God, the “Lord of the Disk,” shed a portion of his radiance on the world.  Now, given an ignorance of the true astronomical character of the sun, we see how eminently rational a religion this was.  In effect, the sun is the source of all life upon this earth, and so Akhunaten caused its rays to be depicted each with a hand holding out the sign of life to the earth.  The monotheistic worship of the sun alone is certainly the highest form of pagan religion, but Akhunaten saw further than this.  His doctrine was that there was a deity behind the sun, whose glory shone through it and gave us life.  This deity was unnamed and unnamable; he was “the Lord of the Disk.”  We see in his heresy, therefore, the highest attitude to which religious ideas had attained before the days of the Hebrew prophets.

This religion seems to have been developed out of the philosophical speculations of the priests of the Sun at Heliopolis.  Akhunaten with unwise iconoclastic zeal endeavoured to root out the worship of the ancient gods of Egypt, and especially that of Amen-Ba, the ruler of the Egyptian pantheon, whose primacy in the hearts of the people made him the most redoubtable rival of the new doctrine.  But the name of the old Sun-god Ba-Harmaehis was spared, and it is evident that Akhunaten regarded him as more or less identical with his god.

It has been supposed by Prof.  Petrie that Queen Tii, the mother of Akhunaten, was of Mitannian (Armenian) origin, and that she brought the Aten religion to Egypt from her native land, and taught it to her son.  Certainly it seems as though the new doctrine had made some headway before the death of Amenhetep III, but we have no reason to attribute it to Tii, or to suppose that she brought it with her from abroad.  There is no proof whatever that she was not a native Egyptian, and the mummies of her parents, Iuaa and Tuaa, are purely Egyptian in facial type.  It seems undoubted that the Aten cult was a development of pure Egyptian religious thought.

At first Akhunaten tried to establish his religion at Thebes alongside that of Amen and his attendant pantheon.  He seems to have built a temple to the Aten there, and we see that his courtiers began to make tombs for themselves in the new realistic style of sculptural art, which the king, heretical in art as in religion, had introduced.  The tomb of Barnes at Shekh ’Abd el-Kurna has on one side of the door a representation of the king in the old regular style, and on the other side one in the new realistic style, which depicts him in all the native ugliness in which this strange truth-loving man seems to have positively gloried.  We find, too, that he caused a temple to the Aten to be erected in far-away Napata, the capital of Nubia, by Jebel Barkal in the Sudan.  The facts as to the Theban and Napata temples have been pointed out by Prof.  Breasted, of Chicago.