Wikipedia:Peer review/Akhenaten/archive1

Akhenaten

I hope to improve this article as much as possible, so I would like to request advice on what it would take to get it back to GA or even FA status. The article has gone through a GA reassessment in 2013, but a lot has been changed and udpated since then, so I would appreciate your thoughts on the article as is now.

Thanks, Kamocsai (talk) 03:05, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Comments from A. Parrot

I'm very sorry for not noticing earlier that you had put this up for peer review. First I'll thank you for tackling this subject—the Amarna Period is one of the thorniest problems in the entire study of ancient Egypt. I'll make my first round of comments over this weekend, but I expect it will only be a first round, considering the level of depth that such a topic calls for. A. Parrot (talk) 05:31, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

@Kamocsai: OK, I've looked it over. The article is clearly far better than it was in April, with much more comprehensive sourcing. I'm afraid I'm not good at distinguishing GA quality from FA quality, and I've probably written these comments with an FA standard in mind, so I hope they're not intimidating. I think you and the previous article contributors have actually done most of the work of describing the topic, and most of the remaining changes won't be as large-scale as these comments may make them sound. Anyway, I think these are the broad points that should be kept in mind in any future work on the article. Let me know if you want more detailed comments on the text, or if you need to draw upon the extensive sources I have. A. Parrot (talk) 23:50, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

• As noted in Ridley 2019 (an excellent find, by the way; I've previewed the opening pages and now want to read the whole thing), Akhenaten provokes scholars to produce guesswork and flights of fancy based on minimal evidence. The primary sources, such as the Restoration Stela and the Amarna Letters, are also highly tendentious and should not be unthinkingly taken at face value, and while Egyptologists are beginning to acknowledge that, not enough of them do. For these reasons, it's best to exercise caution when stating anything but the hardest archaeological facts. That doesn't mean we should ignore the views of reliable sources, but it is possible to deemphasize the more outlandish claims, particularly when those claims are explicitly countered by other, more skeptical RSes such as Ridley or Montserrat.
• One way of doing that, and of keeping the article to a reasonable length despite the breadth of subjects and opinions it has to cover, is to summarize the range of opinions rather than listing each individually. For example, the suggested ages for Akhenaten at the time he took the throne are, as Ridley points out, mere guesses. All that really needs to be said is that the suggestions range from 10 to 23 and that the latter part of the range is more likely, given the length of Amenhotep III's reign and the apparent dates of birth of Akhenaten's daughters. Similarly, although the wide variety of perceptions of Akhenaten should definitely be mentioned in the lead, it doesn't seem like a good idea to give such prominence to the idea that he was insane.
• It's also necessary to avoid old sources, certainly those from before World War II. The likes of Breasted and Weigall were even more prone to flights of fancy than recent Egyptologists are, and their work rested on less extensive evidence. They shouldn't be cited except as examples of how people have perceived Akhenaten. If an idea is still current, it should be possible to find a more recent source.
• The biggest thing that seems to be missing from the article thus far is an assessment of Akhenaten's long-term impact—he is often thought to have had one, in spite of the effort to erase him from memory. A prime example is in the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt at the end of Jacobus van Dijk's chapter on the late New Kingdom, which says that Akhenaten's attack on the traditional gods and temples, followed by the extinction of the royal line and a long period when none of the reigning kings had been born to royalty, undermined the prestige of the kingship for the rest of the New Kingdom. This may be an exaggerated argument, given that we don't know how thorough Akhenaten's opposition to the traditional pantheon actually was, but I haven't seen a source specifically contradict it. Many scholars, especially Jan Assmann, have said things along similar lines, so it's at least a significant viewpoint.
• As Egyptian religion is my specialty, I'm most likely to be picky about Atenism. One of the most significant things about it is easy for modern people to miss. However monotheistic or non-monotheistic it may have been, it seems to have clearly been exclusivist. Whereas past developments in ancient Egyptian theology had integrated new ideas with old ones, Atenism rejected most of the old theology and seems to have treated Amun, at least, as incompatible with Atenism. To grasp how radical this change was—not just in Egyptian history but world history—a good and readable source is Akhenaten and the Religion of Light by Erik Hornung, which is listed in the further reading right now but not in the bibliography. In some other respects, Atenism was an outgrowth of preexisting trends in Egyptian religious thought. While those trends are difficult to summarize, I'm happy to supply more details about them, as I have plenty of sources on them. I'd particularly like to tweak the article's treatment of the relationship between the Aten, Amun, and Ra; perhaps I can post a more detailed comment about it on the talk page.
• I think the treatment of the speculative theories about Akhenaten should be adjusted. A lot of the "speculative theories" section could be integrated with other parts of the article text, as most of the section either deals with ordinary Egyptological debates (for example, most of the stuff about Smenkhkare, which belongs in the section on succession) or ideas that were once current in Egyptology but are now moving out of the mainstream (the possible illness or deformity). But I'm not sure that the section should be entirely done away with. Ideas with widespread influence but little or no scholarly support, such as the supposed influence of Atenism upon Abrahamic religions or the garbage spouted by Velikovsky, should be clearly distinguished and separated from the mainstream scholarship. (I'm not sure Velikovsky is worth including in the article at all.)
• The "In the arts" section seems to be a pop-culture section by a different name. This article definitely needs to treat Akhenaten's pop-cultural presence, but some of the examples are cited to nothing but the fictional works themselves, which is not advisable. I'm a fan of the essay at User:Jackyd101/Popular culture advice. If an artwork has influenced how a figure is perceived in the public imagination, there are usually sources that say so. Often an article topic has too many appearances in art to list them all, but you can point to particular trends in how the topic is perceived and cite the better-known pop-culture appearances as examples; I did this in Isis#Influence in later cultures. In Akhenaten's case, Montserrat makes it easier than you'd expect, as his book is an excellent source for different perceptions of Akhenaten during the 20th century, though unfortunately not the 21st.

@A. Parrot: Thank you so much, this is extremely helpful! Could I contact you on your talk page if I stumble upon things or need more detail on these comments as I continue to edit? --Kamocsai (talk) 00:34, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

@Kamocsai: Absolutely! A. Parrot (talk) 01:12, 21 June 2020 (UTC)