Amarna Monotheism

About Amarna Monotheism

Amarna monotheism is the religious revolution carried out by the pharaoh Akhenaten (originally Amenhotep IV, r. c. 1353-1336 BCE) of the 18th Dynasty during the New Kingdom, in which the Aten — the visible disk of the sun — was elevated to the position of sole god, the cults of the other Egyptian deities (above all Amun of Thebes) were suppressed, and worship was centralized at a newly founded capital, Akhetaten ('Horizon of the Aten'), at the site now called Amarna in Middle Egypt. The reform is the most radical episode in the religious history of pharaonic Egypt and the earliest documented state-sponsored attempt to reduce divine worship to a single god.

The Aten had existed for centuries before Akhenaten as a minor solar concept — the physical disk of the sun, a poetic aspect of the sun-god Ra. Akhenaten's father, Amenhotep III (r. c. 1390-1352 BCE), had already promoted the Aten. But under Akhenaten the Aten was transformed from one solar aspect among many into the exclusive object of state cult. The king abandoned anthropomorphic and animal images of the divine and represented the Aten as a sun-disk whose rays end in human hands extending the ankh-sign of life toward the royal family. In his fifth regnal year the king changed his name from Amenhotep ('Amun is satisfied') to Akhenaten ('Effective for the Aten' or 'He who is beneficial to the Aten'), renounced the Theban god, and founded Akhetaten on virgin ground, marking its boundaries with a series of inscribed stelae around the sixth regnal year. At some point the agents of the crown moved to erase the name and images of Amun from monuments across Egypt, an act of theological annihilation directed at the most powerful deity and priesthood of the age.

Whether the reform constitutes true monotheism is contested among Egyptologists. Erik Hornung argued that the proper term is monolatry — the exclusive worship of one god without the denial that others exist — while others, noting the active suppression of rival cults and the Great Hymn's presentation of the Aten as the sole creator of all things, have defended 'monotheism' or a qualified term such as 'revolutionary' or 'reductive' monotheism. The king and his family alone appear to have had direct access to the Aten; the wider population worshipped the Aten through the king, so that the system has also been described as a form of royal-centered cult in which the divine reached humanity only through Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti.

The reform did not survive its author. Within a few years of Akhenaten's death the court returned to Thebes, the young king Tutankhaten changed his name to Tutankhamun ('Living image of Amun') to signal the restoration of the old cult, Akhetaten was abandoned, and the temples of Amun and the other gods were reopened and re-endowed. Later kings classed Akhenaten among the enemies of order and omitted him from the official king-lists, and his city fell into ruin. The principal sources for the reform are the Great Hymn to the Aten, preserved in the tomb of the courtier Ay at Amarna; shorter Aten hymns in other Amarna tombs; the boundary stelae of Akhetaten; the dismantled talatat blocks from Akhenaten's Karnak temples; and the Amarna Letters, the cuneiform diplomatic archive of the period.

The Story

The Amarna reform unfolded across the seventeen-year reign of Akhenaten as a progressive escalation from the elevation of one solar aspect to the suppression of an entire pantheon, followed after his death by an equally decisive reversal.

The king began his reign at Thebes as Amenhotep IV, the son of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye, ruling in the conventional manner alongside the established cults. In his earliest years he constructed temples to the Aten at Karnak, the great precinct of Amun, decorating them with a distinctive new art style and with reliefs depicting the worship of the sun-disk. These temples were built of small standardized blocks, later called talatat, which made construction rapid; when the temples were demolished after the reform the blocks were reused as fill in later structures, and tens of thousands have been recovered, allowing partial reconstruction of the earliest phase of Aten worship.

In his fifth regnal year the king made the decisive break. He changed his name from Amenhotep ('Amun is satisfied') to Akhenaten, severing his royal identity from the Theban god and binding it to the Aten. He resolved to abandon Thebes — a city saturated with the cult of Amun — and to found a new capital on ground that, in the words of the boundary stelae, belonged to no god and no goddess, no ruler and no people. The site chosen was a bay in the cliffs on the east bank of the Nile in Middle Egypt, the modern Amarna, which the king named Akhetaten, 'Horizon of the Aten.'

