The Heretic King
Akhenaten, the Heretic King, ruled between 1353 - 1336 BCE. He married Nefertiti and spoke of her as "Mistress of his Happiness, at hearing whose voice the King rejoices". They had seven daughters but no sons. Akhenaten was a romantic poet who disapproved of priests and their charms, of animal sacrifice, of religious obscurantism and political corruption. He was the first Pharaoh to propose monotheism—worshiping the sun god Ra or Aton—and made many radical moves to achieve monotheism and to expunge any memory of other gods in Egypt. But the people were not ready; this religious revolution effectively destroyed the Empire of Egypt, and Akhenaten was hardly thirty when, in 1361 BCE, he died, broken with the realization of his failure as a ruler, and the unworthiness of his race. His nephew Tutankhamun restored polytheism.
Source: Durant, Will, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 1: Our Oriental Heritage, A history of civilization in Egypt and the Near East to the Death of Alexander, and in India, China, and Japan from the beginning. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.
Image by Gérard Ducher under CC BY-SA 2.5 license
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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!