One of Amenhotep's greatest surviving achievements is the Temple of Luxor on the east bank of the river. Unfortunately, his mortuary temple on the west bank, the largest of its kind ever built, was destroyed. His son Akhenaten was an even more unusual character. He was an intellectual and philosophical revolutionary who had the power and wealth to indulge his ideas. He tried to change the Egyptian people to a concept of godhead which was both monotheistic and abstract. He worshiped the sun (Aten) as the one true god and it is possible that the Hebrew prophets' concept of a universal God was derived in part from this cult.
However, the ancient Egyptians were a deeply religious people who loved their ancient traditions and were not ready to embrace such radical changes. It would not be until the Christian era that the Egyptians would finally reject the old gods in favour of a single universal deity.
Akhenaten came to the throne of Egypt around 1353 BC. The reign of his father, Amenhotep III, had been long and prosperous with international diplomacy largely replacing the relentless military campaigning of his predecessors. The reign culminated in a series of magnificent jubilee pageants celebrated in Thebes (modern Luxor), the religious capital of Egypt at the time and home to the state god Amun-Re. The new king was crowned as Amenhotep IV (meaning 'Amun is content') and temple construction and decoration projects began immediately in the name of the new king. The earliest work of his reign is stylistically similar to the art of his predecessors, but within a year or two he was building temples to the Aten or divinised sun-disk at Karnak in a very different artistic style and had changed his name to Akhenaten in honour of this god. The Egyptians had traditionally worshipped a whole pantheon of gods who were represented in human or animal form or as animal-headed humans. Some gods were specific to particular towns or places; others had broader appeal. From early periods solar gods such as Re had played an important role in Egyptian state religion because the distant but universal power of the sun fitted well with prevailing ideas of the supreme power of the king both within Egypt and beyond its borders.
In the New Kingdom, solar gods again became prominent, among them the Aten, the visible sun-disk which can be seen traversing the sky each day. Akhenaten raised the Aten to the position of 'sole god', represented as a disk with rays of light terminating in hands which reach out to the royal family, sometimes offering the hieroglyphic sign for life. Akhenaten and his family are frequently shown worshipping the Aten or simply indulging in everyday activities beneath the disk. Everywhere the close ties between the king and god are stressed through art and text. A number of hymns to the Aten were composed during Akhenaten's reign and these provide a glimpse of what has been described as the 'natural philosophy' of Akhenaten's religion. The wonders of the natural world are described to extol the universal power of the sun. The most important surviving document of the new religion is the Aton Hymn, which was inscribed in several versions in the tombs of Akhetaton. Like some other hymns of its period, the text focuses on the world of nature and the god's beneficent provision for it. The hymn opens with the rising of the sun: "Men had slept like the dead; now they lift their arms in praise, birds fly, fish leap, plants bloom, and work begins. Aton creates the son in the mother's womb, the seed in men, and has generated all life. He has distinguished the races, their natures, tongues, and skins, and fulfills the needs of all. Aton made the Nile in Egypt and rain, like a heavenly Nile, in foreign countries. He has a million forms according to the time of day and from where he is seen; yet he is always the same." The only people who know and comprehend the god fully are said to be Akhenaton together with his wife, Nefertiti. The hymn to the Aton has been compared in imagery to Psalm 104 ('Bless the Lord, O my soul'). Akhenaten decided that the worship of the Aten required a location uncontaminated by the cults of traditional gods and to this end chose a site in Middle Egypt for a new capital city which he called Akhetaten, 'Horizon of the Aten'. It is a desert site surrounded on three sides by cliffs and to the west by the Nile and is known today as el-Amarna. In the cliffs around the boundaries of the city the king left a series of monumental inscriptions in which he outlined his reasons for the move and his architectural intentions for the city in the form of lists of buildings. On the plain near the river massive temples to the Aten were constructed: these were open to the sky and the rays of the sun and were probably influenced by the design of much earlier solar temples dedicated to the cult of Re. Akhenaten died in his seventeenth year on the throne and his reforms did not survive for long in his absence. The throne passed to a child, Tutankhamun (originally Tutankhaten) who was the son of Akhenaten. Over time, the process of restoration of traditional cults turned to whole-scale obliteration of all things associated with Akhenaten. His image and names were removed from monuments. His temples were dismantled and the stone reused in the foundations of other more orthodox royal building projects. The city of Akhetaten gradually crumbled back into the desert. His name and those of his immediate successors were omitted from official king-lists so that they remained virtually unknown until the archaeological discoveries at Akhetaten and in the tomb of Tutankhamun made these kings amongst the most famous of all rulers of ancient Egypt.
The word Aten or Athen is a very old word for the "disk" or "face of the sun," and Atenism was beyond doubt an old form of worship of the sun. But there were many forms of sun-worship older than the cult of Aten, and several solar gods were worshipped in Egypt, many centuries before Aten was regarded as a special form of the great solar god at all.
One of the oldest forms of the Sun-god worshipped in Egypt was HER (Horus), who in the earliest times seems to have represented the "height" or "face" of heaven by day.
He was symbolized by the sparrow hawk, the right eye of the bird representing the sun and his left the moon. The oldest seat of the cult of the Sun-god was the famous city of Anu the On of the Bible, and the Heliopolis of Greek and Latin writers. Gods of death and resurrection are often gods of the solar cycle and the most important Christian dates in the year mirror it.
Since the beginning of human existence, civilisations have established religious beliefs that involved the Sun's significance to some extent or other. As new civilisations developed many spiritual beliefs were based on those from the past so that there has been an evolution of the sun's significance throughout cultural development.
In different religions solar supreme deities carry different names and are associated with different aspects of the cultural universe of the society, but for the most part its raw image remains identical. The sun is vital to our existence, to producing our crops, lighting our way (spiritually and practically), they regulate our tides, even our own inner tides, hormones, blood and chemicals etc as we are so much water ourselves. Although we comprehend in some ways the scientific side of it and what the Sun is, really and truly there's a lot about how the Sun and Moon affect us inside that we still have much to learn. We all know that without the sun as we know it there would be no life on earth..... The sun isn't just a big ball of gas........it also has a spiritual counterpart just as the earth does and just as us humans do..... sun worship back in the day was not just about the physical sun, it was about the energetic sun. it was about absorbing the energy of the sun in a way which feeds our subtle energy systems. Using the chakra system. The energy of the sun was breathed into certain energy centres which then fed the physical body..... .....actually breathe in its energy through your 'solar' plexus.... For certain there is an allegory in the sun as the light of consciousness. It's an allegory to spiritual enlightenment. Solar Significance The Sun has affected human cultures since mankind first walked on the earth and has played an enormous role in the shaping of ancient civilisations dating as far back as the Sumerian's five thousand years ago. It has thus played a significant role in the shaping of the human race we are all a part of today.
We have seen the influence of the sun on our lives in the context of scientific discovery. However, it has also had a significant influence on our cultural pursuits including art, music, literature and dance. One of the Sun's greatest influences has been on religious or spiritual culture. The Earth, our continents, oceans, in fact every living thing depends on light to be able to exist. Ancient Egyptian healer Priests knew that light is in fact emitted by every cell in our bodies. We live in a sea of energy where colour is working within us. It shines with in our divine self, and radiates upon us from the sun.
It has a presence on Earth through the power of its rays, which not only pervade our environment but also touch our very hearts. By the Sun, meaning does not simply refer to the outer luminary, the central star of our solar system. It means the principle of light and consciousness on a universal level, of which the Mind(Sun) is our radiant representative.
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