[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]
There is a scholarly view of Polytheism and monotheistic
belief in antiquity, which is often quite subtly nuanced. And there is the
public view, put about by popularisers, and in religious education classes. The
latter view is a simple one, which provides support for the idea that modern
religious belief is improved in some way. It suggests that monotheism
represents an intellectual advance on polytheistic belief, and provided a basis
for cultural unification which was not present before the introduction of the
idea. In the public mind there is a simple sequence of polytheism being
superseded by monotheism.
There are two candidates which appear to illustrate this
transformation, for the argument requires something resembling evidence: the
earliest being the supposed intellectual revolution undertaken by the Pharaoh
Akhenaten. This revolution failed to the extent that great effort was expended
by the other priesthoods in Egypt to obliterate all mention and memory of
Akhenaten’s name and actions. He was referred to as ‘that heretic’ by
succeeding generations.
The second candidate is the god of the Hebrews, and the
supposed development of monotheism. The revolution is recorded in the
Pentateuch as the work of Moses. The Hebrew god is shown as being more
efficacious than other Levantine Gods (it is to be remembered that, according
to the Pentateuch, Yahweh was introduced to the Hebrews before their migration
into the land of the Canaanites). [i] This revolution was successful, even if it did not prove a happy
transformation for the Hebrews, since later on, it led to the destruction of
much of their cultural life, when they were in conflict with Rome. It provided
a background for the development of Christianity. The Christian religion,
particularly once taken over as the state religion of Rome, oversaw the final
destruction of the great polytheistic systems of belief in Assyria, Babylonia,
and in Egypt.
The scholarly view has long known that polytheistic belief
in the ancient world is complex and much more than just a world of many gods.
Divinities were not seen as entirely discrete, and it was possible for
principal figures in a pantheon to embrace the lesser gods. Thus the Mesopotamian god Marduk
embraced the other gods, and their properties. Gods could appear in the form of
other gods – this is expressly described in Egyptian texts, where a god king
could appear (for example) in the form of the warrior god Montu, slaying his enemies, whatever
the King’s principal divine cult was. In Assyria, a priest possessed by a god
might speak a few lines in the character of one god, and in succeeding
sentences, speak in the voice of another god. This was conceivable if all of
the gods were connected together in a kind of primordial monotheism, which we
now describe with the term ‘henotheism’. As a consequence of this way of
thinking, the worship of one god did not preclude the recognition of other
gods, since they represented related aspects of the worshipped god.
The importance of this phenomenon is that it indicates that
the concept of the gods was understood to some extent as a continuum, and that
each of the gods represented a different characterization of the divine. The
individual gods in effect offered different connections with divinity.
Rome under the republic consolidated its power over
conquered territories and people through the assimilation of local gods. While
Rome still worshipped its pantheon of gods, such assimilation of local gods in
conquered territories was common. After Rome embraced Christianity
however, the former easy equivalence between divinities became impossible,
since the God of the Christians could not be the equivalent of all local
deities, as it was the universal deity, and by definition, one alone. The
policy of the Christian church was to employ the tactic of declaring local and
foreign gods as devils and their followers as heathens. They and their
characters were not to be embraced, but emphatically rejected.
As justification for this, the god of the Christians became
something which had been shown to man by divine revelation, rather than a
matter of philosophical argument about the nature of divinity. Whereas in the
ancient model of divine things there was an easy acceptance that the gods were in some way realisations of the properties and attributes they represented, and that they could be interchanged and
adapted, Yahweh, was the one true god, without peer, and for all eternity.
A similar process - the demonization of Caananite and
foreign gods and the forbidding of their worship - occurred among the Hebrews
in the earlier part of the first millennium B.C.E. Through the books of the Old
Testament we can gain a little understanding of the arc of development in
Hebrew thought, and something of the essentially polytheistic nature of their
intellectual system before the severe depredations of Hebrew culture by the
Assyrians, particularly in the 8th century B.C.E.
The rise of monotheism in Egypt is particularly difficult to
understand, but it is important to try and fathom its main aspects in order to
gain a comparative view. It is not clear
in fact that what we take to be the development of monotheistic belief in Egypt
in the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C.E is any such thing. Before
the rise of modern archaeology we knew little about Akhenaten, and there was a tendency
among the first scholars to study the evidence, to read easy parallels with
monotheism as represented in the Old Testament.