Around his sixth regnal year Akhenaten marked the limits of the new city with a series of boundary stelae carved into the surrounding cliffs, on which he swore not to extend the city beyond the marked bounds and recorded his devotion to the Aten and his foundation of the temples, palaces, and tombs of the new capital. The city rose rapidly: the Great Temple of the Aten, open to the sky so that the sun's rays could fall directly on the offerings, the Small Temple, royal palaces, administrative quarters, villas of the elite, and workmen's villages. The tombs of the courtiers were cut into the cliffs, and the royal tomb was prepared in a remote wadi.

The theology centralized in the new city presented the Aten as the sole creator and sustainer of all life. The disk's rays, ending in hands, extended the breath of life to the king and queen; the king and Nefertiti were the Aten's sole intermediaries, and the worship of the population was directed through them. The royal family was depicted in an unprecedented intimacy — the king, queen, and their daughters bathed in the rays of the sun-disk — and the art of the period abandoned the idealized conventions of earlier reigns for an exaggerated, fluid style depicting the king with an elongated face, full lips, and a heavy lower body.

As the reform deepened, the suppression of the older cults intensified. The name of Amun, and in places the plural word 'gods,' was hacked out of inscriptions across Egypt, even in remote and private monuments — an attack on the very existence of the rival deity, since to destroy the name was to destroy the being. The temples of the other gods were closed or their revenues diverted, and the priesthoods that had administered the wealth of the great cults lost their position.

The Great Hymn to the Aten, the fullest surviving expression of the new theology, was inscribed in the tomb of the courtier Ay at Akhetaten. It praises the Aten as the creator of all lands and peoples, who made the Nile in the sky for foreign nations and the Nile in the underworld for Egypt, who set every man in his place and provided for his needs, and who is known fully only to the king, his son. The hymn presents a universal and naturalistic theology: the Aten governs not Egypt alone but the whole world, including Syria, Nubia, and the foreign lands, each in its language and its nature.

The reform did not outlast its founder. Akhenaten died in his seventeenth regnal year, and after a brief and obscure succession the throne passed to the boy-king Tutankhaten, who within a few years moved the court back to the old centers, restored the cults of Amun and the other gods, re-endowed their temples, and changed his name to Tutankhamun to proclaim the restoration. Akhetaten was abandoned within a generation; its temples were dismantled, its blocks carried away for reuse, and its name omitted from the official record. Akhenaten himself was struck from the king-lists and remembered, when remembered at all, as a heretic and an enemy of the gods. The old polytheism resumed its course, and the experiment of the sole sun-disk left no continuing cult — only the ruins of a city, the hacked and re-inscribed monuments, and the hymns preserved by chance in the tombs of the courtiers.

Symbolism

Amarna theology expressed itself through a deliberately restricted and innovative symbolic vocabulary that broke with the conventions of Egyptian religious art and writing in ways that themselves carried theological meaning.

The central symbol is the Aten itself: the sun-disk represented not as an anthropomorphic god or a god with an animal head, but as the literal disk of the sun with rays descending toward the earth, each ray ending in a small human hand. The hands extend the ankh, the sign of life, toward the noses of the king and queen, and hold royal regalia. This image rejects the entire tradition of Egyptian divine iconography, in which gods were shown in human or animal form. The Aten has no face, no body, no myth of birth or death, no consort, no offspring among the gods — only the visible disk and its life-giving light. The reduction of the divine image to the disk and its rays asserts that the true god is the sun as it is genuinely seen, not a hidden being behind the sun.

The hands at the ends of the rays encode the theology of life as gift. The Aten does not act through cult-statues or through the mediation of the older gods but reaches directly to the royal family, placing the ankh at their nostrils. The breath of life flows from the disk to the king and queen, and through them to all creation. This symbolism makes the king and Nefertiti the indispensable channel of divine life, a point reinforced by their constant depiction beneath the rays.

The abandonment of the underworld and of the night encodes a further theological shift. Earlier Egyptian religion was preoccupied with the sun's nightly journey through the duat and with the figure of Osiris, ruler of the dead. Amarna theology, centered on the visible sun, had little place for the night or for the Osirian afterlife. The Great Hymn presents the night as a time of darkness and danger, when lions come forth and serpents bite, and the dawn as the daily renewal of the world by the rising disk. The dead at Amarna were to be revived not by union with Osiris in the underworld but by the rising of the Aten each morning over the eastern cliffs of the city — a reorientation of the afterlife from the subterranean realm of Osiris to the daily solar cycle.

