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Amarna Sunset

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My recent reading includes the book AMARNA SUNSET (2018), by Egyptologist Aidan Dodson.

It is about the demise of ancient Egypt's 18th dynasty, the dynasty famous for the heresies of Pharaoh Akhenaten, who gets credit (or blame) for the creation of monotheism.

Akhenaten was featured in Sigmund Freud's last book, MOSES AND MONOTHEISM (1939). Freud posits that the historical Moses was a devotee of Akhenaten, and that he and the other loyalists were exiled from Egypt after his hero's death, and followers of the older polytheism restored their own power and their gods. That was the origin of Judaism, on this view.

There is much more to Freud's theory, and of course he brought psychoanalysis into the picture. He believed that the reason Moses didn't reach the promised land was that he was murdered, as an oppressive father figure, and that after he was murdered the memory of that dark deed was buried in the unconscious of the perpetrated, taking the form of exaggerated reverence for the decedent. That stuff is appropriately ignored by contemporary archeologists. But as to the origin of monotheism, and the real-life equivalent of the biblical exodus, there is some reason to believe Freud got a lot of that right.

The most famous names in ancient Egypt's history are associated with the 18th dynasty. It appears that Akhanaten's Queen was Nefertiti, and their sun was Tut. So far as we can tell, through the fog of history and subsequent attempts by the "counter-reformation" to bury the truth about the Amarna period. Tut died in his teenaged years -- he was probably NOT murdered, though that has been  persistent view. It isn't at all clear what happened to Nefertiti after the deaths of her husband and son. But the counter-reformation prevailed, the old polytheism was restored, and the capital was moved south back to Thebes, so that Amarna could be covered over with sand.

None of this is all that new. It is the background against which Dodson writes. I'll say something about Dodson's specific contributions to the study of the end of the 18th dynasty, the sunset at Amarna, at a later time.



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