The shapely figure of Akhenaten

[Khaemwaset]

[kmt_sesh]

3 hours ago, Kenemet said:

I should  point out that early statues of him show him looking pretty normal.  We can also point to the famous bust of Nefertiti in the Berlin Museum which is quite lifelike and nothing like her depiction in Amarna art.  It's clearly a style, just like the very odd stick figure god phase that Thutmose went through.

I've always liked Tuthmosis III's stick figures. Quite distinctive:

The most common explanation I've encountered is that they're meant to resemble the artwork one sees in papyri texts. So in essence, the walls of his burial chamber are like a huge papyrus scroll.

Quote

One thing I have noticed is that when you walk up to those huge statues, the elongated features start to look very normal, leading me to wonder if the extreme appearance is in part due to the way these things were to be viewed (the position of the viewer, in other words.)

I've also come across this idea, and to a degree it does make sense. Where it falls short is in other forms of Amarna artwork, such as stelea:

You see the same distortions to the bodies, but in this case you're viewing them head-on, or nearly so.

[kmt_sesh]

1 hour ago, Khaemwaset said:

Oh, man, that's great! Probably only we Egypt nerds would fully appreciate that.

[ShadowSot]

I think we have an explanation for Ancient Egyptian megaliths; they had to build something big enough for the cats to not push over. 

 

[kmt_sesh]

4 hours ago, Khaemwaset said:

Such a splendid topic!  Well, I'd put it this way: the wicked Priests of Amun had busily amalgamated their wealth and power in the New Kingdom, especially after Hatshepsut, and then halfway through the reign of Amenhotep III, the High Priest of Amun Ptahmose was made Vizier, as well as Director of Public Buildings and Head of all the Priests of Egypt.  I do not know if that was before or after the death of Crown Prince Thutmose, Sem Priest and High Priest of Ptah.  But it was a significant surge in power flowing into the hands of the Theban cult.

A number of years ago a few fellows and myself mused about this topic.  What if High Priest and Vizier Ptahmose saw High Priest and Crown Prince Thutmose as a threat to his plans.  Without his mummy we cannot know how the prince died, but it must have dashed a lot of the hopes of his parents.  If he was 'gotten rid of', would Tiye have figured it out?  Would she then have instigated her second son to reject the Amun priests' power?  Would she have advised him (and thereby Bek) to fashion a new standard of pharaonic representation, one free from the 'framing' that had become concretized by the Amun dictates?  Somebody did.  Amun was dropped, and the art changed.

Sorry for the crystal ball gazing...but it's a theory.

 

Now that sounds like an excellent plot for an historical novel.

I've never considered this idea. Makes you think, doesn't it? The one flaw is Tuthmose was crown prince, and so would've dropped his priestly and administrative titles once he took the throne.

I also must wonder, then, what Ptahmose would've thought once poor Tuthmose was, um, dispatched, and the odd-ball Amunhotep IV took the throne. Soon he changes his name to Akhenaten, moves everyone to a barren, virgin desert site, slowly abolishes many of the deities, and just mucks everything. I can picture Ptahmose proclaiming, "Crap, I should've thought this through better!"

[Nefer-Ankhe]

4 hours ago, Khaemwaset said:

If he was 'gotten rid of', would Tiye have figured it out?  Would she then have instigated her second son to reject the Amun priests' power? 

I would have thought that they would've strongly endorsed the reject of the Amun priests to all their immediate and potential heirs just in case something like what had happened to Thutmose did occur? Perhaps not to the same
degree that they instigated to their first son but there certainly must've been a stigma against the Amun priests in close family quatres. Certainly must have been an intense environment.

[kmt_sesh]

In the early days of Egyptian archaeology, no one seemed quite sure what to make of Akhenaten. His capital was called Akhetaten, the purpose-built city he erected in honor of his favored god. The site goes by the modern Arabic name Tell el Amarna. When the site was first being excavated in the nineteenth century and they were pulling up the oddly shaped statues of this king, some of the early scholars pegged him for a woman.

