Carpe Diem #792 Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV)

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

It's with joy and pleasure that I present to you a new episode of our daily haiku meme Carpe Diem Haiku Kai. As you all know we are traveling with full sails over The Nile from its delta to its source. Along The Nile we will visit several wonderful places and I hope to tell you all something about the historical places on its banks.
Yesterday we visited Karnak, that wonderful temple complex, and I told you all already a little bit over Akhenaten, the pharaoh who brought monotheism to ancient Egypt risking his life with that, because in ancient Egypt the priests were a very powerful group of people, even more powerful than the Egyptian rulers.

Akhenaten created the religion of The Aten, the sun, and through that he was looking for power himself, because Akhenaten was (in his vision) the personification of The Aten, the sun. Several years ago I published my first novel and the religion in that novel was based on Akhenaten's religion of The Aten. That novel I published in 2007, only in Dutch. I hope that the translation of this first novel into English will be ready this year, but that's not up to me, that's up to my publisher.

After a long time of consideration I have decided to stop with one of our other CDHK weblogs, Haiku Shuukan at Wordpress. It's not because of lack of inspiration, but the lack of time, that I have decided to close that weblog at the end of this month. You all will understand that CDHK is my priority, so by shutting Haiku Shuukan I will have more time for CDHK.

Statue of Akhenaten in Cairo

Ok ... back to our episode of today, Akhenaten, Akhenaten was a pharaoh of Egypt who reigned over the country for about 17 years between roughly 1353 B.C. and 1335 B.C.

A religious reformer he made the Aten, the sun disc, the center of Egypt’s religious life and carried out an iconoclasm that saw the names of Amun, a pre-eminent Egyptian god, and his consort Mut, be erased from monuments and documents throughout Egypt’s empire.
When he ascended the throne his name was Amenhotep IV, but in his sixth year of rule he changed it to “Akhenaten” a name that the late Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat translated roughly as the “Benevolent one of (or for) the Aten.”
In honor of the Aten, he constructed an entirely new capital at an uninhabited place, which we now call Amarna, out in the desert. Its location was chosen so that its sunrise conveyed a symbolic meaning. “East of Amarna the sun rises in a break in the surrounding cliffs. In this landscape the sunrise could be literally ‘read’ as if it were the hieroglyph spelling Akhet-aten or ‘Horizon of the Aten’ — the name of the new city,” wrote Montserrat in his book "Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt" (Routledge, 2000).
He notes that this capital would quickly grow to become about 4.6 square miles (roughly 12 square kilometers) in size. After his death, the pharaoh’s religious reforms quickly collapsed, his new capital became abandoned and his successors denounced him.
Akhenaten, either before or shortly after he became pharaoh, would marry Nefertiti, who in some works of art is shown standing equal next to her husband. Some have even speculated that she may have become a co-, or even sole, ruler of Egypt. Source: Live Science)

Credits: Right Eye of Horus

There is a lot of mystery around this pharaoh, one of those mysteries was the so called "School of Horus's Right Eye", a mystery school in which the followers of Akhenaten and his The Aten religion learned how to create for example light with just their mind. This mystery school took 12 and a half year and at the end of the school the students were tested with a life-threatening test. They had to dive into a well, had to swim all to the bottom of it, than find their way through a night-black space of this well in which crocodiles swam too. They had to find their way out by using their skills as learned at the Right Eye of Horus school. Many of them didn't survive and turned out to be not worthy to be a graduate of the mystery school. It is said that Akhenaten himself was a graduate of the mystery school, but that's from a not confirmed source. (More about this mystery-school you can find in one of the older posts of CDHK by clicking on the above image of Horus' Eye)

Eye of Horus
brings Spirit back in mind
the Light has won

© Chèvrefeuille

Tomorrow we will visit Amarna, Akhenaten's sacred city, and we will "learn" more about this city and its creator.

This episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7.00 PM (CET) and will remain open until August 11th at noon (CET). I will try to publish our new episode, Amarna, later on.