Great Hymn To The Aten

Great Hymn To The Aten

The Great Hymn to the Aten is the longest form of one of a number of hymn-poems written to the sun god Aten and attributed to King Akhenaten who radically changed traditional forms of Egyptian religion replacing them with Atenism. The hymn-poem provides a glimpse of the religious artistry of the Amarna period expressed in multiple forms encompassing literature, new temples, and in the building of a whole new city at the site of present day Amarna as the capital of Egypt. Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson said that "It has been called 'one of the most significant and splendid pieces of poetry to survive from the pre-Homeric world.'" Egyptologist John Darnell asserts that the hymn was sung.

Various courtiers' rock tombs at Amarna (ancient Akhet-Aten, the city Akhenaten founded) have similar prayers or hymns to the Aten or to the Aten and Akhenaten jointly. One of these, found in almost identical form in five tombs, is known as The Short Hymn to the Aten. The long version discussed in this article was found in the tomb of the courtier (and later Pharaoh) Ay.

Akhenaten forbade the worship of other gods, a radical departure from the centuries of Egyptian religious practice. Finally, Akhenaten issued a royal decree that the name Aten was no longer to be depicted by the hieroglyph of a solar disc emanating rays but instead had to be spelled out phonetically. Thus Akhenaten extended even further the heretical belief that Aten was not the disc or orb of the sun (the Egyptian sun god Ra) but a universal spiritual presence (see Akhenaten and Atenism). Akhenaton's religious reforms (later regarded heretical and reverted under his successor Tutankhamun) have been described by some scholars as the earliest known example of monotheistic thought while others consider it to have been an example of henotheism.