Roxana Cooper Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Akhenaten presented Akhetaten as a utopian City of
> the Sun but the numbers of armed guards visible in
> wall reliefs as well as the malnurished overworked
> remains of its poor suggest otherwise. Akhenaten's
> aten religion does not appear to have had a
> miraculous healing or charitable dimension from
> the few sources that remain.

I agree with Roxana, and have some thoughts to add.

The Amarna phenomenon looks to me like an oppressive messianic personality cult built around Akhenaten and Nefertiti, one that did not long survive their deaths. If so, the move to Akhetaten was classic. It’s very common for a messianic character to lead the faithful into a wilderness, literal or metaphorical, where they—and he—can better be cut off from old ties, outside influences and reality checks. Think of Moses, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Joseph Smith, Charles Manson, etc.

There are other messianic markers. For example, AFAIK, the only people ever shown directly worshipping the Aten are the royal couple and their immediate family, indicating that Akh had set himself up, not just as the earthly soul of the Aten, but as the sole intercessor between the supernatural and the earthly. Everybody else is shown as bowing and scraping, and accepting gifts of gold necklaces from the royal couple. Akhenaten may have claimed to be worshipping the sundisk, but it looks to me like the people were expected to worship him.

Then there’s the progressive deterioration: commonly, a personality-cult leader moves further out of touch with reality, and further into delusions of grandeur and omnipotence, even as things fall apart outside his magic circle. Sounds like the Amarna period to me.

A common messianic accessory is a consort: that is, the messiah’s wife or opposite-sex soulmate. Not all messiahs have them, but for those who do, the consort may have almost as much power as the messiah, or may be the only person the messiah defers to or depends on emotionally. Sometimes, she will even assume control of the cult (or try to) if the messiah goes out of the picture. To me, Nefertiti looks a lot like Tammy Faye, Imelda Marcos, Mother Divine, Mrs. Sun Myung Moon, and so forth.

Returning to the questions in the OP: Akhetaten sprang up out of bare desert like a gold rush town, by Akhenaten’s order, and it must have looked fabulous - but it was all surface display, built to glorify, not just the Sundisk, but the Sundisk’s prophet, Akhenaten. Little thought was given to things like sanitation, drainage, or garbage removal. The workmen building the showy palaces and temples were underfed and overworked to a degree that is not typical of AE. I suspect the guards were there at least partly to ensure everyone showed proper enthusiasm for the Glorious Leader. The city is unlikely to have been a utopia - more like a megalomaniac’s folly, and I suspect it was abandoned with relief when the end came.