Excavation at modern Tell el Amarna (Akhet-aten, or ‘Horizon
of the Aten’/ ‘Limit of the Aten’), Akhenaten’s new city foundation,
quickly revealed that here scholars were dealing with a king whose beliefs and
cultural artefacts were significantly different from they had come to expect. [ii] He seems to have annoyed the priests of other Egyptian cults in
his own time, and he is still capable of acting as a lightning rod for
uninformed argument even now.
An important clue to the intellectual background of the
change in styling lies in Akhenaten’s former name: Amenhotep. At this time (the fourteenth century B.C.E.) the
cult and the priesthood of the god Amun were powerful and prominent, and they
had an important power base in Luxor. [iii] Amun is the first element in the name of
Akhenaten’s original name, and that of his father. The relationship of Egyptian
pharaohs to the various priesthoods is undeniably complex, however the
tradition in Egypt was that the king was a representation of the divine on
Earth. He was a god king, and could appear in the form of any member of the
divine pantheon. No-one however would be comfortable with a Pharaoh whose
principle identification would be that of a lesser god. So the most important divine name in
the Pharaoh’s name would be that of the divine cult which had the greatest
power and prestige at the time. The cult would then be the cult of the
King. [iv]
Amun is a strange god. He is unknowable and unseen. His
shrine was kept in a darkened temple. He could be represented in one of his many
forms, and through symbols. But his nature defies human understanding. He was regarded as an old god, though his cult did not have a history stretching back
into the distant past. Which means that Amun was recognised as a primordial
god, involved in the creation of the world, even if there was no ancient cult
of Amun. This means that the God was understood to be theologically significant in the 14th century B.C.E. Hence
the incorporation of the Gods’s name in the names of successive pharaohs.
The significant point to remember is that, as Amenhotep,
Akhenaten could appear in some divine form, but could not manifest as the god
himself. That is, he was Amun, who appears as other things, but by his very
nature, cannot appear directly in his principal nature. He transcends shape and form, and
is the unknowable god. Clearly there is an abstruse theology behind the
articulation of a divine nature which is invisible and unknowable. One might
characterize the Assyrian god Ashur in a very similar way: he sits at the head
of the pantheon, embraces the other gods, and manifests himself through
presence and action expressed in terms of representation by other divine forms.
Akhenaten however had a very specific idea of what was
divine. This idea departed radically from the complex and nuanced theologies of
Luxor and Thebes. On the face of the matter, it used to be argued that
Akhenaten represented the sun as divine.[v] This has been presented as a heresy pure and
simple, from the point of view of the other priesthoods in Egypt. The evidence
however does not support the notion that Akhenaten forbade the worship of other
gods from the outset, or that the priesthoods of other gods regarded the worship
of the Aten as a danger. After all, the sun was a divine figure in the pantheon
of gods, represented by Ra. But this was, at the time, a sun god whose
essential nature was understood to be beyond its outward appearance. The sun
was its symbol, and the good things which came to man from it were the product
of its essential nature, rather than its appearance and physical properties of heat and light. We know this since at this
particular period, the god Ra was often conjoined with the unknowable formless
god, as Amun-Ra. In this way the representational and symbolic nature of the
visible sun was emphasized.
It is useful to look closely at the name of Akhenaten’s god. We know it as Aten, and that is how it is given by most scholars. His full title however was
‘The Ra-Horus who rejoices in the horizon, in his/her Name of the Light which
is seen in the sun disk’. We find this full rendering of the Aten’s name on the
stelae placed around Akhetaten, which was Akhenaten’s newly founded capital.
These stelae were placed to mark the boundaries of the new foundation. Sometimes
the full name was shortened to Ra-Horus-Aten, or just ‘Aten’. Since two of the
names of Akhenaten’s god refer to the sun (Ra being an older name for the sun
god), it seems that some kind of intellectual synthesis of older ideas had
taken place.
The Aten is first mentioned (to our knowledge) in the Story of Sinuhe, which dates at least as far back as the twelfth dynasty, where the dead king is described as uniting with with the sun-disk
in the heavens. Akhenaten’s iconography never shows the god in anthropomorphic
form – instead the Aten is always shown as the sun disk with rays of light
extending from it, with hands at the end of each ray. Akhenaten and his family
receive these rays, and stand between the Aten and the ordinary Egyptians. The
Sun god was considered to be neither male nor female, but both simultaneously,
an idea which was reflected in the depiction of Akhenaten in sculpture and
reliefs.
