Original subtitles

(ambient flourish)

- [Narrator] Ancient Egypt.

For over 3,000 years,

the world's most vibrant and puzzling civilization

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 their prosperity

to the thousands of gods they worshiped,

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?

(ambient exotic music)

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.

- [Narrator] To preserve his power,

Akhenaten shatters 15 centuries of tradition.

Generations of Egyptians have built temples

to worship their gods,

and those gods have been generous.

(gentle dramatic music)

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

and the best possible organization.

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.

That was a bad word for the Egyptians.

- [Narrator] 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.

(gentle dramatic music)

Akhenaten's radical break with religious tradition

doesn't happen overnight.

It festered quietly for 30 years

under the reign of his father.

In Thebes, Egypt's political capital,

stood Karnak, a magnificent temple complex.

Built to honor the god Amun-Ra,

for centuries this was the center

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 the Third.

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.

(gentle music)

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 10 years,

archeologists have uncovered this enormous building.

Hundreds of workers unearthed 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 stories tall.

Archeologist 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.

- [Interpreter] Of course, these colossal statues

represent Amenhotep, but it is king as god.

Or you could turn it around and say this is the god as king.

The gods take the form which the king gives him.

- [Narrator] Amenhotep sees himself as god on Earth,

and that's new.

Up to then, pharaohs had only been considered godlike.

But the center 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.

(gentle orchestral music)

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.

(gentle orchestral music)

This is a glittering festival.

The priests sacrifice hundreds of animals.

The worshipers leave a fortune in offerings.

Dozens of musicians and ecstatic dancers

join the sacred procession.

(gentle ominous music)

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.

- [Narrator] 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.

In 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 worshiping on behalf of the pharaoh,

the only mortal who can communicate with the gods.

(gentle orchestral music)

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.

(gentle orchestral music)

- [Narrator] The most powerful serve in the capital, Thebes,

in the temple of Amun-Ra, Karnak.

Today, Karnak is one of the grandest

archeological sites in the world.

(gentle orchestral music)

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 citizen 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.

In gratitude, the citizens leave offerings for Amun-Ra,

which the priests record in the temple walls.

The generous display not only pleases the god,

but encourages the people to open their purses wider.

(gentle dramatic music)

Gifts of meat, grain, wine, beer, and much more

flood into the temples to win the god's good will.

- 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 training 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.

- [Narrator] 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 the paradise on Earth.

They represent this stability

through a feathered goddess called Maat.

- Maat 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 Maat personified.

And the priest,

as soon as he had opened the doors of the shrine at dawn,

would immediately present Maat,

to prove to the god that in the darkness hours

evil had not triumphed and order was still there.

- [Narrator] 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 temples,

saying you will get, I don't know,

1/64th of all the offerings that are presented.

- [Narrator] 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 Maat.

(gentle exotic music)

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.

(horses galloping) (yelling)

(gentle dramatic music)

Pharaohs portrayed themselves

through showy marketing campaigns,

carved into temple walls like billboards on Times Square.

- What we moderns do not realize

is that all these relief scenes in antiquity

were brightly colored.

Lavish, lurid, poster color type paints

were applied all over these scenes,

for the Egyptian artist's palette

was very highly-keyed with red, 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 a 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.

(horses galloping)

- [Narrator] 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.

(speaking in foreign language)

It takes 100 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.

- [Interpreter] Everyone knows that a pharaoh was human,

but in office he's godlike.

When he's clothed in his regalia, in his royal garb,

then he appears to be divine.

In time, he becomes the son of god.

And by the time of Amenhotep the Third,

he is the god.

- [Narrator] Amenhotep built his funerary temple

as the physical expression of his boundless ambition.

The temple walls, 750 meters long and eight meters thick,

were adorned with colorful 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.

(speaking in foreign language)

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.

- [Interpreter] There is a pool

with three naked girls swimming in it.

That's unique.

We were so happy to find that.

There are no names, but we assume

that they are the king's daughters,

swimming on a hot day.

