* These extracts are taken from the hymns of Tel el-Amarna.
** In one of the tombs at Tel el-Amarna the king is depicted leading his mother Tîi to the temple of Atonû in order to see the Shadow of Râ, and it was thought with some reason that the Shadow of Râ was one of the names of the temple. I think that this designation applied also to the statue or symbol of the god; the _shadow_ of a god was attached to the statue in the same manner as the double, and transformed it into an animated body.
His worship assumes none of the severe and gloomy forms of the Theban cults: songs resound therein, and hymns accompanied by the harp or flute; bread, cakes, vegetables, fruits, and flowers are associated with his rites, and only on very rare occasions one of those bloody sacrifices in which the other gods delight. The king made himself supreme pontiff of Atonu, and took precedence of the high priest. He himself celebrated the rites at the altar of the god, and we see him there standing erect, his hands outstretched, offering incense and invoking blessings from on high.* Like the Caliph Hakim of a later age, he formed a school to propagate his new doctrines, and preached them before his courtiers: if they wished to please him, they had to accept his teaching, and show that they had profited by it. The renunciation of the traditional religious observances of the solar house involved also the rejection of such personal names as implied an ardent devotion to the banished god; in place of Amenôthes, he to whom Amon is united, the king assumed after a time the name of Khûniatonû, the Glory of the Disk, and all the members of his family, as well as his adherents at court, whose appellations involved the name of the same god, soon followed his example. The proscription of Amon extended to inscriptions, so that while his name or figure, wherever either could be got at, was chiselled out, the vulture, the emblem of Mût, which expressed the idea of mother, was also avoided.
* The altar on which the king stands upright is one of those cubes of masonry of which Naville discovered such a fine example in the temple of Hâtshopsîtû at Deîr el-Baharî.
** We find, however, some instances where the draughtsman, either from custom or design, had used the vulture to express the word mailt, the mother, without troubling himself to think whether it answered to the name of the goddess.