Akhenaten’s abandonment of the old God Amun,
who had been worshipped as the Supreme Deity for successive generations of
Pharaohs before him, may have been motivated by a major pragmatic reason. Aten
is the visible sun, Amun is mysterious and enigmatic. Whereas the cult of Amun
was maintained by rites performed by priests often in great secrecy inside the
dark enclosures of the temples inaccessible by the public, the temple of Aten
in Akhenaten’s new capital Akhetaten lay exposed to the sun and the full
power of the Sun God himself.
But was Aten the new god invented by
Akhenaten as a new target of his idolatry? Did it represent a complete break
away from the tradition of old? No, Aten was actually an obscure aspect of the
Sun God worshipped as early as the Old Kingdom. It was not at all a mere invention
and in fact assisted Akhenaten in his attempt to reconnect with the remnant of Egypt’s
ancient religion dating back possibly to the time of Narmer himself.
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| Temple of Aten at Akhetaten |
The word “Aten” was associated with the
traditional name for the sun-disc, hence the name of the God Aten. Aten's
origins are unclear and he may have been a provincial Sun God worshipped in
small villages near Heliopolis. In the coffin texts of the Middle Kingdom, the
word “Aten” represents the sun disc, and in the famous Middle-Kingdom Story of
Sinuhe, Amenemhat I is described as soaring into the sky to be united with Aten
the Creator. Indeed, Aten has been called the creator of man and the nurturing
spirit of the world. In the Book of the Dead, Aten is called on by the
deceased, "Hail, Aten, thou lord of beams of light, when thou shinest, all
faces live." During the New Kingdom, Aten was considered to constitute an
aspect of the composite deity Ra-Amun-Horus, with Ra representing the daytime
sun, Amun the sun in the underworld, and Horus the sunrise…
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| Akhenaten in the form of a Sphinx worshipping Aten |
And then Akhenaten came along and swept away
all the gods, and proclaimed Aten the Visible Sun to be the sole deity. The sun
worship was taken a stage further and, according to some theories put forward,
may have been based on the scientific observation that the sun’s energy is the
ultimate source of all life. Akhenaten’s new religion was initially best
described as a henotheistic religion, one being devoted to a single god while acknowledging
the existence of other gods. However, it gradually developed into a
proto-monotheistic system when the Pharaoh forbade the use of idols with the
exception of a rayed solar disc. He made it clear that the image of Aten was
the only representation of the God since the God transcended creation and thus should
remain enigmatic and unrepresentable. For
this, Akhenaten was usually proclaimed the first monotheist.
Akhenaten’s deep veneration for the Visible
Sun was demonstrated from a number of hymns to Aten composed during his reign,
some even by himself. They describe the marvels of nature and proclaim the sun
the absolute and universal lords of all things.
Despite being worshipped in the sunlight, the
public was not permitted participation in the sacred rites to the Visible Sun.
Only Akhenaten and his family could communicate with the God, as recorded in
his Hymn to Aten where the Pharoah states “there is none who knows thee save
thy son Akhenaten. Excluded from the worship, the people were unwilling to take
up the new religion, and instead continued to worship the traditional gods in
the private of their homes. That this is where Akhenaten has totally failed to instill
in his people love in the new religion he painstakingly advocated and developed;
his failure to advocate public participation.
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