When Akhenaten died, his nine-year-old son Tutankhamun was installed on the throne.
The priests and generals around him moved fast to restore the old order.
Amun — the god Akhenaten had tried to erase — was reinstated.
Tutankhamun became the instrument of that restoration.
In this statue, Amun stands beside the boy-king with a protective hand raised behind his head.
However then someone smashed it.
Tutankhamun's head is gone, his arms are gone, the arms of Amun broken off.
This is not accident or time.
This is deliberate erasure.
He only lived to about seventeen years old.
His own successors would then move to erase him too — his bloodline was considered tainted by his father's heresy.
Yet what survives is extraordinary: Amun's calm face, the geometry of the composition.
