Akhenaten is the most mysterious and interesting of all the ancient Egyptian pharaohs. He created a revolution in religion, philosophy, and art that resulted in the introduction of the first monotheistic form of worship known in history. Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was the first to suggest a connection between Moses and Akhenaten.
In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939, Freud argued that the biblical Moses was an official in the court of Akhenaten, and an adherent of the Aten religion. After the death of Akhenaten, Freud's theory goes, Moses selected the Israelite tribe living east of the Nile Delta to be his chosen people, took them out of Egypt at the time of the Exodus, and passed on to them the tenets of Akhenaten's religion. When modern archaeologists came across the strangely-drawn figure of Akhenaten in the ruins of Tell el-Amarna in the middle of the 19th century, they were not sure what to make of him. Some thought he was a woman disguised as a king. By the early years of the 20th century when the city of Amarna had been excavated and more became known about him and his family, Akhenaten became a focus of interest for Egyptologists, who saw him as a visionary humanitarian as well as the first monotheist.