Colossal Bust of Akhenaten from Karnak
Unknown · c. 1349-1333 BC
Amenhotep IV came to the throne as a conventional pharaoh and within a few years had renamed himself Akhenaten, Effective for the Aten, suppressed the cult of Amun, and moved his capital to a virgin site in Middle Egypt. Before he left Thebes he built a vast open air temple to the sun disc east of Karnak, and ringed its court with colossal statues of himself. This upper portion comes from that series, and it belongs to the first and most extreme phase of the artistic revolution he imposed.
The sandstone was cut with a deliberate strangeness that still unsettles. The face is elongated into a narrow oval, the eyes are heavy lidded and slanting, the lips are thick and drooping, the chin juts, the neck is impossibly long. The king wears the nemes headcloth with the uraeus, carries the crook and flail crossed on his chest, and bears cartouches naming the Aten and himself. Scholars have argued for decades over whether this reflects a real medical condition, Marfan syndrome and Froelich syndrome have both been proposed, or whether it is a theological statement: a body remade to resemble the androgynous, life giving sun. The second explanation now has the wider following.
The Karnak colossi were pulled down after Akhenaten's death and their blocks reused as rubble fill inside later pylons, which is why so much Amarna material survives at all. This piece was excavated at East Karnak and given to France by Egypt, with the Louvre committee approving the acquisition in May 1972. Stand slightly to one side and the profile becomes even more alien than the frontal view.
Did You Know? Akhenaten's monuments were so thoroughly demolished by his successors that his statues survive mainly because the fragments were recycled as hidden filling inside later temple walls.
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