There have been some conflicting ideas on what kind of event it was that caused Akhenaten to introduce his new cult of the Aten. We all know that the Aten was actually the sun disc. Hence, something must have been going on in respect of our Sun – but what? The Aten was a distinct feature of Old Kingdom worship. Was there a connection between the two?
Some Egyptologists have put a modern slant on the Aten by proposing it was a calculated political move to centralise political power. Others have pointed out that the rise of Aten sidelined the cult of Amun – but to what extent. Did it really leave the Amun priesthood without power. If so how did they so easily recapture their position and eliminate the Aten rival? Something must have happened that put the Aten on the back foot.
We also know that an epidemic occurred in the reign of Akhetaten. Some archaeologists found evidence among the remains of workers at Tell al-Amarna, the city of Akhetaten, malnutrition, or worse, a plague of some kind. In the EA letters, between the Egyptian court and their vassals in the Levant, there are reports of an outbreak of disease. The Hittites say they contracted the plague from a foray into Syria as a result of the Egyptian illness. Obviously, that was not strictly true as a similar thing happened in Babylonia. In that instance, the king was removed. He was the son of a Babylonian princess and an Assyrian king, Ashur uballit. It was interpreted as the disapproval of the god Marduk, who did not like the idea of a king with a foreign origin sitting on his seat in Babylon. A political ploy, no doubt, and part of the ongoing hostility between Assyria and Babylonia, from generation to generation. The Assyrians were regarded as having, in part, a barbarian origin. The word used for them was Subarian – which goes back to the arrival of steppe folk in the wake of events at the end of the third milllennium BC. These were overtaken by the arrival of the Mitanni, another steppe people that arrived in mid second millennium – roughly at the same time as the Hittites in what became Armenia. It suggests the Assyrian royal family at some stage married into the Mitanni royal family. A similar thing happened in Egypt with Mitanni brides in the harem of pharaoh. Such marraiges were used to cement relations and avoid war. That was no doubt why the Assyrian prince was married off to the Babylonian court. A faction in Babylonia did not like it and he was killed in a coup – and a Babylonian elevated. This provides a perfect set of synchronisations between 3 or 4 different lands, as well as the recipients of the EA letters in what was Canaan and Syria. However, strangely this is not recognised in mainstream chronology. Ashur uballit is set 20 years too early – and the events in Babylon are considered as a separate outbreak earlier than the Hittite one. Even the majority of revisionists do not include this very real synchronism as they are concerned in reducting chronology – not in moving it the wrong way, upwards by 20 years.