538 
Horus of the Two Horizons, rejoicing in the horizon, 
in his name Shu who is Aton.” The new-god is thus 
identified with the two forms under which the sun-god 
was known both before and after the reign of Okhnatén 
—Harakhte (=Horus of the Two Horizons) and Shu. 
The epithet “ rejoicing in the horizon ” is not, Sethe 
points out, an invention of Okhnat6n’s, but appears 
earlier in the eighteenth dynasty as a description of 
the sun-god. Shu, originally personified space, was, 
as Sethe also points out, a common appellation of the 
sun-god from the Hyksos period onwards, and never 
(certainly not as written in this cartouche with the 
sun-determinative) can be used in the sense of “ heat ”’ 
or “splendour,” as Breasted and Erman respectively 
have supposed. Sethe rightly maintains that the 
prominent feature in this official nomenclature is the 
element Ré‘-Harakhte, the name of the Heliopolitan 
sun-god, all the rest, even the name Aton, being purely 
subsidiary. 
The later official designation, which came into force 
apparently soon after the eighth year of the king’s 
reign, is marked by certain significant changes. It 
runs as follows :—‘‘ Liveth Ré, the ruler of the Two 
Horizons, who rejoices in the horizon, in his name 
Father of Ré, who has come as Aton.” 
_ It will be seen that Horus and Shu, names which 
Okhnatén perhaps thought were too definitely associ- 
ated with the old religion, have been struck out and 
replaced by two epithets, “ Ruler of the Two Horizons ” 
and “ Father of Ré.””. The name Ré‘, which has not 
been interfered with, had been, as Sethe points out, 
a regular element in the Pharaoh’s first cartouche 
ever since the fifth dynasty, and as such was of no 
theological significance. Also the king evidently had 
no objection to this old name of the sun-god. For 
example, he still retained the royal title Son of R& ; 
Ré‘ appears as an element in his own first name and in 
the names of his two daughters ; two temples or shrines 
associated with his mother Tyi and his daughter Meri- 
taton bore the name “ Shade of Ré ”; and the king him- 
self, like other Pharaohs, is officially spoken of as Ré. 
The element “‘ Father of Ré*” in the god’s official 
designation is interesting, taking as it does the place 
of Shu. Shu, according to the old Heliopolitan 
theology, was the son of Ré‘, and as such he actually 
was assigned that title. It would, Sethe suggests, have 
been scarcely tolerable to the founder of the new re- 
ligion that Aton, the creator and author of all being, 
should be regarded as the son of Ré‘, the sun-god of 
the old religion. Okhnatdn therefore asserts that his 
god is the father of Ré‘, i.e. he makes him cosmically 
older. The fact that the god is called Ré‘, and, at the 
same time, the Father of Ré‘, reminds one of the old 
epithet of Amiin, Bull of his Mother, which simply 
means that he is self-created, that is, that he was not 
begotten by another. Sethe rightly maintains that 
though this epithet has a polytheistic touch about it, 
Okhnatén would have been as little conscious of this 
as were the Christian Fathers when they formulated 
the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity. 
Sethe directs attention to another very interesting 
point in this later designation of the god. “ To come,” 
he says, “‘ has obviously here, as so often, the meaning 
of ‘to come again.’ The Father of Ré* in question 
is thought to have come again after he had obviously 
NO. 2790, VOL. I11 | 

NATURE 
[APRIL 21, 1923 
disappeared or had been mistaken for another through 
man’s ignorance, and indeed he has come again in the 
form of the apparently new but in reality primeval 
god of Amenophis IV.” 
Let us now consider briefly the temples of the Aton 
erected at El-Amarna and the liturgy celebrated therein. 
The main difference between the temples of the Aton 
and those of the old Solarised religion lies in the fact 
that the former seem to have been roofless. There 
were thus no columned halls and dark, mysterious 
sanctuaries with their surrounding chambers, the place 
of these being taken by a series of main and subsidiary 
courts lying behind the forecourt and leading one out 
of another. The reason for this architectural change 
was that Okhnatén permitted no cultus-image of his 
god to be made, not because he was an iconoclast or 
afraid of idolatry, but because his conception of God 
was so intensely materialistic. The Aton, as already 
pointed out, was the actual physical sun, the cosmic 
body itself, not a divinity dwelling in that body and 
manifesting himself through it, and therefore ready 
similarly to manifest himself through a cultus-image, 
which was “ the body ” of the divinity it represented, 
according to the ideas of the ancient theologians—as we 
should express it, the divinity’s embodiment. Offer- 
ings had, therefore, to be made direct to the god in the 
sky, a procedure which necessitated a roofless temple, 
for no roof must intervene between the god and the 
offerings held up to him and laid on the altar. 
Despite this complete break with the old concep- 
tion of the indwelling presence of the god in the 
temple-sanctuary,—a conception which brought the 
god so near to his priests and worshippers—it is remark- 
able how closely in many respects the general plan and 
equipment of the traditional Egyptian temple were 
adhered to, a clear indication that there were no direct 
foreign influences at work in the new religion ; indeed, 
the architecture down to the very last detail is purely 
Egyptian. We still find the pylon with its two be- 
flagged towers and the great forecourt with its large 
stone altar in the midst *—the forecourt being colon- 
naded in the case of the temple bearing the name of 
“ Shade of Ré‘ of the Queen Mother, the Great Royal 
Wife, Tyi.” Evidently, too, the rearmost court of all 
in the Aton-temples, which occupied the place of the 
sanctuary in the ordinary Egyptian temple, was re- 
garded as particularly sacred. Again statues of the 
king and also of the queen were set up as heretofore 
in different parts of the temples, the king and queen 
being thus enabled, so it was thought, to function 
perpetually as worshippers and offerers, or conversely 
as the recipients of worship and offerings. Yet again, 
before the entrance to what N. de G. Davies calls “ the 
inner temple ” of the Aton stood eight tanks of water 
for the purification of those who entered it. Such 
tanks or pools of water were, as pointed out in the 
preliminary article, a characteristic feature of the old 
Heliopolitan sun-cult. Finally, the “inner temple” 
was called the House of the Benben, the benben being, 
as we have seen, the sacred pyramidion in the great 
sun-temple at Heliopolis. Curiously enough, in the~ 
representations we possess of Okhnatén’s Aton-temples, 
4 By an oversight no reference was made in the account of an ordinary 
Egyptian temple, given in the preliminary article, to the stone altar that 
always stood in the colonnaded forecourt, 