The distinctive Amarna art style is itself a theological statement. The elongated forms, the fluid lines, the intimate domestic scenes of the royal family, and the exaggerated portrayal of the king's body broke radically with the idealized canon of earlier Egyptian art. The new style has been read as an attempt to represent a new divine reality — the king as a unique being, neither simply male nor simply female, who embodied the creative androgyny of the sole god, or as a deliberate rejection of the artistic conventions associated with the old cults.

The erasure of the name of Amun deploys the Egyptian theology of the name (ren) as a weapon. To erase a name from a monument was to attack the existence of its bearer, since the continued existence of a being depended on the perpetuation of its name. The systematic hacking-out of Amun's name across Egypt was therefore not mere vandalism but a theological act intended to annihilate the rival god — the inverse of the careful preservation of the names of the dead that sustained their existence in the afterlife.

Cultural Context

The Amarna reform arose within the religious and political conditions of the mature 18th Dynasty, at the height of the Egyptian New Kingdom empire, and cannot be understood apart from the institutional power of the Theban cult of Amun that it sought to overturn.

Over the course of the 18th Dynasty the god Amun of Thebes had risen from a local deity to the supreme god of the empire, syncretized with the sun-god as Amun-Ra. The military successes of the early New Kingdom kings, who credited their victories to Amun, had endowed the god's temples — above all Karnak — with vast estates, treasuries, and a priesthood that controlled enormous economic and political resources. By the reign of Amenhotep III, Akhenaten's father, the temple of Amun was the wealthiest institution in Egypt after the crown, and the high priesthood of Amun was a power that could rival the king. The elevation of the Aten and the suppression of Amun therefore had a political dimension: the reform broke the power of the Theban priesthood and concentrated religious authority in the person of the king.

The theological background lay in the long development of New Kingdom solar religion, which had increasingly emphasized the sun as the supreme creative power and had moved toward what some scholars call a 'new solar theology' in which the sun-god was understood as the single source of all life. The hymns to Amun-Ra of the period already approached a kind of inclusive near-monotheism, in which all gods were aspects of the one hidden god. Akhenaten's reform can be seen as a radical and exclusive turn within this development: where the Theban theology made Amun the hidden unity behind all the gods, Amarna theology made the visible Aten the sole god and denied the others altogether.

The foundation of Akhetaten on virgin ground reflects the Egyptian theology of the primeval mound and the act of creation. By founding a new city on land that belonged to no prior god, the king re-enacted the first creation and established a place wholly dedicated to the Aten, untainted by the cults of other deities. The boundary stelae record this dedication and bind the king to the new foundation.

The Amarna Letters, the cuneiform diplomatic archive recovered from the site, place the reform in its international context. They record the correspondence between the Egyptian court and the kings of the great powers and the vassal rulers of Syria-Palestine during the late 18th Dynasty, and they show that the empire continued to function during the reform, though some scholars have read in them signs of neglected vassals and weakening Egyptian control. The archive also demonstrates that the king's religious revolution did not isolate Egypt from the wider Near Eastern world of Babylonia, Mitanni, Assyria, and Hatti.

The reform's failure and the subsequent damnatio of Akhenaten shaped its cultural memory. Because the later tradition treated the king as a heretic and erased him from the record, the Amarna period was largely forgotten until its rediscovery by modern archaeology. The Great Hymn and the other Aten texts survived only because they were carved in the tombs of the courtiers at the abandoned city, where they escaped the systematic erasure that destroyed the king's monuments elsewhere.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

The Amarna reform sits at the intersection of two structural questions that cross-tradition comparison can isolate: what happens when a state attempts to reduce divine worship to a single god, and what does that reduction reveal about the theological assumptions of the tradition doing the reducing? The answer differs sharply depending on whether the single god is understood as the only real deity, the hidden unity behind all gods, or the exclusive focus of worship while others continue to exist.

