Aten

Aten


 * Other Names:**

Aton, Atonu, Itni, Itn, Ado


 * Hieroglyphics:**



The mythology of the Aten, the radiant disk of the sun, is not only unique in Egyptian history, but is also one of the most complex and controversial aspects of ancient Egypt. The Aten was the sun disk, a symbol of power and divinity, a form of Ra or Horus. It was often worn by deities. In the Book of the Dead, the Aten is called on by the deceased as a protector: "Hail, Aten, thou lord of beams of light, when thou shinest, all faces live." The deceased pharaoh was thought to fly to the sky and unite with the sun-disk. It should be noted that the term "Aten" initially could be applied to any disk, including the surface of a mirror or the moon.

The Aten was never depicted in anthropomorphic (human) form - rather, it was always shown as a red or yellow disk with the goddess Wadjet coiled at the base, and was often worn by deities such as Ra, Sekhmet, or Horus. In some instances the Aten had falcon wings, and its rays ended in hands.

In the 14th century B.C.E., the pharaoh Amenhotep IV claimed that the Aten was the one and only god, and attempted to suppress the worship of the other Egyptian deities. Changing his name to Akhenaten ("Effective Spirit of the Aten") he declared that the Aten was not merely the supreme god, but the //only// god, and that he, Akhenaten, was the only intermediary between the Aten and his people. Like Henry VIII of England, he tried to carry though a religious revolution at high speed; and Akhenaten not only elevated a new supergod but persecuted the old ones.

Akhenaten systematically began a campaign to erase all traces of the other gods. He hacked off the names of the other gods from the temples and public works, and smashed statues of deities. Priesthoods of the other deities were forced to disband and the income from their temples was seized to support the Aten. He even went so far as to erase names from the accessible portion of tombs, inducing his own father's cartouche, because the god Amun was featured on them (in ancient Egypt this was an especially heinous act, due to the concept of the name being linked with the soul.) Even the word "gods" was unacceptable because it implied there were other deities besides Aten. Akhenaten also relocated Egyptian burials on the East side of the Nile (sunrise) rather than on the traditional West side (sunset.)

The Aten was now considered the king of kings, needing no goddess as a companion and having no enemies who could threaten him. Irregardless of the existence of a new priesthood devoted exclusively to Aten, only to Akhenaten had the god revealed itself, and only the king could know the demands and commandments of the Aten. Akhenaten's new creed could be summed up by the formula, "There is no god but Aten, and Akhenaten is his prophet."

Akhenaten mentions on two stele that the priests were saying more evil things about him than they did his father and grandfather. Eventually, relations between Akhenaten and the various priesthoods became so strained that Akhenaten decided to build his own city, which he called Akhetaten, the "Horizon of the Aten." He abandoned both Memphis, Egypt's administrative capital, and Thebes, its religious heart, to build a new city 700 miles away. This new city was also the place that Akhenaten planned to build his tomb.

The moving of the people and the building of an entire new city, complete with palaces and extensive, gold-covered temples for the Aten, was an enormously expensive undertaking. Akhenaten's new city was not located near the fertile Nile but in the middle of a desert, a place where it is virtually impossible to feed and house a self-sustaining populace of any real size without the importation of vast quantities of food stuffs, an expensive and labor-intensive investment of resources. Egypt was bankrupted for years after Akhenaten's 17-year reign. So eager was Akhenaten for a city untouched by any god but the Aten that he moved to the city before it was finished, and he and his followers had to camp out in tents for months before the royal palace was completed.

The new city was hemmed in by mountains with a desert beyond, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere, and the whole site has been compared to a concentration camp. The city led an isolated existence, closely guarded by Nubian and Asiatic mercenaries. When members of the royal family went in their chariots outside the city limits they were surrounded by running soldiers, and all the countryside around was regularly policed by military patrols. Tomb inscriptions reveal that the rich of Amarna were self-made men with no pedigrees, or rather men whom the king had raised from nothing: soldiers, artists, scribes - but no priests. Most of them admit this in their tombs; in fact, they go further and claim that they were "taught" their professions by the king.

In short, Amarna was a city built for the new cult, but it was also a city built for one man, a self-centered pharaoh who wanted a "theater of the absurd" where he could rule as absolute master. The consequences of Akhenaten's splendid isolation resulted in an inactive Egypt and a failure to send troops and supplies to halt the spreading Hittite Empire. The Amarna Period is also associated with a serious outbreak of a pandemic, possibly plague, polio, or the world's first recorded outbreak of influenza. The prevalence of disease may help explain the rapidity with which the site was subsequently abandoned after Akhenaten's death. It may also explain why later generations considered the gods to have turned against the Amarna monarch.

For the Egyptian people themselves, the "intellectual beauty of the Akhenaten's creative spirit," as some scholars have termed it, would have meant little. To an existence previously filled with celebration of the divine, the predictable rising and setting of the Aten now provided life's only rhythm. The festivals of the past which had divided the year, marked the inundation, and provided the stops and starts which powered day-to-day living were removed, and do not seem to have been replaced. The progress of the king along the Royal Road, however however splendidly orchestrated, offered but a poor substitute. Egyptian religion was astonishingly flexible at popular level. There was a multitude of gods which could take on different identities and attributes to meet different human and spiritual needs. They were grouped together in families or merged as composite gods in a rich mythology which covered creation, birth, death, and the afterlife. To have all this replaced by a single entity available in only one form was a cultural shock far greater than the Egyptians could absorb.