More common was the idea that he had some sort of illness. In Post 11 Hammerclaw stated Akhenaten probably had Marfan syndrome. When one compares a statue of Akhenaten to someone with the disorder, this is a reasonable conclusion to reach. So, was it Marfan syndrome or a similar connective-tissue disorder? Was Akhenaten proud of his appearance and demanded it be accurately represented in pharaonic art?

The mummified bodies of many kings have been found and studied. Very few provide evidence for unusual medical conditions that would've been obvious to the naked eye. Granted, something like Marfan would be very difficult to detect in a body from over 3,000 years ago, but what do some of the other kings show us? One of the only exceptions medically speaking is Siptah (1197-1191 BCE), whose short reign was in Dynasty 19. Siptah was a boy-king and probably was on the throne until he was only about eighteen. His mummy shows clear health problems, most notably a severely deformed left foot. And yet, while all who knew and worked with him would've known about his disability, to the general populace he was depicted as normal:

That's Siptah at left, standing before the god Re-Horakhty. Note that in the image his left foot appears normal.

So if Akhenaten had congenital deformities, was it simply vanity that motivated him to depict his body realistically?

And what does Akhenaten's mummy show us? Well, most agree we cannot pinpoint his mummy, or if it's ever been found. The one holdout in Egyptology is Zahi Hawass, who to this day insists the unknown mummy designated KV55 is Akhenaten. The problem is, Hawass has never been able to sustain this argument, and nearly every forensic expert who's examined the KV55 remains agree they belong to a man who died no later than his early twenties. Akhenaten would've been in his mid-thirties when he died. So more than likely Akhenaten's mummy is unknown and unfound, and quite possibly was destroyed in ancient times. The consensus in the world of Egyptology is that KV55 was the ephemeral king named Smenkhkare. I agree with this, personally.

But we have other bodies directly from the line of Akhenaten, including his own parents and more than likely several of his daughters. None of them show evidence of Marfan syndrome or a similar disorder.

The bottom line is, disease or disorder is not a likely explanation for the odd appearance of Amarna figural art. What else might be the answer?

[ShadowSot]

10 minutes ago, kmt_sesh said:

What else might be the answer?

Aliens. Duh.

 

 More seriously, Hapi was a god with hermaphroditic features. Did he get any special treatment under Akhenaten or inspiration maybe?

[kmt_sesh]

4 minutes ago, ShadowSot said:

Aliens. Duh.

 

 More seriously, Hapi was a god with hermaphroditic features. Did he get any special treatment under Akhenaten or inspiration maybe?

Well, of course aliens is the leading academic theory. I was just waiting for someone else to post it, you know.

Seriously, last weekend at the museum a man was asking me about Akhenaten and aliens. I tried my best, and did so diplomatically, to guide him toward the world of reality.

Hapi is indeed an odd-looking god:

He's got man-boobies and a paunch just like Akhenaten. It's an interesting thought. Hapi was a god of the river Nile, specifically representing its fertility and fecundity. Let's see if Harte can make something naughty out of that second word. But I can't think of anything from the Amarna Period in which Hapi receives special emphasis. In fact, to Akhenaten, the Aten was the god of all fertility and fecundity, so in Akhenaten's mind Hapi would've become one of the deities that was ignored.

[ShadowSot]

9 minutes ago, kmt_sesh said:

Well, of course aliens is the leading academic theory. I was just waiting for someone else to post it, you know.

Seriously, last weekend at the museum a man was asking me about Akhenaten and aliens. I tried my best, and did so diplomatically, to guide him toward the world of reality.

Hapi is indeed an odd-looking god:

He's got man-boobies and a paunch just like Akhenaten. It's an interesting thought. Hapi was a god of the river Nile, specifically representing its fertility and fecundity. Let's see if Harte can make something naughty out of that second word. But I can't think of anything from the Amarna Period in which Hapi receives special emphasis. In fact, to Akhenaten, the Aten was the god of all fertility and fecundity, so in Akhenaten's mind Hapi would've become one of the deities that was ignored.

