The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt

But to Akhnaton, although he had absolutely no precedent upon which to launch his thoughts, God was the intangible and yet ever-present Father of mankind, made manifest in sunshine. The youthful high priest called upon his subjects to search for their God not in the confusion of battle or behind the smoke of human sacrifices, but amidst the flowers and the trees, amidst the wild duck and the fishes. He preached an enlightened nature-study: in some respects he was, perhaps, the first apostle of the Simple Life.

But to Akhnaton, although he had absolutely no precedent upon which to launch his thoughts, God was the in

the young Pharaoh was in no sense one of those old deities which our God ultimately replaced in Egypt. The Aton is God as we conceive Him. There is no quality attributed by the king to the Aton which we do not attribute to our God. Like a flash of blinding light in the night-time the Aton stands out for a moment amidst the black Egyptian darkness, and disappears once more,—the first signal to this world of the future religion of the West. No man whose mind is free from prejudice will fail to see a far closer resemblance to the teachings of Christ in the religion of Akhnaton than in that of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The faith of the patriarchs is the lineal ancestor of the Christian faith; but the creed of Akhnaton is its isolated prototype. One might believe that Almighty God had for a moment revealed himself to Egypt, and had been more clearly, though more momentarily, interpreted there than ever He was in Syria or Palestine before the time of Christ.

Originally the Aton was the actual sun’s disk; but, as has been said, the god was now called “Heat-which-is-in-Aton,” and Akhnaton, concentrating his attention on this aspect of the godhead, drew the eyes of his followers towards a force far more intangible and distant than the dazzling orb to which they bowed down. Akhnaton’s conception of God, as we now begin to observe it, was as the power which created the sun, the energy which penetrated to this earth in the sun’s heat and caused all things to grow. At the present day the scientist will tell you that God is the ultimate source of life, that where natural explanation fails there God is to be found: He is, in a word, the author of energy, the primal motive-power of all known things. Akhnaton, centuries upon centuries before the birth of the scientist, defined God in just this manner. In an age when men believed, as some do still, that a deity was but an exaggerated creature of this earth, having a form built on material lines, this youthful Pharaoh proclaimed God to be the formless essence, the intelligent germ, the loving force, which permeated time and space. Let it be clearly understood that the Aton as conceived by

And his Majesty said unto them, “Ye behold the City of the Horizon of Aton, which the Aton has desired me to make for him as a monument in the great name of my Majesty for ever. For it was the Aton, my father, that brought me to this City of the Horizon. There was not a noble who directed me to it; there was not any man in the whole land who led me to it, saying, ‘It is fitting for his Majesty that he make a City of the Horizon of Aton in this place.’ Nay, but it was the Aton, my father, that directed me to it to make it for him.... Behold the Pharaoh found that [this site] belonged not to a god, nor to a goddess, it belonged not to a prince, nor to a princess. There was no right for any man to act as owner of it.” ...
[... And they answered and said] “Lo! it is Aton that putteth [the thought] in thy heart regarding any place that he desires. He doth not uplift the name of any King except thy Majesty; he doth not [exalt] any other except [thee.] ... Thou drawest unto Aton every land, thou adornest for him the towns which he had made