which attached to Amenhotep and his immediate successors on account of
their religious reformation.
[Illustration: KHUENATEN WORSHIPPING THE SOLAR DISK.]
The aversion of the "Disk-worshippers" to the old Egyptian religion was
shown (1) in the change of his own name which the new monarch made soon
after his accession, from Amenhotep to Khu-en-Aten, whereby he cleared
himself from any connection with the old discarded head of the Pantheon,
and associated himself with the new supreme god, Aten; (2) in the
obliteration of the name of Ammon from monuments; and (3) in the removal
of the seat of government from the site polluted by Ammon-worship and
polytheism to a new site at Tel-el-Amarna, where Aten alone was
worshipped and alone represented in the temples. The enmity, however,
was not indiscriminate. Amenhotep took for one of his titles the
epithet, "Mi-Harmakhu," or "beloved by Harmachis," probably because he
could look on Harmachis, a purely sun-god, as a form of Aten; and to
this god he erected an obelisk at Silsilis. His monumental war upon the
old religion seems also not to have been general, but narrowly
circumscribed, being, in fact, confined to the erasure of Ammon's name,
especially at Thebes, and the mutilation of his form in a few instances;
but there does not appear to have been any such general iconoclasm
practised by the "Disk-worshippers" as by the "Shepherd Kings," or any
such absolute requirement that "one god alone should be worshipped in
all the land" as was put forth by Apepi. The "Disk-worshippers" did not
so much attempt to change the religion of Egypt as to establish for
themselves a peculiar court-religion of a pure and elevated character.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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