- [Narrator] 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.

(gentle orchestral music)

The pillars represent Egypt's plant life.

The temple's ceilings recall the sky and the heavens.

The floor symbolizes the Nile and its fertile mud.

- The art is a reflection of this orderliness

that we called Maat, that the ancient Egyptians called Maat.

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 tranquility.

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, Maat.

- [Narrator] Entering a traditional Egyptian temple,

the priests transition from light to dark

as they approach the holy of holies.

(gentle ambient music)

It's where the gods live,

hidden from the eyes of the people.

But Amenhotep re-imagines the temple.

He wants to let the light shine in.

He identifies himself with Aten, the Sun Disk,

another form of the sun god.

He even has himself addressed as Shining Sun Disk.

(speaking in foreign language)

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 Disk 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.

(gentle music)

Aten is a god who is everywhere, visible to everyone,

a god of every day 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 Amenhotep Third did something more than that.

He considered himself in a special way divine.

- [Narrator] 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.

(speaking in foreign language)

Akhenaten will attack the cult of Amun-Ra head-on.

In the process, he will undo 1,500 years of tradition

and rattle Egypt to its foundation.

(thunder rolling)

He starts be 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 Disk,

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 Disk 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 Disk at all.

And so we're told that the Sun Disk created the world.

We're not told how.

All the old creation stories, the mythology is gone.

- [Narrator] 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 favor.

"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 labor.

Now, offerings flow to the new god

and to Akhenaten.

- Immediately, the tax revenue, as he calls it,

that poured into the granaries of the Sun Disk

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.

(gentle dramatic music)

- [Narrator] 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.

(gentle dramatic music)

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 Disk Aten, is worshiped 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 kilometers 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.

(dramatic orchestral music)

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.

(birds tweeting)

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 Disk

told the pharaoh to build here.

- He tells us in the boundary text,

the Boundary Stelae, in his own voice,

that the Aten directed him here.

And that he had certain, 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.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] In the fifth year of his reign, 1347 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, archeologists preserve the remains

of Akhenaten's city.

(speaking in foreign language)

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.

(birds squawking)

On many of the Aten temple walls,

reliefs depict the royal couple praying to the sun god.

(gentle dramatic music)

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.

(gentle dramatic music)

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.

- [Narrator] 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,

claimed 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.

- [Narrator] In 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,

from their worship through splendid festivities.

(gentle ambient music)

- There're 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.

- [Narrator] We don't know if this is what they really felt

or if they wrote it to win favor.

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

realizes 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.

(birds tweeting)

- [Narrator] Most surprisingly,

many of the remains Kemp and his team have unearthed

were young children or babies,

like this 15-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.

- [Narrator] 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.

(gentle dramatic music)

- Even in his own new city,

the extent to which his new religion took root

is very minimal.

Because in certain 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 worshiping.

What the 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.

- [Narrator] Akhenaten will die young,

after just 17 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 Disk, too?

What would the role be of the new king coming?

- [Narrator] 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, Maat, can be reestablished.

The priests and the people

can celebrate the gods openly once more.

(upbeat drum music)

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 100,000 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.

- [Narrator] Ironically, the decay of Karnak's temple

over the centuries has been a godsend

for archeologists researching this period.

As its walls collapsed,

they exposed Akhenaten's talatat blocks.

Donald Redford and his colleagues

have spent decades cataloging 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 Disk

would grant him and his family eternal life.

His goals were grandiose, but his fall was complete.

Even his heir, the boy king Tutankhamen,

curses his legacy.

To distance himself from his father,

he erects plaques listing all of Akhenaten's abuses.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- He complains, in his great reformation stela,

that the gods had turned their back 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 gonna make them turn around.

I'm gonna re-open the temples.

- [Narrator] After a period of drastic harmful change,

the priests and pharaoh embrace conservatism,

a time-tested order.

In 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.

1,500 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 worshiped 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.

(dramatic orchestral music)

(ambient flourish)