* We know at present of fourteen of these stelæ. A certain number must still remain to be discovered on both banks of the Nile.
[Illustration: 082.jpg THE DECORATED PAVEMENT OF THE PALACE]
Atonû was one of the forms of the Sun, and perhaps the most material one of all those devised by the Egyptians. He was defined as the good god who rejoices in truth, the lord of the solar course, the lord of the disk, the lord of heaven, the lord of earth, the living disk which lights up the two worlds, the living Harmakhis who rises on the horizon bearing his name of Shû, which is disk, the eternal infuser of life. His priests exercised the same functions as those of Heliopolis, and his high priest was called Oîrimaû, like the high priest of Râ in Aunû. This functionary was a certain Marirl, upon whom the king showered his favours, and he was for some time the chief authority in the State after the Pharaoh himself. Atonû was represented sometimes by the ordinary figure of Horus,* sometimes by the solar disk, but a disk whose rays were prolonged towards the earth, like so many arms ready to lay hold with their little hands of the offerings of the faithful, or to distribute to mortals the _crux ansata_, the symbol of life. The other gods, except Amon, were sharers with humanity in his benefits. Atonû proscribed him, and tolerated him only at Thebes; he required, moreover, that the name of Amon should be effaced wherever it occurred, but he respected Râ and Horus and Harmakhis--all, in fact, but Amon: he was content with being regarded as their king, and he strove rather to become their chief than their destroyer.
* It was probably this form of Horus which had, in the temple at Thebes, the statue called the red image of Atonû in Paatoml.
** Prisse dAvennes has found at Karnak, on fragments of the temple, the names of other divinities than Atonû worshipped by Khûniatonû.