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To make this user friendly, allowing you to simply use the "post a comment" box, I think I will make this two pages. So, the links below take you to a list of evidence for and evidence against pages. You can post to either simply with a list item, but be specific enough that people know what you're talking about (i.e. "Tomb of Huya at Amarna: scene showing four royal people walking up the stairs - looks like two living royal males at same time!") If we want to get into big debates about how to read any single given piece of evidence, or to post questions, let's do it on this main page. - Prof. B

Pro-coregency

Anti-coregency

Nick Bartos says:

Working my way through this week’s readings about Akhenaten’s new religion and the issue of co-regency, I thought of a more general question which may be worthy of debate (Professor Bestok, please feel free to move this post as I didn’t quite know where to put it).  We ended today’s class with an excellent point about the removal (or non-removal) of Amenhotep III’s name from tomb inscriptions and general records.  The main premise of the argument was that if there was co-regency, it would have lasted about nine years, well into the “radical stage” of Akhenaten’s reign.  Following that logic, it seems odd that only Akhenaten’s name was removed from previous inscriptions while the name of Amenhotep III (a co-heretic if there was co-regency) was left relatively unharmed.  Personally, I think this is tremendous evidence that there wasn’t co-regency, but nevertheless, I think we still need to step back and look at this issue against a more general background of Egyptian religion.  We have already discussed that Egyptian religion did not operate under rigid dogmas or have the categorical nature (i.e. Aphrodite = god of love/beauty/sexuality, etc.) that we may be more familiar with.  Baines suggests that Egypt might have been a pluralist situation in which “competing beliefs coexist without violent conflict” (1998: 280).  With these two concepts in mind, my questions are the following:

1)      Knowing nothing about Egyptian religion (except what we have discussed), is it conceivable that its inconsistencies exist not because the Egyptians had a completely different conception of logic, but because maintaining a pluralistic society is by its nature a more peaceful and stable way to rule?

2)      And to tie into the co-regency theme, the assumption made in the argument above is that if Amenhotep III and Akhenaten ruled together, they would promote the same religious tenets and thus, when it came time for their opponents to alter the record, both their names would be removed.  However, does that necessarily have to be the case?  With this background of religious tolerance/ plurality, is it possible during the co-regency (assuming it happened), Egypt was ruled by two kings with slightly different conceptions of the relationship between the sun-god and the royal family?  Would that explain why only Akhenaten was removed from the records or does that seem completely impossible?

Posted at Feb 16/2011 09:35AM:
Justine Avery: I agree with Nick in the importance in the fact that Amenhotep III’s name was not erased from the record. In essence if there was a co-regency, Amenhotep III would have been the “heretic” because he had been promoting a very different concept of religion throughout his reign. Akhenaten would have simply been carrying on the traditions established during the co-regency. By not erasing his father’s name, it would seem that the Egyptians did not feel as though he did anything wrong in the same way as Akhenaten. However, if Amenhotep III was deified during his reign, the Egyptians may not have wanted to erase the name of a god.

Posted at Feb 16/2011 12:45PM:
Victoria Wilson: To respond to Justine's comment, from what we know Amenhotep III didn't promote the new monotheistic religion that Akhenaten did. From my understanding is that he was the one to point out the important role of the sun. He never erased older gods or prohibited others from worshiping them. If there was a co-regency, Akhenaten wasn't carrying on old traditions but trying to establish new ones. Or maybe he wanted to start something that his father couldn't.

Posted at Feb 16/2011 04:10PM:
Justine A: I agree. I should have been clearer in what I meant. Amenhotep III throughout his reign was promoting the sun-god as well as other gods. I meant that if he was a co-regent he must have contributed to the new "radical" ideas because the co-regency lasted into the radical stages of Akhenaten’s reign as Nick pointed out. Therefore, would he be a heretic as well because he was going against what he was originally promoting (if he was a co-regent)? Then Akhenaten would have been carrying on the tradition of the co-regency where the radical ideas had to have been previously introduced because they would have ruled together when the changes occurred. I guess to argue for a co-regency then we must assume that Amenhotep III knew about the religious changes in some way. It just brings up the issue of whether or not Akenhaten was the sole innovator or a co-innovator. For me, as Nick brings up, I would think that the Egyptians would want to erase Amenhotep III’s name as well.

