Pharoah of the Sun

Mom and Ralph treated me to the Ahknaten exhibit at the L A County Museum of Art. I instantly loved Ahknaten. He revolutionized Egyptian art, religion and social politics. His artists portrayed people and animals with much more natural movements and shapes than the proscribed Egyptian stylized forms and poses. I particularly loved this stone carving of the royal family, inwhich the parents are cuddling and kissing their children. Archeologists believe he recognized his wife, Nefertiti, as an equal because she is depicted as equal in size to him in these images. This alone puts him thousands of years ahead of his time.

He was the only pharoah to worship only one god, Aten, the sun, and even that god was not anthropomorphized. He worshipped the sun as White Light that also shines from within, the creator of all beings as one family. This concept did not re-emerge until the advent of Judaism, and is still under discussion. Where previous--and succeeding--pharoahs demanded that royal artists depict them in physically ideal form, with perfect faces, square shoulders, muscular torsos, and slender hips, Ahknaten allowed his artists to reveal his slender torso, convex abdomen, full hips and oversized facial features. His faith must have imparted a humility unusual in a monarch. His innovations in art, architecture, religion and social form were immediately destroyed after his death, by his son Tutankamen. That's King Tut as in King Tut's tomb.

There are banners for the Pharoah of the Sun exhibit all over West Hollywood, just in time for Passover, the feast with a story inwhich the pharoahs are visited by locusts, lice, plagues, and other things you normally wouldn't mention at the dinner table.