In ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh Akhenaten made an artistic and religious revolution against the still background of a millennium of unchanging tradition.
He’d inherited a taste for the avant-garde from his father, then played fast and loose with the rules of all the visual arts. His painters and sculptors lengthened faces, plumped hips, and depicted ordinary, intimate moments of life. Akhenaten also reduced Egypt’s vast array of gods to Aten, the Sun, the one and only making himself thereby perhaps the world’s first monotheist.
When the Egyptian capital of Thebes proved too confining for Akhenaten’s new vision, he created an entirely new city 200 miles away called Amarna, where the decorated temples reflected his new sensibilities.
And to top it off, he married Neferetiti, a stunning and powerful woman who helped govern the country.
The mysterious, intriguing, and surprisingly modern world of Akhenaten – in the second hour of the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Rita Freed, curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and Donald Redford, Egyptologist at Penn State University.