Historical beliefs · Documented tradition
Akhenaten and the light in the Sun's disc
Soon after he became king, Amenhotep IV, later known as Akhenaten, made the light in the orb of the Sun, the Aten, the centre of Egypt's official worship.
The record
- Who
- Amenhotep IV / Akhenaten and his court
- Where
- Egypt, and the new city at Amarna
- When
- about 1353–1336 BCE
- Kind of evidence
- Reliefs, hymns and a new city (The Met: essay by Marsha Hill; Relief with the Aten disk, 1991.237.15)
- A living tradition?
- No
A new image
The Met's essay describes the many-armed disk becoming the omnipresent icon of the god: a sun whose rays end in small hands. A relief fragment in the Met's collection, Relief with the Aten disk, comes from Akhenaten's reign.
Not out of nowhere
The same essay stresses that the change had roots in the growing prominence of the solar god Re earlier in Dynasty 18, the dynasty of Roy's statue. It also cautions that the king himself, and what Atenism meant to people living it, are hard to bring into focus from the art and texts that survive.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art Art, Architecture, and the City in the Reign of Amenhotep IV / Akhenaten (Marsha Hill, 2014) (opens in a new tab) for worship of the light in the orb of the sun (the Aten); the many-armed disk; roots in earlier Dynasty 18 · checked 2 October 2026
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art Relief with the Aten disk (1991.237.15) (opens in a new tab) for Amarna Period, reign of Akhenaten, ca. 1347–1330 BCE · checked 2 October 2026