Which Egyptian god was the god of the sun disk worshipped during the Amarna period? Aten was the Egyptian deity represented by the sun disk and central to Akhenaten’s religious reforms.
Aten began as a term for the sun’s visible disk and was associated with the traditional solar god Ra. Under Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, later called Akhenaten, Aten was elevated above Egypt’s other gods and eventually became the sole god of the official state religion.
Akhenaten founded a new capital, Akhetaten—modern Amarna—to honor Aten. Unlike traditional gods, Aten was usually shown not as a human or animal figure but as a radiant disk whose rays ended in hands, sometimes offering the ankh, the symbol of life, to the royal family.
A common mix-up is calling Aten simply “the sun god” in the same sense as Ra. Aten was specifically the solar disk and became the focus of Atenism, a short-lived religious system that declined after Akhenaten’s death. His successor Tutankhamun restored the older cults and changed his name from Tutankhaten.