To erect them took many more." "And he erected over 1 000." "Each represents Pharaoh Amenhotep." "designed to confirm his status as god on earth." "Amenhotep built his funerary temple as the physical expression of his boundless ambition." "The temple walls." "7 50 metres long and 8 metres thick." "were adorned with colourful. painted reliefs and statues of the pharaoh." "all made from precious red granite." "white alabaster and quartzite from the north and south of the country." "He fashioned a masterpiece - built for eternity." "But today's dig reveals something more than the monumental statues that dominate the terrain." "Hourig Sourouzian and her team have made subtler finds that expose another side of this pharaoh." "They're digging out illustrated blocks of stone that show intimate scenes from the pharaoh's personal life." "Scenes unthinkable for a pharaoh to reveal before Amenhotep's time." "For the pharaoh. even mundane scenes from his family life are worth recording." "His young son Akhenaten." "growing up in the shadow of his father's gigantic temple." "learns the importance of pictures and symbols in religious life." "Inside and out." "his father's temple incorporates the traditional elements of cosmic harmony." "The pillars represent Egypt's plant life." "The temple ceilings recall the sky and the heavens." "The floor symbolises the Nile and its fertile mud." "The art is a reflection of this orderliness that we call Ma'at." "that the ancient Egyptians called Ma'at." "You see it in Egyptian temples." "where on the outer walls of the temple you have battle scenes with Pharaoh going after the enemies of Egypt and. of course." "always winning the battle." "You go inside the temple and you find peace and tranquillity." "You're in the home of a god and the scenes are very different." "You have moved from the symbols of disorder and chaos to the symbols of order. peace." "tranquility" " Ma'at." "Entering a traditional Egyptian temple." "the priests transition from light to dark as they approach the holy of holies." "It's where the gods live." "hidden from the eyes of the people." "But Amenhotep reimagines the temple." "He wants to let the light shine in." "He identifies himself with Aten. the sun disc." "another form of the sun god." "He even has himself addressed as Shining Sun Disc." "What goes on in a boy's mind when he sees his father turn himself into a god?" "For Akhenaten. the message is clear." "The sun disc now rises above all other gods." "The sun is the source of all life." "It feeds the people of the empire." "It makes the cattle thrive and the harvests abundant." "Aten is a god who is everywhere." "visible to everyone." "A god of everyday life." "always present." "No need for priests to mediate." "And so Amenhotep's new Aten cult is a not so subtle threat to the priests of Amun-Ra." "To control them. he also appoints loyal friends and family members to some of the highest positions at the temples of Luxor and Karnak." "By altering the politics and the scope of throne and temple." "Amenhotep tips the balance of power away from the priests." "He did at one point." "this is true... sort of engineer a shift in the status of the pharaoh. the god king." "by considering himself." "to a certain extent. an enhanced god." "Now. every Egyptian pharaoh was a god." "A perfect god or the great god." "But Amenophis lll did something more than that." "He considered himself in a special way divine." "The priests of the old cult of Amun-Ra see this new sun-god pharaoh eclipsing their power." "They are not pleased." "As Akhenaten grows up and marries Nefertiti." "he has a difficult act to follow." "Eventually he will succeed his father." "but how can he outshine a man who is already a god?" "Amenhotep - pharaoh. family man and self-made deity - dies at the peak of his power." "He has obtained immortality by building more than any pharaoh before him." "by redefining what it means to be a god and by revealing more of himself as a man." "He leaves behind an incredibly rich country and a simmering conflict - the rivalry between the pharaoh and the priests of Amun-Ra." "As his son Akhenaten ascends the throne." "what do the priests expect of him?" "Perhaps he'll want to avoid confrontation and reconcile with them." "But instead." "Akhenaten will take his father's policies and extend them even further." "If pharaoh is a god." "then he must have no competition." "Akhenaten will attack the cult of Amun-Ra head on." "ln the process. he will undo 1 500 years of tradition... and rattle Egypt to its foundation." "He starts by escalating his father's conflict with the priests... ordering the temples of Amun-Ra closed and banning the god." "His supporters storm the sacred sites and confiscate the toppled god's treasures." "Amun-Ra is struck from history." "his name obliterated from the temple walls." "Egypt has only one god now." "Aten. the sun disc." "the supreme and final ruler." "No pharaoh had ever dared to attack the cherished pantheon of Egyptian gods." "Nothing will remain now but the sun disc and his children." "Akhenaten and Nefertiti." "With the removal of the gods." "their mythology went too." "There was no more mythology." "He didn't have a myth about the sun disc at all." "And so we are told that the sun disc created the world. we're not told how." "All the old creation stories." "the mythology is gone." "For the priests of Amun-Ra." "it spells disaster." "They stand to lose power." "money and authority." "Secretly. they try to save some statues of their god." "hoping to stay in his favour." ""Look upon us." "Amun-Ra." ""You were here when there was nothing." "And you will be here for eternity." ""Banish