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Aten

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Alternative use: the Aten asteroids, named after 2062 Aten

Aten (or Aton) was the disk of the sun in ancient Egyptian mythology, and originally an aspect of Ra. He became the deity of the monotheistic — in fact, monistic — religion of Amenhotep IV, who took the name Akhenaten. The worship of Aten seems to have ceased shortly after Akhenaten's death.

Overview

Aten was the life-giving force of light. The full title of Akhenaten's god was The Rahorus who rejoices in the horizon, in his/her Name of the Light which is seen in the sun disc. (This is the title of the god as it appears on the numerous stelae which were placed to mark the boundaries of Akhenaten's new capital at Amarna, or "Akhetaten.") This lengthy name was often shortened to Ra-Horus-Aten or just Aten in many texts, but the god of Akhenaten raised to supremacy is considered a synthesis of very ancient gods viewed in a new and different way.

Both Ra and Horus characteristics are part of the god, but the god is also considered to be both masculine and feminine simultaneously. All creation was thought to emanate from the god and to exist within the god. In particular, the god was not depicted in anthropomorphic (human) form, but as rays of light extending from the sun's disk. Furthermore, the god's name came to be written within a cartouche, along with the titles normally given to a Pharaoh, another break with ancient tradition.

The Aten first appears in texts dating to the 12th dynasty, in The Story of Sinuhe. Ra-Horus, more usually referred to as Ra-Herakhty (Ra, who is Horus of the two horizons), is a synthesis of two other gods, both of which are attested from very early on. During the Amarna period, this synthesis was seen as the invisible source of energy of the sun god, of which the visible manifestation was the Aten, the solar disk. Thus Ra-Horus-Aten was a development of old ideas which came gradually. The real change is the apparent abandonment of all other gods following the advent of Akhenaten, i.e., the introduction, apparently by Akhenaten, of monotheism. This is readily apparent in the Great Hymn to the Aten.

Royal Titulary

During the Amarna Period, the Aten was given a Royal Titulary (as he was considered to be king of all), with his names drawn in a cartouche. There were two forms of this title, the first had the names of other gods, and the second later one which was more 'singular' and referred only to the Aten himself. The early form has Re-Horakhti who rejoices in the Horizon, in his name Shu which is the Aten. The later form has Re, ruler of the two horizons who rejoices in the Horizon, in his name of light which is the Aten.

Variant Vocalizations

The name as been vocalized as Aton, Atonu, Itni, Itn, and Adon.

Variant Translations

Because high relief and low relief illustrations of the Aten show it with a curved surface (see for example the photograph illustrating this article), the late scholar Hugh Nibley insisted that a more correct translation would be globe, orb or sphere, rather than disk. The three-dimensional spherical shape of the Aten is even more evident when such reliefs are viewed in person, rather than merely in photographs.
There is a possibility that Aten's three-dimensional spherical shape depicts an eye. In the other early monotheistic religion Zoroastrianism the sun is called Ahura Mazda's eye.
These two theories are compatible with each other, since an eye is an orb.

References

Citations General

Collier, Mark and Manley, Bill. How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs: 2nd Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.