The reason this passage about Aten stands out to me because it celebrates one of the first monotheistic views in history. It was interesting that the king, Akhenaten, decided to stray from the regular polytheistic ways and starts worshipping one god who is in charge of the sun.
Based on the history from before the passage, it seems that a very small portion of society believed in the one god, Aten. It appears that only Akhenaten, the queen, and Aten’s sons are the main believers of this monotheistic view. The rest of Egypt chose to believe in many different gods and not just the sun god. It is also intriguing that after Akhenaten dies, the god Aten is rejected within a few years and the kings monuments are destroyed. They try to erase Akhenaten’s name from the society and go back to the ways of polytheism.
This story focuses on Aten being the sun God. Throughout the prayer, the sun and rays are mentioned many times, the first line of the passage “splended you rise in heaven’s lightland” (Line 1) refers to the sun rising in the sky. It then speaks about how when the sun(Aten) sets “earth is in darkness as if in death” that without Aten there is death and treachery at night, praising Aten for bringing light during the day. This is interesting because if Aten is the god of everything why is the darkness referred to as a separate entity? The prayer speaks about “their maker rests in lightland” which I assume means anything that happens in the dark has nothing to do with Aten, the sun god. If Aten is the one and only god, I think he should also be praised for the dark he “created”?
Another thing that was engaging in this prayers was the mention of “dat” which means the underworld. The prayers says “you made Hapy in dat,” which is referring to the flooding of the nile in the underworld. The mention of the underworld is confusing because of Aten being constantly referred to as exclusively the sun god. The underworld seems like something that should be mentioned when referring to whoever controls the night and the darkness, not the positive view of the sun god.