21. An Ancient Egyptian Religious Struggle Between Pharaohs and Priests
From roughly 2100 BC until the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC, the Temple of the gods at Karnak, near Luxor, was Ancient Egypt’s religious center. A vast complex that covered hundreds of acres, it was dedicated to the worship of a pantheon of gods, chief among them the main deity Amun-Ra. Over time, the priests of Karnak grew so powerful that they alarmed the pharaohs. One of them, Amenhotep III (reigned 1388 – 1351 BC), in an attempt to check them, appointed his own relatives to serve in the temple in order to guarantee the priests’ loyalty.
His successor Akhenaten (reigned 1351 – 1334 BC) had a more radical solution: he invented a new religion and built a new temple complex to rival and replace Karnak. Akhenaten and his wife-sister (Egyptian pharaohs often kept it in the family) Nefertiti set up the world’s first monotheistic religion, centered around the worship of the sun deity, Aten. At first, Akhenaten added an extension to the Karnak Temple, dedicated to his god Aten. When he encountered resistance from the established priesthood, however, he turned to radical and wholesale reforms. The pharaoh began to dismantle his realm’s traditional religious pantheon and replaced its many gods with a single one: Aten.
