3,350 years ago, a pharaoh shut down every temple in Egypt, declared there was only one god (the visible sun disk), built a new capital, and ordered artists to abandon three thousand years of stylized convention for this: elongated faces, rounded bellies, intimate domestic scenes no pharaoh had ever permitted.

Akhenaten was the world’s first monotheist. The world’s first iconoclast. And after he died, his successors erased his name from history.

Look closely at the columns of Medinet Habu in Luxor and you will find, carved beneath three thousand years of hieroglyphs: JOHN GORDON, 1804.

You will see it at the Temple of Luxor. Same name carved into stone temples made more than three millennia earlier.

Gordon was a Scottish militia officer on a grand tour of Egypt. He carved his name on monuments across the Nile valley, then sailed home. He inherited a castle, bought four islands in the Outer Hebrides, and served in Parliament.