If there's on period of Egyptian history that Egyptophiles want to hear about it's the short period (less than 20 years) of pharaoh Akhenaten's reign. Very early on the king who had been crowned as Amenhotep ('the god Amun is satisfied') IV set about changing things. The worship of the traditional gods bar was forbidden leaving just one – a manifestation of the sun-god called the Aten. He built new temples dedicated to the Aten according to an entirely new design and decorated in a new style. He changed the way that the human form was depicted in art, and he himself took on an exaggerated, almost grotesque appearance prompting scholars to speculate that he may have suffered from a terrible illness (we don't think that anymore). After a few years he announced that he would be changing his name from Amenhotep to Akhenaten meaning 'effective for the Aten' an entirely new capital city in the middle of nowhere. It would be called Akhetaten – the 'horizon of the Aten' – and archaeology has revealed that he really did build an entire city in the desert in a matter of a few years and that it was occupied by perhaps as many as 50,000 people.

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