Eventually the worship of the other gods was proscribed,
probably after a period of struggle between the royal court/cult of the Aten,
and the priesthoods, for which we have no direct detail – particularly the
priesthood of Amun. This does not mean that such a proscription was always part
of the intention of Akhenaten; he may have felt that he was forced to do this
owing to the strength of political opposition. However his adoption of the
worship of the sun disk, of which he was the representative on earth, as the
supreme deity, is an idea which does leave the other gods as fundamentally
irrelevant to the life of Egypt. Akhenaten’s Egypt however, was not monotheistic
in any meaningful sense, as long as other gods were worshipped.
Was Akhenaten's reign a "revolutionary" period in Egyptian
history? The evidence we have for Akhenaten is puzzling in a number
of ways: he changed the artistic canon of Egypt, moved his capital, changed the
public forms of worship and ritual; and changed the design of temples. The
reasons for these changes are not easy to understand. Consequently Akhenaten
has been the victim of both modern conjectures by Egyptologists,
and also the speculations of the lunatic fringe: the evidence is enigmatic,
suggestive, and lends itself to speculation. However, such is the psychological
power of the ”perceived” figure of Akhenaten that even the actual evidence is
sometimes discounted.
It is easy, for instance, to characterize Akhenaten as in
some way abnormal, as an aberration within his culture, by arguing from the
evidence of the extant Amarna letters and the boundary stelae that he walled
himself up in his new city foundation of Akhet-Aten; also, from his apparent
refusal to go to the assistance of his Levantine dominions when under attack
from the north; and, developing this notion further into Akhenaten as the first notable
pacifist, arguing that he was not depicted in the traditional warrior pose of
"Smiter of Asiatics".
As for the last assertion, it is untrue to say that
Akhenaten is not depicted in traditional fashion: he is shown as a warrior in a
number of kiosks; also, he initiated one campaign in Nubia, and in the Levant
he "responded to the collapse of the Mittani before the Hittites with a
mixture of diplomacy
and military action" [O'Connor, in Trigger, Kemp,
O'Connor, Lloyd, Ancient Egypt: A Social History, ch. 3, p.220.] The remains of the
Amarna archive of cuneiform tablets are insufficient for us to determine the
precise nature of Akhenaten's response to Levantine difficulties: most of the letters
are from Byblos, and their precise chronological order is uncertain. They can be arranged to illustrate a
continuous decline, but they might as well be arranged to show a series of ups
and downs.
As for his supposed voluntary imprisonment in his own
capital Akhet-Aten, this also is a conclusion which is not warranted by the
evidence. Akhenaten identifies one of his stelae saying that it is the
"southern stela which is on the eastern mountain of Akhet-Aten, that is
the stela of Akhet-Aten, which I shall let stand in its place" [M.
Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II, p. 50: the later Boundary Stelae of Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten)].
This can be literally understood to mean that he himself stayed permanently
within its boundaries, but it is more likely that he meant that the stelae
themselves would not be moved. Later in
the same text [op. cit., p. 51] he emphasises the importance he attached to the
existence of the stelae in the places in which they had been made. Of the oath
on the stelae he says:
It shall not be erased. It shall
not be washed out. It shall not be hacked out. It shall not be covered with gypsum.
It shall not be made to disappear. If it disappears, if it vanishes, if the
stelae on which it is falls down, I shall renew it again, afresh in this place
in which it is.
Why he regarded the precise limits of Akhet-Aten as a matter
of great importance is not clear, though since the city was understood to
participate in eternity it is easy to understand concern with the precision of
its limits as an extension of Akhenaten's wish that the city abide.
The art of Amarna is, compared with the whole history of Egyptian
art, distinctly naturalistic: is this an innovation by Akhenaten? A
naturalistic style was already beginning to appear under Amenhotep III, although
the precise chronology of this is difficult to determine because of the
unsolved problem
of co-regencies. It may be safe to say that Akhenaten developed
(or rather encouraged through patronage) a style of art already coming into
existence. On the other hand, the characteristics of images of Akhenaten may be connected with a pattern of religious ideas specifically associated with him: modern
scholars find the religious ideas to be the strongest evidence of his revolutionary
character.