I read a little bit that Hapi was taken as an aspect of the Aten. Might be he borrowed some of the trappings like the representation and tried to place those on himself? Like the hermaphroditic figure?

 It'd be a useful symbolism for him to adopt, I think.

 In a way, sort of cutting the mythic middleman between the pharaoh and the abundance from the Nile, and taking that symbolism for himself.

[Khaemwaset]

2 hours ago, kmt_sesh said:

Now that sounds like an excellent plot for an historical novel.

I've never considered this idea. Makes you think, doesn't it? The one flaw is Tuthmose was crown prince, and so would've dropped his priestly and administrative titles once he took the throne.

I also must wonder, then, what Ptahmose would've thought once poor Tuthmose was, um, dispatched, and the odd-ball Amunhotep IV took the throne. Soon he changes his name to Akhenaten, moves everyone to a barren, virgin desert site, slowly abolishes many of the deities, and just mucks everything. I can picture Ptahmose proclaiming, "Crap, I should've thought this through better!"

Yes, crown prince Thutmose as pharaoh would no longer be HPoP.  But he likewise would not have been in the Amunist fold, or sufficiently under their influence say, as he was stationed in Memphis, administering a different cult in his princely years.

Likewise, Ptahmose may have been wary of Thutmose because of his alpha male qualities, and his ability to resist coercion or strong influence from Thebes.  The 'odd-ball' Amenhotep may have been seen as easy to mold.  Perhaps the boy was actually mis-shapen to some extent, and Ptahmose thought he would be unsuitable as Pharaoh because of it...maybe he even suggested such.  It could have presented an opening for somebody to marry one of the princesses to fill the void.  That would have irked the boy and most likely his mighty mother...maybe it's the reason for the extremeness in depicting his affliction during the Amarna years, as a way of thumbing the nose at the qualities of physical perfection insisted upon by Ptahmose.

[Nefer-Ankhe]

2 hours ago, kmt_sesh said:

Hapi was a god of the river Nile, specifically representing its fertility and fecundity.

 

2 hours ago, kmt_sesh said:

In fact, to Akhenaten, the Aten was the god of all fertility and fecundity

There's a clue! Both deities are representations of fertility. You know how much ancient Egyptian royalty loved to incarnate into that of their favourite dieities in art form. Perhaps Akhenaten wanted to emphasis the fertility aspect of the Aten (fertility being greatly associated with creation). Especially during the beginning of his reign when a need for conversion by the general public was highly anticipated by him. 

[Khaemwaset]

The Hapi connection is quite interesting...I like it.  Only a couple of the older gods were welcomed in Akhetaten, and Hapi is known to have been there, as a representation of the fecundity of the Nile, and would not have represented a powerful political/religious cabal of opposition. 

[Kenemet]

11 hours ago, Khaemwaset said:

Yes, crown prince Thutmose as pharaoh would no longer be HPoP. 

Technically not true, as the king was considered to be THE high priest for all of Egypt.

[Jon101]

13 hours ago, kmt_sesh said:

In the early days of Egyptian archaeology, no one seemed quite sure what to make of Akhenaten. His capital was called Akhetaten, the purpose-built city he erected in honor of his favored god. The site goes by the modern Arabic name Tell el Amarna. When the site was first being excavated in the nineteenth century and they were pulling up the oddly shaped statues of this king, some of the early scholars pegged him for a woman.

More common was the idea that he had some sort of illness. In Post 11 Hammerclaw stated Akhenaten probably had Marfan syndrome. When one compares a statue of Akhenaten to someone with the disorder, this is a reasonable conclusion to reach. So, was it Marfan syndrome or a similar connective-tissue disorder? Was Akhenaten proud of his appearance and demanded it be accurately represented in pharaonic art?

