Deity · Egyptian · c. 1350 BCE
Aten
Also called Aton, Iten
The sun-disc of Akhenaten's reform: for about twenty years the only god Egypt was permitted, worshipped without an image, and erased almost completely afterwards.
Narrow source base
For roughly two decades in the fourteenth century BCE, Akhenaten shut the temples of the other gods, moved the capital to virgin ground, and made the Aten the sole object of worship. The iconography is the most striking part of it: no animal head, no human body, just the disc with rays ending in hands that reach down and offer the sign of life. It is a deliberate refusal of the way Egyptian gods had always been drawn.
The Great Hymn to the Aten, carved in the tombs at Amarna, is one of the finest surviving pieces of Egyptian literature — a long, close, observational poem about what light does to a country when it arrives in the morning. Its resemblance to Psalm 104 has been argued about for a century and is not settled.
The reform did not outlive its author. The court returned to Thebes, the old cults reopened, and Akhenaten's name was chiselled out of the record so thoroughly that he was unknown until the nineteenth century.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
What the name means
The ordinary Egyptian word for the physical disc of the sun, promoted to the name of a god — the point being that this god is the thing you can see.
Where it was actually worshipped
Akhetaten, the purpose-built capital at Amarna
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- Rank
- The Disc
- Pantheon
- Egyptian
- Order
- Egyptian pantheon
- Base of operations
- Akhetaten, the purpose-built capital at Amarna
- Era
- c. 1350 BCE
- Traditions
- Egyptian
Traits
- Domain
- The sun's visible disc, light, the sole source of life
- Traditional form
- A disc with rays ending in human hands — deliberately not a person and not an animal
Stats
Known connections
Identified with
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to Aten, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- divination1
- material1
- social1
1 texts
Which texts say so?
Sole creator in the Amarna hymns: makes the seasons, fills the land with beauty at dawn, and is addressed without an image because the disc itself is the god.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
Named in the plague table alongside Ra for the ninth plague, the darkness. The corpus grades that pairing A — the strongest in the whole table — though the credit belongs to Egyptian solar theology generally rather than to the Aten, whose cult had been dead for centuries by any plausible date for Exodus.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Aten?
Is Aten the same as Ra?
What rank is Aten?
How else is Aten spelled?
What is Aten said to do?
How old is Aten?
Nearest in the corpus
If Aten is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Khepri
The Morning Sun · Egyptian
The sun at dawn, in the form of a scarab beetle rolling it up over the horizon — one of the three daily aspects of the sun, and a pun on the word for coming into being.
Anubis
Guide of the Dead · Egyptian
Embalmer and psychopomp, who leads the dead to the scales — the office Western tradition eventually gives to Michael and to Azrael.
Horus
Falcon King · Egyptian
Son of Osiris, who contends eighty years with Set for the throne. Every living pharaoh was understood to be his incarnation.
Isis
Great of Magic · Egyptian
The great magician who reassembles Osiris and tricks Ra into surrendering his secret name. Her cult eventually reached as far as Roman Britain.
Nephthys
Lady of the House · Egyptian
Set's wife who sides with her sister Isis against him, and mourns Osiris at the head of the bier.
Osiris
Lord of the Dead · Egyptian
Murdered by Set, reassembled by Isis, and installed as judge of the dead. He is the earliest fully developed dying-and-rising sovereign we have.
The book behind Aten
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. It is public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Egyptian Hymns, Stelae & Temple Inscriptions
Various; tr. E. A. Wallis Budge and others · c. 2000 BCE - 300 BCE · Egyptian
Read Egyptian Hymns, Stelae & Temple Inscriptions in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.