Atenism

Atenism, also known as the Aten religion, the Amarna religion, and the Amarna heresy, was a religion in ancient Egypt. It was founded by Akhenaten, a pharaoh who ruled the New Kingdom under the Eighteenth Dynasty. The religion is described as monotheistic or monolatristic, although some Egyptologists argue that it was actually henotheistic. Atenism was centered on the cult of Aten, a god depicted as the disc of the Sun. Aten was originally an aspect of Ra, Egypt's traditional solar deity, though he was later asserted by Akhenaten as being the supreme of all deities.
In the 14th century BC, Atenism was Egypt's state religion for around 20 years, and Akhenaten met the worship of other gods with persecution; he closed many traditional temples, instead commissioning the construction of Atenist temples, and also suppressed religious traditionalists. However, subsequent pharaohs toppled the movement in the aftermath of Akhenaten's death, thereby restoring Egyptian civilization's traditional polytheistic religion. Large-scale efforts were then undertaken to remove from Egypt and Egyptian records any presence or mention of Akhenaten, Atenist temples, and assertions of a uniquely supreme god.

History

Egyptian religion before Atenism

The traditional form of ancient Egyptian religion was polytheistic, encompassing hundreds of deities. The Egyptians defined these gods by describing their relationships and interactions with one another. As the Egyptologist Jan Assmann put it, "a deity was not conceivable without reference to other deities". The relationships between deities were often expressed through mythological imagery. For instance, the movement of the sun through the sky was often envisioned as a divine king, the sun god Ra, sailing through the heavens in a barque, accompanied by subordinate deities who served as his crew and defended the barque against the forces of chaos. Deities might also be linked with, or syncretized, with each other to represent the overlap in their roles. Ra was often syncretized with the sky god Horus as Ra-Horakhty, representing the sun at the horizon, or with the creator god Atum, reflecting Egyptian creation myths, in which the creation of the world coincided with the rising of the sun.
The gods were worshipped in temples in cities across Egypt, and the chief deity of a city's main temple was considered the city's patron deity. Making offerings to the gods, and therefore managing the temples where the offerings took place, was one of the core duties of the pharaoh, the king of Egypt. Over the course of Egyptian history, the more significant temples became major landholders, their activities supported by vast estates worked by thousands of people. These estates were ultimately under royal control, and a king could have a major effect on the economy by revising the distribution of temple resources.
File:Temple-solaire-abousir.jpg|thumb|right|Reconstruction of the sun temple of Nyuserre Ini, twenty-fifth century BC
Over the history of ancient Egypt, deities shifted in their prominence relative to each other. During the Old Kingdom, Ra was the foremost deity. The ideology surrounding Ra, in which the sun god was the father of the pharaoh, became integral to Egyptian kingship, and many Old Kingdom rulers incorporated Ra's name into their own. Whereas other deities were believed to manifest themselves in cult statues in enclosed sanctuaries within temples, Ra's temples and shrines centered on open-air courts, where the focus of worship was either the sun itself or a sacred stone known as the benben. The original temple of this type was at Ra's cult center of Heliopolis in Lower Egypt. Several rulers in the Fifth Dynasty in the late Old Kingdom built their own sun temples, centering on massive obelisks that may have been modeled on the benben of Heliopolis. Many Egyptologists therefore see the Fifth Dynasty as the peak of Ra's worship.
Ra remained one of the most important deities in the pantheon even after the Old Kingdom, and many other major deities developed syncretistic links with him. During the Middle Kingdom, rulers from Thebes in Upper Egypt elevated that city's patron deity to national prominence, syncretizing him with Ra as Amun-Ra. Amun was considered a mysterious, unknowable deity, but the theology of Amun-Ra made Ra the visible face of Amun's hidden power. Amun assumed even more importance early in the New Kingdom, when the rulers of the Eighteenth Dynasty conquered large areas of Nubia, Canaan, and Syria and poured much of the wealth from these conquests into temples, especially Amun's main temple at Karnak in Thebes. Thutmose III, for instance, made many additions to Karnak that emphasized Amun's link with the sun, and Thebes itself became known as the "Heliopolis of Upper Egypt".
Some texts from the early New Kingdom, before the emergence of Atenism, characterize Amun-Ra in a novel way, which Assmann dubbed the "new solar theology". In these texts, primarily hymns found in tombs of the period, the sun god's actions in the daily movement through the sky are characterized as his alone, ignoring the deities who were traditionally said to assist him. The hymns stressed that the sun's light gave life to all living things, and in the multiethnic empire of the New Kingdom, even foreign peoples—traditionally considered agents of chaos in Egyptian ideology—could be thought of as the subjects of the sun god's beneficent rule.
At the same time, another term for the sun god was growing increasingly prominent. The word jtn, or "aten", originally referred to a circle or a disk and, in the Coffin Texts near the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, began to be used specifically for the disk of the sun. It was originally treated as an inanimate object, in contrast with the sun god, who was thought of as sitting within or shining through the Aten. But the Aten increasingly came to be treated as a deity, and in the early New Kingdom solar hymns, it was increasingly closely connected with the sun god, whether Ra or Amun.
The Aten attained particular importance under Amenhotep III, who reigned for 38 years in the early fourteenth century BC, when Egypt was at a peak of power and prosperity. Amenhotep's personal name means "Amun is satisfied", and while he built monuments to many deities across Egypt, he especially concentrated on Amun's temples in Thebes. At the same time, he used, even more frequently than most pharaohs, royal titles that connected him with the sun god. One of his most-used titles was a novel one: aten-tjehen or "the dazzling sun disk". After the first of his sed festivals, a ritual that took place after 30 years on the throne and at three-year intervals afterward, Amenhotep began to be portrayed in ways that seem to indicate he had divine status while still living. Some Egyptologists have interpreted this evidence as proclaiming him to be a solar deity: the king united with the sun god.

