Reflection on, "Akhenaten"

Before this reading, I had never heard of him.  I had never even known about a spark of monotheism in egyptian history.  In the reading, " The Hymn to Aten," it lists a set of ideals created by Akhenaten.  Basically in everything he lists, he is creating a perfect lifestyle to live by, where you are protected and nothing can go wrong.  Also, in one section of the reading, he speaks about how before the sun god, Aten, was addressed as the only god as oppose to all of the gods, how the human's eyes were covered and they didn't know anything.  So, in a way Akhenaten is sort of trashing polytheism is a classy manner.  Now something that i was interested the we discussed is how when Akhenaten declared there only being one god, how everyone followed his way, then switched back to polytheism after he died.  I think that mostly comes from the way he projected his beliefs.  If he wasn't doing a very good job, they obviously it didn't stick with the people.  To conclude, In my opinion i think of Akhenaten as being a not very persuasive and good pusher of his religious ideas, and that is what made the whole monotheistic idea at the time suffer.