Posted at Feb 16/2011 08:42PM:
Brendan Burke: But, could there possibly be an issue with erasing too many kings from the record? Removing Amenhotep III could have caused gaps in royal succession, or some other quandary.

Posted at Feb 16/2011 09:39PM:
Max Straus: Firstly, although I understand the logic behind Brendan's point, I do not think that we are dealing with culture that shares our concept of narrative history. Trying to obliterate the record of any king within the generation following their death (as we know occurred) creates the obvious problem that there are individuals alive who still remember his reign; however, even for those who do not immediate believe the veracity of the historical propaganda, merely censoring Akhenaten's name sends a (perhaps more) powerful ideological message about the illegitimacy of his practices. Furthermore, in the absence of an "Egyptian Herodotus" (as we heard on Tuesday), within several generations it hardly matters whether a group of kings are entirely forgotten (as long as their monuments are effectively whitewashed as occurred at Amarna). When counting with regnal years, a missing century may never be missed. Therefore, I think it is "too easy" to simply say that Amenhotep III was impossible to remove.

That being said, I think we need to establish an "active" explanation for Amenhotep III's survival, which I brings us back to the joint monarchy. Here I would like to return to Nick's original post: could two kings have pursued divergent policies simultaneously? Johnson suggests that this could have been the case as far as artistic styles were concerned (Johnson 71); however, Akhenaten's total extirpation of non-Aten deities and destruction of "heretical" imagery at Karnak could not occur alongside his father's promotion of Amun (which if one accepts a co-regency beginning before year 30 would have to overlap). Yet, I see no reason why Amenhotep could not embrace a policy of pluralism (Baines 280, 282), while his son moved toward what Baines terms mere tolerance (or perhaps a bit less so). Every religion after all has its fundamentalists (to use a somewhat anachronistic term). Finally, in several of the texts in Murmane 10 from Akhenaten's Karnak period, there is an increasing emphasis placed upon the Aten alongside occasional references to Re, his original throne name, etc.

This perhaps allows for a short co-regency, or a co-regency in the early years; however, can we show either that Amenhotep III radicalized along with his son in later years? Showing his adoration of the sun isn't problematic, it is his hatred of the other cults that we need to prove.

Posted at Feb 17/2011 12:02AM:
TA Kathryn: It's great to see people really sinking their teeth into this issue! You're right to bring up the issue of two simultaneous religions in the case of a coregency. Given that supporters of the coregency theory have to argue for two separate artistic styles in use at one time (as Max says) I suppose it's possible that the two religions could also have been running, but you're right, it's very powerful circumstantial evidence against a coregency.

A further thought I had about the issue of Amenhotep III not being erased from history in the same way as Akhenaten was in the case of a coregency- his name is AMENhotep, thus connecting him very powerfully with the old religion. As long as he kept his original name and didn't change it like Akhenaten did I think he would have been safe from erasure. I think we even have some examples where Akhenaten erased the 'Amen' part from his father's names in cartouches. That brings up an interesting issue in how Akhenaten referred to his father when he depicted him on the monuments we looked at on Tuesday. Sure enough the cartouches labelling Amenhotep III on the door lintel of Huya's tomb seem to have been deliberately erased, perhaps because Akhenaten changed his father's name to something with 'Aten' rather than 'Amun' in it. But the cartouches in Kheruef's tomb (which we decided due to artistic style was carved at the beginning of Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten's reign) are untouched with 'Amen' still intact. So that would provide striking evidence that the year 37 jubilee which is depicted happened waaay before Akhenaten came in with his religious reforms which shut out Amun (and possibly changed the way he referred to his father).

A point of information about name erasure (often referred to in the scholarly literature as 'damnatio memoriae')- for the Egyptians I think this wasn't about the memory of Egyptians as much as it was about the power of carved words/images in Egyptian thought. Images were thought of as imbued with a kind of magic- if you carved a picture of yourself offering to the gods in a temple, you didn't need to come in and offer physically every day, as the image was in some ways doing this constantly for you. Names were also very important and tied into this- what made that offering image represent you offering was your name attached to it. If someone else were to come and scrape your name away and put their name in your place, they'd get all the divine brownie points (remember Egyptian images didn't necessarily look much like the person they were portraying). Hence why Hatshepsut and Akhenaten suffered in this way- by erasing names and depictions of them, later Egyptians were preventing the power of the images from bringing the kings eternal benefits from the gods.

