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, or grandson, of an Assyrian king, Ashur uballit, and a Babylonian princess. 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 – or even earlier intrusions. 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 oujt of kilter – 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 reducing chronology – not in moving it the wrong way, upwards.
In 2025 there was a new appraisal of the evidence for an epidemic at Akhetaten [Amarna]. It was concluded the evidence didn’t suggest an outbreak of disease but did display evidence of the heavy loads the workers had to shift in order to build the city in such a short time. We thus need to look at this idea again. Could the new city have been built in order to avoid plague that was raging in other parts of Egypt? This idea is supported by the fact that in his father’s reign, and overflowing into the early reign of Akhenaten, avenues of statues were erected of the goddess Sekhmet. She was a destructive deity that waged war on the human world below. In other words, she represented something in the sky – and something which involved fire falling out of the sky. However, she had another role as dispenser of plague and disease. Were all the statues erected in order to appease Sekhmet, not because she was raining meteors on the world but because an epidemic of some kind had befallen Egypt?
So, what had caused Akhenaten to worship the Aten – the sun disc. It can hardly have been because the disc of the Sun was bright as it was always bright and hot weather ruled the roost in Egypt. Nicholas Costa [1] went for the opposite – a dust veil event. The Sun had dimmed and by worshipping, or appeasing the Aten, it was hoped to reinvigorate the Sun disc and bring it back to life. It obviously did come back to life as the Amun cult was reinstated in the reign of his son, Tutankhamun, the boy king.
What then caused the Sun to dim? Costa uses the period AD536-45 as an example. There are plenty of classical references to a dim Sun, or a weak and pale Sun at this point in time, as a result of two volcanic eruptions separated by around 7 years in between. It also ignited a cooling period in global climate that continued to be a problem for several decades, leading to another round of migration and human displacement. The period also included the Justinian Plague, an early outbreak of bubonic plague that decimated human populations in late Classical world. The migrants settled in areas of the Roman empire that had been decimated of their inhabitants – and the rest is history. The parallels with the Amarna period are quite striking. Just as Justinian’s armies continued to operate in North Africa and other restless parts of the empire, so too were armies on the move in the late reign of Akhenaten. Those of the Hittites, for example. However, in both cases there is no evidence an epidemic was directly caused by the volcanoes. The epidemic must have been earlier – as far as Egypt was concerned. It was then taken into the Egyptian lands in the Levant where the Hittite armies fell victim. Likewise, a passage of Halley’s comet occurred shortly prior to the dust veil event of AD536 and it has been suggested that the same comet passed by in the general Amarna period. If the epidemic was blamed on the comet it must have visited the sky above Egypt when the statue avenues were built. This leaves open the idea a volcano, or volcanoes, were responsible for the dust veil event. And the adoption of the Aten cult as a religious foci – a temporary affair.
All guesswork of course and not able to be proved for certain. The two volcanoes in the 6th century AD allowed Baillie and McAneney [2015] to bring ice core data in line with tree ring data. Baillie had flown over from Northern Ireland to give a talk to an SIS meeting on a completely different topic but when he started speaking he was full of what he had discovered at an exhibition at the Natural History Museum in the morning prior to the meeting and that is what his talk was all about, running out of time to actually talk about the subject he was supposed to have been speaking on. At the time we were all a bit bemused by what the significance was – but as the exhibition was about the Roman city engulfed in ash and tephra as a result of an eruption of Vesuvious we should have guessed. The evidence was in the trees – in the tree rings. The ice core people had been resistant to changing their data in order to come into line with the tree ring data but as Vesuvius had a known date of eruption they were forced to capitulate from their position. Baillie had seen in the exhibition the proof of the pudding, if you like, which is why he was so elated when he arrived at our meeting in Watford.
Hence, we can proceed with a new interpretation of the Aten cult – using something that occurred in the natural world rather than a theory dreamt up by historians, Egyptologists, or archaeologists with a trowel in their hands. The Hittite king Suppiluliumas was active in the reign of Akehenaten as he is referred to in the Amarna letters. According to the Plague Prayers of Mursilis II, both Suppiluliumas and his son, the crown prince and heir, died as a result of contracting a plague during a campaign in Syria. This was Egyptian territory at the time so it was actually an invasion of lands aligned with Akhnaten. It was probably this that led to the demise of Akhenaten – and the Aten cult subsequently grinded to a halt. It was not necessarily anything to do with a revived Amun priesthood hostile to Akhnaten, as assumed by historians of the period. Akhenaten had failed to keep the borders of the Egyptian empire in good order. It is clear from the Amarna letters that he did not respond to inroads into the land of Canaan, by different factions such as Habiru and various rebellions against his loyal vassals. The Hittite invasion was far worse. In that respect the guesswork involved in the above seems to pan out nicely. One has to remember attitudes by Egyptologists, as far as the Aten cult was concerned, and the character of Akhenaten himself, were already established long before Akhetaten was excavated and the Amarna letters assessed. They were interpreted in ways to support the already prevailing theories [2].
1] https://atlantisamazons.com/2026/01/14/why-akhenaten-began-worshiping-the-sun-halleys-comet-and-the-16-resonance-with-jupiter-what-happened-in-egypt-c1352-bc/ … Costa is an original thinker and the root of his ideas is Greek myth. He considers that Halleys comet was nudged by Jupiter and formed a new orbit through the inner solar system that brought it closer to the Earth, from around the time of Akenaten to the Iron Age period, around 800BC. So, for around 5 centuries. His chronological sequence is based on the 76 year cycle of Halleys comet but that is conjectural, we may note. It does not detract from the volcanic dust veil and therefore the reason why the Aten cult temporarily became dominant.
2] We may also note the Amarna letters were addressed to Amenophis III as well as his son. Many of them were probably transferred from the old court to the new court at Akhetaten, I would hazard a guess. They turned up on ancient antique markets and were bought by archaeologists once they realised how important they were. When they discovered the source of the tablets, Tell el-Amarna, excavations of the site took place – firstly with the aim of securing as many more tablets as they could find. There was plenty of evidence of the king elsewhere in Egypt but not the site of his new city.