Akhenaten: The Pharaoh Erased from Egypt’s Stones and Memory

On the eastern bank of the Nile, about 300 kilometres south of Cairo, a city lies almost abandoned in the desert. The ancient Egyptians called it Akhetaten, “the horizon of Aten”. Today the site is known as Amarna. Houses, palaces, temples, and cemeteries still mark the ground, but the name of the man who built the city was repeatedly cut out of stone.

That man was Amenhotep IV, a pharaoh who ruled Egypt in the fourteenth century BCE. He changed his name to Akhenaten, closed many old temples, placed Aten at the centre of state worship, and moved the court from Thebes to Akhetaten. After his death, the city was abandoned, its temples dismantled, his name was removed from royal lists, and later rulers restored the old religion. This was not a name lost by accident. It was the trace of a campaign to remove an entire revolution from the memory of a country.