The Aten

The Aten is the visible disk of the sun, worshipped as a god in its own right. Under the pharaoh Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BCE, the Aten was elevated to the sole god of Egypt — the other deities suppressed in what is often called history's first experiment in monotheism, and celebrated in the famous Great Hymn to the Aten as the one creator whose rays give life to all things.

Though the revolution was undone after Akhenaten's death and Egypt returned to its many gods, the episode remains a striking ancient reach toward a single supreme deity — the one divine source of light and life behind the world, a theme the later Platonists would pursue through their image of the Good as a sun lighting all that is.