Great Aten Temple

The Great Temple of the Aten was a temple located in the city of el-Amarna, Egypt [1]. It served as the main place of worship of the deity Aten during the reign of the 18th Dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten (c. 1353–1336 BCE) [1]. The Great Temple of the Aten was located just north of the Central City and was where Akhenaten fully established the proper cult and worship of the sun-disk [1]. The Temple was oriented on an east-west axis and the western entrance to the Great Temple was along the Royal Road [1]. Soon after the death of Akhenaten, Atenism was rejected as a religion and the city was destroyed [1]. The temple was dismantled, covered in new sand, and paved over, but ironically this has preserved the site better than it might normally have been for archaeologists today [1]. In 1890, Flinders Petrie, with permission from the Egyptian Antiquities Service, began excavating the area [1]. Since there was no cult statue, the traditional acts of raising and washing the god played no role in the Great Temple and worship rather consisted solely of singing hymns and giving offerings to the Aten [1].