King Akhenaton of the New Kingdom in ancient Egypt
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The earliest monuments of Amenhotep IV, who in his fifth regnal year changed his name to Akhenaton (“One Useful to Aton”), are conventional in their iconography and style, but from the first, he gave the sun god a didactic title naming Aton, the solar disk.
This title was later written inside a pair of cartouches, as a king’s name would be.
The king declared his religious allegiance by the unprecedented use of “high priest of the sun god” as one of his own titles.
The term Aton had long been in use, but under Thutmose IV the Aton had been referred to as a god, and under Amenhotep III those references became more frequent.