APRIL 21, 1923] 
took place, z.e. before the sixth year of his reign, we 
happen to know that Okhnatén celebrated the so-called 
sed-festival, a festival marking the 3oth anniversary 
of the Pharaoh having been designated heir to the 
throne. Had it not been for the age-limit imposed by 
_ Okhnatén’s supposed body, we should naturally have 
imagined, in view of this last piece of evidence, that 
when he succeeded his father, Amenophis III., he must 
_ have been at least 24 or 25 years old. 
_ As a matter of fact, however, though the coffin in 
which the body was found was beyond question made 
for Okhnatén, yet the body itself is almost certainly 
not his, the date of the objects found thereon, as Prof. 
Sethe has recently shown, precluding that possibility. 
There can be little doubt, therefore, that Okhnaton 
was a full-grown man when he came to the throne, 
while at the time of his break with the priests of Amin 
and his shifting of the capital to Middle Egypt he was 
‘more than 30 years old, and accordingly at the height 
of his intellectual and physical vigour. The fact that 
Okhnatén’s supposed body is not his at all also disposes 
of the theory that he was weak mentally. There is, 
therefore, no necessity whatever to suppose that the 
new faith, which contemporary records so closely 
associate with the person of the king and which he was 
certainly quite old enough to have formulated, was 
the product of foreign influences during a regency of 
Tyi, nor yet of the Heliopolitan priesthood struggling 
fora religious and political supremacy. That Okhnatén 
really was a man of exceptional mental gifts and high 
_ideals—Breasted calls him “ the first individual in 
history”—is evident from that remarkable portrait of 
him found at El-Amarna in rg12 and now in the Berlin 
Museum. All who see it are impressed by the beauty 
of the features and expression, the thoughtfulness per- 
_vading the whole countenance. 
We need not, however, go to the other extreme, as 
some writers have done, and regard the love of right- 
eousness and the beneficence attributed to Okhnatén’s 
god as primarily the expression of the king’s own ideas 
and feelings. On the contrary, as has been pointed 
out in the preliminary article, these are the very 
qualities assigned to the old Heliopolitan sun-god. 
_ How far, indeed, the old solar religion had advanced 
in these particular directions, even before the Middle 
Kingdon, is especially evident in a literary composition 
of the ninth to tenth dynasties, to which by an over- 
sight no reference was made in the above-mentioned 
article. In one portion of the work in question the 
ancient writer speaks of men as “the flocks of God 
(i.e. the sun-god).” God, he goes on to say, “made 
heaven and earth at their (7.e. men’s) desire. He 
checked the greed of the waters, and made the air to 
give life to their nostrils. They (men) are His own 
images proceeding from His flesh. He arises in heaven 
at their desire. He sails by (i.e. in the celestial solar 
barque) in order to see them. . . . When they weep 
He heareth. . . . How hath He slain the froward of 
heart ? Even asa man smiteth his son for his brother’s 
sake. For God knows every name.”? In the pre- 
ceding section of the same work we read that ‘“‘ more 
acceptable (to the sun-god) is one righteous of heart 
than the ox of him who doeth iniquity.” 












) 
2 A. H. Gardiner, “ New Literary Works from Ancient Egypt,” in Journal 
of Egyptian Archeology, vol. i. p. 34. ald 
NO. 2790, VOL. 111] 
NATURE 
537 
That Okhnatén’s sun-cult is nothing more than a 
special development of the older sun-cult becomes 
only more evident the further one pursues one’s re- 
searches. In the earliest stage of the cult the god 
appears simply in the guise of the Heliopolitan sun-god, 
Ré‘-Horus of the Two Horizons (Ré‘-Harakhte), with 
whom indeed, as we shall see, he was actually identified. 
As such he is depicted as a human figure with a hawk’s 
head surmounted by the ureus-encircled sun’s disk. 
Later on, however, but before the migration of the 
court to El-Amarna, the mode of representing the god 
was entirely changed. He was depicted as a solar 
disk, from which descend rays terminating each in a 
human hand—these hands being the only trace left 
of the old anthropomorphism, if they are not, as is 
quite likely, simply an expression of poetic fancy. 
The ureus was also retained, sometimes hanging from 
the disk, generally, however, rising up from the bottom 
edge towards the centre, though it was of no religious 
significance, but merely the emblem of kingship— 
Okhnatén’s deity being not only the world-god but 
the world-king. 
The name of the new god in ordinary everyday 
parlance was pa Aton, “the Aton,” aton (zim) being 
the word used then and earlier to denote the visible, 
physical solar body, though, as Sethe points out, the 
word seems occasionally to have been employed, even 
before Okhnatin’s time, to designate the sun-god him- 
self. Generally, however, it just denotes the sun as 
anatural phenomenon or cosmic body, as distinguished 
from the god dwelling in it, a sense in which the word 
R€ is never used. 
According to the old theological teaching the physical 
sun was simply the embodiment of the god. Thus we 
read of “ Atum (the sun-god) who is in his aton,” 
* Ré* whose body is the aton,” and him “ who lightens 
the Two Lands (Egypt) with his aton.” In fact, it 
was exactly on account of the very definite meaning 
of the word aton, Sethe maintains, that Okhnatén 
chose it as the designation of his god; for the new 
religion was entirely materialistic in its conception of 
the Supreme Deity, in marked contrast to the—it must 
be confessed—much more spiritual conception of the 
old religion. Indeed it is just here that Breasted has 
gone astray when he asserts that “it is evident that 
the king was deifying the force by which the sun made 
itself felt on earth,” 3 an assertion that is based on a 
mistranslation of the Aton’s official nomenclature (see 
below). On the contrary, it was the actual cosmic 
body, the physical sun itself, not a mysterious power 
incorporated in it or working through it, which 
Okhnatén made his subjects worship. 
In addition to the ordinary name, the Aton, the god 
also bore an official or formal designation, the words 
composing it constituting a short profession of faith— 
a compressed creed. This designation, which, on 
account of the god’s world-wide kingship, was, like 
the two names borne by every Pharaoh, enclosed in 
two cartouches, appears in two forms, an earlier and 
a later. The earlier, which dates from the very com- 
mencement of the reform, and continued in use until 
after the seat of government had been moved from 
Thebes to El-Amarna, is as follows :—‘ Liveth Ré’- 
3 Breasted, ‘“ Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt,’ 
Pp. 321. 
