Ekskluzywizm w religii Achenatona?

Abstrakt

33,000 years ago, 15,000 people, or perhaps 20,000 or a little more, following their king, began to settle a wide and hitherto unoccupied desert portion on the Nile in Middle Egypt. This place, a place of sunrise, was later termed Achet-Aton ‘Horizon of the Sun-disk’, a sacred territory dedicated to the sun god Aten, by Akhenaten (‘devoted to the Aten’) otherwise Amenhotep IV (1347-1332 BC).

The focus of this article is to engage with the controversy surrounding the exclusivism of the god Aten. We will propose that King Achenaten intended to create a sacred space for the god Aten, confining the new religion to the site of Akhet-Aten.

Akhet-Aten was not conceived of as a typical city (in the modern sense), but was essentially a royal residence with a tract of sacred land attached, with a new style of ceremonial architecture, as for example The Long Temple, the field of offering-tables, and a string of courts open to the sky, where many ceremonies were held in the open sunlight. The huge enclosure the Great Aton Temple was surely designed to accommodate large crowds of people.        

In the context of the territory surrounding the city, the positions of the boundary stelae make it clear that the sacred territory took was not only determined by the King’s religious vision. The visual arts, and in particular the architecture, were embedded in a sacred geography and landscape. The complex became an extraordinary tool to dramatize Akhenaten’s authority.