It was not unusual for a pharaoh to favor one god over the others by, for instance, diverting resources to that god’s temple or employing more priests to tend to the god’s needs. But the exclusive worship of one god was unprecedented in Egypt, and the denial of the other gods’ existence was unfathomable. Yet that is precisely what Akhenaten proposed with his worship of the Aten. As a result, the young pharaoh from the Eighteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom in ancient Egypt became the first monotheist in all of recorded history.