our fear!"" "Their prayers go unanswered." "Akhenaten closes the temples and sentences the priests to hard labour." "Now. offerings flow to the new god... and to Akhenaten." "lmmediately. the tax revenue." "as he calls it." "that poured into the granaries of the sun disc was enormous." "And all other temples were very quickly pushed into economic hardship." "Their doors closed. they couldn't sustain themselves and they lay idle." "But Akhenaten hasn't finished." "He envisions grand temples to Aten." "to rival the gigantic complex of Karnak." "He wants to outdo even his father's colossal constructions and he wants it... now." "The quickest way to build in ancient Egypt is with mud bricks." "which take no time to manufacture." "But mud bricks don't last for eternity." "and so they're unfit for building temples." "So the resourceful young pharaoh builds with smaller. easier-to-carry blocks instead of massive stone slabs." "With these sandstone blocks." "Akhenaten can erect an enormous temple to Aten in just a few years." "And he builds it right next to Karnak." "the old seat of Amun's power." "He envisions a revolutionary temple." "with a new architecture." "His god. the sun disc Aten." "is worshipped under an open sky." "The whole complex has no roof so the sun god's rays can flood the interior." "After a short time." "Akhenaten has already surpassed his father's temple." "But then... he abandons it." "Perhaps to show his defiance of the old order." "or to demonstrate the strength of his new god." "Akhenaten decides to leave Thebes." "where the air is still thick with the spirit of the old god." "and starts from scratch." "He relaunches a new Egyptian society 400 kilometres north of Thebes." "in an almost deserted region." "creating a new capital city." "It's a crazy idea." "a complete break from tradition." "Akhenaten takes his architects into the desert." "where his vision will become reality." "Akhetaten rises on the eastern bank of the Nile." "a sprawling metropolis to rival Thebes." "It boasts 50.000 subjects." "colossal temples dedicated to Aten." "a vast palace and wide streets." "And yet. at the site of Akhetaten - today's Amarna - little remains." "Egyptologist Barry Kemp has spent his professional life studying Akhenaten's city." "We know its borders." "marked by boundary plaques carved deep into the rock face of the surrounding mountains." "They proclaim that the god of the sun disc told the pharaoh to build here." "He tells us in the boundary text." "the boundary stele. in his own voice." "that the Aten directed him here and that he." "Akhenaten." "had certain criteria in mind." "It had to be on the east side." "in a mountainous area." "and it had to be a place which had not belonged to any god or goddess or king or queen or anyone before." "So it was a clean. pure place that had not been claimed by anyone." "ln the fifth year of his reign. 1 347 BC." "Akhenaten dedicates his city." "Akhetaten." "To the tens of thousands of people he has forced to move here." "he announces a new beginning in Egypt's history." "From now on. they are all under the protection of the sun god Aten." "It's a time of new opportunity and equality." "Today. archaeologists preserve the remains of Akhenaten's city." "After years of studying the foundations and thousands of area photographs." "they have traced the outlines and finally know what Akhetaten looked like." "The officials live in the north." "beside the palace complex." "Every day." "Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti travel the broad avenues to show themselves to the people." "On many of the Aten temple walls." "reliefs depict the royal couple praying to the sun god." "The palace and the temple are both arranged so that. at sunrise and sunset." "Aten's rays flood the sacred buildings of the new capital." "Akhenaten and Nefertiti are obsessed by their holy role as children of the sun god." "They've replaced the crowded pantheon of Egyptian gods with the single god." "Aten." "It's a simple idea. foreshadowing the monotheism of later religions." "but radical in its day." "However. in spite of their promise of a better society." "the royal couple shows no interest in their subjects... putting their own immortality in jeopardy." "I don't think he was intending to reform society." "It's a very personal reform of how the state-god should be defined and approached." "And an important part of that approach is to create a special place." "Akhenaten decorates this special place with a new form of art." "No more strange animal gods or victorious warrior pharaohs." "For the first time in Egypt's history." "the pharaoh is depicted as an individual. with human emotions." "and shown in the circle of his family as a loving husband and father." "And always. the royal family is seen basking in the light of the sun god Aten." "who caresses his family with his rays." "Akhenaten's art is all about the here and now." "not about eternal life or the gods." "One aspect of his reign that I find intriguing is that some of the courtiers." "the officials in their tombs." "claim to have been guided by him in moral instruction... that he was the one that helped them to distinguish between right and wrong." "And Akhenaten. through that." "becomes perhaps a teacher." "a guider of people." "ln the rock tombs of Amarna." "a new elite presents itself." "Proud of the exalted position Akhenaten has granted them." "they are unified in their belief in Aten." "whom they worship through splendid festivities." "There are also a couple of letters from a very ordinary person that have survived. which were sent from Amarna to Thebes." "in which the writer claims to have been