The ultimate sacred power cannot be arbitrarily confined to an idol tangible or intangible, nor can it be encompassed by the city of a god such as the utopian dream city Jeremiah had in mind instead of the real Jerusalem he was confronted with. No, a thoroughgoing iconoclast would eschew the worship of a city, even if it were the throne of a god or a central seat of power. Indeed, desert prophets often condemned cities for being race-mixing whores. Iconoclasts would fain destroy any worshipped object—not only a carved idol, painted image, and such, but an entire city. For instance, the dream city built by the iconoclastic pharaoh Akhnaton (He-who-serves-Aton) during the end of Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty: he named his city Akhetaton, or City of the Horizon of the Sun-disk.

Akhnaton found the site for his holy city in the middle of nowhere, in the black virgin soil undefiled by the pantheon of gods that Egypt had accumulated over the centuries: “For it was Aton, my Father, that brought me to this City of the Horizon. There was not a noble who directed me to it. There was not any man in the whole land who led me to it, saying, ‘It is fitting for his majesty that he make a City of the Horizon of Aton in this place’…Behold the Pharaoh found that this site belonged not to a prince, nor to a princess. There was no right for any man to act as owner of it.”

So it was there that Akhnaton built his ark, a city to carry the seeds of the revolutionary race consecrated to the Sun-god. He built it quickly of brick and mortar along modern, “natural” lines—there was no time for massive quarrying—and inscribed on a stone tablet his vow never to leave it: “I will not pass beyond it…for ever and ever,” he promised. His oath and the tablet upon which it was written would forever endure, he declared: “It shall not be erased. It shall not be washed out. It shall not be kicked. It shall not be struck with stones.” This is particularly ironic in view of the fact that the city only flourished for about twenty-five years: it was razed to the ground after his death. In any case, never before had a king built a city so thoroughly suited to the worship of one god.

Akhnaton was portrayed with an oddly shaped head, a thin face with a brooding, in-drawn expression, a slender neck, narrow sloping shoulders, protruding breasts, a pot-belly and wide hips. He apparently wore simple clothing and did not adorn himself with jewelry: his personal distinctions were caricatured and copied by the naturalistic art of the day—he was flattered as the model of natural beauty to be imitated. Akhnaton’s unusual conduct is the subject of endless speculation. He has been variously described as an introspective intellectual, an iconoclast, revolutionary, idealist and modernist, as well as an hallucinating mystic and an hermaphrodite. Given the incest noted by travelers to Egypt, he may have been the model for Sophocles’ Oedipus. A far-fetched theory opines that Akhnaton was an androgynous being descended from Outer Space. Another, more down-to-earth report states that he was the last child descended from the marriage of a common woman who became Queen Tiy and her husband Amenhotep III.

Akhnaton, originally Amenhotep IV, a member of a dynasty that worshipped Amon, changed his name from Amenhotep (Amon-is-satisfied) to Akhnaton (He-serves-Aton), to reflect his dedication to Aton. He and his beautiful queen Nefertiti had six daughters—their mutual affection was openly displayed; his obvious compassion and tenderness and the portrayal of female participation in public life is evidence of a strong feminism.

Akhnaton had mostly likely been a troubled teenager, eager to get out of Thebes and out from under the priests of Amon to do his own thing, to found his City of the Horizon at what is now called Tell-el-Amarna, dedicated to the one god. He may have received his ideas about Aton from certain Mitanni women during his youth at the royal court in Thebes. The Mitannis had been ruled by Aryans. The captive women brought the deity Surya to the Egyptian court, a Vedic version of the solar god in whom the supreme power exists. Surya was initially represented abstractly as a disk, wheel, or swastika, but eventually took an anthropomorphic form.

Jeremiah certainly would have sympathized with Akhnaton’s one and only, universal god. Akhnaton proclaimed,“ O thou sole God, whose powers no other possesseth, Thou didst create the earth according to Thy desire, whilst Thou wast alone: men, all cattle large and small, all that are upon the earth, that go about upon their feet; all that are on high, that fly with their wings. The countries of Syria and Nubia, the land of Egypt; Thou settest every man in his place, Thou suppliest their necessities. Every one had his possessions, and his days are reckoned. Their tongues are divers in speech, their forms likewise and their skins, for Thou, divider, hast divided the peoples.”

Of course Akhnaton did not invent worship of the Sun. In fact, he forbade the perennial worship of the Sun per se, in favor of “Heat-in-the-Sun” and Light. Naturally the perceived forms of energy should be regarded as manifestations of the Original Cause. The discoveries and inventions of our modern solar physicists would no doubt provide Akhnaton with further verification of the wonders of Aton.

  The Egyptian pantheon of gods embody of certain sacred conceptions denoted by sundry terms. Many conceptions naturally overlapped, and different terms eventually designated the same ideas. Through the hierarchical process of generalizing ultimate values, and through the competition of “my god is better than your god,” certain divinities come to predominate over others in a crude pyramidal scheme, with the first family or royal trinity at its apex – in the name of the Father, the Mother, and the Son, Amen. For instance, the Sun god Re was amalgamated with the invisible god of air Amon, who was portrayed as a man painted blue to connote invisibility. The combined Amon-Re was the predominant national god who, at one time or another, could be separately considered as Amon, the prevailing god at Thebes, and Re, prevailing god at Heliopolis.  Among the Hebrews, Amon was a competitor to Yahweh. The Greeks compared Amon to their Zeus—Egypt periodically sent ambassadors of Amon to Athens.

