Quick questions on Akhenaten's religious revolution and the cult of the Aten: HSC Ancient History

The king who would become Akhenaten was born Amenhotep IV, son of Amenhotep III (r. c. 1390 to 1352 BC) and Queen Tiye. Around Year 5 of his reign (c.

The Aten (the visible disc of the sun) was not new. Since at least the reign of Amenhotep III, the Aten had been promoted as one solar aspect among several, alongside Ra, Ra-Horakhty and Amun-Ra. What Akhenaten did was different in kind, not degree: he progressively stripped away the other solar names and, eventually, the other gods altogether, until the Aten stood as the sole active god of the Egyptian state.

Atenism had no priesthood mediating between ordinary worshippers and the god, no mythology of struggle or death and rebirth, and, crucially, no route to the divine that bypassed the king. Akhenaten presented himself as the Aten's only son and chosen agent, uniquely positioned to receive the god's life-giving power and to pass its benefits on to Egypt.

The fullest statement of Atenism's theology survives in the Great Hymn to the Aten, carved in the Amarna tomb of the courtier Ay. The Hymn praises the Aten as the sole creator, present at the world's beginning and sustaining every living thing: "how manifold are your works," it declares, crediting the god with the Nile flood, the growth of crops, the hatching of chicks, and the daily rhythm of waking and sleeping.

Amun's temple at Karnak had accumulated enormous land, labour, cattle and revenue over the New Kingdom, making its priesthood one of the wealthiest institutions in Egypt, arguably a rival power base to the crown. Closing its cult and diverting its income to the crown and the Aten's own establishment was as much an economic and political blow as a theological one. Donald Redford stresses that this dimension, breaking a rival institution's wealth and influence, cannot be separated from the religious story.