guided in personal decisions by the Aten." "as if the Aten is becoming the man's conscience." "And perhaps that was some aspect of Akhenaten's teaching." "We don't know if this is what they really felt or if they wrote it to win favour." "But either way. as never before." "the emphasis is on the individual." "Perhaps life in Akhetaten is best understood by looking at how it ended - in its cemeteries." "Unlike other periods of Egyptian history." "most people were buried straight into the desert soil." "This rare wooden sarcophagus probably held a high official." "The more they dig." "the more Barry Kemp's team realises it's witnessing a brief. unusual moment in Egypt's past." "Almost invariably. ancient cemeteries cover a period of time." "Whereas here. the period of time." "it's so short that it is a real population of people alive more or less at the same time." "many of them probably related." "knowing one another." "So if you study the people from here." "you really are studying a cross-section of a population." "Most surprisingly. many of the remains Kemp and his team have unearthed were young children or babies." "Like this 1 5-month-old child." "Ancient sources say an epidemic raged here." "This seems to be accurate as evidenced by these decaying bones here being gathered for analysis." "The opinion of the anthropologists is that the pattern of death with a peak amongst young people matches records of death of populations in whom an epidemic is running." "But back then. was this pestilence seen as a curse from Amun-Ra." "the god abolished by the pharaoh?" "Akhenaten and Nefertiti worship only themselves and their new god Aten." "But behind their backs. most of their subjects disobey their sovereign and secretly worship their old gods." "Even in his own new city." "the extent to which his new religion took root is very minimal." "Because. in certain of the suburbs of the city." "we can see the fetishes and little idols and other paraphernalia of the old cults still there." "The people are still worshipping." "What people don't have. of course." "are the big temples of the gods where they can go and worship or where their relatives can find employment." "Akhenaten will die young." "after just 1 7 years in power." "and his revolution will die with him." "Shortly after his death. his subjects abandoned the capital city Akhetaten." "The survivors returned to Thebes." "There wasn't much else they could do." "Akhenaten's self-important cult was nothing without him." "There seems to have been no provision made for the succession." "Who was going to follow him?" "And was he going to be the beautiful child of the sun disc too?" "What would the role be of the new king coming?" "Back in the old capital." "the priests bring the images of Amun-Ra out of their hiding places." "For them." "Akhenaten meant only chaos." "Now. true order" " Ma'at - can be re-established and the priests and the people can celebrate their gods openly once more." "The Egyptians believe that Amun-Ra cursed their late pharaoh and all his works." "so they tear down Akhenaten's sun temples just as fast as they went up." "And thousands of ready-made sandstone blocks. called talatat." "find a new use." "The very practical Egyptians decided to use this masonry as fill and core material in later walls and pylons and under floors and things like that." "The result is that." "in the Karnak area." "well over 1 00.000 talatat." "each with a fragment of relief." "has been preserved and has been secreted in their new beds within the pylons and under the floors and so forth." "lronically. the decay of Karnak's temple over the centuries has been a godsend for archaeologists researching this period." "As its walls collapsed. they exposed Akhenaten's talatat blocks." "Donald Redford and his colleagues have spent decades cataloguing them." "Piecing together tens of thousands of photos." "they've reconstructed some of the temple walls of the heretic king." "The mighty reliefs that adorned Akhenaten's cult sites show an uncompromising pharaoh who insisted that everything revolve around the god Aten." "Akhenaten was convinced that the rays of the sun disc would grant him and his family eternal life." "His goals were grandiose." "But his fall was complete." "Even his heir." "the boy-king Tutankhamun." "curses his legacy." "To distance himself from his father." "he erects plaques listing all of Akhenaten's abuses." "He complains in his great Reformation Stela that the gods have turned their backs on Egypt." "If the Egyptian army went into Syria." "they would be defeated all the time and other disasters would follow because the gods had turned their backs." "And now. I'm going to make them turn around." "I'm going to reopen the temples." "After a period of drastic. harmful change." "the priests and pharaoh embrace conservatism. a time-tested order." "ln their magnificent temples." "the illustrations depict the pharaoh in his renewed role as high priest." "talking to the gods." "And the gods. in return. guarantee the prosperity of Egypt and its people." "Akhenaten never appears in the official list of Egypt's kings." "carved into the temple at Abydos." "His name is obliterated from history." "Fifteen hundred years of tradition are stronger than the mightiest pharaoh." "The old rituals will continue for another 1 000 years." "Akhenaten's dangerous vision of a single. all-seeing god was repellent to most Egyptians." "who worshipped at thousands of altars." "We will never know what motivated him to empower Aten." "But the pharaoh was a visionary." "a monotheist born too soon." "long before the idea took hold in much of the world." "Subtitles SBS Australia 201 1"