Zoroastrian — Ahura Mazda and the Rejection of the Daevas (Gathas, c. 1200–1000 BCE)

The oldest Zoroastrian texts, the Gathas attributed to the prophet Zarathustra, elevate Ahura Mazda — the Wise Lord — as the supreme deity and designate the Daevas, formerly revered Aryan gods, as malevolent forces to be rejected. The reform is exclusivist: the other gods do not merely lose priority but are recast as evil. The Amarna parallel is instructive. Akhenaten also recast a formerly supreme deity — Amun — as a target of erasure; he had Amun's name hacked from monuments across Egypt. But where Zoroaster's reform persisted and became the state religion of successive Persian empires, Akhenaten's reform collapsed within a decade of his death. The Zoroastrian exclusivism endured because it built a durable priestly and doctrinal structure; the Amarna reform was concentrated entirely in the royal person, and it died with its patron. Both traditions show that exclusive divine worship requires institutional foundations, not only royal will.

Biblical — The First Commandment and the Mosaic Distinction (Exodus 20:3, c. 7th–6th century BCE)

The first commandment — "You shall have no other gods before me" — is formally monolatric rather than monotheistic: the existence of other gods is not denied, but Yahweh alone receives worship from the community of Israel. Jan Assmann, in Moses the Egyptian (1997), argued that the celebrated resemblance between the Great Hymn to the Aten and Psalm 104 reflects a shared intellectual horizon, and that what he called the "Mosaic distinction" — true god vs. false gods — entered the historical record first at Amarna. The debate remains open. But the structural comparison is clear: the biblical tradition built its exclusive claim into a covenant-and-law framework that survived the destruction of the temple and the loss of the kingdom; the Atenist claim was built entirely into a solar theology accessible only through the king. The biblical one-god endured because the community carried it; the Aten's unique status vanished because the royal mediator was gone.

Hindu — Ekavyaktitva and the Near-Monotheism of Vishnu (Bhagavata Purana, c. 800–900 CE)

The Bhagavata Purana describes Vishnu as the singular source from whom all other gods proceed and to whom all return — a theology that approaches monotheism while formally maintaining the existence of the other deities as aspects or emanations. Where the Aten was presented as the sole god whose rays alone sustained life, the Bhagavata's Vishnu is the ultimate ground of which the other gods are expressions. The Egyptian reform made the theological reduction by elimination — erasing Amun's name, closing other temples. The Vaishnava tradition made a similar reduction by inclusion — the other gods are real but subordinate emanations. The Egyptian method produced violent erasure and violent restoration; the Hindu method produced a devotional hierarchy stable enough to coexist with the polytheism it implicitly superseded. The two traditions offer opposite strategies for the same structural goal of divine singularity.

Inca — Pachacamac and Inca Solar Theology (c. 1400–1532 CE)

The Inca state imposed the worship of the sun-god Inti across conquered territories, building sun temples and demanding that subject peoples recognize Inti as supreme — a solar henotheism that bears a structural resemblance to Atenism. Local cults were often tolerated rather than suppressed outright, and the huacas (sacred local presences) continued to be venerated alongside the imperial sun-cult. The contrast with Amarna is revealing: the Inca solar imposition was pragmatically inclusive, absorbing local deities into a hierarchical system; Akhenaten's reform was theologically exclusive, denying the other gods rather than subordinating them. The Inca empire lasted over a century; the Amarna revolution lasted seventeen years. Exclusive monotheism, the Egyptian experiment suggests, is harder to sustain than solar supremacy with room for the local.

Modern Influence

Amarna monotheism has exercised a disproportionate influence on the modern imagination, becoming the most-discussed episode of ancient Egyptian religion in Western thought, largely because of its apparent anticipation of monotheism and its connection to the origins of the biblical tradition.

The rediscovery of the Amarna period by 19th-century archaeology, and the recovery of the Berlin bust of Nefertiti in 1912 and the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, brought the reform to wide public attention. Akhenaten was hailed in early scholarship — notably by James Henry Breasted — as the first individual in history, a religious idealist and the first monotheist, a reading that made him a hero of the Western narrative of religious progress. Later scholarship, including the work of Erik Hornung and Jan Assmann, complicated this picture, questioning whether the reform was truly monotheistic and emphasizing its authoritarian and royal-centered character.

