Amenhotep IV doesn't become Akhenaton

Hi!

What do you think the consequences would have been had Amenhotep IV not gone off the deep end and start a monotheistic cult? I read somewhere that he got the idea from his wife. All we need is a POD which has him marry someone else and there we go.

At the very minimum, Egypt doesn't get attacked as much as His Majesty spends more attention taking care of the country from the traditional capital instead of heading out to the boonies to build a new capital and pray. He seems to have been a pretty bright guy, so he could have been a good king.

His descendants (with a different wife God knows who'd have replaced Tutankhamen) probably wouldn't have had as many "counterrevolutionary" agendas. Who knows, part of the XVIIIth Dynasty might be butterflied away, and no Rameseses or people like that.

Come to think of it, if there's no Akhenaton to put monotheistic practices on the map (for good or ill), would it have still been available for the Hebrews to adopt in the time of Moses? Even if they did have a single god before they arrived in Egypt, they seemed to have been assimilated into Egyptian culture pretty well. So perhaps Judaism/Christianity/Islam get butterflied away.

ACG
 
Hi!

What do you think the consequences would have been had Amenhotep IV not gone off the deep end and start a monotheistic cult? I read somewhere that he got the idea from his wife. All we need is a POD which has him marry someone else and there we go.

At the very minimum, Egypt doesn't get attacked as much as His Majesty spends more attention taking care of the country from the traditional capital instead of heading out to the boonies to build a new capital and pray. He seems to have been a pretty bright guy, so he could have been a good king.

His descendants (with a different wife God knows who'd have replaced Tutankhamen) probably wouldn't have had as many "counterrevolutionary" agendas. Who knows, part of the XVIIIth Dynasty might be butterflied away, and no Rameseses or people like that.

Come to think of it, if there's no Akhenaton to put monotheistic practices on the map (for good or ill), would it have still been available for the Hebrews to adopt in the time of Moses? Even if they did have a single god before they arrived in Egypt, they seemed to have been assimilated into Egyptian culture pretty well. So perhaps Judaism/Christianity/Islam get butterflied away.

ACG

Agree with your first two points, but not with your third. There is not really a lot of compelling evidence that Hebrew monotheism had anything to do with Akhenaten. The two most likely dates for the Exodus, for example, are centuries away from Akhenaten. The new theory put forth by Simcha Jacobovitch dates it during the reign of Amosis I, which was well before the birth of Akhenaten. The more traditional date puts it during the reign of either Rameses II or Merneptah, which is 200 years after Akhenaten. In the first case, any influence on Hebrew monotheism is impossible, and in the second, it is extremely unlikely, given the extreme lengths to which his successors went to erase all memory of his heresy.

Based on certain clues in the Bible and from archaeology, the original Hebrew religion wasn't strictly monotheistic to begin with anyway. It may have been dualist, as there is some evidence of a female consort to Yahweh in the time before the Babylonian Captivity, and it certainly can be argued to have had henotheistic attributes. Unlike the Islamic Koran, the First Commandment, for example, does not say "There is no God but God." It says "I am the Lord your God, and you shall have no other gods before me." This statement clearly does not deny the existence of other gods...it simply says that the Hebrews were not to worship other gods. Over time, this has been reinterpreted to mean that there is, in fact, only one God, and all the other gods were false gods. It was only when that reinterpretation took place that the religion truly became "monotheistic."
 

yourworstnightmare

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1. You take out Nefertiti from the the TL. No!! She's one of the coolest queens in history:mad:!

2. On Judaism and so on... The Hebrew religion evolved from henotheism to monotheims during the Babylonian captivity. (Henotheistic roots were old, but even the Bible suggest a split between the henotheistic clergy and the mixed hebrew- cananean population that prefered a mix of Yahweism and Cananean religion). Anyways, Akhenaten's cult had nothing to do with the emergence of Judaism.
 
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