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: RaGrown out of the solar theology rather than against it — the early Amarna formulations name the Aten as an aspect of Ra-Horakhty before the doctrine hardens into an exclusive one.Reference treatment of the Aten and of its relation to the older solar theology of Ra and Ra-Horakhty. (secondary)

Sources

• The Aten is the disk of the sun, raised by Akhenaten to sole god of Egypt, depicted as a rayed disk with hands and worshipped in open-air temples, its cult dismantled after the Amarna period.: Reference treatments of the Aten, of Akhenaten's reform and of Amarna iconography. (secondary)