The reasons for the specific elements of a myth (the cryptic reason why a given culture might have chosen a serpent god or the son of god over the sun god) are ineffable, and all attempted explanations of a myth are mythical. Scholars of myths compare religions to find that spiritual element that links and validates the human search (that search to find that which is everlasting within the brevity of a human's lifespan); and historians of recorded cultures thread together implication, meaning, and motive from a few tangible and often random happenings. The myth of Aten came from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt. For over 1500 years Ancient Egypt practiced polytheism with each town having its own god. Usually such gods were animal gods as was the case with the cat-goddess, Bast of Bubastis, but many of the towns found that once they attached the word "Re," the commonest name for the sun god, it enhanced the denotation so that local gods became more ubiquitous and more deserving of reverence. In the case of the falcon god, Re-Harakhti, a name change was given to It (the great It) that contained more overt connotations. Not only was the word, "Re" put before the regular name of the falcon-god, but engravings depicted It with the sun god above It's head. The pharaoh, Akhenaten, in his quest for the one sun god, Aten, disliked focusing all of his energies toward military ventures that would have decimated the bellicose Nubian-like creatures and stray Hittites that fell onto his shores like waves. He knew that he could decimate them if continual efforts were applied the way one wipes away a group of ants again and again. He hadn't even considered that it would wipe out his nation's treasury not to mention his own personal coffers. He didn't want to give himself to anti-terrorist strategies and 24 hour a day campaigns that would have sustained his empire but buried him in lonely problematic calculations, hypotheses about the thinking of some elusive enemy, and general logic (not that the President Bushes used any of the above). He was reluctant to part from continual dreaminess and to end the world of the child that saw magic in a waving leaf on a branch of a tree. He didn't want tedium that was as long as the sentences of this prose. The only military ventures he envisioned for himself were preemptive and bloody executions of the more vocally intransigent non-believers who would diminish the ubiquitousness of his own god and challenge his animistic thinking of nature as being linked to man by their harping on animal gods. For his eternal link to the sun was more essential and part of himself than any of his arms or legs. And so, reluctant to part from dreaminess, he built a new capital city for Egypt that he devoted to the worship of Aten. The city, Amarna, was created to be Aten's sacrosanct home. As for the crusades to extirpate all memory of any gods other than Aten through the destruction of temples and relieves