Akhenaten, on the train home from Paris - Gilbert Sinoué’s slow-burn political record
I bought Akhenaton by Gilbert Sinoué the way you buy a vinyl reissue you didn’t plan on owning — impulse, mood, vibes. Museum shop at the Louvre. Egyptian wing. Too much history in the air to walk out empty-handed.
I cracked it open on the train ride home. By the second chapter, I stopped checking my phone.
The book tells the story of the infamous the 18th-dynasty pharaoh who tried to blow up ancient Egypt’s religious system from the inside. Born Amenhotep IV, he abandons the traditional gods, sidelines the powerful priesthood, and installs Aten — the sun disk — as the sole object of worship. He builds a new capital, cuts ties with centuries of ritual, and rules as if belief alone could hold an empire together.
This is not your blockbuster ancient-world epic. No sandstorm openers, no sword-rattling masculinity, no cheap mysticism. Akhenaton moves like a slow burn record — side A is all tension, side B is fallout. Sinoué doesn’t try to sell you a legend. He dissects one.
His Akhenaten neither the a saint or a lunatic.
He’s something worse for an empire: a true believer. A guy so locked into his vision — one god, one light, no middlemen — that he forgets the boring stuff holding a civilization together. Armies. Alliances. Administration. Optics.
And that’s the real flex of this book.
Sinoué doesn’t tell this story as a straightforward biography. He reconstructs Akhenaten’s life through a chorus of voices — family members, courtiers, priests, foreign observers, archaeologists — each with their own version of what went wrong and what actually the true story. The result feels less like a historical epic and more like a long-form investigation into a regime that collapsed under the weight of its own ideals.
The religious revolution?
It is less of a miracle more of a hostile takeover. Monotheism doesn’t arrive bathed in golden light; it shows up disruptive, destabilizing, and politically suicidal. Akhenaten’s obsession with purity reads less like enlightenment and more like a refusal to compromise with reality.
Nefertiti, thankfully, is no background decoration. She’s the one reading the room while Akhenaten stares into the sun. Grounded, strategic, emotionally legible — she’s the album’s underrated bassist holding the whole thing together while the frontman melts down chasing transcendence.
The prose is clean, controlled, almost anti-lush. If you’re looking for sweaty decadence or soap-opera drama, this isn’t it. Sinoué writes like someone who trusts the material — and the reader — enough not to overplay it. The pacing is deliberate, sometimes demanding, but that’s the point. This is a book about the cost of absolutism. It doesn’t rush.
What hit hardest, somewhere between stations, was how contemporary it all felt. Strip away the crowns and temples and Akhenaten becomes painfully recognizable: the leader who confuses moral righteousness with competence, who believes he is right and that should be enough, who leaves others to deal with the aftermath.
By the time the train rolled in, I wasn’t thinking about ancient Egypt anymore. I was thinking about power, ego, and what happens when conviction outpaces responsibility.
Not bad for a museum-shop impulse buy.
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