Aten

The registry held Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Meritaten, Meketaten and Tutankhamun — the whole Amarna family — and not the god the entire episode was about. The Aten is the visible disk, and the doctrine's radicalism is not that it is solar (everything in Egypt is solar) but that it is imageless: no falcon head, no human body, just a disk and rays and hands. Worship happened in roofless courts under the actual sun. It did not survive its king by many years, and his successors took his city apart for building stone.

Domains

• sun

Relations

• counterpart of: Ra

Sources

• Reference treatments of the Aten, of Akhenaten's reform and of Amarna iconography.