Given the magic co-religious basis of medicine, birth, and death, the need of the Egyptian people for the old gods was practical as much as spiritual. According to Donald Redford, "the new concept of deity that Akhenaten created was rather cold. The Aten created the cosmos and keeps it going, but he seems to show no compassion on his creatures. He provides them with life and sustenance, but in a rather perfunctory way. No text tells us that the Aten hears the cry of the poor man, or heals the sick, or forgives the sinner. The reason for this as for all other conspicuous absences in the new cult is that a compassionate god did not serve Akhenaten's purpose."

Akhenaten's campaign to erase the existence of other gods was no academic exercise, but a true persecution which generated a real and tangible fear among the Egyptian people, for it was not only from the large and public monuments that the hieroglyphics of the old gods were excised. As the archeological record shows, small, personal items such as pots for eye-makeup and commemorative scarabs were dealt with in the same relentless fashion.

Literal armies of stonemasons were sent out all over the land and even into Nubia, to chisel off any reference to any god but the Aten. Fearful of being in possession of forbidden items, the owners themselves often gouged or ground out any offending hieroglyphics which contained the name of any god other than Aten. Such displays of frightened self-censorship and toadying loyalty are ominous indicators of the paranoia which griped the country.

Not only were the streets filled with Akhenaten's soldiers, it seems the population also had to contend with the danger of malicious informers. A picture painted by Manetho of Hyksos may in fact preserve a memory of these sorry times: "Not only did the pharaoh's men set towns and villages on fire, pillaging the temples and mutilating images of the gods without restraint, but they also made a practice of using the holy sanctuaries as kitchens to roast the sacred animals which the people worshiped; and they would compel the priests to sacrifice and butcher the beasts, afterwards casting the men forth naked and beaten."

Under Akhenaten's new regime, all images of deities were banned, with the exception of the solar disc of Aten. Even pet animals, such as cats, dogs, and monkeys, disappeared in tomb paintings of the period, as they could be associated with various non-Aten deities.

Much has been made of Akhenaten's strange appearance - he is pictured with an elongated head, face, and neck, a sunken chest, a narrow waist, broad hips, protruding belly and breasts, and long, spindly legs and arms. It is theorized that he had Marfan's or Froehlich's Syndrome. The king and his artists were anxious to present his own deformed figure as the norm - his wife, Nefertiti, their six daughters, and statues and portraits of the young Tutankhaten were often portrayed in the same grotesque fashion, although evidence reveals that they did not share Akhenaten's physique.

The Egyptian people were not allowed to worship the Aten itself but instead were forced to worship the royal family, the "beloved of the Aten" and Akhenaten claimed that only through the worship of himself could people find salvation in the afterlife. In the Hymn to the Aten, Akhenaten states "there is none who knows thee save thy son Akhenaten." Images of Akhenaten seem to have been obligatory in every house. The god of Akhenaten's religion was Akhenaten himself, as he claimed to be the living incarnation of the Aten.

It is clear that the Egyptian people never accepted their king's religion and view of the world. Even at his own capital, amulets featuring Bes, Taweret, Ptah, Thoth, Mut, Horus, Hapi, and Ma’at have been uncovered, some secretly hidden within the walls of houses. In a workmen's village on the eastern edge of the city, numerous amulets of the traditional gods have been found, as well as small private chapels.

There is some evidence that Akhenaten was murdered by his own priests. Following Akhenaten's death, Atenism died rapidly. Akhenaten's son, Tutankhaten, eventually succeeded him, changing his name to "Tutankhamen" and reinstating the worship of the old gods, much to the relief of the Egyptian people. Their gratitude, in fact, would help explain the grandeur of Tutankhamun's burial, even though he was a very minor ruler, and perhaps even to some extent the preservation of his tomb.

After his death images of Akhenaten were defaced, and his city was abandoned - the Great Temple of the Aten was cemented over "to seal in the infection of the accursed spot." Akhenaten himself was referred to as "the Enemy" or "the Heretic" in archival records, and the Aten was removed from the Egyptian pantheon, the only god ever to be deliberately shunned.


 * Outside of Egypt:**

The idea of Akhenaten as the pioneer of a monotheistic religion that later became Judaism has been considered by various scholars. Freud argued that Moses had been an Atenist priest forced to leave Egypt with his followers after Akhenaten's death, and similarities between Akhenaten's "Hymn to the Aten" and Psalm 104 in the Bible have often been remarked upon. However, the distinct parallels between the two are usually interpreted simply as indications of the common literary heritage of Egypt and Israel. Akhenaten appears in history almost two centuries prior to the first archaeological and written evidence for Judaism and Israelite culture.

Donald B. Redford noted that some have viewed Akhenaten as a harbinger of Jesus and as a failed precursor of Christ. He has concluded: "Before much of the archaeological evidence from Thebes and from Tell el-Amarna became available, wishful thinking sometimes turned Akhenaten into a humane teacher of the true God, a mentor of Moses, a Christlike figure, a philosopher before his time. But these imaginary creatures are now fading away one by one as the historical reality gradually emerges. There is little or no evidence to support the notion that Akhenaten was a progenitor of the full-blown monotheism that we find in the Bible. The monotheism of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament had its own separate development—one that began more than half a millennium after the pharaoh's death."

Egyptian scholar and curator Nicholas Reeves is more blunt - "Rather than a gentle teacher preaching a message of peace and brotherhood to the poor and downtrodden of Rome, Akhenaten //was// Rome. Akhenaten was an egomaniac who did not hesitate to use violence and religious persecution to enforce the worship of Aten, his own divine alter-ego."

Egyptian Deities - A