ATON

also spelled Aten, also called Yati, in ancient Egyptian religion, a sun god, depicted as the solar disk emitting rays terminating in human hands, whose worship briefly was the state religion. The pharaoh Akhenaton (q.v.; reigned 135336 BC) reinstituted the supremacy of the sun god (see Re) with the startling innovation that the Aton was to be the only god. In opposition to the Amon-Re priesthood of Thebes (see Amon), Akhenaton built the city Akhetaton (now Tell el-Amarna) as the centre for the Aton's worship. The most important surviving document of the new religion is the Aton Hymn, which was inscribed in several versions in the tombs of Akhetaton. Like some other hymns of its period, the text focuses on the world of nature and the god's beneficent provision for it. The hymn opens with the rising of the sun: Men had slept like the dead; now they lift their arms in praise, birds fly, fish leap, plants bloom, and work begins. Aton creates the son in the mother's womb, the seed in men, and has generated all life. He has distinguished the races, their natures, tongues, and skins, and fulfills the needs of all. Aton made the Nile in Egypt and rain, like a heavenly Nile, in foreign countries. He has a million forms according to the time of day and from where he is seen; yet he is always the same. . . The only person who knows and comprehends the god fully is said to be Akhenaton, together with his wife, Nefertiti. The hymn to the Aton has been compared in imagery to Psalm 104 (Bless the Lord, O my soul). Akhenaton devoted himself to the worship of the Aton, erasing all images of Amon and all writings of his name, and sometimes even writings containing the word gods. But the new religion was rejected by the Egyptian elite after Akhenaton's death, and the general populace had probably never adopted it in the first place. After Akhenaton's death, the old gods were reestablished and the new city was abandoned. Aton-worship was not fully monotheistic (because the pharaoh himself was considered a god), nor was it a direct precursor of monotheistic religions like Judaism.