There is a legend in ancient Egypt that the young King Ikhnaton was born at sunrise, and it is written further how the sun sought out his earthly son, and set his mark upon the infant brow and starred the infant eyes so that they might bear the splendour of the god. The child stretched forth his tiny hands to the power of all life, thus acknowledging this immortal kinship. Then, it is said, all the court hid its face, being seized with a sudden terror and blinded with the light, save only the Queen Tiy, who bowed her head in joy because she recognized in this symbol the favor of Re and of the new god Aton.
But the power which was felt only by the mother was to be expressed by the son — in the evolution of a new religion. From his birth the boy was dreamy, given to strange meditations, and this nature brought up amidst the traditions and surroundings of an ancient race, at a time when new intellectual and emotional forces were directing themselves against the old order in Egypt, combined to make a man who was far, far ahead of his time.
This king saw beyond the barriers of his crumbling empire, and knew that there was a relationship between Egypt and the rest of the world. He knew this because in some marvelous way he had come to believe that there was only one God over all the world. He was so eager and sure that in his enthusiasm he cried aloud, “He was known in my heart, revealed to my face, I understood—” “O, living Aton, beginning of life—” But Egypt was too old to understand — or to care. Because he was the king he could alter much in the outward forms, and to all appearances Egypt worshipped Aton “the sole God” during the brief reign of Ikhnaton — yet with his death the reaction from the first monotheistic tendency in Egypt was still more swift and bitter. All but a few went their own way back to the old gods, since the fine gold of the king no longer meted out to them “in the new faith.”
So it is Ikhnaton the individual (the first individual in history) rather than Ikhnaton the priest of Aton, whom it is interesting to contemplate. During the brief span of years in which he reigned, years so fraught with tumult and strife and warfare, years fretted with the discontent of the people of the empire, he dared to stand alone and face not the laws that were written down in the Book of Pharohs, but the facts which he believed to be more important than war, power, or temporal happiness — namely, “living in truth” to oneself and one’s god.
This piece was first published in Issue 2 of The Keynote, an early student journal, in December 1928.