Bill Fawcett - 100 Mistakes That Changed History

These drastic changes were still not enough for the new pharaoh to ensure power over the people. The priests of Amun retained significant influence in the capital city of Thebes, so Akhenaten undermined them even more by moving the capital to a more remote location in the desert. He called his new capital Akhetaten, meaning “the horizon of the sun.” Tens of thousands of people were expected to make the move to what must have seemed like a wasteland. Mass building projects began almost immediately. The new city would have all the amenities: palaces, lakes, and, most important, the temple to Aten. Much of the country’s resources were tied up in new building projects. In fact, so much of Akhenaten’s efforts went into building his new city that he forgot the importance of maintaining the good relations that his father established with the neighboring countries. Lines of communications and diplomacy were all but broken.

In the twelfth year of Akhenaten’s reign, tragedy struck. His beloved Nefertiti suddenly disappeared from all records. The reason for this is a bit of a mystery, but what is known is that Akhenaten launched a full-scale war against Amun-Ra and his priests. He tried to eradicate all traces of the name Amun. He even went so far as to defile his father’s name by scratching out the “Amun” from Amunhotep. All his energies turned toward the destruction of Amun. Akhenaten began to neglect the needs and will of his own people. The country slowly began to spiral downward. Blame for this was laid on Akhenaten for angering Amun-Ra, but the jilted god soon had his revenge. In 1336 BCE, Akhenaten died, leaving his nine-year-old son, Tutenaten, as his successor. People began to flee back to Thebes in droves, and all construction at the new capital city stopped.

Immediately after Akhenaten’s death, the priests of Amun-Ra reestablished their dominance in the community. Then they went to work on the young pharaoh. Gaining control over the naive leader proved to be an easy task. They pressed him into changing his name to Tutankamun, meaning “the image of Amun.” Tutankamun then issued a statement, under the “guidance” of the priests, faulting his father for Egypt’s decline. Akhenaten was declared a heretic. All images of him and his queen were defaced or destroyed, and the capital city was knocked down stone by stone. The name of Akhenaten was erased from Egyptian history and his father’s god, Aten, was reduced to a minor status.

Akhenaten’s dream of monotheism through the god Aten never came to fruition. By pushing his new religion too strongly, Akhenaten guaranteed its failure. Had he been a better and wiser pharaoh, this might not have been the case. Certainly a thousand years later another monotheistic religion that was introduced from the bottom up and against great resistance, Christianity, joined Judaism as a monotheistic faith.

Of course, this is not the end of the story. How, you ask, do we know anything about Akhenaten? The answer lies in the very stones used to build the city of Akhetaten. These small stones, called talatat , were much smaller than the ones used to build the pyramids. They could be easily transported, allowing building projects to progress at a faster rate than before. Unfortunately, they could also be destroyed with the same swiftness. After dismantling the abandoned city, workers used these same talatat as filler for buildings in Thebes. As a result of being able to study the stones and even reconstruct sections of the original walls they came from, we now know more about Akhenaten’s dynasty than perhaps any other Egyptian dynasty. But the stones were not the only thing uncovered by modern archaeologists. In 1922, Howard Carter made the discovery that has yet to be matched, the tomb of the boy king, Tutankamun. Hidden in the glory of the magnificent riches hung a depiction of King Tutankamun and his wife. Etched in pure gold, the king and his wife stand basking in the rays of the sun god, Aten.

The Jewish kingdom began its rise to being a regional power under King Saul in 1020 BCE. His successor, David, raised the status of Israel to that of a major local power using a combination of diplomacy and military successes. It was David who truly united the twelve Israeli tribes into a single kingdom, with its capital city at Jerusalem, when he defeated Ishbaal in 993 BCE. David was followed by Solomon, who ruled—well, okay, I have to say it—wisely until 931 BCE. At that point, Israel was a rich and fairly powerful state tied by treaty with all its neighbors, and it was more than capable of defending itself. Israel under Solomon was a rich trading crossroads; it had developed its copper and other metal industries, and many new cities and towns were founded and old ones fortified. It was under Solomon that the Temple in Jerusalem was built.

The problem arose after Solomon died. To begin with, Israel was prospering, but the Jewish people under Solomon had been subjected to an ever-increasing burden of taxation to pay for defense (including a strong army) and the Temple. So when Solomon died in 931, there was an open rebellion by the ten smaller northern tribes. Under the leadership of Jeroboam, a former court official, they split with the tribes of Judah and Benjamin and founded a kingdom in the northern half of the formerly united Jewish land and established the new capital at Samaria. The two remaining tribes formed the new nation we call Judah, which was ruled by David’s son Rehoboam and whose capital remained Jerusalem; Judah continued to be ruled by the descendants of David.

Somehow during the split, the Jewish people lost the size and prestige needed to stay an important regional power. Less than 200 years later, the Kingdom of Israel was defeated by the Assyrians, and its people were scattered throughout the Assyrian empire, where they soon lost their identity. These are the ten lost tribes. Judah managed to hang on for more than another century before it was overwhelmed by the Babylonians, in 586 BCE. By deciding to split apart, the Jewish tribes may have dealt with immediate problems, but they forever lost the opportunity to become a realm strong enough to survive. Had the kingdom not split, the Jews would likely have been able to maintain themselves as a nation and a people. After all, Judah was able to survive its fall to the Assyrians, and a united Jewish kingdom might have done so as well. Who knows what such a state might have achieved?

It was a time when civilization in the West was divided between two cultures. The largest was the Persian centralized empire, which was based on having an all-powerful ruler with little regard for the individual. The other culture was much more dynamic, but smaller and poorer; it was the emerging democracy of Greece. In spite of the fact that there were places in ancient Greece with dictatorial and oppressive city-states, such as Sparta, individual heroism was honored. It is a divide we still see today in the different values found in Iran, Iraq, and the other nations that are descended from ancient despots, and Western cultures that are descended from the Greek traditions.

In 480 BCE, things had not gone all that well for Xerxes, ruler of the Persian empire, particularly in regard to his invasion of Greece. His object was to revenge his father’s loss at Marathon and to incorporate the impudent and pugnacious Greek city-states into the Persian empire. The free city-states were both a direct threat and a threatening example to the many diverse peoples in his empire, especially those of Greek descent.

The war had started well, with the construction of a remarkable bridge across the Hellespont (the Dardanelles now dividing modern-day Istanbul). This bridge still is considered one of the great engineering achievements of ancient times. The crossing was followed by the rapid conquest of Macedonia and a number of smaller Greek cities. Then Xerxes’ army marched south along the coast of Greece to Athens. Numbers in ancient battles are often exaggerated, but it is likely the Persian emperor had as many soldiers in his army as there were residents of the city itself. The people of Athens had fled to the safety of the Aegean islands, many to the nearby island of Salamis. The resistance of the few Athenians who had instead retreated to the city’s citadel was easily squashed. Then the most important and richest city in Greece was burned to the ground. This may well have been in belated revenge for the burning of the Lydian capital (see page 4) twenty years earlier. But Xerxes’ destruction of Athens had come only after his army took painfully high losses while forcing the pass at Thermopylae against the 300 Spartans and 6,700 other Greek warriors, mostly from Thespiae. These losses led to extremely low morale among the men of the Persian army, including the generals.