The mummified bodies of many kings have been found and studied. Very few provide evidence for unusual medical conditions that would've been obvious to the naked eye. Granted, something like Marfan would be very difficult to detect in a body from over 3,000 years ago, but what do some of the other kings show us? One of the only exceptions medically speaking is Siptah (1197-1191 BCE), whose short reign was in Dynasty 19. Siptah was a boy-king and probably was on the throne until he was only about eighteen. His mummy shows clear health problems, most notably a severely deformed left foot. And yet, while all who knew and worked with him would've known about his disability, to the general populace he was depicted as normal:

That's Siptah at left, standing before the god Re-Horakhty. Note that in the image his left foot appears normal.

So if Akhenaten had congenital deformities, was it simply vanity that motivated him to depict his body realistically?

And what does Akhenaten's mummy show us? Well, most agree we cannot pinpoint his mummy, or if it's ever been found. The one holdout in Egyptology is Zahi Hawass, who to this day insists the unknown mummy designated KV55 is Akhenaten. The problem is, Hawass has never been able to sustain this argument, and nearly every forensic expert who's examined the KV55 remains agree they belong to a man who died no later than his early twenties. Akhenaten would've been in his mid-thirties when he died. So more than likely Akhenaten's mummy is unknown and unfound, and quite possibly was destroyed in ancient times. The consensus in the world of Egyptology is that KV55 was the ephemeral king named Smenkhkare. I agree with this, personally.

But we have other bodies directly from the line of Akhenaten, including his own parents and more than likely several of his daughters. None of them show evidence of Marfan syndrome or a similar disorder.

The bottom line is, disease or disorder is not a likely explanation for the odd appearance of Amarna figural art. What else might be the answer?

But doesn't the genetic testing show that the KV55 mummy is definitely Tut's father?.  Or am I remembering incorrectly?.

If it isn't Akhenaten and is the father of Tutankhamun, then does that mean smenkhare was the daddy, (and is also the mummy)?.

[fred_mc]

Well, men can look in very different ways so it is not impossible that Echnaton looked something like the statues although they may be exaggerated. Despite of being a man, I have a quite female looking body myself with wide hips and extremely thick thighs. My class mates used to tease me since they thought I had big breasts.

[back to earth]

23 hours ago, Kenemet said:

I should  point out that early statues of him show him looking pretty normal.  We can also point to the famous bust of Nefertiti in the Berlin Museum which is quite lifelike and nothing like her depiction in Amarna art.  It's clearly a style, just like the very odd stick figure god phase that Thutmose went through.

 

One thing I have noticed is that when you walk up to those huge statues, the elongated features start to look very normal, leading me to wonder if the extreme appearance is in part due to the way these things were to be viewed (the position of the viewer, in other words.)

Look at the 5th line of my 'Hymn' in post  # 7     

[back to earth]

19 hours ago, kmt_sesh said:

I've always liked Tuthmosis III's stick figures. Quite distinctive:

The most common explanation I've encountered is that they're meant to resemble the artwork one sees in papyri texts. So in essence, the walls of his burial chamber are like a huge papyrus scroll.

I've also come across this idea, and to a degree it does make sense. Where it falls short is in other forms of Amarna artwork, such as stelea:

You see the same distortions to the bodies, but in this case you're viewing them head-on, or nearly so.

 " Thou gazelle like legs can outrun any  enemy that flees    " 

( Hymn to  Akhenaten )       

[back to earth]

5 hours ago, Khaemwaset said:

The Hapi connection is quite interesting...I like it.  Only a couple of the older gods were welcomed in Akhetaten, and Hapi is known to have been there, as a representation of the fecundity of the Nile, and would not have represented a powerful political/religious cabal of opposition. 

17 hours ago, kmt_sesh said:

Hapi was a god of the river Nile, specifically representing its fertility and fecundity.

 

17 hours ago, kmt_sesh said:

In fact, to Akhenaten, the Aten was the god of all fertility and fecundity There's a clue! Both deities are representations of fertility. You know how much ancient Egyptian royalty loved to incarnate into that of their favourite dieities in art form. Perhaps Akhenaten wanted to emphasis the fertility aspect of the Aten (fertility being greatly associated with creation). Especially during the beginning of his reign when a need for conversion by the general public was highly anticipated by him.

