How Did Akhenaten Rise To Power

Akhenaten’s rise to power was not revolutionary or unique, but the changes he made at the start of his reign were shockingly anti-tradition. Akhenaten was born as Amenhotep IV, son of the great New Kingdom pharaoh Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye. Amenhotep IV came to power by birthright, and took the throne with no incident. Like all pharaohs, he took a wife, a woman named Nefertiti, and had multiple children, the most famous being his son, Tutankhamun. At the beginning of his reign, it appeared as if Amenhotep IV planned to continue the traditions of his father, but around Year 3, Amenhotep IV became Akhenaten and started an unprecedented revolution that shook Egypt to its core. As explained by Egyptologist Richard Parkinson, “By Year 3, he is building a

By Year 8, the new city seems to have been built. By Year 9, the old gods are exiled, banned, and a colossal program of erasing their names throughout the traditional monuments.” The whole of Egyptian society revolved around religion, and any change to the traditional pantheon of gods, particularly the divine Ra, whose image was the very definition of power, was unthinkable. In a little over five years, Akhenaten completely abandoned the traditions of his father and seventeen previous dynasties, for a new religion in a new city far, both geographically and ideologically, from the cultural center of the past. In addition to the bizarre new sun disk, Akhenaten also broke tradition when he celebrated his Sed festival, a sacred ritual dedicated to celebrating the long reign of the pharaoh, nearly two decades early. Akhenaten's Sed festival seemingly acted as the christening of a new age, and most Egyptologists recognize a connection to the “theocracy of Aten.” When Akhenaten made his move to Thebes and celebrated the Sed, he broke with the identity of Egypt itself and began the Amarna Period, a radical departure from nearly 1,500 years of recorded Egyptian