Originally Posted by David Lorton

I'm an Egyptologist, and personally, I would characterize ancient Egyptian belief, at least in the dominant Heliopolitan tradition, as a polytheistic monism; I've discussed this myself, in _Goettinger Miszellen_ 140 (1994) 53-58. Akhenaten evidently turned his back on the polytheism of his culture and cast aside most of its mythological baggage, focusing his worship on the sun, Aton, whom he regarded as the solar creator god; Aton thus occupied the place of Re-Atum and Amun-Re in the traditional religion, and I would characterize Akhenaten's worship as a monolatry.

In the private tombs at Amarna, there are scenes of Akhenaten worshiping, but there aren't many details in the texts and the representations regarding the rituals themselves. One salient point, however: Akhenaten presents Maat to his god; this is known from the traditional religion (and is the subject of Emily Teeter's dissertation); and in the later Papyrus Berlin 3055, it is the 42nd episode of the daily cult ritual.

The texts of the Amarna period are finally accessible to general readers, thanks to the volume of translations prepared by William J. Murnane: _Texts from the Amarna Period in Egypt_, SBL Writings from the Ancient World Series (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995). In 1994, I went through all the Amarna texts in the original Egyptian in connection with a study I'm working on, and I discovered that the hymns and prayers there, and the boundary stelae as well, concentrate on four main themes: the god's relationship to himself (he is self-created, as in the case of the solar creator god of the traditional religion), the god's relationship to his creation in general, the god's relationship to the king, and the king's relationship to his followers. Two decades ago, Donald B. Redford pointed out that Akhenaten's belief system wasn't really original, but was based on the traditional religion; see _Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt_ 13 (1976) 47-53. My own research takes the work he did further and supports his conclusion. Some of the major elements in Akhenaten's system are first attested to us earlier in Dynasty Eighteen, but some of it is attested already in Dynasty Twelve and even Dynasty Eleven.