An early trinity comprised Amon-Re the Father, husband of his mother; Mut the Mother, Queen of Darkness (the Black Virgin); and Khons the Child. A later triune, stripped of the feminine element, was Re the Father; Ptah the Son; Amon the Spirit.

An Amonite hymn of the Nineteenth Dynasty states: “Amon, who came into being at the beginning, so that the mysterious nature is unknown…His image is not displayed in writing…Hidden (amen) is his name as Amon, he is Re in the face and his body is Ptah.”

There were many other gods; one or the other god might seem to prevail here and there according to the predilection of the worshipper and the occasion—it was a common practice to flatter the god presently worshipped by saying he or she was “the sole god besides whom there is no other.” Akhnaton brought the syncretic evolution of the pantheon to focus on a single symbol of the signified divine being: Aton, the Sun-disk, symbol of divine energy radiating rays with hands at the end of them reaching out to all. The “stimulating” form of the Vedic deity Surya he was acquainted with in his youth also reached out with “golden arms” to all beings.

Aton was not concealed in an ark or in a darkened chamber at the end of a temple, nor was he the subject of occult incantations or books of the dead and weird rituals, nor was he further obscured by theological rigmarole. Quite to the contrary: Aton, although his essence was invisible, was celebrated in plain view, in the broad light of day. After all, it is impossible for any human being—except perhaps Moses, and then only by divine command—to cover up the Sun for everyone at the same time. Aton’s temples had no roofs; their doors were flung wide open; there were no sacred icons or holy images within—artistic decor consisted of natural scenes, flowers, plants and animals. There was no absurd mumbo-jumbo to explain anything: Atonism simply described Aton’s effulgent beauty as it is experienced in nature. There was no wrath, jealousy, revenge, thou-shalt-nots, or the static stiffness of eternity. The accent was on the positive: there was love and the lively, flowing here-and-now, and death was unmentioned; the only “shalt” was to have positive gratitude for life. The hidden was replaced by the unhidden, privacy by publicity. Aton’s food was ma’at, or truth, which also referred to the candor of the sun and of the pharaoh’s own life as it was expressed in the revolutionary “naturalism” of the contemporary art.

Akhnaton ordered all references to Amon and plural references to “gods” hacked out with hatchets, hammers and chisels. The Egyptians were well-aware of the magical hold names have on the mind, of the pervasive influence of words inscribed on tablets and temples, tombs and other monuments; they believed the visible sign signified an invisible double that would be obliterated with the destruction of the sign; they were firm believers in iconoclasm as the antidote for undesirable gods.

While Moses’ invisible YHWH was absolutely brilliant when asked for a name, responding with “I AM WHO I AM”, Akhnaton’s solar disk was simply a brilliant visible symbol for one universal deity—the solar sign might be effaced, but the all powerful Sun would defiantly remain as evidence of the invisible essence of the one god. An iconoclastic nihilist could hurl dung at the Sun all day with no visible effect; of course, the Moon can eclipse the Sun, as a woman can occlude the man-child in her ark.

The only permissible personification of Aton in the City of the Horizon was the pharaoh Akhnaton, the Son-of-Re the Father, a form of Aton. Akhnaton was in effect the Son of God. He asserted the Divine Right of Pharaoh, an iconoclastic assertion destructive of the organized polytheistic religion of Egypt together with its political and economic trappings that had had such an enormous influence over the Empire. Many people of the old order lost their jobs and influence while newcomers found theirs.

Atonism was an abstract religion, a religion of intellectuals. Ordinary people preferred to have their vulgar icons and idols at home, and the former elite wanted their power back along with the idolization industry, wherefore the Egyptian Reformation naturally began and ended with the Rebel Pharaoh. After Akhnaton died, Amon was easily restored along with his human sycophants. After all, the old god Amon was the triumphant god of war who had built up the Empire, while Aton the new god of Love had by virtue of his pacifism in the space of a few years lost all of it except a little corner of Palestine.

Akhnaton ignored the desperate pleas for military help coming in from his vassals. The Empire was his personal property: he reportedly turned his cheek and gave away his cloak. His pragmatic mother Queen Tiy came down from Thebes to set him straight. A coregent was named and sent backsliding to Thebes and its pantheon of deities. Akhnaton’s wife, Queen Nefertiti, was no backslider: she continued to adore Aton and her husband after she was sent away to a northern suburb of the dream city.

We do not know how Akhnaton met his end. His glorious City of the Horizon was soon abandoned a few years later. General Horemheb, the commander of his army, ascended to the throne, determined to curb anarchy. He ordered workmen to destroy the signs of Aton and Akhnaton. And then Ramses the Great continued to blot out the official city of Akhnaton, using its monuments as a quarry for the building of Hermopolis. It became a crime to even mention Akhnaton’s name—he could only be officially referred to as “that criminal.”

The Akhnaton of popular legend was too preoccupied with ideas and ideals to ensure their protection by force of arms. The world was not ready for Love—modern writers still criticize Atonism, saying that it was an “Oriental” religion relying on the “oceanic feeling of oneness”; that is to say, Love. There is a difference between the propositions “God is love” and “Love is God.” Hope remains that “God is Love” will someday express an equality relation between God and Love, so that the terms may actually be commutative. As Jeremiah reiterated so well, change has to be inscribed in hearts instead of on tablets: change has to come from a change of heart and not from an objective representation of a god. Pending that change, war shall prevail, and the will of God—whether under Name or No-name—shall try the consciences of warriors until they come into peace and harmony, wheresoever that might be.

Despite our changing archeological interpretations, all idols, including great cities, are bound to fall.