FIRST the pharaoh changed his name, from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten. Then he decreed that a new capital should be built far away from the old one. And in this city, one god should be worshipped, forsaking all others: the sun god Aten. Akhenaten’s heresy didn’t last long, ending with his death less than 20 years later. It was a blip in the 3000 years of cultural stability that characterises Ancient Egypt, but its enduring trace in art and thought places it among the most debated religious revolutions of all time. One common explanation is that Akhenaten was fed up with the powerful priests in the old capital of Thebes, who worshipped many gods.
But what if he was actually fleeing an epidemic? The idea isn’t new, but it has enjoyed a revival since covid-19 arrived. Having lived through the worst pandemic in a century, many Egyptologists and archaeologists are looking back with fresh eyes. They have seen first-hand the social impact a pandemic can have – the exacerbation of inequality, rejection of authority, xenophobia and search for meaning – and realised that these probably aren’t without precedent.
Advertisement
“Communicable disease plays a cultural and economic role that is repeated through time, up to the present day,” says at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Witnessing how tightly entwined social discord, viral ideas and real viruses are, Hitchcock and others are asking if this could explain major cultural shifts throughout history, from Akhenaten’s time to the Black Death and 1918 flu. Could it even explain some of the ideological crosswinds that buffet us now, and that may shape the post-covid world?
The case for plague – meaning any infectious disease of epidemic proportions – in late Bronze Age Egypt is circumstantial for now. In 2012, US Egyptologist suggested that there were in the reign of Akhenaten’s father, Amenhotep III. She pointed to an eight-year gap in the written record, and the fact that Amenhotep ordered hundreds more statues of the lion-headed goddess of healing, Sekhmet, than of any other god. He also moved palaces at one point, in a possible attempt at isolation.
In 2020, at Leiden University in the Netherlands proposed that the to take more drastic action. Kelder had seen how frequently people felt let down by the governments they expected to protect them from covid-19. Akhenaten’s reformation of Egyptian religion in the 14th century BC “may perhaps be seen as a pre-emptive move to highlight not his, but the traditional Gods’ failure to protect Egypt”, he wrote. However, Akhenaten’s new city, Amarna, quickly became a critical hub in an international network of trade and diplomacy – “a byword for the first cosmopolitan age”, says Kelder. So it might not have escaped the plague as its founder had hoped. And the same plague might have caused his death as well as those of his wife Nefertiti and three of their daughters.
The mysterious disease might also have spread beyond Egypt, especially once people started deserting Amarna. Hitchcock wonders if it weakened a string of Mediterranean civilisations, leading to their demise at the hands of the Sea Peoples (a group that rampaged through the eastern Mediterranean) and to the end of the Bronze Age just over a century later. She and Kelder stress that they aren’t Egyptologists – although both are archaeologists working on late Bronze Age Mediterranean civilisations – and their hypotheses are just that. Egyptologists, meanwhile, are divided over what happened at Amarna.
One person who isn’t surprised that those who study ancient history are thinking this way is Joel Finkelstein, co-founder of the not-for-profit (NCRI) in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. The NCRI tracks information trends across social media networks and correlates them with real-world events. Since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, across the political spectrum, the network has watched the rise of “essentially religious revolutionary groups that are breaking off from society in order to start something that will usher in a utopian era”, says Finkelstein. Having built followings in the virtual realm, the activity of these groups has now spilled into the physical one.
Finding religion
Others too have observed people turning to religion in times of pestilence, even in today’s . at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, found in the intensity of prayer in the early months of the covid-19 pandemic, as measured by Google searches for prayer texts across 107 countries. And in April 2020, the Pew Research Center in the US reported that a quarter of adults there said their .
What people look for in religion at such times is less clear, but there is a strong case that for many it is a stricter social order. at Stanford University in California has long argued that a society’s norms tighten up in response to ecological threats such as disease, famine and natural hazards. These demand prosocial behaviour and large-scale cooperation, and one way to encourage such action is to invoke a vengeful god who punishes norm violators. In 2021, Gelfand’s group reported that US states with high historical levels of ecological threat also have .
Religion isn’t the only way to tighten a culture. In a study involving nearly 250,000 people in 47 countries, at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues found that as infectious diseases become more prevalent, – even after controlling for income, education and other factors. Intriguingly, the correlation only holds for diseases that are transmitted from person to person, rather than via an intermediate host or vector. This suggests that whatever is driving the authoritarian turn is profoundly social – to do with how we perceive others. Although the research predates covid-19, people’s behaviour during the current pandemic has reinforced these findings. “This very social disease, this disease that can be acquired from other people, has led to a wave of authoritarianism around the world,” says Zmigrod.
In a , at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that, among German cities, the higher the death rate during the 1918 flu pandemic, the greater the share of the city’s votes for the Nazi party in the early 1930s – again controlling for factors such as income and unemployment. “There is a real fear of chaos in [epidemic] settings, so it’s this desire for tightness that I think predicts support for strict gods and governments,” says Gelfand. And wherever people seek control, she adds, it seems to involve reinforcing group boundaries and a greater preference for one’s in-group. Last year, at the University of Nottingham, UK, and his colleagues reported that the main factor driving this is – whether they are foreigners or compatriots perceived as belonging to a different ethnic, religious or other subgroup.
