It’s one of history’s great ironies: the successors of Pharaoh Akhenaten sought to obliterate all traces of his reign and yet, more has been written on Akhenaten than on any other ancient Egyptian. University of Melbourne history professor Ronald T. Ridley’s study of Akhenaten sounds a cautionary note (a whole concert?) against anyone making claims on the distant past. He recounts dozens of conflicting theories on the ruler (supposedly the world’s first monotheist) and dispenses with most of them. Akhenaten has been called a great idealist and a ruthless totalitarian, a pacifist and a mass murderer—all of those assumptions culled from fragmentary evidence that dissolves on close inspection. He has been subjected to amateur psychoanalysis; the worries and hopes of the present have been projected onto a man dead 3,000 years. And Akhenaten is far from the only example of fantasy presented as historical fact.