The most influential line of modern reception concerns the relationship between Atenism and biblical monotheism. The Great Hymn to the Aten bears a celebrated resemblance to Psalm 104, sharing the theme of the one god as creator and sustainer of all life and several specific images; the parallel has been debated since the early 20th century, with positions ranging from direct dependence to common Near Eastern background. Jan Assmann, in Moses the Egyptian (1997), traced the long history of the idea that Akhenaten's religion lay behind the monotheism of Moses — an idea given its most famous formulation by Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism (1939), which argued that Moses was an Egyptian adherent of the Atenist faith who transmitted it to the Hebrews.

In the academic study of religion, the Amarna reform became a central case in debates about the origins, definition, and political character of monotheism. Assmann's concept of the 'Mosaic distinction' — the introduction into religion of the distinction between true and false gods, which he located at Amarna and in biblical monotheism — made Atenism a key reference point in discussions of religious intolerance and the relationship between monotheism and violence.

In the arts, Akhenaten and Nefertiti have inspired a large body of modern work, including Philip Glass's opera Akhnaten (1984), which dramatizes the rise and fall of the reform, numerous historical novels (Naguib Mahfouz's Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth among them), and a continuing stream of popular and fringe literature linking Akhenaten to esoteric and conspiratorial theories. The distinctive Amarna art style, with its elongated forms and intimate royal scenes, has shaped the modern visual image of ancient Egypt and influenced 20th-century artists.

The Berlin bust of Nefertiti has become among the most recognized images of the ancient world, and the figures of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and Tutankhamun are among the most widely known of all Egyptian royalty. The reform's combination of religious radicalism, artistic revolution, dynastic drama, and apparent relevance to the origins of monotheism has made it the subject of an enduring fascination matched by few episodes in ancient history.

Primary Sources

The principal primary source for the Amarna reform is the Great Hymn to the Aten, preserved in hieroglyphic inscription in the tomb of the courtier Ay at Amarna (Amarna Tomb 25, TA25; c. 1340 BCE). The hymn, addressed to the Aten as the sole creator and sustainer of all life, is the fullest theological statement of the reform and the text at the center of comparison with Psalm 104. The standard English translation is in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II: The New Kingdom (University of California Press, 1976), pp. 96–100, which also includes the shorter Aten hymns from other Amarna tombs. William Kelly Simpson's anthology The Literature of Ancient Egypt (Yale University Press, 3rd ed., 2003) provides an additional translation with notes.

The boundary stelae of Akhetaten, carved into the cliffs surrounding the site in Akhenaten's sixth regnal year (c. 1347 BCE), are primary documents of the foundation of the new capital, recording the king's oath to build the city and his devotion to the Aten. The standard publication and translation is William J. Murnane and Charles C. Van Siclen III, The Boundary Stelae of Akhenaten (Kegan Paul International, 1993), which provides hieroglyphic texts, transliterations, and translations with full commentary.

The talatat blocks from Akhenaten's early temples at Karnak, dismantled after the reform and reused as fill in later structures, have been studied and partially reconstructed through the work of the Akhenaten Temple Project; key findings appear in Donald B. Redford, Akhenaten: The Heretic King (Princeton University Press, 1984), which synthesizes the archaeological and textual evidence for the early Karnak phase alongside the Amarna period. Erik Hornung addresses the theological character of the reform in Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, translated by John Baines (Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 248–254, where he argues for the term monolatry rather than monotheism and situates the Aten cult within the broader context of New Kingdom solar theology.

The Amarna Letters (EA 1–382, cuneiform tablets found at the site in 1887, now divided among the British Museum, the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, the Cairo Museum, the Louvre, and other collections) are the diplomatic archive of the period, documenting the correspondence between the Egyptian court and the kings of Babylonia, Mitanni, Assyria, Hatti, and the Syro-Palestinian vassals during the Amarna age. The standard translation is William L. Moran, The Amarna Letters (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

For the relationship between the Great Hymn and Psalm 104, and the broader argument about Atenism and the origins of biblical monotheism, the primary scholarly treatment is Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Harvard University Press, 1997), especially chapters 1–2; and Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (Knopf, 1939; trans. Katherine Jones), which advanced the argument of Akhenaten's influence on Moses. Assmann's The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, translated by David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 178–198, traces the theological development of New Kingdom solar theology within which the Aten cult emerged.

Significance

Amarna monotheism is the most radical religious reform in the history of pharaonic Egypt and the earliest documented state attempt to reduce divine worship to a single god, making it a key episode in the global history of monotheism and a central case in modern debates about the nature and origins of exclusive religion.

