Their primary solution to the difficulty was the combined god Amun-Re, representing Amun as manifest and active in the created world through its major force, the sun (the Egyptian word
Re, also used as a name of the sun god, means "sun"). This process of combining two or more gods into a single deity, known as
syncretism, was embedded in Egyptian thought. It reflected the realization that different gods could be understood both as independent entities and as complementary manifestations of a single, larger force—in essence, much the same as the Christian concept of the Trinity.
Early Rule
Akhenaton's original name, Amenhotep, means "Amun is content," and the king began his reign by honoring Amun-Re on royal monuments, as his predecessors had done. Akhenaton's earliest known project, however, was a monument erected in Karnak not for Amun-Re but for a separate form of the sun god under a new name: "Harakhti, who becomes active from the Akhet in his identity as the light that is in the Aton." Harakhti, meaning "Horus of the Akhet," was one of the traditional Egyptian gods, the sun viewed as king of nature, rising into the world from the Akhet, the liminal zone between the netherworld, where
the sun was thought to go at night, and the visible horizon.
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