Editing Akhenaten (section)

=== Atenism and other gods ===

Some debate has focused on the extent to which Akhenaten forced his religious reforms on his people.{{sfn|Hornung|1992|p=47}} Certainly, as time drew on, he revised the names of the Aten, and other religious language, to increasingly exclude references to other gods; at some point, also, he embarked on the wide-scale erasure of traditional gods' names, especially those of Amun.{{sfn|Allen|2005|pp=217–221}} Some of his court changed their names to remove them from the patronage of other gods and place them under that of Aten (or Ra, with whom Akhenaten equated the Aten). Yet, even at Amarna itself, some courtiers kept such names as Ahmose ("child of the moon god", the owner of tomb 3), and the sculptor's workshop where the famous [[Nefertiti Bust]] and other works of royal portraiture were found is associated with an artist known to have been called [[Thutmose (sculptor)|Thutmose]] ("child of Thoth"). An overwhelmingly large number of [[Egyptian faience|faience]] amulets at Amarna also show that talismans of the household-and-childbirth gods Bes and Taweret, the eye of Horus, and amulets of other traditional deities, were openly worn by its citizens. Indeed, a cache of royal jewelry found buried near the Amarna royal tombs (now in the [[National Museum of Scotland]]) includes a finger ring referring to Mut, the wife of Amun. Such evidence suggests that though Akhenaten shifted funding away from traditional temples, his policies were fairly tolerant until some point, perhaps a particular event as yet unknown, toward the end of the reign.{{sfn|Ridley|2019|pp=187–194}}

Archaeological discoveries at Akhetaten show that many ordinary residents of this city chose to gouge or chisel out all references to the god Amun on even minor personal items that they owned, such as commemorative scarabs or make-up pots, perhaps for fear of being accused of having Amunist sympathies. References to Amenhotep III, Akhenaten's father, were partly erased since they contained the traditional Amun form of his name: Nebmaatre Amunhotep.{{sfn|Reeves|2019|pp=154–155}}