The earliest monuments of Amenhotep IV, who in his fifth regnal year changed his name to Akhenaton (“One Useful to Aton”), are conventional in their iconography and style, but from the first, he gave the sun god a didactic title naming Aton, the solar disk.
This title was later written inside a pair of cartouches, as a king’s name would be.
The king declared his religious allegiance by the unprecedented use of “high priest of the sun god” as one of his own titles.
The term Aton had long been in use, but under Thutmose IV the Aton had been referred to as a god, and under Amenhotep III those references became more frequent.
Thus, Akhenaton did not create a new god but rather singled out this aspect of the sun god from among others.
He also carried further radical tendencies that had recently developed in solar religion, in which the sun god was freed from his traditional mythological context and presented as the sole beneficent provider for the entire world.
The king’s own divinity was emphasized: the Aton was said to be his father, of whom he alone had knowledge, and they shared the status of king and celebrated jubilees together.
In his first five regnal years, Akhenaton built many temples to the Aton, of which the most important was in the precinct of the temple of Amon-Re at Karnak. In these open-air structures was developed a new, highly stylized form of relief and sculpture in the round.
The Aton was depicted not in anthropomorphic form but as a solar disk from which radiating arms extend the hieroglyph for “life” to the noses of the king and his family.
During the construction of these temples, the cult of Amon and other gods was suspended, and the worship of the Aton in an open-air sanctuary superseded that of Amon, who had dwelt in a dark shrine of the Karnak temple.
King Akhenaton of the New Kingdom in ancient Egypt