 

See post 7 lines 1 and 2 of 'hymn' .

Edited March 4, 2017 by back to earth

[Nefer-Ankhe]

8 hours ago, Jon101 said:

If it isn't Akhenaten and is the father of Tutankhamun, then does that mean smenkhare was the daddy, (and is also the mummy)?.

KV55 is definitely the father of Tutankhamun, who KV55 is however is still under some discussion though I think it's pretty accepted that KV55 is Smenkhkare.

[LV-426]

On 02/03/2017 at 4:12 AM, jaylemurph said:

...I can't help but notice you skipped over the long, velvety fake ears displayed here. Sure, you could say it's part of the headdress, but then you'd be part of the cover-up. As would be a proponent of the cats.

--Jaylemurph

Great... now I can't look at the image without picturing Jar Jar Binks

Interesting question in the OP though. The lower half of the body; belly and hips are unmistakably feminine.

[kmt_sesh]

12 hours ago, Kenemet said:

Technically not true, as the king was considered to be THE high priest for all of Egypt.

Probably that was never more so the case than with Akhenaten, considering he believed he and he alone could directly address the Aten.

I've always pictured him just about to walk into the Great Temple of the Aten and telling all the other priests: "No, you stay out. It's my temple!"

[kmt_sesh]

12 hours ago, Jon101 said:

But doesn't the genetic testing show that the KV55 mummy is definitely Tut's father?.  Or am I remembering incorrectly?.

If it isn't Akhenaten and is the father of Tutankhamun, then does that mean smenkhare was the daddy, (and is also the mummy)?.

I touched on this earlier, and Nefer-Ankhe answered it perfectly well, but I'm a windbag. So there!

According to the SCA's genetic testing in 2007-10, the KV55 mummy is Tut's father and the mummy designated KV35YL is his mother. The testing further revealed that KV55 and KV35YL were full brother-sister, Eww.

This is if you accept the findings of the SCA's testing. I am certainly not a scientist and on balance am prepared to accept them, but a lot of other scientists around the world are highly suspicious of the work. This is mostly because the SCA has never published its methodology in carrying out the genetic testing (only the results were published, in JAMA). It's really well explained in Jo Marchant's book The Shadow King.

The identities of both of these mummies is not known for certain. Zahi Hawass from the start argued that KV55 is Akhenaten, and he's pretty much alone on that. KV55 was a man much too young to have been Akhenaten (Hawass has argued the remains show evidence the skeleton was of a man actually a lot older, but neither he nor his staff has ever presented evidence to substantiate this). Most folks in the archaeological community believe KV55 was Smenkhkare. I agree with this. We'll probably never know with certainty, but more than likely Tut's dad was Smenkhkare.

The identity of the female mummy KV35YL is even less certain, and considerably so. All we know, based on the genetic testing, is that she was a full sister of KV55. So, more than likely, if KV55 was a minor son of Amunhotep III, KV35YL was one of Amunhotep's daughters. I find that plausible. Also possible but a theory that doesn't convince me is that KV55 was Akhenaten's son, making KV35YL one of the six daughters of Akhenaten.

You can see how delving into the Amarna tar pits can give one a headache, and this particular confusion is hardly the end of it.

[kmt_sesh]

5 hours ago, LV-426 said:

Great... now I can't look at the image without picturing Jar Jar Binks

Interesting question in the OP though. The lower half of the body; belly and hips are unmistakably feminine.

Oh, gosh, thanks. Now, whenever I see statues of Akhenaten, I'll think of this:

[Black Monk]

Akhenaten most likely had at least one disease which caused physical abnormalities.

One theory is that he suffered from Frohlich's Syndrome, which causes physical abnormalities and impotence. But considering the king had nine children, including Tutankhamen, this is unlikely, unless he developed the disease later in life.

Edited March 5, 2017 by Black Monk