Image Details

Erich Lessing
Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti, make offerings to their sole universal god, the sun disk Aten, in this 3.5-foot-high carving from Tell el-Amarna. The rays from the sun disk end in human hands that may be presenting an ankh (the symbol of life) to the royal couple. “You are in my heart,” the pious Akhenaten wrote in his Hymn to Light (see the first sidebar to this article), “and one lives only through you.”