Oh, look who is sitting here. It's the heretic pharaoh in Shanghai. My, you are the globetrotting celebrity now, aren't you? Irony of ironies is that General Horemheb inadvertently made you famous by trying to cover you up. By trying to obliterate you from Egyptian history after your death, he turned you from a probable footnote into a renegade hero. Yeah, you’re proud, I see that smile on your face. So you’re in Shanghai now? You know, you can get some real pizza in this city and a fairly good burrito. Been to New York yet? You just have to visit the Met or the Brooklyn Museum.

Wandering into a hushed room of the Shanghai Museum, I hadn't expected to run into Akhenaten in a sensational show about Ancient Egypt, meant to dazzle the retina and showcase the unusual as well as edify. Actually, when this sandstone sculpture was made, he was still Amenhotep IV, but he was already moving toward worship of the Aten disk.

So here he was, staring at me through the centuries with a wry yet benevolent smile. The artistic reforms he had encouraged made this large sculpture seem like a warm and engaging presence. It was like suddenly being in the presence of this enigmatic king, the charisma was so palpable. Once a pariah, now a global icon, Akhenaten’s presence in a city so far removed from his own time and empire left a feeling of haunting displacement, as if time itself had cracked open and spilled its ancient, solemn beauty into the neon-hued future of this Chinese megacity.

This was the man whose sudden and radical religious reforms had been chiseled away, his name sanded from monuments, his city left to be reclaimed by the desert. And yet, despite all efforts to erase him, here he was, possessing a magnetic aura in the heart of Shanghai for us commoners. Not only had he not been erased, but he sat majestically as a victor over the ravages of politics, bureaucracy, corruption, religion, and time. People passed by, glancing at him and the strange physical distortions he liked to see in sculptures of himself.

Akhenaten is the most enigmatic of all the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. During his reign of 17 years (circa 1353–1336 BCE), he experimented with monotheism, diverging from thousands of years of tradition, in which he declared the sun god, Aten, as the only god. This was not just a theological fine point but a subversion of the entire Egyptian worldview. He moved the capital to Akhetaten (modern-day Amarna), abandoned the traditional pantheon, and revisioned Egyptian art, encouraging artists to use an unprecedented fluidity, realism, and maybe even a bit of what would later be called expressionism.

Abandoned were the harsh, rigid, idealized depictions of rulers conveying gravitas and strength. Instead, there were now images of Akhenaten with elongated features, full lips, and a body that seemed almost androgynous. He became like a Pharaoh Ziggy Stardust. Even more unusual were the family portraits, which were intimate, affectionate depictions of Akhenaten with his queen, Nefertiti, and their daughters.

Sigmund Freud wrote a book called Moses and Monotheism, in which he proposed that the Jewish religion took the concept of monotheism from Akhenaton. This theory has been completely disproven, but looking at the monotheistic religions, which would change the world, reveals what the heretic pharaoh was up to.

Akhenaten’s monotheism was not an ethical revolution, as it was in the case of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This type of monotheism also carried with it the responsibility of the individual and society to engage in personal and societal ethical improvement. For Akhenaten, monotheism was more about an exclusive devotion to the Aten disk to bring greater religious importance to himself and his family, to centralize power, and to break the control of the priests of Amun.

Did Akhenaten really begin to move away from a transactional, magical type of worship to higher ethical levels? Or, did he just replace the priests with himself as an intermediary to a new god and create an art to humanize himself as a form of propaganda, like most dictators? The move to the Aten seemed to be a case of moving just one notch higher on a level of self-absorption and self-importance.

Dr. Toby Wilkinson, an Egyptologist who has focused on the lives of common people in Ancient Egypt, pointed out in The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt that those who lived in Akhenaten’s capital lived brief, wretched lives. Life expectancy was often in the teens. Bone analysis shows inadequate nutrition, extreme physical and emotional stress, and continuous physical adversity. Height was stunted, and anemia was rife. I’m guessing, think of North Korea during the 1990s and magnify it by a power of three. This was the effect of Akhenaten’s religious reform.

Akhenaten’s new religion did not possess moral commandments like the Torah, Gospels, or Quran. There was no emphasis on justice, charity, or righteousness. Akhenaten’s reforms were a power grab, not social change. The people seemed to be there to be worked to death for the god-king.

After Akhenaten's death, the pendulum swung back. The boy-king, Tutankhaten, changed his name to Tutankhamun and brought back the old gods. Amarna was abandoned, and Akhenaten’s name was scratched from records. Horemheb, the general who later seized the throne, went further, dismantling Akhenaten’s monuments and using their stones for his own projects.

Yet, the more they tried to erase him, the more intriguing he became to us. The rediscovery of his legacy in the 19th and 20th centuries turned him into one of Egypt’s most famous rulers, a pharaoh who challenged the gods and reshaped history. As I stood before his sculpted image, I couldn’t help but smile at the absurdity of it all. Because they tried to silence Akhenaten, the louder he has been promoted through the ages.

Now I know what that wry, benevolent smile means. I’ve seen all this before. I saw it at Angkor Wat, where people were enslaved to build a temple to a god-king, and I even saw it at Borobudur, where common folks were most likely forced to work to build a giant temple honoring a religion of peace and kindness. Akhenaten sits there smiling at how gullible we are. He smiles at the worldwide tourist industry that promotes grandiose structures and benevolent-looking statues built through human exploitation of other humans.

The Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) once wrote: "Le mal aussi a ses héros" ("Evil has its heroes too”). So there you sit, you sly dog, the opposite of Ozymandias, preserved for all time, not truly held accountable for your actions, representing narcissistic values that exist to this day, and now lionized by a contemporary world that often seems to place empty celebrity above all. You have lasted, you are the opposite of Ozymandias, but we can adjust a couple of lines from Shelley’s poem to apply to you: “My name is Akhenaten, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”