It can be argued that what Akhenaten did was to change the emphasis
on the character of Re, who had been becoming increasingly important in the eighteenth
dynasty, so that the religious focus of Egyptian culture shifted even more from
the invisible aspect of Re (Amun in the yoking Amun-Re), to the visible aspect
of the sun, the disk (the Aten). This by itself does not represent a great innovation,
for "the identification of king and disk had become more explicit in the
reign of Tuthmosis IV... and was to continue until Ramesses III... the cult
itself survived" [Trigger, et al, op. cit.,
p. 220.]
In the hymn to the sun from El-Amarna, the Aten is described
as the living sun. But it is also spoken of as Re. Both terms refer to the sun,
but they do not mean precisely the same thing. One of his titles contains
"Re": i.e., "Nefer kheprure - Sole one of Re".
"Shu" also appears in one of his
titles: i.e., "Harakhti that rejoiceth in the Horizon in his name Shu, which is the sun" [A.
Erman, The Ancient Egyptians, pp.289-291; 292]. Therefore it is not legitimate
to argue that Akhenaten rejected all forms of divinity save the Aten. What we can say from the evidence of Amarna art,
the texts of the Amarna hymns, and the boundary stelae. is that he seems to
have rejected all forms of divinity unconnected with the sun, or at least those
not closely connected with it.
In focussing his attention on the sun's disk, what is Akhenaten
doing? Is this a radical or reactionary change? One can argue from the hymns
and the art that Akhenaten is locating
his god in a very concrete way: worshipping the sun itself and its visible
attributes and tangible properties (i.e., warmth and light; promotion of growth
and vitality);with most other gods being ignored as irrelevant.
Two important facts require to be explained:
Two important facts require to be explained:
1. The suppression of Amun (associated with the sun through
the yoking Amun-Re) by the quite literal obliteration of the name wherever it
was found, and
2. the obliteration of references to "gods" in the
plural ["Neteru"]. Amun (more accurately, Amun-Re) is described in
other sources as “Greatest of heaven, eldest of earth, lord of what existeth
who abideth in (?) all things. Unique in his nature... chiefest of all gods.
Lord of Truth, father of the gods who made mankind, and created beasts... more immanent
of nature than any god, over whose beauty the gods rejoice... thee who didst
create the gods, raise up the sky and spread out the ground... the Lord of
Eternity, who created everlastingness... thou whose chapel is hidden, lord of
gods. [Erman, op. cit., "The Great Hymn to Amun", p. 283-4.]
The point here is that Akhenaten appears to have been suppressing
the worship of a god whose very nature ought to have made it very difficult to
conceive of such a worship in the first place, halfway through the 2nd
millennium B.C.E. The description of his nature indicates that it is essentially a transcendent one. This is
without question a philosophically based conception of a creator deity, the
Lord of Eternity who created the other gods, who raised up the sky, and spread
out the ground. In this hymn, Amun is the lord of an undifferentiated plenum,
from which the physical world is generated.
Amun is one who remains forever unknown: "One falleth
down dead on the spot for terror, if his mysterious, unknowable name is
pronounced". That is, if we did know Amun, and could pronounce his name,
it would breach every comfortable category of our understanding: "no god
can address him by it, him with the soul (?) [i.e., the Ka which connects him
with eternity] whose name is hidden, for that he is a mystery" [A. Erman,
op. cit., p. 30]. In contrast the disk of the sun
is a visible image of the divine, and is therefore a proper and publicly
intelligible object of worship and adoration; and for the same reason the king
is also a proper object of worship: since one is reckoned as the image of the
other
.
As noted earlier, the identification of the king and the sun
disk predates the reign of Akhenaten, which implies that his actions and
beliefs ought to be intelligible – to some extent at least - within a pre-existing
pattern of ideas in Egypt. One might speculate that the singular nature of this
image is the reason for the suppression of the divine plurals, but I think that
the matter is much more complicated. If Amun is intrinsically mysterious
("...none knoweth his mysterious nature..."), then to come to exist
in the manifold of space and time, he must appear in a form which can be
understood - as a manifestation or metaphor of his real unknowable nature.
Thus: "He who shaped his egg himself... the divine god
who came into being of himself: all gods came into being, after he began to
be”. Hence all gods can be understood as aspects of the unknowable Amun:
"of mysterious form... the wondrous god with many forms". But Amun
"hid himself from the gods, and his nature is not known" [A. Erman,
op. cit., p.299]. To determine the intention of Akhenaten's actions, we have to
gain a clearer understanding of the meaning and usage of theological concepts and terms, in both
his own period, and in the preceding dynasties. This clarity is some way off.
