The Rebel Pharaoh

Dan Cruickshank travels the Nile, from magnificent Karnak to the desolate ruins of El Amarna, in search of the truth about Akhenaten, the most radical and mysterious pharaoh ever to rule Egypt, and his beautiful wife Nefertiti. They were a golden couple, rich and all-powerful, but when Akhenaten had a personal religious conversion, it changed everything. Akhenaten decided to overturn the entire religious belief system of ancient Egypt and convert the whole nation to his own new religion. He swept aside centuries of worship of many gods and declared that there was only one god, the Sun - the 'Aten'. To the ancient Egyptians this was heresy, but as he was the pharaoh, no-one could stop him. He then built a vast new sacred city in the desert, far away from the ancient capital of Thebes, a city dedicated to the Aten, in which he and Nefertiti lived in splendour. But, as Dan discovers, the royal couple's dreams would soon come to a tragic end. From the grand temples at Karnak, Dan traces the route of the heretic king and queen along the Nile to the site of their splendid new city at El Amarna, in Middle Egypt - now just a poignant, desolate ruin where Akhenaten and Nefertiti lived out their glorious but doomed lives.