Word: ikhnaton
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Because the modern world tends to monotheism, the reign (circa 1375-1358 B.C.) of Pharaoh Ikhnaton is usually described in comparative-religion courses as a brief but glorious false dawn of theological enlightenment. Novelist Stacton will have none of this. In an astringent tale that examines men's motives and man's fate as closely-and coldly-as any historical novel in recent years, he presents his own view of the matter...
...true, Stacton writes, that Ikhnaton set aside the prevailing pantheism, in which the god Amon and Amon's priests ruled over a motley array of other deities. It is also true that the Pharaoh moved his capital downriver from Thebes to a new city built in honor of the new sun god Aton. But his actions had little to do with religion. They were the work of an inbred neurotic, a king of erratic, often clouded mind, whose strange, troubled life was set on its eccentric course by an obsessive fear of the dark...
Corrupt Priests. With care and cynicism, Author Stacton builds his theory. Egypt's priesthood, Ikhnaton's mother reflects at one point, was "a series of venal officials ... a branch of the police, and only slightly more corrupt." Yet she is well aware that "corruption is the price we have to pay for order." Her son might have realized it too, had he possessed only that measure of insanity normal to a bloodline transmitted for generations through the marriage of brother and sister. But when the priests of Amon, in the traditional coronation ceremony, pushed the new Pharaoh alone...
From Egypt to Sinai. Fast agrees with Freud and others that Moses' monotheism is traceable to the great Egyptian monarch, AkhenAton (also known as Ikhnaton), who forswore all gods save the Sun-God Aton. But where Freud guessed that Moses was an Egyptian by birth. Novelist Fast makes him an Egyptian merely by adoption and education. As Fast tells it, fear of the old gods and their priests caused AkhenAton's successors to denounce Aton worship, but not before the idea of monotheism had taken root in some Egyptian minds. In Fast's account, every priest...
...well of the past is deep, but, when they have finished the two great characterizations of Joseph the Provider-Old Jacob, and the brilliant, unstable Pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, better known as Ikhnaton, the great liberalizer of Egyptian religion and art, one of the precursors of Christianity, most readers will feel that Mann has made the past's deep waters, at least for a dizzying way down, crystal clear...