Under Akhenaten

, the son of Amenhotep III, was crowned king 1353 BC. Some Egyptologists have argued that Amenhotep IV spent several years as coregent alongside his father, although this hypothesis is increasingly considered obsolete. In the set of royal names he adopted upon his accession, the new king made no mention of Amun except in his preexisting personal name, and texts from the first years of his reign acknowledge Amun but give greater prominence to the Aten, which they treat as synonymous with the sun god.
Amenhotep IV's first royal building project was a new temple at Karnak dedicated to this deity, who was referred to in its inscriptions as both Ra-Horakhty and Aten. The temple was decorated in a new art style, today known as Amarna art, that emphasized movement and portrayed human figures, especially the king's own, with exaggerated proportions. While the temple was still being decorated, possibly in Year 3 of Amenhotep's reign, the Aten began to be given a pair of names enclosed in cartouches, similar to the names of a pharaoh, and the Aten began to be portrayed by a sun disk with rays, instead of the falcon-headed man found in the earliest depictions. Around this time or shortly afterward, Amenhotep celebrated a sed festival, despite not having reigned the traditional 30 years. Whereas a normal sed festival entailed offerings to many deities, during his festival Amenhotep IV made offerings to the Aten alone.
Resources were diverted from older temples to fund the construction of the new Aten temple, and a tomb inscription from early in the king's reign implies that the Aten was given far more offerings than other deities. But the temples of traditional deities continued to function at least as late as Year 5 of the reign, when an official in the city of Memphis wrote to the king to say that all the gods in the temples there had been given their offerings.
In that year, the king adopted a new set of names, referring to no deities except Ra and the Aten and replacing even his personal name with "Akhenaten", meaning something like "effective spirit of the Aten". The name change coincided with the founding of a new capital, Akhet-aten or "Horizon of the Aten" in Middle Egypt, now known by the modern name of the site, Amarna. The site gave its name to the Amarna Period, the term often applied to Akhenaten's entire reign and those of his immediate successors. The city centered on two temples to the Aten and the major palace, on the east bank of the Nile.
Akhenaten made other cultural changes alongside his religious ones. Amarna art was more emotional and expressive than conventional Egyptian art, placing new emphasis on the king's family—especially his Great Royal Wife, Nefertiti—and showing them in scenes of everyday life. Royal decrees began to use a dialect closer to the language of common speech, Late Egyptian, as opposed to the archaic and formal Middle Egyptian used in previous reigns. In the words of the Egyptologist James P. Allen, "All of these changes reflect Akhenaten’s emphasis on the visible, tangible, here-and-now rather than the more spiritual and timeless forms of traditional Egyptian art."
Many of the key developments in Atenism are difficult to date. At some point, workmen began chiseling out the names and images of Amun and other deities in reliefs and inscriptions across the country. Sometime after Year 8—often dated to Year 9, although some Egyptologists put it as late as Year 14—the two names of the Aten were reformulated, removing the names of the gods Ra-Horakhty and Maat, as well as a word for "light" that was a homophone for the name of the air god Shu.