Who is aten

This was not much of a departure from the older religious beliefs of Egypt, as the pharaoh and his family were believed to be descended from the gods and to step further into divinity at death upon rising to the heavens. The difference with Atenism, however, was that the priests were to not just honor Akhenaten as a god, but they were to worship him as Aten upon earth.

Akhenaten had the Principles of Aten the beliefs, rules and theology of Atenism etched into the rock walls of Akhetaten.

Some of the most important principles were:. The Great Hymn to the Aten is the longest of a number of surviving poetic hymns written to the god Aten either by temple courtiers or by Akehenaton himself. Considered some of the most significant works of literature prior to Homer, the Great Hymns to the Aten were designed to be sung.

A number of these Hymns to Aten have been found in the tombs of Akhentaten modern Amarna , particularly among temple courtiers and even pharaohs Pharaoh Ay. Outside of tombs, no surviving hymns have been found. Thou didst create the world according to thy desire,. Whilst thou wert alone: All men, cattle, and wild beasts,. The countries of Syria and Nubia, the land of Egypt,.

Everyone has his food, and his time of life is reckoned. The lord of all of them, wearying himself with them,. Only your son, Neferkheprure, Sole-one-of-Re Akhenatan ,. Every leg is on the move since you founded the Earth.

You rouse them for your son who came from your body. The Son of Re who lives by Maat. And the great Queen whom he loves, the Lady of the Two Lands,. Nefer-nefru-Aten Nefertiti, living forever. Famine struck as well, and Egypt continued to take heavy military losses, ceding land and territory to the Hittites. The people of Egypt believed that they were suffering at the hands of their forbidden gods, as it was their former gods who kept them safe.

And Aten, apparently, could do nothing. Even the royal family was not immune, as sickness descended upon the pharaoh. However, unlike his father, Tutankhaten had no love for the sun cult. Upon assuming power, Tutankhaten immediately restored the Cult of Amun to its prior place of honor and lifted the ban on other gods and god cults.

Akhenaten's religious reforms were not entirely new, but his exclusion of the cult of other deities marks a break with traditions.

The Aten, or sun disc, was worshipped as the main deity. This period is marked by dramatic changes in iconography around religious observance and the representation of the human body. These sanctuaries were later dismantled, but thanks to the Egyptian penchant for recycling building material, the temple blocks were reused elsewhere.

Over the past few decades, tens of thousands of inscribed blocks from these later edifices have been collected by Egyptologists. Over time, they have become dilapidated, thereby exposing the earlier stone. The sandstone blocks in question were of a different size than those used to construct previous temples called talatat by Egyptologists. Because of their unique size, they are easily recognisable when reused. Efforts to piece together this massive jigsaw puzzle actually four puzzles!

From these scenes, the four original temples were identified. One key Egyptologist leading the effort to assemble the blocks was the historian Donald Redford then of the University of Toronto , who sought to glean as much information as possible from the scenes about the formative years of Atenism.

I n , French Egyptologists working at Karnak Temple were summoned to examine some strange demolished statues that were uncovered outside the eastern wall of the temple complex during the excavation of a drainage canal. After exposing more of the statues, which turned out to represent Akhenaten and temple blocks, the work was abandoned, and the area largely forgotten.

Fifty years elapsed before work resumed in As a graduate student, I had the privilege of working with Redford on these excavations between and We re-excavated the now-covered area exposed in , and then moved north where we uncovered the southwest corner. Years later, the northwest corner was found too. Between the corners, an entrance was cleared where the avenue of statues continued west, perhaps toward one or more of the other Aten temples.

The telltale talatat blocks were used throughout. The western wall was feet metres wide. Ongoing work has uncovered traces of talatat walls and statue fragments below the village farther to the east of our excavation area, showing that it was a square structure.

This makes it the single largest temple built at Karnak up till that time. By studying the carved reliefs and texts on the blocks, a number of conclusions could be reached about this new religion. Significantly, it was within the large, open courtyard that a royal jubilee was celebrated, and in fact this might have been the main function of Gemet Pa-Aten.

At around age , Akhenaten surely did not need such a boost! At coronation, the throne name of the king was revealed. When construction on Gem Pa-Aten began, in the 2nd or 3rd regnal year, the king still used his birth name Amenhotep. But before the project was completed around his 4th or 5th year, without explanation he dropped that name and adopted the name by which he is known in history: Akhenaten. With the jubilee, Akhenaten seems to signal that the Aten was now the ultimate ruler, replacing Amen-Re.

What followed was a systematic programme of iconoclasm in which images of Amen and writings of his name throughout Egypt were desecrated and removed. The temples of his father, Amenhotep III, were not off-limits. This pristine land had not been sacred to any deity before.

No city or temples previously stood there. Only temples to Aten were built there, and the largest was called Gemet Pa-Aten. The king no longer tolerated any divine name or personification of a force of nature that could be construed as another deity. The exclusivity of Aten and the campaign to exterminate Amen and other deities is proof positive of a movement from polytheism to monotheism. Akhetaten grew quickly into a large, sprawling city on the east bank of the Nile River.

Vast temples were dedicated to the Aten, left unroofed to be filled with light - thus eliminating the need for cult statues of the god. Offerings of bread, beer, cattle, fowl, wine, fruit and incense were given to the sun god on open-air altars.

Reliefs, paintings and statues of the royal family adorned cult buildings, less extreme in style than the early Karnak colossi but often still fluid and exaggerated. Occasionally the royal family was depicted kissing and embracing. Around the city's outskirts, Akhenaten built at least four Sunshade of Re temples dedicated to royal women, where the king connected with the regenerative powers of the sun god.

In a valley deep in the eastern cliffs, he created a new royal burial ground. Loyal officials were granted space in the cliff face for their own grand tombs. Hoping for an afterlife in the company of the sun god, they celebrated the cult of the Aten and the divine king through scenes and texts carved on the tomb walls.

These included the famous Hymns to the Aten , in which the Aten is presented as the creative power of light.

The Hymns stress that the Aten is the only god, encompassing concepts of beauty, love and fatherhood. Today, the ruins of Akhetaten at Amarna form a remarkable archaeological site: one of the most intact cities to survive from the ancient world and one containing the houses, temples, palaces, streets and cemeteries of a single generation.

Ongoing fieldwork by the Amarna Project at the city's non-elite cemeteries, for example, has shown that difficult working lives and poor nutrition were common, although whether these conditions were more or less extreme at Akhetaten is still unknown.

The cemetery excavations also have yielded coffins decorated with images of traditional funerary deities, suggesting that not everyone followed the king in abandoning the gods.