The Aten religion in Ancient Egypt 14th Century BC. It virtually came and went with one King, Akhenaten, which may indicate how centralised power must have been in that society.
The king's power to make his subjects adopt a new religion that they quickly abandoned after his death may have been to do with the country's natural geographical isolation by desert, good internal communications via the Nile, dependence on government to organise irrigation and production and storage of food in an economy dependent on the Nile floods and which lacked a currency or a merchant class, as well as the immense prestige of the Egyptian monarchy.
We know that Akenaten closed the temples of Egypt's colourful multiplicity of gods and goddesses like Re, Amun, Horus, Seth, Osiris, Isis, Hathor etc. and had their names defaced in inscriptions.
He instituted instead the worship of the sun disk, which he called the Aten, worshipped in temple courts open to the sky. He built a new capital city and pioneered new styles and even colours in art that would not be associated with worship of the old gods. He made himself the key figure in Aten worship.
Arguably, this was the first recorded monotheistic religion in the world. Whether it is coincidence that the next oldest recorded monotheistic religion, that of the Hebrews, appeared in a country, Israel, that is a near neighbour of Egypt, is an extremely important but open question.
After Akhenaten's death his immediate successors seem to have continued the Aten religion to an extent for a couple of years, but then abandoned it, along with his capital and artistic innovations. Akhenaten's son, born 'Tutankhaten', came to the throne a few years later as 'Tutankhamun', under which name he is still famous. Thereafter, Akhenaten's own name was chiselled out of inscriptions and left out of lists of Egyptian kings, and the memory of him and his religion removed from history, until the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie excavated the site of Akhenaten's capital in the early twentieth century.
