Akhenaten & The Origins of Monotheismby James K. HoffmeierOxford University Press, 2015Egyptologist James Hoffmeier centers on one of the most famous figures from antiquity in his new book Akhenaten & The Origins of Modernism, and his book, assembling a vast amount of the latest research, works not only as a systematic in-depth study of the enigmatic 14^th century B.C. Pharaoh but also, interestingly, as a study of the mutability of organized religions.Akhenaten, successor to the magnificent Amenhotep III, husband to the famous queen Nefertiti, ruled Egypt for 17 years, transferred his capital from Thebes to Amarna, had himself portrayed with startling, stylized realism in all his public representations, and, most famously, wrenched the state religion of the kingdom from a spectrum of gods and goddesses with a powerful clerical bureaucracy centered in Thebes and focusing on the god Amun to a monotheism focusing on Aten and centered at Amarna. In the long roster of Egyptian pharaohs, Akhenaten stands out in every way; physically and figuratively, there was no one like him before or since.“Polytheism,” as Hoffmeier writes, “by its very nature, is inclusive. Deities are not typically excluded.” And yet exclusion is exactly what Akhenaten effected, and Hoffmeier insightfully argues that the pharaoh was at first not so much blazing a new trail as he was looking to the past for a model – the very distant past, in this case, the 5^th Dynasty, “the golden age of Egyptian history when the sun ruled Egypt,” and it's this distant era, Hoffmeier claims, that Akhenaten, “a thousand years later, sought to revive, and then transform into a genuine monotheistic religion.”That transformation was more abrupt and more brutal than most modern readers might recall from their brief acquaintance with Akhenaten's history at school, and the reason, as Hoffmeier points out, was due to the breathtaking compression of the process:

From the standpoint of the history of religions, in the span of less than a decade (between about 1352 – 1346 B. C.) Akhenaten's religious-intellectual pilgrimage went from polytheism, to henotheism or monolatry (i.e., the worship of one god while not denying the existence of other deities), to monotheism (the exclusive belief in one God). The point is that this process was not a lengthy evolutionary one that took centuries or longer.

The Theban god Amun was abolished – his temples were closed, his priests were dismissed, his followers were persecuted, and his enormous revenues were confiscated; the entire religious superstructure was repurposed to Akhenaten's new pet cult of Aten. The most pragmatic explanation for such a shift was Akhenaten's desire to break the power of the Theban priesthood, but Hoffmeier indulges himself with comparisons to Saul being thrown from his horse by a blinding light on the road to Damascus, experiencing “some sort of theophany”:

The obvious question is, did Akhenaten have his own version of a “Damascus road experience”? Some sort of revelation? Aten shining on him in some remarkable or unique way that was taken to be an encounter with the numinous?

Hoffmeier's book is the best, most readable, and most detailed account of Akhenaten that's appeared in a quarter-century, so we can allow our author the occasional flirtation with the numinous.