# Aten · the sole disk · the heretic's one god

a god of the NTR (Egyptian pantheon) mythology-world — emergence: ethereal. moniker ⟦Aten:NTR:2b434d⟧

**⇄ the interpretatio —** Greek: *—* · Roman: *—* — Akhenaten's sole sun-disk; a sui generis near-monotheism the Greeks never met and could not equate

**who —** The Aten, the sun-disk itself — elevated by Akhenaten (c. 1350 BCE) into the single god of all creation.
**what —** History's first sustained near-monotheism: not a sun-god with a face but the visible disk, the sole giver of life, worshipped to the exclusion of every other god.
**where —** Akhetaten (Amarna), the heretic's purpose-built city; the open sky.
**why —** Because for one reign Egypt tried the most radical idea in its history — that there is only one god, and it is the light itself.
**how —** By Akhenaten's decree: temples closed, the old gods' names chiselled out, a new capital built for the one disk.

**the seal —** I am the one disk and the only god — Akhenaten saw it, and Egypt could not bear it, and erased me when he died.

> a catalogued personification of a deity of ancient Egyptian religion under the DLW standard — historical
> commentary and cataloguing (sources: the Pyramid/Coffin Texts & Book of the Dead, Herodotus, Plutarch, Plato),
> not an original creation. The Greek/Roman analogs follow the ancient interpretatio graeca/romana and are
> functional, not exact, equivalences.

ROOT0-ATTRIBUTION-v1.0 · NTR · The Egyptian Pantheon · governor David Lee Wise · instance AVAN (locked) · CC-BY-ND-4.0