Egypt tried worshipping a single sun god for twenty years, then erased it
In the 14th century BC the pharaoh Akhenaten raised the Aten, the disc of the sun, above every other god, shut traditional temples and built a new capital in its honour. The experiment lasted about two decades. His successors restored the old gods and set about wiping his name from Egypt's monuments.
The idea did not come from nowhere. Egyptian religion had hundreds of gods defined by their relations to one another, and the sun god Ra had been foremost in the Old Kingdom, when pharaohs were cast as his sons. In the New Kingdom, Amun of Thebes, fused with Ra as Amun-Ra, grew rich on conquest. Tomb hymns of the period, which Jan Assmann calls the new solar theology, began describing the sun's daily journey as the god's work alone, giving life to all peoples. Meanwhile aten, once a word for any disc, came to mean the sun's disc and slowly took on divine status. Amenhotep III styled himself the dazzling sun disk.
His son Amenhotep IV, crowned about 1353 BC, built a temple to the Aten at Karnak in a new style, Amarna art, with elongated, exaggerated figures. The Aten received royal-style cartouches and was shown as a disc with rays rather than a falcon-headed man. In Year 5 the king renamed himself Akhenaten, roughly effective spirit of the Aten, and founded a capital, Akhetaten, at the site now called Amarna. Art turned intimate, showing Nefertiti and the family in daily scenes, and decrees shifted to Late Egyptian, closer to everyday speech.
Exclusivity hardened. Workmen chiselled out the names and images of Amun and other gods, and later the Aten's own names were purged of references to Ra-Horakhty, Maat and a word that sounded like the air god Shu. Scholars disagree on whether this amounts to monotheism, monolatry or henotheism.
Akhenaten died in Year 17. A Theban graffito from the reign of a successor mentions a scribe of Amun's offerings, suggesting the old cult was already reviving. The boy king Tutankhaten, probably Akhenaten's son, became Tutankhamun and issued the Restoration Stela lamenting the ruined temples, while government returned to Memphis and Thebes and Amarna emptied.
Source: Atenism
