Akhenaten, a 14th-century BCE Egyptian Pharaoh, is considered by many to be the first monotheist in history.
Below is a translated entry from his recently discovered diary, originally scratched onto Egyptian reed with a delicate and decorative hand. The entry seems to suggest a minor defect introduced into monotheism at its earliest stage, a kind of intolerance.
Nile Delta, Egypt
Fall 1330
Sunday
Dear Diary
I got the pharaohship through the bloodline, and like the bloodlines up and down my bowed legs, I wear the purple on the outside and warm red on the inner.
My passion might be crimson. My blood has leaked onto our cut stones and sarcophagi, I hope indelibly, like the sticky pimples of gum this gnawing populace drop from their mouths onto my city streets.
(Disgusting habit, gum chewing, perhaps brought on by the perfection of our teeth and our inborn inability to keep our mouths at rest.)
I Was Never Expected to be Ardent
Little did I suspect that I would possess theological genius, along with a passion for imperial persuasion on that front.
My persuasiveness has not reached the fever of the pinprick, however. I never hurt except with intent to heal. But heal the people, I must do.
There is only one God and he is the burnt yellow disc who imparts life: the Sun, the fiery orb with his licking arms. More than once, through double-layered cotton, I could see his feelers whipping out, as if to me.
Aten is God's name, as everyone in Egypt and beyond now knows.
Resistance
I have opponents. Priests of the countless gods and temples. Pious layabouts. I've sent them packing picking pasture pods from wooly sheep in the hinterlands. That's a good use of their overgrown fingernails and their narrow eyes.
Architects too have opposed me, they say, for aesthetic reasons.
These antique Egyptian gods deface every building in my city. They are nothing but a wisp of shredded thread in Aten's eyes, true. Imagery matters mostly to me. Why shouldn't I prevent rivalry to Aten? Why shouldn't I feel offense when I monitor the idolatrous scrapes of talented trowels upon the walls of my city? It's my city. And I am right.
Right and Wrong
Can right permit wrong? Does wrong have rights? Does anyone have a right to be wrong?
My monotheistic motto shall be No Right To be Wrong.
Will that last the ages through? If I am remembered as the first monotheist, and if monotheism persists, will my motto persist with it?
Nefertiti
Nefertiti is the most darling of my wives, and she is a believer like me in Aten. She advises cautious restraint.
She says the people (by which she means rude mechanicals: bent-over gravel workers, dark-eyed date growers, filthy fabric makers with dye stained hands, and those bouncy transsexual performers) need the flourish of superstition.
Ignorance, Nefertiti says, excuses. And besides, she says, ignorance finds its circuitous route to knowledge. The gods the people bow to in ignorance are as nothing, are nothing, to Aten. And Aten may accept offerings made to nothing as if they were made to him.
Amusing camel dung, I say.
Mono Means One Licit Way
There's a thing called a labyrinth in Greece. It has many routes on the way to a single exit. All of these routes are dead ends, but one. You may spend a day lost in these labyrinthine alleys. If a circuitous route is nonetheless a dead end, then it cannot lead to liberty from the labyrinth. There is only one path out. One way. Mono. One permissible way.
--from a work in progress called 'Almost True Diary Entries of the World's Famed'
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