Akhenaton has been called by historian James Henry Breasted "the first individual in history", as well as the first monotheist, first scientist, and first romantic. As early as 1899 Flinders Petrie declared that ; '' If this were a new religion, invented to satisfy our modern scientific conceptions, we could not find a flaw in the correctness of this view of the energy of the solar system.

How much Akhenaton understood, we cannot say, but he certainly bounded forward in his views and symbolism to a position which we cannot logically improve upon at the present day. Not a rag of superstition or of falsity can be found clinging to this new worship evolved out of the old Aton of Heliopolis, the sole Lord of the universe. '' H.R. Hall even claimed that the pharaoh was the "first example of the scientific mind".