We have seen this in the past two years, of course. For example, the NCRI has tracked the rise of the anti-government boogaloo movement, which includes white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Although it predates the pandemic, it really took off at the held across the US in spring 2020. Its followers, some of whom have since been charged with serious crimes, stood out with their Hawaiian shirts and Pepe the Frog badges, and online with apocalyptic memes including #DOTR for “day of the rope” and #RWDS for “right wing death squad”. Covid-19 has also brought a wave of on people of Asian origin and a deluge of . Anti-Semitism is an ancient trope in times of contagion, says Finkelstein, going back to the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt following a spate of plagues.
Control and exclusion aren’t the only possible reasons for the coincidence of pandemics and social upheaval, though. at the University of Oslo, Norway, and at the University of California, Los Angeles, study the role of narrative in cultural evolution, and they believe that what people are looking for is a new story. “When we feel threatened, we have anxiety,” says Larsen. “To ameliorate that anxiety, humans need a story to commit to.”
A plague challenges the “master narrative” told by the spiritual or secular leaders and allows new stories to emerge that explain where things went wrong, and how to put them right. In an earlier parallel of boogaloo, the mid-14th century saw the rise of a southern European movement called the Flagellants, which had existed at the margins of society for a century, but became far more influential during the Black Death. When people asked why a benevolent god would inflict this horrible disease on them, the Flagellants responded that their faith wasn’t strong enough. They roamed from town to town, whipping themselves, harassing priests and murdering Jews. Theirs wasn’t the only story vying for acceptance at that time. There were conspiratorial explanations for the scourge too, says Witoszek, and “all kinds of wizardry”.
at the London School of Economics, who studies cultural evolution, has a Darwinian way of looking at this. Shocks such as epidemics throw up constellations of ideological “mutations”, he says. Then, the cultural equivalent of natural selection goes to work, weeding out the less well adapted mutations in the population while the others become more established.
How might that work in practice? Germs and ideas both travel through human social networks, says sociologist and physician at Yale University. These networks have evolved to strike an optimal balance between the advantages and disadvantages of being exposed to other people – principally, learning from them versus catching dangerous germs or ideas. “The spread of germs is the price we pay for the spread of ideas,” he says. As Christakis and his colleagues showed using information about Harvard students gathered during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, and facilitate or block their spread. These are dynamic, competitive processes, shaped by many factors. For instance, the idea of rejecting flu vaccines might spread and persist if promulgated by a charismatic influencer or if lockdown reduces people’s exposure to other ideas. But it becomes self-limiting if people die, weakening the information network.
Changing narratives
The Flagellants remained a thorn in the side of the Catholic church for decades. Eventually, says Witoszek, the church reimposed its authority after subjecting itself to “a cleansing operation”, addressing its own failings to win back the faithful. In other words, to remain dominant, the master narrative bent towards its challengers. There seems to have been no such bending towards Akhenaten’s disruptive ideas: later pharaohs were largely successful in erasing his memory. However, some Egyptologists suggest that his cultural experiment marked the beginning of the decline of the all-powerful pharaoh, and that it laid the ground for Hebrew monotheism.
“We have a lot of clear evidence that major transformative change comes on the heels of big societal disasters – but it’s not automatic,” says , project manager of Seshat, a repository for global historical data. For change to happen, the society must take advantage of the disruption by correcting course, he says. If it doesn’t, it risks being even more vulnerable to the next shock.
“Few if any society so far has collapsed solely as a result of an epidemic,” says Kelder. But it is true that the same forces that make societies vulnerable to contagion – widening inequality, population explosion, globalisation – also make them susceptible to revolutionary ideas, and they ignore these ideas at their peril. So, we should expect today’s pandemic to bring change, says Hitchcock. “History suggests that … the post-covid normal is unlikely to look much like the old normal.”
A plague of Egypt?
Ancient epidemics are very hard to detect because few infectious diseases leave traces on bones. Nevertheless, some archaeologists believe that a plague swept through Egypt in the mid-14th century BC, spurring a cultural revolution.
One clue comes from EA35, a tablet of baked clay belonging to a cache of diplomatic correspondence known as the “Amarna letters”, on which the king of what is now Cyprus informs the pharaoh that a shipment of copper will be delayed due to sickness at its origin. Another is a collection of texts revealing that plague ravaged the mighty Hittite kingdom – in what is now Turkey – later that century, apparently brought by Egyptian prisoners of war.
From 2005, archaeologists excavating Amarna – the city built by the revolutionary Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten – unearthed what looked like further evidence. at the University of Cambridge, who leads the Amarna cemetery project, says that one cemetery in particular, North Tombs, seems to corroborate the plague idea. There, the dead show a narrow age profile – from 7 to 24 – and around 40 per cent of excavated burials contain more than one person, sometimes as many as seven. “It’s pretty clear that they were dying close in time to one another,” she says.
As other cemeteries were excavated, however, they revealed a more standard age profile and individual burials. An epidemic can’t be ruled out, says Stevens, but in light of evidence that life for Akhenaten’s workers was gruelling and their immune systems less than robust, her group now thinks that constantly present diseases are sufficient to explain what they see.
Others remain open to the epidemic hypothesis, however. at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, who has worked at Amarna, believes its inhabitants experienced high levels of malaria – so high that when the city fell, they may have triggered epidemics of it further afield.
Eva Panagiotakopulu at the University of Edinburgh, UK, has found another smoking gun: excellently preserved fleas in Amarna’s workmen’s village. In an area where , she says, the combination of a large concentration of people, the run-down nature of the settlement and trade on the Nile, made Amarna a “prime situation where [bubonic] plague could spread”. It is a theory she intends to go back and test.
