[display_podcast]

I don’t know how many of you listen to my Biography podcast, but the episode we recorded today is, I think, pretty interesting, so i hope you don’t mind me throwing it into this feed.

Today we tackle two subjects – Egyptian Pharoah Akhenaten (aka Amenhotep IV) and Moses. Originally we were going to do Moses but as he is (according to the majority of secular scholars) a mythological figure and not historical, I didn’t want to get into the same trouble we did when we talked about Helen of Troy.

And then I remembered Akhenaten. Like Moses, Akhenaten was the founder of a monotheistic religion. In fact, he is considered the first person to conceive of monotheism or, at least, to put it into practice on a wide scale. He pre-dated Moses (or at least when Moses would have lived had he actually existed) by 300 – 900 years, depending on where you posit the Moses stories. And, unlike Moses, we have proof Akhenaten lived. However, we only discovered his story in the 19th century, as the record of his reign and the reign of his successors, his wife Nefertiti and his son/step-son Tutenkhamen, were eradicted from the official records, possibly because of his attempts to usher in monotheism into Egypt.

You can read the rest of the shownotes here.