Posted at Feb 17/2011 11:24AM:
Dani Candelora: Sorry to head off in a totally different direction, but as I was reading Dorman I was wondering if all Theban tombs as a rule are decorated east-west, from the outside in? Is it possible that Kheruef's tomb was decorated in segments not in that order, or necessarily continuously (in terms of time- like could a scene have been carved, lapse 5 years, next scene, etc)? Because if it is the case that tombs were usually carved in this orderly way, the scene layout in Kheruef's tomb becomes an interesting argument pro-coregency - though of course another argument that need not be definitive.

Posted at Feb 18/2011 12:34PM:
Katie East: It is possible that Amenhotep III's name would still have been erased even if he was deified because, as we have seen, the name of the Aten was erased throughout Egypt following the Amarna period. Furthermore, I don't think the lack of erasure has anything to do with erasing too many people's names or causing problems of succession because many of Akenaten's successors were erased and that did lead to gaps in the records of succession. However, I do wonder how many Kings Lists we have. If the only one is the one from Seti I that we mentioned in class, which was built quite a while after Akhenaten's reign, is it possible that he had the same problem that we are having and wasn't sure if there had been a co-regency?

Posted at Feb 21/2011 10:56PM:
TA Kathryn: @Dani- it's generally accepted that tombs would have been decorated from the outside in, though I guess it's pretty difficult for us to say with finished tombs whether that was always the case. Same goes for how long it took to finish a tomb- the tombs would have been completed by large teams of sculptors and painters, so I imagine most tombs would have been completed in one period. But as we mentioned in class, we do have tombs where some of the art is in the old style of Amenhotep III/IV and some is in the high Amarna style, suggesting that tombs could have been decorated in bursts over a period of some years. And in fact that's what pro-coregency people use as an argument to dismiss the evidence from Kheruef's tomb that we looked at. Since the styles of the facade pieces and the Amenhotep III jubilee scenes inside are the same, though, I tend to think that they were carved at the same time.

Posted at Feb 21/2011 11:07PM:
TA Kathryn: @Katie- we do have other king lists, apart from the Seti I temple one that I mentioned. There's the Palermo stone, which only refers to kings up to the fifth dynasty and so isn't relevant to Akhenaten, the Turin king list papyrus which might have mentioned Akhenaten but is broken off before it reaches the eighteenth dynasty, and Manetho's much later Greek king list which we only have as quotations in other Classical authors. This DOES mention Akhenaten, but seems to have him in the wrong place. It also refers to him as Amenhotep- so perhaps Egypt remembered him only from his surviving monuments as Amenhotep IV?

Posted at Feb 23/2011 05:47PM:
Lewie Pollis: This is a bit out there, but is it possible that Akhenaten thought Amenhotep III was a manifestation of the Aten? There have been some allusions to the idea in the readings (Silverman 29, for example) but it doesn't seem to be given much thought in the debate about Amenhotep III's role in his son's reign.

Not saying I buy into this, but look how well it fits: Amenhotep III made himself into a god and related himself to the sun-disk. Akenhaten repeatedly stresses that he is the "son" of the Aten. Also, in general, it seems like when Amenhotep III is depicted in Amarna art, the Aten isn't there, and vice versa. That could explain how statues of him alive ended up Amarna (Johnson 76-80). Maybe they were meant to signify that he had continued his reign in a different form?

Obviously these all have other explanations and typing this out made it seem a little ridiculous, but doesn't it kind of make sense?

Posted at Feb 27/2011 01:32PM:
Maddy Jennewein: I find the idea of that Atenism was developed between Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV intriguing, particularly when Tiye is brought into the picture. In the Johnson reading, he talked about how Akhenaten represented shu, the creator god, and nefertiti, tefnut. Because it seems that Amenhotep III was deified before his death, it does seem that the Kings are representing gods on earht. However, I don't think that akhenaten thought that Amenhotep III literally was the Aten. The way I see it, Egyptian royals always claimed to be descended form gods, and that if Amenhotep III was supposed to represent a god on earth, he was Re, and the whole sequence was planned with Akhenaten.