Aten

Itn was Egyptian for the disc of the sun, and for most of Egyptian history it was a noun rather than a name. It appears in Middle Kingdom literature as the thing the sun-god crosses the sky in, and by the earlier Eighteenth Dynasty it had begun to be spoken of as a deity in its own right; Amenhotep III already gave it some prominence. What happened under his son was of a different order.

Amenhotep IV came to the throne about 1353 BCE, built an enormous open-court precinct for the Aten at Karnak in the shadow of the temple of Amun, and in his fifth year changed his own name to Akhenaten, "effective for the Aten", and moved the court to a new capital he founded on empty ground in Middle Egypt: Akhetaten, the horizon of the Aten, at the place now called Tell el-Amarna. He then went further than any Egyptian king had gone. The temples of the other gods were closed or defunded, their priesthoods dispersed, and the name of Amun, and in places the plural word for "gods" itself, was chiselled out of monuments the length of the country. The temples built for the Aten were roofless, open to the sky, because the god was not a statue in a dark shrine but the visible disc overhead.

The iconography is unlike anything else in Egyptian religion. The Aten has no body, no animal head, no consort and no myth. It is drawn as a disc with long straight rays, each ending in a small human hand, and many of those hands hold the ankh to the noses of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their daughters. Those hands reach the royal family and nobody else, which is the theology stated in a picture: the god is universal, and access to him runs through the king.

The Great Hymn to the Aten is inscribed in the tomb of the courtier Ay at Amarna, the longest and most complete of several Aten hymns, and it is one of the finest religious poems to survive from the ancient world. It describes the world at night, when the lion comes out and every serpent bites and the land lies in silence, and then the dawn, when the two lands are in festival and people wake and wash and raise their arms. It takes in the chick that speaks inside the egg, the child in the womb, the fish in the river, and the foreign countries of Syria and Nubia, whose peoples the god made with different tongues and different skins. Tradition ascribes it to Akhenaten himself; the ascription is not secure.

Whether Atenism should be called monotheism has been argued for a century and a half and remains open. In its favour: the other gods were not merely subordinated but suppressed, and the hymn says flatly that there is no other. Against it: the king and, in some formulations, his queen remain divine and remain the necessary intermediaries, so what the ordinary Egyptian gained was not direct access to one god but a shorter pantheon with the royal family in it; and the reform touched the state cult far more than it touched what people did in their houses at Amarna, where the excavated evidence shows household gods like Bes and Taweret still in use throughout. Erik Hornung and others have preferred to describe it as a revolution in the state cult that reached monotheistic form without producing a monotheistic society.

The parallels between the Great Hymn and Psalm 104 are close in places (the night with its predators, the dawn and human work, the creator who gives every creature its food), and they have been noticed since the tomb was published. What they mean is disputed. Direct dependence, mediated transmission through Levantine hymnic convention, and independent use of a common Near Eastern repertoire have all been argued, and the gap of some six centuries is a real difficulty for the simplest version of the claim. Sigmund Freud's further step, in Moses and Monotheism, that Israelite monotheism derives from Akhenaten, is not accepted by Egyptologists or biblical scholars and is best treated as part of the history of the idea rather than as evidence for it.

The reform did not outlive its king by long. Akhenaten died about 1336 BCE; within a few years the court had left Amarna, the boy king Tutankhaten had changed his name to Tutankhamun and issued a restoration decree describing the temples as fallen into ruin, and the old cults were funded again. Under Horemheb and the Ramesside kings the process became systematic: the Amarna buildings were dismantled, their small blocks reused as fill inside new pylons at Karnak, and Akhenaten was struck from the king-lists, referred to when at all as "the enemy" or "that criminal of Akhetaten". The Aten reverted to being a word for the sun's disc.

Which is why almost everything now known about the god comes from what the erasure failed to destroy. The reused blocks, the talatat, were recovered in their tens of thousands from inside later masonry and have been reassembled by computer matching into whole reliefs. The site at Amarna, abandoned rather than built over, is the best-preserved ancient Egyptian city there is. The Amarna letters, a cache of diplomatic correspondence on clay tablets found there in 1887, are a principal source for the international politics of the entire Late Bronze Age Near East, and they exist because the archive was left behind.

Modern reception has been busy, and mostly says more about the moderns. Akhenaten has been made a proto-monotheist, a proto-Christ, a pacifist, a tyrant, an aesthete and a heretic; his art, with its long skulls and soft bellies, has generated a long series of retrospective medical diagnoses, none demonstrated. The god itself has no continuous cult; there was no surviving community of Aten-worshippers after the fourteenth century BCE, and modern Kemetic revival, where it touches the Aten at all, is a twentieth-century reconstruction and not a transmission.