Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [106]
This was radical enough, but Akhenaton went still further. He abandoned the worship of the old gods of Egypt—that proliferous pantheon whose complexities must have baffled the ancient Egyptians themselves. In particular, he abominated the greatest of gods, Amon-Re. His agents were sent throughout the land, to temples and tombs and monuments, to cut the hated name from the rock walls even when it appeared in the name of his own father, Amenhotep. The other gods were not spared, and in some cases even the plural word gods was scratched out.
Who was this Aton, for whom a king of Egypt committed such monumental offenses against tradition? It is not precisely accurate to call him a “new” god; he had been around for a while. In the previous chapter we gave a brief account of his origins and increasing prominence, but his sudden leap to divine stardom under Akhenaton was without precedent.
The earliest representations of Aton show him as a hawk-headed human figure. This was in keeping with a conventional Egyptian treatment of the gods in art—the animal or bird head on the human body. The hawk was one of the symbols of the sun god, and Aton was originally the sun itself. Akhenaton soon abandoned this tradition too. He showed Aton as a solar disk with rays that end in tiny human hands holding an ankh, the hieroglyphic sign for “life”—the looped cross, or crux ansata—to the nostrils of the members of the royal family. Not all the god’s human characteristics were abandoned. He had the titles and cartouches of a king and wore, even as a simple sun disc, the royal uraeus serpent; his jubilee or Heb-Sed was celebrated with that of Akhenaton himself.
Just what was it then that Akhenaton worshiped? The theories vary. By now my own prejudices should be apparent to the intelligent reader. Breasted’s History was my first introduction to ancient Egypt. It left a permanent impression. Try as I may to become dispassionate and cynical about Akhenaton, I don’t always succeed. My own, admittedly subjective, feeling is that it was the spirit of animation and creation implicit in the heat-and light-producing sun that was the object of Akhenaton’s adoration. That this spirit implied more than physical well-being is suggested by the king’s insistence upon maat.
The god Aton in original form
We can translate maat as “truth.” Abstractions are hard to translate, and the English word truth means many things to many people. In Egyptian, maat certainly could mean something like our concept of “justice”; the word was personified by a goddess who stood at the side of Osiris at the time of the judging of the soul. The hieroglyph for maat is the feather, which was weighed against the heart of the dead man. But maat went beyond justice; it has been defined as the universal order, the divine system of correctness—the right way to do things, established at the creation and constantly renewed by religious ritual. Akhenaton’s insistence upon his love of maat is too striking to be accidental, but there has been much discussion as to just what he meant by it. Some scholars interpreted maat as “candor,” particularly when it applied to the new art forms of the period, which Akhenaton encouraged.
Aton as a sun disk, with rays ending in hands
We have already mentioned the features of this art form in royal portraiture, where its innovations are most noticeable. Akhenaton swept away the old canon of artistic taste; it was, perhaps, inevitable that the original freedom of expression which he may have meant to promote developed into a new canon, with its own set of rules. The strange bodily malformations of the king were copied in the portraits of his wife and children and, to a lesser degree,