Select bibliography:
Clayton, Peter A., Chronicle of the Pharaohs, Thames & Hudson, 1994
David, Rosalie, Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt, Penguin Books, 2002
Erman, Adolf, The Ancient Egyptians. A sourcebook of their writings. Translated by Aylward M. Blackman, Harper & Row, 1966
David, Rosalie, Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt, Penguin Books, 2002
Erman, Adolf, The Ancient Egyptians. A sourcebook of their writings. Translated by Aylward M. Blackman, Harper & Row, 1966
Lichtheim, Miriam, Ancient
Egyptian Literature, vol. II: The New Kingdom, University of California Press, 1976
Redford, Donald B. Akhenaten: The Heretic King, Princeton University Press, 1984; American University in Cairo Press, 1989
Redford, Donald B. Akhenaten: The Heretic King, Princeton University Press, 1984; American University in Cairo Press, 1989
Shafer, Byron E., The Temples of Ancient Egypt, IB Tauris, 1998
Shaw, Ian, ed. Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, OUP, 2000
Shorter, Alan W., A Handbook of Egyptian Gods, RKP, 1937
Trigger, Kemp, O'Connor, Lloyd, Ancient Egypt: A Social History, CUP, 1983
Wilkinson, Richard W., The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Thames & Hudson, 2003
[This the first part of a two part examination of Akhenaten and the Cult of the Aten. The second part, 'The Horizon of the Aten', will be published on this website on New Year's day, 2019. We have much more information about Akhenaten (and his father) than is normally taken into account in the construction of theories about Akhenaten's intentions. 'The Horizon of the Aten' analyses this extra information, and looks at how it may change our view of Akhenaten and his understanding of his role as Pharaoh. The article also reconstructs the political and religious aspects of his reign, so far as we know them.
The article will then become part of a separately published review of Akhenaten, This will be available as an ebook, with an extensive preface, and a bibliography. Further details to follow. TY, November 28, 2018.]
Shaw, Ian, ed. Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, OUP, 2000
Shorter, Alan W., A Handbook of Egyptian Gods, RKP, 1937
Trigger, Kemp, O'Connor, Lloyd, Ancient Egypt: A Social History, CUP, 1983
Wilkinson, Richard W., The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Thames & Hudson, 2003
[This the first part of a two part examination of Akhenaten and the Cult of the Aten. The second part, 'The Horizon of the Aten', will be published on this website on New Year's day, 2019. We have much more information about Akhenaten (and his father) than is normally taken into account in the construction of theories about Akhenaten's intentions. 'The Horizon of the Aten' analyses this extra information, and looks at how it may change our view of Akhenaten and his understanding of his role as Pharaoh. The article also reconstructs the political and religious aspects of his reign, so far as we know them.
The article will then become part of a separately published review of Akhenaten, This will be available as an ebook, with an extensive preface, and a bibliography. Further details to follow. TY, November 28, 2018.]
[i] There
is little attempt to describe the transition to monotheism in terms of a
competition of ideas. I remember the competition between the priesthoods of
Yahweh and Baal from bible class in school – Yahweh and Baal were invoked
sequentially to ignite kindling. Baal failed, and Yahweh succeeded.
[ii] All
further instances of ‘horizon’ as a term should be understood to connote
‘limit’ and ‘boundary’, unless indicated otherwise. ‘Akhet’ may also mean
‘inundation’, which ties together the importance of the limit and inundation
for the annual regeneration of the world.
[iii]
The temple at Luxor appears to have been built around 1400 B.C.E., and was
dedicated to the Theban Triad of the cult of the Royal Ka (Amun, Mut, and
Khonsu). The Ka is one of the two Egyptian conceptions of the soul, and it
represents Pharaonic participation in divinity. The temple complex is not dedicated
to one god alone, but to three related aspects of divinity.
[iv] The
cult of Amun is not as old as other Egyptian cults, so its importance did not
arise simply from its longevity. So it is likely that there was a strong
intellectual component in the struggle between the cult of Amun and the cult of the
Aten in the 14th century B.C.E.
[v] We
are familiar with Plato using the sun as an image of the Good in the Republic,
where its character and nature illustrates a point about leading men out of
intellectual darkness. But there was no attempt to argue that the sun was the
good or the divine in actuality.
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