I was wondering if he [Akhenaten] was like his statues in real
life. It's highly unlikely Akhenaten even remotely resembled the
unique and bizarre statues and reliefs for which he is famous.
So distinctive are these forms that they are principally used to
illustrate the pharaoh on web pages or in magazine articles or
books written about him. Neglected in much literature is the
later Amarna statuary of Akhenaten, which depicts him as a quite
ordinary-looking man. Egyptologists still argue over precisely
why many of these statues and reliefs depict him in such an odd
form. The old theories that he suffered from a disease like
Marfan's Syndrome have lost a lot of ground, but the debate
otherwise goes on. I favor the explanation held by probably most
professionals in the field, who tell us this odd statuary form
is probably a religo-artistic convention. By all accounts
Akhenaten was obsessed with his worship of the Aten to the point
that he deemed only himself out of all mankind as being fit to
be its intermediar