I’m delighted to share that I took part in the new documentary Akhenaten’s Afterlife, produced by my talented friend Curtis Ryan Woodside.
When we think of ancient Egypt, we picture gold, glory and gods. But beneath the radiant sun of Akhenaten’s Amarna lay a very different reality, one carved not in stone but atop fragile bones.
This film peels back the glittering facade of the pharaoh’s “city of light” to reveal a civilisation crumbling under hunger, toil and disease. Excavations of Amarna’s pit-grave cemeteries tell the story of young labourers buried without honour, their bodies marked by brutal work, malnutrition and infection.
At the same time, Akhenaten was rewriting Egypt’s faith, turning away from the gods of his ancestors towards monolatry and devotion to a single deity: the Aten. In doing so, he made himself the only channel between heaven and earth. Was this the result of divine inspiration, political strategy or a troubled, extraordinary mind?
Through science and archaeology, this documentary exposes the haunting truth behind the utopia: a paradise built on human suffering, divine obsession and one of the first recorded instances of power fused with faith.