A Temple Built Open to the Sky

Egyptian temples were dark. The plan moves from an open forecourt through progressively lower and narrower halls to a small sanctuary with no windows, where the image of the god stood in the dark and was attended by a few priests. The Great Temple of the Aten at Akhetaten inverts this. It is a series of open courts filled with hundreds of offering tables, with no roofed sanctuary and no cult statue at the end, because the object of worship was the sun itself and the point was to stand under it. The change in architecture follows directly from the change in theology.

Akhenaten's Aten is not a god who lives in an image and must be woken, washed and fed each morning; it is the disk overhead, whose rays are shown in reliefs ending in small hands that reach down to the royal family. The reliefs are also the clue to who was allowed to approach. In traditional Egyptian religion any person could petition a local god through its image, but at Amarna the Aten is shown attending to the king and his family, and ordinary worshippers are shown honouring the king. Whether that made the cult a genuine monotheism or a royal monopoly on access is an argument scholars continue to hold, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than settling it.