Amenobamahotep IV


The name belongs to Akhenaten, King Tut's dad before his dad's fifth year of reign and before he changed his name from Amenhotep and moved the capital from Thebes to his new city at Amarna. 

Tut's dad changed the religion by cutting off the priesthoods and directing the wealth of the country to his new priesthood. Akhenaten upset the balance of Maat throughout the land. The land in the shape of a snake. Completely disrupted the priesthood system thereby disrupting the entire economy, the whole thing, priesthood, beliefs, economy are inextricably linked. Nothing worked properly. The nation  floundered, except for the capital city, Amarna.

A similar colossus is part of the traveling Tut exhibition that landed next door for months. I took everyone I knew there who would go. Called up old friends. (Surprising to me how many had excuses not to go.) Surprising too how many American blacks I know do not know nor care that Egypt is serious black history. One fellow who used to live on my floor that did go was amazed to recognize African features among the statuary of Tut's relatives. To my tremendous embarrassment he reached out and touched the stone statues, the African-looking statues included to describe Tut's time in the galleries leading to the galleries devoted specifically to Tut's tomb. And the alarms did not go off, and the guards all around did not intervene. I said, "Don't touch those." But he could not resist, and the guards did not bother him. The guards wanted him to touch the statues. 

The very next day I am asked to move back by the guards from pointing to specific hieroglyphics on Horemheb's stele.

Racists.

One lady I took there, a religious person, upon seeing this colossus in the fourth gallery said, "Isn't it amazing their religion stayed the same for that whole time?" 

I said, "Yeah." 

But it did not stay the same. The characters changed all over the place, continuously, in fact, that whole time taking on fresh attributes from new sources, combining attributes, amalgamating entire deity attributes, sharing attributes, combining by syncretism as fortunes of individual city-states rise and fall that the deities are associated with, and the myths evolve with them.

[When it comes to Egyptian "H," you must decide which "H" sound you want. 

The emphatic H, like I did here.
The pharyngeal H like Arabic, or Hebrew
The voiceless velar fricative like German "ach" ]

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