Work for them was not lacking, for houses had to be built for all the courtiers and government officials who had been obliged to follow the king, and in a few years a large town had sprung up, which was called Khûîtatonû, or the “Horizon of the Disk.” It was built on a regular plan, with straight streets and open spaces, and divided into two separate quarters, interspersed with orchards and shady trellises. Workmen soon began to flock to the new city—metal-founders, glass-founders, weavers; in fine, all who followed any trade indispensable to the luxury of a capital. The king appropriated a territory for it from the ancient nome of the Hare, thus compelling the god Thot to contribute to the fortune of Atonû; he fixed its limits by means of stelæ placed in the mountains, from Gebel-Tûnah to Deshlûît on the west, and from Sheikh-Said to El-Hauata on the eastern bank;* it was a new nome improvised for the divine parvenu.
* We know at present of fourteen of these stelæ. A certain
number must still remain to be discovered on both banks of
the Nile.
Atonû was one of the forms of the Sun, and perhaps the most material one of all those devised by the Egyptians. He was defined as “the good god who rejoices in truth, the lord of the solar course, the lord of the disk, the lord of heaven, the lord of earth, the living disk which lights up the two worlds, the living Harmakhis who rises on the horizon bearing his name of Shû, which is disk, the eternal infuser of life.” His priests exercised the same functions as those of Heliopolis, and his high priest was called “Oîrimaû,” like the high priest of Râ in Aunû. This functionary was a certain Marirl, upon whom the king showered his favours, and he was for some time the chief authority in the State after the Pharaoh himself. Atonû was represented sometimes by the ordinary figure of Horus,* sometimes by the solar disk, but a disk whose rays were prolonged towards the earth, like so many arms ready to lay hold with their little hands of the offerings of the faithful, or to distribute to mortals the crux ansata, the symbol of life. The other gods, except Amon, were sharers with humanity in his benefits. Atonû proscribed him, and tolerated him only at Thebes; he required, moreover, that the name of Amon should be effaced wherever it occurred, but he respected Râ and Horus and Harmakhis—all, in fact, but Amon: he was content with being regarded as their king, and he strove rather to become their chief than their destroyer.**
* It was probably this form of Horus which had, in the
temple at Thebes, the statue called “the red image of Atonû
in Paatoml.”
** Prisse d’Avennes has found at Karnak, on fragments of the
temple, the names of other divinities than Atonû worshipped
by Khûniatonû.
His nature, moreover, had nothing in it of the mysterious or ambiguous; he was the glorious torch which gave light to humanity, and which was seen every day to flame in the heavens without ever losing its brilliance or becoming weaker. When he hides himself “the world rests in darkness, like those dead who lie in their rock-tombs, with their heads swathed, their nostrils stuffed up, their eyes sightless, and whose whole property might be stolen from them, even that which they have under their head, without their knowing it; the lion issues from his lair, the serpent roams ready to bite, it is as obscure as in a dark room, the earth is silent whilst he who creates everything dwells in his horizon.” He has hardly arisen when “Egypt becomes festal, one awakens, one rises on one’s feet; when thou hast caused men to clothe themselves, they adore thee with outstretched hands, and the whole earth attends to its work, the animals betake themselves to their herbage, trees and green crops abound, birds fly to their marshy thickets with wings outstretched in adoration of thy double, the cattle skip, all the birds which were in their nests shake themselves when thou risest for them; the boats come and go, for every way is open at thy appearance, the fish of the river leap before thee as soon as thy rays descend upon the ocean.” It is not without reason that all living things thus rejoice at his advent; all of them owe their existence to him, for “he creates the female germ, he gives virility to men, and furnishes life to the infant in its mother’s womb; he calms and stills its weeping, he nourishes it in the maternal womb, giving forth the breathings which animate all that he creates, and when the infant escapes from the womb on the day of its birth, thou openest his mouth for speech, and thou satisfiest his necessities. When the chick is in the egg, a cackle in a stone, thou givest to it air while within to keep it alive; when thou hast caused it to be developed in the egg to the point of being able to break it, it goes forth proclaiming its existence by its cackling, and walks on its feet from the moment of its leaving the egg.” Atonû presides over the universe and arranges within it the lot of human beings, both Egyptians and foreigners. The celestial Nile springs up in Hades far away in the north; he makes its current run down to earth, and spreads its waters over the fields during the inundation in order to nourish his creatures. He rules the seasons, winter and summer; he constructed the far-off sky in order to display himself therein, and to look down upon his works below. From the moment that he reveals himself there, “cities, towns, tribes, routes, rivers—all eyes are lifted to him, for he is the disk of the day upon the earth.” * The sanctuary in which he is invoked contains only his divine shadow;** for he himself never leaves the firmament.
* These extracts are taken from the hymns of Tel el-Amarna.
** In one of the tombs at Tel el-Amarna the king is depicted
leading his mother Tîi to the temple of Atonû in order to
see “the Shadow of Râ,” and it was thought with some reason
that “the Shadow of Râ” was one of the names of the temple.
I think that this designation applied also to the statue or
symbol of the god; the shadow of a god was attached to the
statue in the same manner as the “double,” and transformed
it into an animated body.
His worship assumes none of the severe and gloomy forms of the Theban cults: songs resound therein, and hymns accompanied by the harp or flute; bread, cakes, vegetables, fruits, and flowers are associated with his rites, and only on very rare occasions one of those bloody sacrifices in which the other gods delight. The king made himself supreme pontiff of Atonu, and took precedence of the high priest. He himself celebrated the rites at the altar of the god, and we see him there standing erect, his hands outstretched, offering incense and invoking blessings from on high.* Like the Caliph Hakim of a later age, he formed a school to propagate his new doctrines, and preached them before his courtiers: if they wished to please him, they had to accept his teaching, and show that they had profited by it. The renunciation of the traditional religious observances of the solar house involved also the rejection of such personal names as implied an ardent devotion to the banished god; in place of Amenôthes, “he to whom Amon is united,” the king assumed after a time the name of Khûniatonû, “the Glory of the Disk,” and all the members of his family, as well as his adherents at court, whose appellations involved the name of the same god, soon followed his example. The proscription of Amon extended to inscriptions, so that while his name or figure, wherever either could be got at, was chiselled out, the vulture, the emblem of Mût, which expressed the idea of mother, was also avoided.**
* The altar on which the king stands upright is one of those
cubes of masonry of which Naville discovered such a fine
example in the temple of Hâtshopsîtû at Deîr el-Baharî.
** We find, however, some instances where the draughtsman,
either from custom or design, had used the vulture to
express the word mailt, “the mother,” without troubling
himself to think whether it answered to the name of the
goddess.