Within Egyptian religious history, the reform is significant as the moment when the long development of New Kingdom solar theology — which had increasingly emphasized the sun as the single source of all life — reached its most extreme and exclusive expression. Where the Theban theology of Amun-Ra approached an inclusive near-monotheism in which all gods were aspects of the one hidden god, Akhenaten made the visible Aten the sole god and denied the existence of the others. The contrast illuminates the distinctive Egyptian capacity to hold many gods and one god together, and the unusual and ultimately unsustainable character of Akhenaten's exclusive turn.

The reform's failure is as significant as its content. The rapid collapse of Atenism after Akhenaten's death, the restoration of the old cults under Tutankhamun, and the erasure of Akhenaten from the official record demonstrate the depth of the Egyptian commitment to the traditional pantheon and the resilience of the institutions the reform had sought to destroy. The episode shows the limits of royal power in the face of established religion: even the absolute authority of the pharaoh could not permanently impose a new theology against the weight of tradition and the interests of the priesthoods.

For the comparative study of religion, Amarna monotheism is the principal pre-biblical instance of an exclusive, suppressive religion that denied other gods and attacked their cults. Its celebrated resemblance to Psalm 104, and the long tradition — from the early 20th century through Freud and Assmann — connecting Atenism to the monotheism of Moses, have made it a continuing reference point in debates about the origins of monotheism and about the relationship between exclusive religion and intolerance.

The reform is also a primary source for the political dimension of Egyptian religion. The suppression of Amun and the concentration of religious authority in the king reveal the entanglement of theology and power in the New Kingdom state, and the wealth and influence of the Theban priesthood that the reform sought to break. The Amarna period thus illuminates not only Egyptian theology but the political economy of the great temple cults.

Finally, the reform produced, in the Great Hymn to the Aten, one of the supreme achievements of Egyptian religious literature — a universal and naturalistic vision of a single creator god who governs all lands and peoples — and, in the art of the period, among the most distinctive and influential styles of the ancient world. The cultural products of a failed reform have outlasted the reform itself and shaped the modern image of ancient Egypt.

Connections

Aten in the deities section covers the sun-disk elevated to sole god in the reform, including its pre-Amarna history as a minor solar aspect and the distinctive iconography of the rayed disk with hands. The Aten is the deity around whom Amarna theology was wholly organized.

Amun in the deities section covers the Theban king of the gods whose cult Amarna theology sought to destroy. The wealth and power of Amun's priesthood made the god the chief target of the reform, and the restoration of Amun under Tutankhamun marked its reversal.

Nefertiti in the deities section covers Akhenaten's Great Royal Wife, whose ritual prominence in Amarna religion is without parallel among earlier queens and who may have ruled as co-regent or successor.

Ra in the deities section covers the solar creator-god from whose theology the Aten emerged and within whose broader solar religion the Amarna reform developed.

The Cosmogony of Heliopolis in the mythology section covers the Heliopolitan solar creation theology that formed part of the background to New Kingdom solar religion and to the Aten cult, which drew on the deep Egyptian association of the sun-god with creation.

The Cosmogony of Memphis in the mythology section covers the Memphite theology of creation by thought and speech, one of the traditional cosmogonies that the universalizing theology of the Great Hymn to the Aten implicitly displaced by attributing all creation to the single sun-disk.

Ptah in the deities section covers the Memphite creator-god, one of the major deities whose cult was diminished during the reform and restored afterward.

Osiris in the deities section covers the ruler of the dead whose underworld afterlife was largely set aside by Amarna theology, which reoriented the hope of the dead from union with Osiris in the duat to revival by the rising of the Aten each morning. The contrast between the Osirian and the Atenist afterlife marks one of the deepest theological breaks of the reform.

Sekhmet and Hathor in the deities section cover goddesses of the traditional pantheon whose cults, like those of the other gods, were suppressed during the reform and restored afterward, part of the rich polytheism that Amarna theology sought to replace with the worship of the single sun-disk.

The Book of the Heavenly Cow in the mythology section covers a New Kingdom royal composition of the traditional solar theology, representing the established religion of the sun-god Ra against which the radical exclusivism of the Aten cult defined itself.

Further Reading