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The Aten in hieroglyphs: the sun disc of Akhenaten

17 October 2026

The Aten is the disc of the sun, and its name is written with four signs: a reed leaf, a bread loaf, a ripple of water and the sun disc itself. Read itn, said "AH-ten", the first three spell the word and the disc shows what it means.

Under Akhenaten, around 1352 to 1336 BC, the Aten became the god above all others. It got a long royal name in two cartouches, like a king's, and a picture of its own: a disc whose rays end in small human hands.

Four signs for the sun disc

The reed leaf (M17) is the sound i, the loaf (X1) is t and the water ripple (N35) is n. Egyptian left out vowels, so the scribe wrote only itn. "Aten" is a modern way of saying it. Some scholars reconstruct the ancient sound closer to "YAH-tin".

The sun disc (N5) at the end is silent. It is a determinative, a sign that tells the reader which kind of word this is: something to do with the sun. The same disc read aloud is rꜥ, Ra.

Flowering reed Bread loaf Ripple of water Sun

Itn was once an ordinary word

Long before Akhenaten, itn meant any flat round thing, and above all the visible disc of the sun. The moon could be called a silver aten. In the Story of Sinuhe, written in the 12th Dynasty, a dead king flies up to heaven and joins the sun disc, his body merging with the one who made him.

Akhenaten went much further. He changed his own name from Amenhotep, "Amun is content", to Akhenaten, "Effective for the Aten", and built a new capital called Akhetaten, "Horizon of the Aten", at the place now called Amarna.

The god had two cartouches like a king

On Amarna reliefs and stelae, the Aten's name sits in a pair of cartouches, the rope rings kept for royal names.

The name changed during the reign. The early form, in two rings, reads roughly "The living Ra-Horakhty, who rejoices in the horizon" and "in his name of Shu, who is in the Aten". The first ring often opens with the ankh (S34), "living". Ra-Horakhty was the old falcon-headed sun god, and Shu the god of air and light.

Around year 9 of the reign, by the most common reckoning (some put it a few years later), those older gods were dropped. The later form reads "Ra, ruler of the two horizons, who rejoices in the horizon" and "in his name of light, which is the Aten", which some translate as "Ra the father, who has come as the Aten". If you see a falcon inside an Aten cartouche, the object is probably from early in the reign.

Ankh Cartouche

The disc's rays end in hands

Earlier sun gods were drawn as falcons or men with a sun on the head. Akhenaten's artists drew only the disc, high above the royal family. From it come straight lines of light, and each ray ends in a small open hand. Some hands touch the king and queen. Others hold an ankh to their noses and mouths: the breath of life.

The hands reach only the royal family. Ordinary people appear below, bowing or at work, and receive the god's gifts through the king. The Great Hymn to the Aten, carved in the tomb of Ay at Amarna, praises the disc as the maker of all lands and creatures, and names Akhenaten as the one who knows it.

Berlin shows the Aten's cartouches

In Berlin, the Neues Museum's Amarna rooms show the Aten's cartouches on slabs from houses at Amarna, early and later forms both, and a house altar with the king, Nefertiti and three daughters under the rays. Nefertiti's own longer name, Neferneferuaten, "Beautiful are the beauties of the Aten", holds the same four signs.

At Luxor Museum, a wall rebuilt from small sandstone blocks of Akhenaten's temples at Karnak shows the king under the Aten's rays, praising the god, beside scenes of daily work. Look also at Tutankhamun: he was born Tutankhaten, "Living image of the Aten", and swapped the god for Amun early in his reign. The Aten group survives on some of his objects.

Heart and windpipe

Four shapes write the god's name

Draw the tall reed leaf, the low half-round loaf under it and the zigzag line of water, then a circle with a dot in the middle for the disc. Those four shapes are the god's name in every Amarna cartouche.

For the picture, draw a circle, a fan of straight rays below it and a tiny hand at the end of each ray.

Draw the sun disc

Questions

What does the Aten symbol mean?

It is the sun disc, worshipped as the only god under Akhenaten. The rays ending in hands show the light of the sun reaching and blessing the royal family.

Is the Aten the same as Ra?

They are closely linked. Ra was the sun god of old, and the Aten was the visible disc of the sun. Akhenaten's later name for the Aten calls it Ra and dropped the older gods joined to it.

What happened to the Aten after Akhenaten?

Within a few years of his death, Amun and the old gods came back, and Akhetaten was abandoned. Later kings took down his temples and reused their blocks, and his name was left off the king lists.

Glossary

ankh: The sign of life, ꜥnḫ, a cross with a loop on top. Gods hold it out to kings in temple scenes.
cartouche: An oval ring drawn around a royal name, a loop of rope tied at one end. Kings wrote their two main names in cartouches.
determinative: A sign at the end of a word that is not read aloud. It shows what kind of thing the word means, such as a seated man for men and their jobs.
dynasty: A line of kings counted together, usually one family. Egyptologists number Egypt's kings in about 30 dynasties, following the priest Manetho.
relief: A carving on a flat surface. In raised relief the background is cut away. In sunk relief the figures are cut into the stone.
scribe: A person trained to read and write, who kept accounts, wrote letters and copied texts. Few Egyptians could write, and scribes were well respected.
stela: An upright stone slab carved with words and pictures, set up in tombs and temples or to mark a border.
temple: The house of a god, where priests served the god's statue. Temples for dead kings kept up their offerings after death.
tomb: A burial place: a pit, a mastaba, a pyramid or rooms cut into rock. Its chapel was where the family brought offerings.