EXPERT BIO
GARRY J SHAW
Garry Shaw is an author and journalist covering archaeology, history and world heritage. He has a PhD in Egyptology, and his new book The Story of Tutankhamun: An Intimate Life of the Boy Who Become King, will be published by Yale University Press on 11 October.
Follow him on Twitter @GarryShawEgypt and Instagram @garryjshaw
Tutankhamun – originally called Tutankhaten – was born around 1329 BCE. This was a time of great upheaval in Egypt, when the prince's father, King Akhenaten, had reformed the country's millennia-old traditions. With Queen Nefertiti, he had turned his back on the gods in favour of an obscure deity the Aten, or sun disc. As Akhenaten's reign progressed, the god Amun, king of the gods, was targeted for attacks. The king's followers smashed Amun's statues across Egypt and scratched away his name from monuments. Amun represented all that was hidden, so Akhenaten perhaps regarded him as the antithesis of the Aten's all-encompassing, life-giving light.
But as the years passed, other gods were attacked too. To symbolise Egypt's new beginning, Akhenaten moved the royal court to a newly built city in the desert, which he called Akhetaten – the Horizon of the Aten – today called Amarna. For years, people hauled blocks of stone from nearby quarries to build its temples, and worked in the intense heat making mud bricks for elite villas and palaces. The homes of the poor grew around these villas, and as the city developed, its workers died in large numbers; malnourished, overworked, and often young, they were buried on the outskirts of the city and forgotten. They paid the price for Akhenaten's dreams.
With this dramatic shift in religious devotion, Egypt's art style changed too. Directed by the king, the Amarna artists produced statues and carvings quite unlike any that came before or after him. Despite wearing the traditional regalia of a pharaoh, Akhenaten was carved with a round belly and spindly legs and arms – far from the youthful, muscular and fit bodies that pharaohs typically chose for their official art. Temples changed
