AKHENATEN/TUTANKHAMUN

THE DISCOVERY OF AKHENATEN continued

In this predicament, is was customary for early visitors to Amarna to refer to the people represented on the reliefs as the "Disk Worshippers", from the image of the sun shooting forth a dozen or more rays, each ending in a hand, which dominated the upper part of nearly every scene and which was clearly a special symbol of veneration. It did not require particularly acute perception to see that this rayed disk with its protective uraeus, had a special connection with the royal pair. Its hands brought the ankh or sign of life to their nostrils, or clasped their limbs or persons as though to support them; but such privileges were denied to their subjects, however exalted. It, too, was accompanied by two cartouches enclosing its names, like the two great names of a king, but they were larger than the cartouches of the pharaoh and surrounded by a double border. The signs within these were difficult to interpret but were evidently the same as those which accompanied a representation of the sun-god, ReHerakhte, as a falcon-headed man, found on a few monuments elsewher, though not at Amarna.

Eventually, following the opinion of German scholars, the contents of the two great cartouches were recognized as a 'didactic' name of an age-old kingly god in his aspect of the entire day-time sun, 'Re-Horus, who rejoices in the horizon in his name of the light which is in the sun-disk".

Whatever this name meant, and new interpretations were to appear with each generation of scholars, the important element was (hieroglyph), ATEN, the sun's disk, which was frequently used alone as though it were an abbreviated form of the longer name. It did not go unobserved either that a different version of the didactic name also existed.

The excision of the names of the king and queen and, sporadically of the god himself, and of other members of the royal family, suggested that the "Disk Worshippers" had incurred some kind of odium. Their names did not appear on the lists of pharaohs which about this time were coming to light at Saqqara, Karnak and elsewhere. The family at Amarna bore all the signs of being figures and faces and names that were anathema. Such marks of execration only added to the mistery of the place.