AKHENATEN

" T H E B E A U T I F U L C H I L D O F T H E L I V I N G A T E N "

The traditional titles of Pharaoh remained unaltered, but the king was often pleased to style himself
"The Beautiful Child Of The Living Aten"; representations of the king as a child were popular at this
time and also served as amulets, replacements for the proscribed divine amulets of prior times. The
Aten, Akhenaten's god, did not change his own royal titulary until some years later.

The assumption of the new titulary coincided with the solemn foundation of a new Residence; both
occurred in the fifth regnal year. Akhenaten finally decided no longer to adorn Thebes with temples
for his new god Aten, and he sought out a place where he would not be hampered by monuments
constructed in the traditional style or dedicated to the traditional deities. He found this place in a
remote locale in Middle Egypt, where he would not be obliged to destroy anything but could simply
build.

In moving the Royal Residence, he could find a precedent in Amenemhet I, who inaugurated Dyna-
sty 12 in the 20th century BC and abandoned Thebes to found a new Residence just over 37 miles
south of Cairo, near the modern town of el-Lisht. But this was done solely for political reasons, not
religious ones, whereas here the move was above all a religiously motivated HEGIRA on the part of
the religious reformer, one that did not take him to any of the old centers, but to this remote locale.